Lester Gaba was born in Hannibal, Missouri, and he doesn't look anything like Mark Twain, but he has a sense of humor.

He would have to, for when he gave up the foregoing and succeeding information, hew was in the midst of moving into a new apartment and it was about 10 o'clock in the morning, and anyone who can be in good humor at 10 o'clock in the mroning whe he is also in the act of moving, surrounded by boxes and bales and the evidence of several invaluable possessions having been smashed by the moving men, that person is indubitably possessed of a sense of humor.

Well, as has been said, he was born in Hannibal. His father owned a store, but that never put ideas of soap sculpture or any form of art into his head.

Immune to the suggestion that he could have a job in the store when he grew up, the boy spent most of his time out of school up in the attic, drawing on walls, and on pieces of paper.

Procter & Gamble established their first soap sculpture contest when he was about 10, and he wanted to enter it, because a woman in Chicago, who he liked to draw, sent him a sheet from the Christian Science Monitor which had a story about the contest.

He tried and tried to make some pretty figures out of soap, and they were pretty bad, and he got very discouraged.

So he went to school the alloted time, and the first chance he got, he went off to Chicago, where he got a job in the shipping department of Marshall Field's, with the general idea that he might become an artist.

A man found out about his wanting to be an artist, and bought him a course at an art school, but in the perverse way of some youngsters, it seemed that that wasn't the way he wanted to approach art.

So, he stayed long enough to get his card punched, and then went away, intent on making arrangement with art some other way.

But one night something caught his interest, and he stayed for a while, and a girl looked over his shoulder at what he was doing, and she thought it was pretty good, and gave him a note to the poster department of Balaban & Katz, the theater people, and he got a job there designing posters. He stayed five years. He sketched in his spare time.

He came to New York with a note to Miss Neysa McMein. She sent him with his sketches to the art director of an advertising agency, not primarily for the sketches but for the little soap figures which he had also been doing, and which she thought were better than the sketches, and indeed they were.

But, when he got to the art director he forgot to show him the little soap men, and the director called up Miss McMein and said, "What under the sun was that you sent me?"

And it came out that he hadn't seen the soap sculptures, so Miss McMein made Gaba go back and show those, and he got a chance to do some magazine covers and things and that was what he was doing when wrote the piece for Miss Fleischer, and Miss Lewis asked him to design mannequins for her windows.