The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck

chicken economy. Apart from diseases, he read, chickens are a luxury until you have fifty thousand of them. With that number, you may break even. With one hundred thousand you can show a small profit. Over half a million, you begin to get someplace.
    One need not go into Mr. Johnson’s organizational plans. They involved small investments by some of his neighbors and all of his relatives, who were persuaded to put up the capital for the intial two hundred thousand baby chicks. When half a million birds guaranteed a profit, this money was returned with thanks and a small bonus. From then on, H. W. Johnson was on his own.
    Tod was three when the first million chicks marched in their little wire-floored cells. H. W. by that time was getting government surplus for feed and was selling eggs and fryers to the army and navy.
    Tod went to the Petaluma public schools. In high school he joined the 4-H Club, where he learned a good deal about chickens: their habits, their diseases, and their propensities. He learned also to detest them for their stupidity, their odor, and their mess.
    By the time he had graduated from high school there was no need for his further interest in the birds that were building the family fortune. H. W. Johnson was a factory by then. Dressed pullets and millions of eggs rolled off an assembly line. The Johnson offices were far from the smell and sight of chickens. The Johnson estate was on a lovely hill beyond the country club, while the Johnson energy and genius now concerned itself with figures rather than white leghorns. The unit was no longer a hen, but fifty thousand hens. The company had become a corporation with stock held by H. W. Johnson, Mrs. H. W. Johnson, Tod Johnson, and young Miss Hazel Johnson, a beautiful girl who on three separate occasions was named Egg Queen at the Petaluma Poultry Pageant.
    It was now time for the family to expand to a dynasty, in the American pattern.
    When Tod went to Princeton there were one hundred million chickens represented by stock certificates. But it must not be thought that only chickens were represented. Johnson, Inc., also sold feed, wire, brooders, incubators, refrigeration plants, and all the equipment which must be purchased by a small operator before he can proceed toward bankruptcy.
    H. W. Johnson wore his title of Egg King gracefully and, true tycoon that he was, bought back his old grocery store and set it up as a museum. His only violence lay in his hatred for the Democratic party, for which he had every reason. Otherwise, he was a kindly, generous man, a man of vision. He had peacocks on his lawn at Johnson Vista and an artificial pond for white ducks.
    Tod, meanwhile, dipped into four universities—Princeton for clothes, Harvard for accent, Yale for attitude, and the University of Virginia for manners. He emerged equipped for life with everything except the arts and foreign travel. The first he acquired in New York, where his taste for progressive jazz was developed, and his Grand Tour during the restoration of the French monarchy took care of the second.
    His friendship with Clotilde grew like a mushroom in the caves of Paris, flourished like the pelargoniums in the flower boxes of the sidewalk cafés. Clotilde nurtured the pale plant with care, never letting it stray beyond Fouquet’s on one side and the Hotel George V on the other, in which district Tod’s Brooks-Brothers look did not cause comment. Neither would the princess be embarrassed by meeting any French people.
    The affair reached its crescendo of passion, however, at the Select, when Tod leaned over the table, tore his eyes upward from her bosom, and said hoarsely, “Baby, you’re a dish. A real dish.”
    Clotilde felt it to be a declaration. Afterward, inspecting her well-filled body in a full-length mirror, she growled, “I am a deesh.”
    Clotilde introduced her new friend to Uncle Charlie as a prospective husband, and Charlie accepted him as a