B. Franklin, Swimming Instructor?

How would the world be a different place if Benjamin Franklin had become a swimming instructor?

He considered it, you know. He also tried working in his father’s soap-boiling and candle-making shop and, at one point, dreamed of going to sea.

Ultimately, he became a printer—and, that, to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”

A Different Type of Founder

Virtually every one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence worked in one of four professions: lawyer, merchant, farmer, or physician. Several, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, attended a college, such as Harvard or William and Mary.

Franklin was different. The 15th of 17 children of a tradesman, he was not born, as they say, on third base.

His father had aspirations for him nonetheless. As Franklin explained many years later in his autobiography, Josiah Franklin thought his tenth son should be a tithe to the church, so he sent him to school to become a minister. “But my father, in the meantime,” Franklin later wrote in his autobiography, “from a view of the expense of a college education, which having so large a family he could not well afford, and the mean living many so educated were afterwards able to obtain . . . altered his first intention . . . .” After a little more education at a different school, young Ben wound up working in his father’s shop. Apparently, making candles is not as glamorous as it sounds, however. Franklin recalled:

“But my dislike to the trade continuing, my father was under apprehensions that if he did not find one for me more agreeable, I should break away and get to sea, as his son Josiah had done, to his great vexation. He therefore sometimes took me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work, that he might observe my inclination, and endeavor to fix it on some trade or other on land.”

Eventually, 12-year-old Ben wound up in the print shop run by his brother, James.

B. Franklin, Teenager

Now, if you can imagine a precocious teenager working for an older brother trying to run a successful business, you can imagine how this situation played out—not as well as Dad might have hoped. James became angry, even striking his younger brother on occasion. Recalling this episode of his life, Benjamin wrote of “the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me, though he was otherwise not an ill-natur'd man.” Seeking to explain this contradiction, Franklin hits on a reason that rings true to anyone who has known (or been) a teenager: “perhaps I was too saucy and provoking.”

This description may sound surprising to those of you who know Franklin as the elder statesman, but, if you know much about Franklin’s personality, it sounds just about right: he was one to question authority (a distant government oppressing a whole population, for example) and to take dramatic action when the occasion called for it.

In this case, the dramatic action was running away from home. Yes, beloved Benjamin Franklin was once a runaway teenager. (There is no record of whether he carried his belongings in a tied-up bandana on the end of a stick, à la Snoopy.)

B. Franklin, Slob

Franklin’s plan—perhaps too strong a word—was to seek work in New York, then just a small city of a few thousand people. A printer there told him he had nothing for him, but said his son, a printer in Philadelphia, might need help in his shop. Franklin moved on to Philly, traveling by boat and even on foot. (He reported walking some 50 miles across the colony of New Jersey before catching a boat down the Delaware River to Philadelphia.)

Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia is the stuff of legend—and comedy:

“I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there. I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuff'd out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest, I was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in copper. . . .”

It gets better. Still looking like a vagabond, he visits a baker’s shop and, not knowing how much three pennies would buy, winds up with a comical excess of bread:

“He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpris'd at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk'd off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other. Thus I went up Market-street as far as Fourth-street, passing by the door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father; when she, standing at the door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance. . . . “

The image of the great Benjamin Franklin as a dirty teenager wearing working clothes with more clothes stuffed in the pockets while carrying two “great puffy rolls” under his arms does constitute an “awkward, ridiculous appearance,” one that Franklin himself surely realized would amuse his reader. Indeed, at the beginning of this passage, he calls on his reader to “compare such unlikely beginnings” with his later reputation.

It was, in short, not an especially auspicious beginning.

Franklin eventually did find work in a print shop, although not the one belonging to the son of the printer he met in New York. Instead, he wound up working for an eccentric printer named Samuel Keimer. The experience of working for Keimer came with some amusing episodes, which I will leave for you to read for yourself. What’s important here is merely that Franklin kept following the path he had begun in Boston: he worked as a printer apparently because that was the trade he knew.

Here it starts to get more interesting, though.

B. Franklin, Prodigy

When he wasn’t busy at the shop, young Franklin read and worked on his writing and speaking. Remember, he wasn’t born on third base, but rather in the dugout, where he began eyeing the game carefully and looking for his way to get into the lineup.

All of this self-education seems to have paid off—well, sort of paid off—when he wrote a letter that managed to make its way into the hands of Pennsylvania’s colonial governor, William Keith.

Keith was impressed, and no wonder. The letter has been lost, so we don’t know exactly how it read, but it probably reflected Franklin’s precocity as a writer. By this time, he already had written several satirical essays for his brother’s newspaper. Have a look at one or two of these “Silence Dogood” essays, told from the perspective of a middle-aged widow with a wry wit, and you probably will agree with Keith’s assessment of young Franklin’s abilities. (I attempted some satire when I was an adolescent, and I’m pretty sure none of my attempts will someday appear in major literature anthologies, as Franklin’s do, but I remain hopeful.)

Keith, in short, liked the cut of Franklin’s jib, so much so that, after the boy unsuccessfully tried to wring some funds out of his father back in Boston, Keith offered to set him up as a printer in Philadelphia. He said he would provide some letters of credit, which Franklin could use to purchase equipment in London. All young Ben had to do was to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and back.

In the days before luxury cruise liners, such a voyage was no small endeavor. The trip took weeks instead of days, and, worse, there was no WiFi. Franklin, however, had been drawn to the sea as a boy, even loading a suitcase of books on his back and swimming for miles in the ocean to train himself in the event of a shipwreck. (He eventually would cross the Atlantic eight times, though never by swimming with books on his back.) It’s easy to imagine that he relished the idea of a sea voyage to a distant locale. Besides, he was on his way! Keith’s support promised to help him become independent. With equipment acquired with Keith’s letters of credit, he could set up his own shop, become his own man, so to speak.

Then something unexpected happened.