ABSTRACT
Neither my partner nor I had ever had a day’s experience in the conduct of an advertising agency. I doubt if Mr. Dodd had ever been inside of any such institution. The first advertising agent I ever heard of was Volney B. Palmer, and there was, in the earliest days of my knowledge of Boston, a sign bearing his name, on the south end of a structure called Scollays Building, that stood in the middle of the road, so to speak, at the place where Tremont street so mixed itself up with Court street that one side became Tremont Row, while the other remained Court street, and at a point, too, where Cornhill came to an end, losing itself in the combination. Palmer died perhaps half a century ago and the building he occupied was effaced from the surface of the earth, perhaps as much as a quarter of a century since. It had long stood there, conspicuous as a single tooth in a jaw with practically nothing opposite. Where Mr. Palmer did business, as did also his successor, for several years, there is now nothing but a widened roadway, in the centre of which stands a structure that serves as an entrance to some part of Boston’s modern subway system.
