We went to the baseball game, [Theodore] Dreiser and I. He was a dour, sulky, unpleasant man. He got bored about the fifth or sixth inning and said, "Come on, let's get out of here," so I had to leave. I remember it was a close game and I was outraged, but I had to go with him.....
He was one of the most churlish, disagreeable men I ever met in my life, always thinking that everybody was cheating him. He'd come in about every three months to examine the ledger to see whether his royalty statements were correct.
We soon discovered Dreiser didn't know what he was doing. He'd make a great pretense of checking, but he was just trying to scare us into being honest. He'd make little marks against all the items he'd examined and then he'd go out for lunch and we'd rub all the marks off, and when he came back he wouldn't even notice. We had a very pretty telephone operator, and Dreiser was intent upon making her his. It was the joke of the whole office, because his clumsy approaches were so ludicrous. Finally she went out to lunch with him just to see what would happen. When she came back she used an expression that became quite popular, but this was the first time I'd ever heard of it. She said, "He's just an old garter-snapper."
--Bennett Cerf (1898-1971), founder of Random House publishers, in his autobiography At Random (2002).
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