Let's Have Twelve

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN (237 pp.)--Frank B. Gllbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey--Crowell ($3).

There was not much in Cheaper by the Dozen to excite the critics when it appeared last January. It was just a story about a father with twelve children, written by two of his children a quarter-century after his death. Last week it was riding at the top of U.S. bestseller lists.

Like father Day in Life With Father, Dad Gilbreth pretty much ran things his way; but there most of the resemblance ended. Whenever Dad Gilbreth, returning from a trip, turned in at the sidewalk of his Montclair, N.J. home, he whistled "assembly call"; it brought freckle-faced kids from upstairs, basement, backyard and even the next street. Sometimes his signal meant that he wanted to take everybody for a ride in the big Pierce-Arrow. "How do you feed all those kids, mister?" folks would yell when the car had to stop for an intersection. His favorite answer: "Well, they come cheaper by the dozen, you know."

The Good Naked Eye. The book is as bland and amiable as Dad Gilbreth's rejoinder, a sometimes hilarious, sometimes tiresome story of life in the first quarter of the century. Yet nothing between the book's covers is as remarkable as its runaway bestselling.

The Book-of-the-Month Club set Cheaper off by picking it as a dual selection (with Fred Gipson's Hound-Dog Man) and distributing 250,000 copies. In five months Publisher Crowell has sold an additional 150,000 copies and reports that customers are still carrying it out of bookstores at the rate of 5,000 copies a week. Twentieth Century-Fox paid out $100,000 for the screen rights.

In a world where a good many fathers blanch at the thought of another mouth to feed; and where "rejected" children grow up to spend their time & money on psychiatrists' couches, U.S. readers have jumped at the chance to meet a man like Frank Bunker Gilbreth. He told his bride straight off on their wedding day that he wanted a lot of children--at least a dozen. She liked the idea. Before his death in 1924, he had sired the twelve redheaded youngsters that he'd bargained for. And he had taken a keen interest in their upbringing. For one thing, they formed a convenient laboratory for his own professional work in motion-study and human relations.

By using motion pictures or merely his own good naked eye, Efficiency-Expert Gilbreth studied everything his children did or had done to them. He analyzed their dishwashing and typewriting; when they had their tonsils removed, he brought a cameraman in to photograph the whole thing. He learned how to save time and energy not only for his own family but for workers in the firms that employed him.

The Boisterous Chorus. The Family Council was the Gilbreths' plan for organizing the flock into a well-run, cooperative team. Every Sunday after dinner the council, with Dad as chairman, met around the table to appoint purchasing committees, divide up the house and yardwork on an equitable basis, and make decisions on such acquisitions as rugs and dogs. As the kids realized, this was merely an extension of Dad's ideas on employer-employee relations.

Perhaps because the co-authors collaborated by mail (Frank Jr. lives in Charleston, S.C., sister Ernestine in Manhasset, N.Y.), their product lacks unity and presents the reader with only the haziest notion about the chronology of the Gilbreth tribe's doings. Though father Gilbreth often sounds (and sounds off) like father Day, Cheaper by the Dozen lacks the literary merits of its wise, well-honed predecessor. Mother Gilbreth's firm character is made clear (she still lives in Montclair, runs her husband's business and was 1948's "Woman of the Year"). But the personalities of the twelve Gilbreth children are never created; they remain a vague, boisterous chorus. How little such shortcomings mattered to people who want to read about the Pierce-Arrow days, Crowell's cash registers were recording.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.