Henry Frickby WCS ’11

Henry Clay Frick was born in 1849, but that’s not the half of it. By 1871 he was doing his thing and by 1880 he didn’t take no for an answer. In 1881 he met Andrew Carnegie, of Gilded Age fame. It was something of an open secret that the search was on for a new chairman at Carnegie’s steel company, Carnegie Steel Company. Frick was born for the job, in 1849.

Story goes something like this. Frick walks right into that building, skips the elevator, skips the stairs, bursts through the door and all but screams “brass tax.” Carnegie looks up from his papers or whatever, motions for Frick to sit in one of those big leather chairs, then tries to shave a little off the asking price. But Frick’s already looking through Carnegie’s family photos, getting them all smudged up and asking if anyone in this picture has died since it was taken, saying how he’s sorry to hear that. Carnegie’s ringing for his secretary but someone told her to take an early lunch. She’s thinking Thai food but that’s the least of Carnegie’s problems. It’s mano-a-mano on the seventeenth floor and Frick just took his shoes off. He’s got one foot up on the desk and the other god knows where.

Carnegie tries to play it cool. “No dice,” he says.
Frick doesn’t miss a beat. “Dice.”
Son of a bitch. “No dice,” says Carnegie.
“Dice.”
“No dice.” Jesus, where’s the other foot?
“Dice,” says Frick. Boom, there’s the foot.
Carnegie’s not even pretending to know what’s going on anymore. “No dice. I mean, dice. Dice? Dice.” Carnegie’s starting to lose it. “Dice!” he screams, “dice!”

Frick thinks it over. He takes out a cigar - a real Domicano - and lights up while giving Carnegie this smug look like, “did you drop something?” Frick writes down a number, then scratches it out, then asks Carnegie for an eraser. Carnegie rifles through his desk, says he swears he just saw the thing, where could it possibly be? Frick says forget it, he never wants to hear about the eraser again. Carnegie nods. Frick says he means ever again, then gets up to leave. He pauses by the door.

“Andy,” he says, already smiling. “The look on your face...” He cracks up, practically slapping his own knee. Carnegie seems like he wants to cry but instead he fakes a chuckle and mimes the motion for “this guy’s breaking my balls but it is OK.”

Classic Hank Frick. He didn’t care who you were or how much money you had, he’d look you right in the eye and tell you that he’d been hanging with your cousin Tod a lot, how he seems like a great role model and an even better friend, how you should all grab a beer sometime. Now Frick’s under your skin, now you don’t stand a chance.

Take the Homestead Strike of 1892. Carnegie goes off to Europe and lets Frick the Prick handle the picket line back home. The board is talking major concessions, a 15% wage bump to get the workers to the table, plus vacation time at Pentecost, a little something thrown in for the Poles. Frick listens to the presentations and when they’re done, he pulls out a daisy. No one’s saying anything as Frick does the whole “she loves me, she loves me not” routine. Frick’s still plucking the petals when he finally decides to say something.

“Gentleman. What is the most shortest distance between two points?”
A minute or so goes by until one of the underlings has the guts to say “a straight line?”

Frick doesn’t acknowledge the response, just gets up and walks out of the meeting. Then someone notices how Frick has arranged all the petals on the table.

A perfect swastika.

The message was clear. The next day Frick sends the union leader a bag of his own feces. To this day, no one knows how he got into the guy’s bathroom.