grand ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania in response to a newspaper advertisement. Here, apparently, at last was the thing for which they had long been seeking. Back in high school and college, they had pored over books, believing that knowledge alone was the open sesame to financial - and professional rewards. But a few years in the rough-and-tumble of business and professional life had brought sharp disillusionment. They had seen some of the most important business successes won by men who possessed, in addition to their knowledge, the ability to talk well, to win people to their way of thinking, and to "sell" themselves and their ideas. They soon discovered that if one aspired to wear the captain’s cap and navigate the ship of business, personality and the ability to talk are more important than a knowledge of Latin verbs or a sheepskin from Harvard. The advertisement in the New York Sun promised that the meeting would be highly entertaining. It was. Eighteen people who had taken the course were marshaled in front of the loudspeaker - and fifteen of them were given precisely seventy-five seconds each to tell his or her story. Only seventy-five seconds of talk, then “bang” went the gavel, and the chairman shouted, “Time! Next speaker!” The affair moved with the speed of a herd of buffalo thundering across the plains. Spectators stood for an hour and a half to watch the performance. The speakers were a cross section of life: several sales representatives, a chain store executive, a baker, the president of a trade association, two bankers, an insurance agent, an accountant, a dentist, an architect, a druggist who had come from Indianapolis to New York to take the course, a lawyer who had come from Havana in order to prepare himself to give one important three-minute speech. The first speaker bore the Gaelic name Patrick J. O'Haire. Born in Ireland, he attended school for only four years, drifted to America, worked as a mechanic, then as a chauffeur. Now, however, he was forty, he had a growing family and needed more money, so he tried selling trucks. Suffering from an inferiority complex that, as he put it, was eating his heart out, he had to walk up and down in front of an office half a dozen
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