Louis Roney: Calling it quits

An ancient Navy saying is “Don’t give up the ship.” Quitting is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Quitting leaves one with empty hands that stay empty.

Thomas Edison was searching for a material that would work as a filament in his idea for an electric light bulb. On about his 1,700th try, he discovered that tungsten worked fine! Someone remarked to him that his hit-or-miss way of doing things was time wasting and unintelligent. Edison answered, “Along the way, I also discovered 1,600-plus substances that don’t work!”

Quitting often leaves one feeling sorry for himself—perhaps the most unattractive of all human emotions.

Many a gal who thinks a rich guy is buying her a beautiful dress finds out soon he is only giving her the slip. Divorces are quittings that started with hopeful promisings, and perhaps in retrospect, should never have been undertaken. Of course, we all start things that we would be better off had we never started, but we often don’t recognize this fact until we have given all we have to the possibility of success.

Without a start, there is no end, and without an end there is no final reward. Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of experience comes from bad judgment.

The trouble with many of us in trying times is that we quit trying. I wonder today how many of the people listed as “unemployed” have simply “given up” looking for a job.

W.C. Fields was not a guy for the long haul: He said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.” (Out of the mouth of babes and W.C. Fields!) Time — which was Einstein’s “Fourth Dimension” — must be dealt with in making final judgments.

I left Winter Park in 1938 after graduating from high school. The part of town we lived in had many streets paved with bricks back in the ‘20s — streets left mostly empty when the “Boom” had collapsed. When I returned in 1980, those streets were lined with handsome houses. The time dimension simply completed the end of something, which had seemed once to have been abandoned.

In American history there are very few examples of Americans “giving up” recounted. We don’t surrender easily to hardships or to problems that are brain-testing riddles. It is no wonder that our new country quickly became the invention and production capital of the whole world. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Steve Jobs, etc., all their ideas sprang from fertile American soil.

When President John F. Kennedy pronounced, “In the next decade, America will put a man on the moon,” he set in motion the American inventiveness that soon had Neil Armstrong walking upon the lunar surface. American stick-to-itiveness has led to a majority of the great breakthroughs in medical science, transportation, manufacturing, finance, communications, astronomy and many other fields of endeavor. The fact that Americans don’t turn loose until they get the job done has played a major role in all these undertakings. The American future would surely be brighter if we now had in the White House another imaginative “can do” mentality such as that of John F. Kennedy.

From the 1967 urgings of “Turn on, tune in, drop out” drug-guru quitter Timothy Leary, to the present government “fairness” policy (the government will take care of you), the old Cotton Mather idea of “let us now be up and doing” seems to be a remnant of past glories.

Me? I cotton to old Cotton! Never quit doing while your heart is still beating.

About Roney: Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF 2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award (Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)