Who is Hartman Jule?

February 5, 2015 11:24 AM

While trying to check a quotation about retirement by one Hartman Jule, I found that while the name appears on lots of quote-collecting websites, I was unable to find any biographical information on anyone by that name. All references inside books only lead to epigraphs (i.e., more quotes), most having to do with retirement or advertising. Is this a known pseudonym of an individual? In lieu of any information on Hartman Jule having been a real person, I'd like to find the primary source(s) for the quotes attributed to him.

Some of the quotations commonly attributed to Hartman Jule include:

Carelessness doesn’t bounce; it shatters.

Retirement has been a discovery of beauty for me. I never had the time before to notice the beauty of my grandkids, my wife, the tree outside my very own front door. And, the beauty of time itself.

I'm not just retiring from the company, I'm also retiring from my stress, my commute, my alarm clock, and my iron.

Advertising is a bit like playing make-believe.

Advertising is only another form of statistics.

Sometimes a headache is all in your head. Relax.

posted by obloquy to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

I have done a search of two different national newspaper archives and find no mention of him, except in one obit for another person, which is recent and his only appearance is in the form of the retirement quote from above, which seems culled from the web as a nice thing to add into the obit. For somebody who is responsible for quotes that show up everywhere, he seems to have no newspaper record.
posted by maxsparber at 11:49 AM on February 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think this is a backwards name and that the person is actually Jule Hartman who has a bit more of a Google trail and has also said things about retirement according to this. Alternately it could be Jules Hartman who was a boat builder in California and disappeared mysteriously after the suicide of his son. The family lived in an ark. While they were certainly interesting (and the elder Hartman apparently may have returned) they may not be your person either. I'll keep poking around some.
posted by jessamyn at 1:00 PM on February 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, Max and Jessamyn! Interesting info.

I don't think it is likely to be Jule Hartman (b. ca. 1889), as he was a mason, so the quote about "retiring" his iron doesn't really fit. Similarly, Jules Hartman, Sr. was a boat builder and was certainly born even earlier (making it doubly unlikely he ironed his own work clothes).

My guess would be that our mystery Jule, if he existed, was born after 1920 and worked in advertising. We didn't really talk about "stress" as a psychological strain often related to work until after the 1940s, nor use "commute" as a noun (meaning a trip to and from work) until the 1950s.
posted by obloquy at 4:42 PM on February 6, 2015

Mod note: Final update from the OP:

"In case you never found an answer, I found this pretty convincing:
https://www.quotegarden.com/tg-noms-de-plume.html

"which I found here:
https://forum.puzzlebaron.com/forum/puzzle-baron/cryptograms/30440-104-quote-authors-who-are-all-actually-terri-guillemets

"—Franklin"
...
The author of the quote seems to be a woman named Terri Guillemets, who has attributed quotes to over a hundred noms de plume, some of which were fictional characters from stories she’d written.

I originally asked the question while I was fact-checking/confirming some epigraphs in a book I was editing. In the end I chose to put the attribution “Hartman Jule” in quotes, which I feel was an adequate solution.

Thanks, AskMe, and thanks, Franklin! It’s super gratifying to finally have a plausible answer nearly ten years later.

posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:23 AM on August 9, 2024