SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: WHITE ELEPHANT MANOR

 "White Elephant Manor" by Ross Russell (from Cash Gorman #5, June 1941)

First, a few words about Cash Gorman, a short-lived pulp magazine character created in 1940 for Street & Smith Publications by Phil R. Sheridan.  (Sheridan published 26 stories and one articel from 1939 to 1943, all -- excepting the six Cash Gorman stories -- in Street & Smith sports pulps; his fictionMags Indez listing also includes one short story in The Saturday Evening Post --which raises the posibillity that Sheridan was a house name.  A seventh Cash Gorman story had been announced but the magazine died before issue #7 could be published.)   Thomas Jefferson "Cash" Gorman was called "The Wizard" because of his ability to make money.  He first appeared in "Gild the Sword with Gold" in the first issue of The Wizard (October 1940).  The Wizard was subtitled "Adventures in Money-Making" -- for some reason that escapes me, the publishers must have felt that this phrase would strike a post-Depression chord and make readers embark on an adventure in money-spending.  With issue #5, the title was changed to Cash Gorman.  The magazine lasted one further issue before dying an undigniofied death with the August 1941 issue.  According to Mike Ashley and Marshal B. Tymm, "For adventures stressing chicanery, cunning, cozening, fraud, mendacity, misrepresentation, perfidy, and trickery (not to mention dissembling, disinformation, and deceit), the sextet of novels featuring The Wizard/Cash Gorman are unparalled."  Cash Gorman (much lke Cash McCall, the hero of Cameron Hawley's novel and the James Garner-Natalie Wood film) takes distrees companies and turns into profit-making entities.  And Gorman is a straight-shooter, as honest as a businessman can be.

[Cash Gorman's attempt to become a comic book character fizzled out after one outing -- in a story in the May 1941 issue of Army & Navy Comics (31).  In 1876, Lin Carter, who never met a pulp fiction character he didn't like, included Cash Gorman in his fourth Prince Zarkon novel, The Earth-Shaker, along with other crossover characters Captain Hazzard, Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, The Avenger, Batman, The Thin Man, Philo Vance, The Phantom Detective, The Phantom Creeps, Doctor Death, Tom Swift, Black Bat, Captain Zero, Angel Detective, and Dick Tracy (with that crowd, it's hard to find enough room to swing a death-ray!).  

In addition to the main novel (actually, novella) about Cash Gorman, each issue of The Wizard/Cash Gorman featured from two to four supporting stories.  For each of the final two issues of the magazine, a story about a character named Hyman Goldfarb by Ross Russell was included.  (Goldfarb's adventures continued for two additional stories published in Street & Smith's Sports Story Magazine.)  Russell (1909-200) published nearly ninety stories in the pulps from 1936 to 1943, the vast majority of them in sports magazines.

With that background out of the way, let's look at "White Elephant Manor.'

Hymie Goldfarb has a big money-making idea.  White Elephant Mamor (the name should have raised flags) was a derelict resort hotel and convention center on the East Coast of Florida, complete with 200 rooms (with baths even, anyway showers), dining room, kitchen, bar, and swimming pool.  For a $20,000 investment, the White Elephant could possibly bring in millions.  Where to get the $20,000?  From his brother-in-law, Chicago lawyer Cody McLarnin.  McLarnin was hesitent at first but the numbers appeared to work and the title was clear.  Then McLarnin got a call from his brother, Thomasheen, "an officer of an undertaker's union of some sort."  Thomasheen offered to book the White Elephant for the 1941 comvention of the National Embalmers' Association -- two hundred delegates!  that could well cover the cost of purchase and refurbishment.  A deal was struck. The Irish, Goldfard decided, had unpublicized talents for business.

Goldfarb would manage the hotel.  The success of the business and of the convention fell strictly on him.

The hotel was quickly and properly refurbished.  Items such as linens, foodstuffs, and liquor were easily arranged.  But then came the problem of staffing.  The local union was determined not to let the working man be taken for a ride, as was common with a "scab market" the year before.  They insisted on wages of fifty cents an hour for unskilled labor, where the year before the wages were fifteen to twenty cents.  Goldfarb negotiated a deal -- 67% of the gross from the ten days that the convention ran would be divvied among the union workers; that way the hotel could accomodate the convention and Goldfarb would not have pay wages up front.  A terrible deal but something had to be done.

Then, an even worse calamity...the local utility showed up just hours before the convention delegates and demanded four thousand dollars that the previous owners had owed them or all electric power would be shut off.  Goldfarb and McLarnin did not have the money and refused to be blackmailed or bullied.  the power was shut off and the hotel and convention appeared to be doomed.

That would have defeated a lesser man, but Goldfarb was made of sterner stuff.  How he overcame the problem the reader can discover for himself.  Let me give you a hint.  Two words:  Haunted Hotel.

A cute and minor story emphasizing some of the stereotypes of the day, but not in an extremely offensive manner.  Goldfarb, always on the lookout for a fast buck, proves to be far more fair-minded and honest than the typical con-man.

I may have to check out the other three stories about Hyman Goldfarb.

The June 1941 issue of Cash Gorman can be read at Internet Archive.