Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Remember, Gentlemen, there is a lady present

So, I have a used book I'm trying to get ready to sell, and I'm flipping through it to see if any of the pages are marked or mussed, and I see this (page 230):

In a small room at Michigan State Prison hangs the picture of an attractive woman with an overhead banner bearing this message: "Remember, Gentlemen, there is a lady present." The picture is of Dorothy Carnegie, and the room is where Dale Carnegie classes are held for inmates of the prison. Prison classrooms are the only places Carnegie classes are held where iron bars on the windows and guards at the door make it impossible for fear-stricken students to take to their heels.

Of all the special classes given by Dale Carnegie & Associates and their sponsors, none have been more successful and more eagerly received than those given to prisoners. In 1960 some fifteen hundred inmates of thirty-one penal institutions in the United States and Canada completed work in forty-eight classes. More than seven thousand prisoners have participated since the prison program was initiated in Hawaii in 1950 by J. Edwin Whitlow, the Carnegie sponsor there...


From Talking Your Way to Success - the story of the Dale Carnegie Course, William Longgood, Association Press, New York, 1962. The copyright is held by the National Board of Young Men's Christian Associations. This is a third printing, from 1973.

Now, if I just knew if any of the fourteen people who signed the ffep of this book are famous...

Addition: I just realized I used an abbreviation that isn't commonly known outside my field. Oops. Sorry. ffep means front free-endpaper (or first free-endpaper). It's that first, usually blank, page you see when you lift the cover.

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