The illustration above by M.L. Blumenthal appeared in the first installment of H.G. Wells’ series “What Is Coming?”
“Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences,” H.G. Wells wrote in 1916. “For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind. … The scientific training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really here now — if only one could see it. And when one is taken by surprise the tendency is not to say with the untrained man, ‘Now, who’d ha’ thought it?’ but ‘Now, what was it we overlooked?’”
This was how Wells began his forecast of the remaining days and aftermath of the world’s first great war. The article was part of a 10-part series titled “What Is Coming?,” which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916.
The author had already established a reputation for prediction, based on books like The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). And he seemed a good fit to predict the outcome of World War I.
But in 1916 when the series was released, the war was far from over. After the article below (the second in the series) was published, the line of battle that stretched from the Swiss border to the English Channel would move no more than a few miles in the following 35 months. Though Wells did not predict how long the war would last, he was proved right about its ultimate conclusion: The end of the war would be “no longer about victories or conquest but about securing … the best chances of rapid economic recuperation and social reconstruction.”
What Is Coming: The End of the War
By H. G. Wells
Originally published on January 15, 1916
The prophet who emerges with the most honor from this war is [Ivan Stanislavovich] Bloch. It must be fifteen or sixteen years ago since this gifted Russian made his forecast of the future. Perhaps it is more, for the French translation was certainly in existence before the Boer War. His case was that war between fairly equal antagonists must end in a deadlock because of the continually increasing defensive efficiency of entrenched infantry. This would give the defensive an advantage over the most brilliant strategy and over considerably superior numbers that would completely discourage all aggression. He concluded that war was played out.
His book was very carefully studied in Germany. As a humble follower of Bloch I did not realize this, and that failure led me into some unfortunate prophesying at the outbreak of the war. I judged Germany by the Kaiser, and by the Kaiser-worship which I saw in Berlin. I thought that he was a theatrical person who would dream of vast attacks and tremendous cavalry charges, and that he would lead Germany to be smashed against the allied defensive in the West, and to be smashed so thoroughly that the war would be over. I did not properly appreciate the more studious and more thorough Germany that was to fight behind the Kaiser and thrust him aside, the Germany we English fight now, the Ostwald-Krupp Germany of 1915. That Germany, one may now perceive, had read and thought over and thought out the Bloch problem. There was also a translation of Bloch into French. In English a portion of his book was translated for the general reader and published with a preface by the late Mr. W.T. Stead. It does not seem to have reached our military authorities, nor was it published here with an instructive intention. As an imaginative work it would have been considered worthless and impracticable.
Getting Military Science Up to Date
But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and French frontiers had been properly prepared — as they should have been prepared when the Germans built their strategic railways — with trenches and gun emplacements and secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty miles into either France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liege and in the Ardennes. Five hundred thousand men would have held them indefinitely. But the Allies had never worked out trench warfare; they were unready for it, the Germans knew of their unreadiness, and upon this unreadiness it is quite clear they calculated. They did not reckon, it is now clear that they were right in not reckoning, the Allies as contemporary soldiers. They were going to fight a 1900 army with a 1914 army, and their whole opening scheme was based on the conviction that the Allies would not entrench. Somebody in those marvelous maxims from the Dark Ages that seem to form the chief reading of our military experts said that the army that entrenches is a defeated army. The silly dictum was repeated and repeated after the Battle of the Marne. It shows just where our military science had reached in 1914 — namely, to a level a year before Bloch wrote. So the Allies retreated. For long weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of Belgium, out of the north of France, and for rather over a month there was a loose, mobile war — as if Bloch had never existed. The Germans were not fighting the 1914 pattern of war, they were fighting the 1899 pattern of war, in which direct attack, outflanking, and so on were still supposed to be possible; they were fighting confident in their overwhelming numbers, in their prepared surprise, in the unthought-out methods of their opponents. In the Victorian war that ended in the middle of September they delivered their blow, they overreached, they were successfully counterattacked on the Marne, and then abruptly — almost unfairly it seemed to our sportsmanlike conceptions — they shifted to the game played according to the very latest rules of 1914. The war did not come up to date until the Battle of the Aisne. With that the second act of the great drama began.
I do not believe that the Germans ever thought it would come up to date so soon. I believe they thought that they would hustle the French out of Paris, come right up to the Channel at Calais before the end of 1914, and then entrench, produce the submarine attack and the Zeppelins, working from Calais as a base, and that they would end the war before the spring of 1915 — with the Allies still a good fifteen years behindhand. I believe the Battle of the Marne was the decisive battle of the war, in that it shattered this plan, and that the rest of the 1914 fighting was Germany’s attempt to reconstruct their broken scheme in the face of an enemy who was continually getting more and more nearly up to date with the fighting. By December, Bloch, who had seemed utterly discredited in August, was justified up to the hilt. The world was entrenched at his feet. By May the lagging military science of the British had so far overtaken events as to realize that shrapnel was no longer so important as high explosive, and within a year the significance of machine guns, a significance thoroughly ventilated by imaginative writers fifteen years before, was being grasped by our conservative but by no means inadaptable leaders.
The war since that first attempt, admirably planned and altogether justifiable — from a military point of view, I mean — of Germany to “rush” a victory has consisted almost entirely of failures on both sides either to get round or through or over the situation foretold by Bloch. There has been only one marked success — the German success in Poland due to the failure of the Russian munitions. Then for a time the war in the East was mobile and precarious while the Russians retreated to their present positions, and the Germans pursued and tried to surround them. That was a lapse into the pre-Bloch style. Now the Russians are again entrenched, their supplies are restored, the Germans have a lengthened line of supplies, and Bloch is back upon his pedestal so far as the Eastern theater goes. Bloch has been equally justified in the Anglo-French attempt to get round through Gallipoli.
The forces of the India Office have pushed their way through unprepared country to Bagdad, but from the point of view of the main war that is too remote to be considered either getting through or getting round; and so, too, the losses of the German colonies and the East African war are scarcely to be reckoned with in the main war. They have no determining value. There remains the Balkan struggle. But the Balkan struggle is something else; it is something new. It must be treated separately. It is a war of treacheries and brags and appearances. It is not a part of, it is a sequence to, the deadlock war of 1915.
But before dealing with this new development it is necessary to consider certain general aspects of the deadlock war. It is manifest that the Germans hoped to secure an effective victory in this war before they ran up against Bloch. But, reckoning with Bloch as they certainly did, they hoped that even in the event of the war getting to earth it would still be possible to produce novelties that would sufficiently neutralize Bloch to secure a victorious peace. With unexpectedly powerful artillery suddenly concentrated, with high explosives, with asphyxiating gas, with a well-organized system of grenade-throwing and mining, with attacks of flaming gas, and above all with a vast munition-making plant to keep them going, they had a very reasonable chance of hacking their way through.
The Teutonic Air Path
Against these prepared novelties the Allies have had to improvise, and on the whole the improvisation has kept pace with the demands made upon it. They have brought their military science up to date, and today the disparity in science and equipment between the antagonists has greatly diminished. There has been no escaping Bloch, after all, and the deadlock, if no sudden peace occurs, can end now in only one thing — the exhaustion in various degrees of all the combatants and the succumbing of the most exhausted. The idea of a conclusive end of the traditional pattern to this war, of a triumphal entry into London, Paris, Berlin or Moscow, is to be dismissed altogether from our calculations. The end of this war will be a matter of negotiation between practically immobilized and extremely shattered antagonists.
There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch deadlock that the Germans at least have contemplated. If it is not possible to get through or round, it may still be possible to get over. There is the air path. This idea has certainly taken hold of the French mind, but France has been too busy and is temperamentally too economical to risk large expenditures upon what is necessarily an experiment. The British are too conservative and skeptical to be the pioneers in any such enterprise. The Russians have been too poor in the necessary resources of mechanics and material. The Germans alone have made any sustained attempt to strike through the air at their enemies beyond the war zone. Their Zeppelin raids upon England have shown a steadily increasing efficiency, and it is highly probable that they will be repeated on a much larger scale before the war is over. Quite possibly, too, the Germans are developing an accessory force of large aeroplanes to cooperate in such an attack. The long coasts of Britain, the impossibility of their being fully equipped throughout their extent, except at a prohibitive cost of men and material, to resist invaders, expose the whole length of the island to considerable risk and annoyance from such an expedition. But it is doubtful if the utmost damage an air raid is likely to inflict upon England would count materially in the exhaustion process, and the moral effect of these raids has been, and is likely to be, to stiffen the British resolution to fight this war through to the conclusive ending of any such possibilities. The best chance for the aircraft was at the beginning of the war, when a surprise development might have had astounding results. That chance has gone by. Nor is there anything on or under the sea that seems likely now to produce decisive results. We return from these considerations to a strengthened acceptance of Bloch.
The essential question for the prophet remains, therefore, the question of which group of Powers will exhaust itself most rapidly. And, following on from that, comes the question of how the successive stages of exhaustion will manifest themselves in the combatant nations. The problems of this war, as of all war, end as they begin in national psychology.
But it will be urged that this is reckoning without the Balkans. I submit that the German thrust through Serbia is really no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 1915. Here there is no way round or through to any vital center of Germany’s antagonists. It turns nothing; it opens no path to Paris, London or Petrograd. It is a long, long way from the Danube to either Egypt or Bagdad, and there and there — Bloch is waiting. I do not think the Germans have any intention of so generous an extension of their responsibilities. The Balkan complication is no solution of the deadlock problem.
A whole series of new problems are opened up directly as we turn to this most troubled region — problems of the value of kingship, of nationality, of the destiny of such cities as Constantinople, which from their very beginning have never had any sort of nationality at all; of the destiny of countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense tribal nationality is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia, where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no definite, national boundaries, no religious, linguistic or social homogeneities, have ever arisen since the Roman legions beat them down. But all these questions can really be deferred or set aside in our present discussion. Whatever surprises or changes this last phase of that blood-clotted melodrama, the Eastern Empire, may involve, they will not alter the essential fact of the great war, they will but assist and hasten on the essential conclusion of the great war, that the Central Powers and their pledged antagonists are in a deadlock, unable to reach a decision, and steadily, day by day, hour by hour, losing men, destroying material, spending credit, approaching something unprecedented, unknown, that we try to express to ourselves by the word exhaustion.
The Rigors of a War of Attrition
Just how the people who use the word so freely are prepared to define it is a matter for speculation. The idea seems to be a phase in which the production of equipped forces ceases through the using up of men or material or both. If the exhaustion is fairly mutual it need not be decisive for a long time. It may mean simply an ebb of vigor on both sides, unusual hardship, a general social and economic disorganization and grading down. The fact that a great killing off of men is implicit in the process, and that the survivors will be largely under discipline, militates against the idea that the end may come suddenly through a vigorous revolutionary outbreak. Exhaustion is likely to be a very long and very thorough process extending over years. A “war of attrition” may last into 1918 or 1919, and may bring us to conditions of strain and deprivation still only very vaguely imagined. What happens in the Turkish Empire or India or America or elsewhere may accelerate or retard or extend the area of the process, but is quite unlikely to end it.
Let us ask now which of the combatants are likely to undergo exhaustion most rapidly, and, what is of equal or greater importance, which is likely to feel it first and most. No doubt there is a bias in my mind, but it seems to me that the odds are on the whole against the Central Powers. Their peculiar virtue, their tremendously complete organization which enabled them to put so large a proportion of their total resources into their first onslaught and to make so great and rapid a recovery in the spring of 1915, leaves them with less to draw upon now. Out of a smaller fortune they have spent a larger sum. They are blockaded to a very considerable extent, and against them fight not merely the resources of the Allies, but, thanks to the complete British victory in the sea struggle, the purchasable resources of all the world. Conceivably they will draw upon the resources of their Balkan allies, but the extent to which they can do that may very easily be overestimated. There is a limit to the power for treason of these supposititious German monarchs that British folly has permitted to possess these Balkan thrones, and none of the Balkan peoples is likely to witness the complete looting of its country in the German interest by a German court with enthusiasm.
Germany will have to pay on the nail for most of her Balkan help. She will have to put more into the Balkans than she takes out. And compared with the world behind the Allies the Turkish Empire is a country of mountains, desert and undeveloped lands. To develop these regions into a source of supplies under the strains and shortages of wartime will be an immense and dangerous undertaking for Germany. She may open mines she may never work, build railways that others will enjoy, sow harvests for alien reaping. And for all these tasks she must send men. Men?
At present, so far as any judgment is possible, Germany is feeling the pinch of the war much more even than France, which is habitually parsimonious, and Russia, which is hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has really only begun to feel the stress. She has probably suffered economically no more than Holland or Switzerland, and Italy and Japan have certainly suffered less. All these countries are full of men, of gear, of salable futures. In every part of the globe Great Britain has colossal investments. She has still to apply the great principle of conscription, not only to her sons but to the property of her overseas investors and of her landed proprietors. She has not even looked yet at the German financial expedients of a year ago. She moves reluctantly but surely toward such a thoroughness of mobilization. There need be no doubt that she will completely socialize herself, completely reorganize her whole social and economic structure, sooner than lose this war. She will do it clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal bickering, but not so slowly as a logical mind might anticipate.
Germany then, I reckon, will become exhausted first among all the combatants. I think, too, that she will as a nation feel and be aware of what is happening to her sooner than any other of the nations that are sharing in this process of depletion. In 1914 the Germans were reaping the harvest of forty years of economic development and business enterprise. Property and plenty were new experiences, and a generation had grown up in whose world a sense of expansion and progress was normal. There existed no tradition of the great hardship of war, such as the French possessed, to steel their minds. They came into this war more buoyantly and confidently than any other people. Neither great victories nor defeats have been theirs, but only a slow vast transition from joyful effort to hardship, loss and loss and loss of substance, the dwindling of great hopes, the realization of ebb in the triumphant tide of national welfare. They are under stresses now as harsh as the stresses of France.
The First Heralds of Peace
We know little of the psychology of this new Germany that has come into being since 1871, but it is doubtful if it will accept defeat and still more doubtful how it can evade some ending to the war that will admit the failure of all its great hopes of Paris subjugated, London humbled, Russia suppliant, Belgium conquered. Such an ending will be a day of reckoning that German imperialism will postpone until the last hope of some breach among the Allies, some saving miracle in the old Eastern Empire, some dramatically snatched victory at the eleventh hour, is gone. Nor can the Pledged Allies consent to a peace that does not involve the evacuation and compensation of Belgium and Serbia, and at least the autonomy of the lost provinces of France. Those are the ends of the main war. Europe will go down through stage after stage of impoverishment and exhaustion until these ends are attained or made forever impossible.
But these things form only the main outlines of a story with a vast amount of collateral interest. It is to these collateral issues that the amateur in prophecy must give his attention. It is here that the German will be induced by his government to see his compensations. He will be consoled for the restoration of Serbia by prospect of future conflicts between Italian and Jugoslav that will let him in again to the Adriatic. His attention will be directed to his newer, closer association with Bulgaria and Turkey. In those countries he may yet repeat the miracle of Hungary. He will hope also to retain his fleet, and no peace, he will be reminded, can rob him of his hard-earned technical superiority in the air. The German Air Fleet of 1930 may yet be something as predominant as the British Navy of 1915. Had he not better wait for that? When such ideas as these become popular in the German press we may begin to talk of peace, for these will be its necessary heralds. The concluding phase of a process of general exhaustion must almost inevitably be a game of bluff. Neither side will admit its extremity. Neither side, therefore, will make any direct proposals to its antagonists nor any open advances to a neutral. But there will be much inspired peace talk through neutral media, and the consultations of the anti-German allies will become more intimate and detailed. Suggestions will “leak out” remarkably from both sides, to journalists and neutral go-betweens. The Eastern and Western Allies will probably begin quite soon to discuss a Zoilverein and the coordination of their military and naval organizations in the days that are to follow the war. A general idea of the possible rearrangement of the European states after the war will grow up in the common European and American mind; public men on either side will indicate concordance with this general idea, and some neutral power will invite representatives to an informal discussion of these possibilities. Probably, therefore, the peace negotiations will take the extraordinary form of two simultaneous conferences: one, of the Pledged Allies, sitting probably in Paris or London; and the other, of representatives of all the combatants, meeting in some neutral country — probably Holland will be the most convenient — while the war will still be going on. The Dutch conference will be in immediate contact by telephone and telegraph with the Allied conference and with Berlin.
The broad conditions of a possible peace will begin to get stated toward the end of 1916, and a certain lassitude will creep over the operations in the field. The process of exhaustion will probably have reached such a point by that time that it will be a primary fact in the consciousness of common citizens of every belligerent country. The common life of all Europe will have become — miserable. Conclusive blows will have receded out of the imagination of the contending powers. The war will have reached its fourth and last stage as a war. The war of the great attack will have given place to the war of the military deadlock; the war of the deadlock will have gone on, with a gradual shifting of the interest to the war of treasons and diplomacies in the Eastern Mediterranean; and now the last phase will be developing into predominance, in which each nation will be most concerned, no longer about victories or conquest but about securing for itself the best chances of rapid economic recuperation and social reconstruction. The commercial treaties, the arrangements for future associated action, made by the great Allies among themselves will appear more and more important to them, and the mere question of boundaries less and less. It will dawn upon Europe that she has already dissipated the resources that have enabled her to levy the tribute paid for her investments in every quarter of the earth, and that neither the Germans nor their antagonists will be able for many years to go on with those projects for world exploitation which lay at the root of the great war. Very jaded and anemic nations will sit about the table on which the new map of Europe will be drawn. Each of the diplomatists will come to that business with a certain preoccupation. Each will be thinking of his country as one thinks of a patient of doubtful patience and temper who is coming out of the drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived and unnecessary operation. Each will be thinking of Labor, wounded and perplexed, returning to the disorganized factories from which Capital has fled.
You can’t take a character home with you or you’d go mad; at least I would,” Sir Ben Kingsley says with a laugh. “What I find is that if I leave the character until the next day’s filming, then I go back and get to jump from me to the character. I love taking that running leap from me to him.”
Sir Ben recently voiced the role of Bagheera, the black panther, in the live-action version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and showed his dark side as a gangster in the action-filled kidnap flick Collide. He’s also co-starring with his son Edmund in the upcoming An Ordinary Man, playing a Nazi war criminal on the run.
Jeanne Wolf: In a career spanning over 40 years, you’ve taken on an incredibly diverse range of characters — from your Academy Award-winning performance as Gandhi to some horrific bad guys in Iron Man 3 and Oliver Twist. Are you aware you can be intimidating?
Ben Kingsley: Whatever mythology surrounds me, true or false, is diffused very quickly when I arrive on the set and give everyone a hug and say, “This is exciting. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
JW: You’re often described as a chameleon. The way you turn into someone else is magical. How do you do it?
BK: I feel quite ashamed sometimes admitting how little research I do and that I just learn my lines. Nobody wants to believe me. But I learn my lines for weeks before a film. The goal is not to let any of my actors or the director down. I’m floored with admiration for Spencer Tracy, and one of his tenets was, “Make the other guy look good.” That’s not to say that I’m not ambitious.
I think that some ambition comes from being told that you’ll never achieve something.
I remember that from my own childhood. And in my adult life I was told by a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company that I would never play leaders or kings or great men — that I would be very good at playing servants. And I knew in my heart that one day I’d prove him utterly wrong in the sense of, “How dare you judge me?” I’ve tried
to let my own kids have some freedom from that.
I try not to interrupt them when they’re working on a new thought or even a new fear — not to interrupt but to step back and watch it flower. So many parents are more interested in power than allowing the other to grow.
JW: How do you keep the work fresh? What drives you?
BK: I am always evolving; otherwise, I guess I couldn’t do my job. If I can’t surprise myself, I can’t surprise my director and my fellow actors and, therefore, the audience — so my quest is to surprise myself. Maybe it’s a little bit like a mountaineer always looking for a particularly dangerous mountain.
If I could choose one thing that I hate about the current nutrition labels, it’s that it’s not easy to figure out exactly how much you’re eating. Right now I’m looking at a bag of mini Kit Kats. According to the label, in a serving size of five pieces there are 11 grams of fat, and there are seven servings per bag. Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell me the amount of fat, calories, and so on in one piece, and then let me multiply the number by how many pieces I eat — which will probably around 20? (Side note: If you’re eating 20 mini Kit Kats in one sitting, the nutrition label is probably unimportant to you.) Other than that, I don’t think the labels are too confusing.
But the FDA is changing them. They’ve introduced a new nutrition label that is not only easier to read but has more information for you, including info on how much sugar is added to the product. But they’ve gotten rid of one or two things too. The Washington Post has a complete rundown on what’s new.
Here’s The Boston Globe’s side-by-side comparison of the old and new labels:
I’m not sure of a lot of things. I can’t swim, I don’t know how to fold a dress shirt, and I’m still not certain how the stock market works. But there is one thing I do know for sure: Gillian Anderson is not going to be the next James Bond.
That’s one of the names being floated around by … well, people who float names around. They know it’s just a silly “wish.” She’s not actually going to be the next 007. You can be sure that the next Bond is going to be what all the other Bonds have been: a man.
But according to rumors and comments he made after SPECTRE was released last year, Daniel Craig might have already quit as the secret agent. Since these types of rumors always come up after an actor does a few Bond movies and is getting a little exhausted from making them, this whole story could be completely untrue.
But if it does turn out to be true, what names actually are being bandied for the role? At the top of the list is Tom Hiddleston, who is currently starring in AMC’s The Night Manager. He’s such a popular choice that bookmakers had to actually stop people from betting on him (yes, apparently you can bet on who the next Bond will be in England). Other people mentioned include Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell (he supposedly has met with the producers); Poldark star Aidan Turner; Damian Lewis, from Billions and Homeland; and Idris Elba, who a lot of people on social media have wanted to be Bond for quite some time. And for good measure let’s throw in all the names that were mentioned just before Craig got the role, such as Eric Bana, Goran Visnjic, Tom Hardy, and Henry Cavill.
Keep in mind that a lot of these “such and such is the new contender for the role of James Bond!” stories could just be rumors created by the publicists and managers of certain actors or something spread by fans on social media. We’ll find out more officially in the next few months if Craig is going to stay or not.
RIP Alan Young and Beth Howland
Young is probably best known as the human star of the classic sitcom Mr. Ed, but he had quite an interesting career beyond having conversations with a horse.
He was the voice of Scrooge McDuck in many Disney cartoons and appeared in such movies as The Time Machine (the original and the 2002 remake), Aaron Slick From Punkin Crick, Androcles and the Lion, and Tom Thumb. He also appeared in many TV shows, from The Alan Young Show and Studio 57 to Murder, She Wrote and The Love Boat. And before all that, he was a radio star. He had his own show when he was 17 years old, and it was rather influential, even if a lot of people don’t remember that part of his career.
Young passed away last week in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 96. Some might not know that his real name was Angus Young or that he was born in England and raised in Scotland and Canada.
Beth Howland passed away from lung cancer on December 31, but her death is just now being announced, per her wishes. She played ditsy but kind waitress Vera on Alice. I didn’t realize that she was married to Charles Kimbrough, who played anchor Jim Dial on Murphy Brown.
I’d love to have Peggy Olsen’s Royal typewriter. I would type these columns on it and then snail-mail them to my editor, who would then have to scan them to post them online. But it would be worth it! [Editor’s note: No, it wouldn’t.]
A Documentary About Rose Marie
If Mad Men is my favorite drama of all time, then The Dick Van Dyke Show is my favorite comedy. It’s like TV comfort food for me. One of the show’s stars, Rose Marie, is still going strong at the age of 92. She even has a strong presence online, with a web site and Twitter and Facebook accounts.
She’s also on Kickstarter! They want to put together a documentary on her life, so please give whatever you can (you’ll get gifts, depending on how much you donate). She’s had a long career (starting out as a child singer and actress), and I’m sure the documentary will be fascinating. She’s one cool lady.
The Qwerkywriter
I guess if I can’t get that typewriter from the set of Mad Men, this might be the next best thing. It’s the Qwerkywriter, a computer keyboard that looks like a manual typewriter keyboard. It looks well-made and has some really nice features. It even sounds like a typewriter when you tap the keys. It works with iPads, Macbooks, iPhones, Windows tablets, and all Android devices. Writer John Scalzi isn’t really a typewriter guy, but he likes it.
It costs $350, which is a little pricey, but it’s really sharp-looking and might be just the thing for the person who wants to have a little bit of the manual typewriter experience without losing access to their Facebook and email.
National Biscuit Day
I’ve never made biscuits before, and I have no idea what White Lily flour is, but if you’re going to make biscuits for National Biscuit Day — it’s this Sunday — then this recipe for the buttermilk version from Food 52 might be the way to go.
Or, if you don’t want to make a mess of your kitchen, you could wait 24 hours and celebrate National Mint Julep Day. Sounds like the perfect drink for a Memorial Day Monday.
Upcoming Events and Anniversaries
100th running of the Indy 500 (May 29)
The first Indy 500 was in 1911, but no races were run in 1917 or 1918 (because of WWI) or between 1942 and 1945 (because of WWII). This year’s race is sold out, which means Hoosiers get to watch the race on live TV for the first time since 1950.
Memorial Day (May 30)
Saturday Evening Post Archive Director Jeff Nilsson wrote about the history of Memorial Day, which was once called Decoration Day.
Lincoln Memorial dedicated (May 30, 1922)
The memorial is part of the National Park Service, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.
A snowball smacked Izzy Mahler on the side of his head while he was turned toward Grundy’s Store, yearning for the assorted candies and fine bubble gums within — luxuries beyond his reach because at age 6 he was too young to carry money.
“Hey!” he cried, releasing Mary Lou’s mittened hand as Barton Bigelow and three sub-bullies surrounded them on the icy sidewalk. Each of the bullies was almost a head taller than Izzy.
“Hey, kid!” Barton said, though Izzy was certain Barton knew his name. “Who said you could use this sidewalk?”
This is terrible, thought Izzy, and Mary Lou did not help things by starting to whimper. She walked with Izzy twice a day, never to school, only home from school, at lunchtime and again at the end of the day.
Izzy had been born without an ounce of combat or contention in him. All he could do in this crisis was blubber tearfully: “But — but, we always walk home this way!”
“Well,” said Barton Bigelow, “this is our sidewalk, see? And you owe us rent.”
Rent? Izzy was speechless.
“How much cash do you have, kid?” Barton asked.
“Cash? I don’t have cash,” whined Izzy, while tears flowed down Mary Lou’s soft, round cheeks.
“You better get some,” said the bully. “Look, we’ll let you go for now. But next time you see us, you’d better have a dime for us, or we’ll beat you up.”
Barton Bigelow and his buddies relaxed their stances just a bit. Izzy pulled Mary Lou by the hand, and the four bullies laughed as he tugged her away.
“Remember, kid. A dime, next time!” said Bigelow.
***
When Izzy got home, he removed his hat, muffler, mittens, galoshes, and snowsuit, leaving them on a chair by the kitchen door.
His tall, blond mother made a soft-boiled egg, diced it on a piece of toast, and placed it and a glass of milk in front of him. She watched and hovered for a few moments, then sat down beside him, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette while she read Ladies’ Home Journal and listened to Ma Perkins, a soap opera that drifted through the doorway from the wood-bodied Philco radio in the living room.
A confident male voice announced that women across the country were getting washes so wonderfully clean and white they could hardly believe it, with deep-cleaning Oxydol!
Then the announcer turned things over to Ma and Shuffle and the folks at the Perkins Lumberyard, who worried that Cousins Eddie and Sylvester were about to swindle Evey and Willie out of their life savings.
Izzy marveled that his mother could follow all this drama effortlessly while simultaneously reading her magazine — but her powers amazed him daily. For his part, it was all he could do to worry about the bullies who wanted to extort from him money that he did not even have yet.
“Mom,” he said, “can I have a dime?”
She raised her head from the Ladies’ Home Journal, and a faraway look came over her. Izzy toyed with his egg and toast, knowing that it would take her a few moments to get back from wherever she had gone. She knit her brows while Willie told Evey that he had given Cousin Sylvester the $2,000 to purchase the stock — whatever that means, thought Izzy.
Mom frowned. Then, abruptly, she turned to Izzy.
“What did you say, honey?”
“I said, ‘Can I have a dime?’” He looked up at her and held his breath.
The corners of her eyes crinkled, as they always did when she found something hilarious.
“Oh, that’s rare, Izzy!” she said. “Of course not. Whatever would you need a dime for?”
He opened his eyes wide, took a deep breath, and let her have it: “Because these kids are going to beat me up if I don’t give them a dime!”
His mother’s face veered abruptly from fair and sunny to impending thunderstorm. This gave Izzy hope, for she was not a woman to be taken lightly.
“Which kids are going to beat you up?” she asked.
“Barton Bigelow and his friends,” he said.
“Bullies,” she declared, “that’s what they are! Stand up to them, Izzy. Just tell them you’re not giving them any money.” She nodded her head righteously. Having solved that problem, she returned to her magazine, while Izzy’s heart sank.
However, just when he was about to head back to school, opportunity suddenly struck. His mother had left the kitchen to retune the radio for Stella Dallas, but her purse sat open on the counter. Quick as a wink, Izzy snatched a dime from the little red coin purse inside. By the time Mom returned, Izzy was sitting on the chair, snowsuited and pulling on his boots.
“Have a good afternoon,” she said. “Study hard.”
***
The dime in his pocket filled Izzy with new-minted confidence as he trod the path from his house to Horace Greeley Elementary School. He imagined the bullies swooping down on him soon, meaning to fill his heart with dread.
“Ha!” he would say. “Here’s your dime.” The magical little coin would change hands and Barton Bigelow would be vanquished. This vision, however, failed to materialize. Barton and his band of bullies were nowhere to be seen. Izzy stood in the middle of the sidewalk and craned his neck in both directions.
“Whatcha lookin’ for, Izzy?”
It was Roger Pagelkopf, Izzy’s neighbor. Roger was 11 and in sixth grade, and he carried books. He wore bright red earmuffs that matched the tip of his unshielded nose.
“Looking for?” echoed Izzy. “Oh, nothing in particular.”
Roger gave him a strange look and dashed on toward school.
As Izzy passed Grundy’s store again, he felt the tug of the glorious candy case. Since he had a few minutes to spare, he went in. He could, at least, take a look.
“Hello, Izzy,” said Mr. Grundy, an old man with sparse gray hair and suspenders. “What brings you in today?”
“I just want to look at the candy, Mr. Grundy,” replied Izzy.
“Here it is, be my guest,” said the grocer.
The case held many kinds of what was known as “penny candy,” even though some cost more than a penny. Transparent suckers in assorted bright colors, their heads wrapped in cellophane; large pink bubble-gum cigars and little boxes of candy cigarettes that mimicked the look of Camels, Luckies, or Chesterfields; paper-twisted taffy, plain and salt-water; sticks, twists, and loops of black and red licorice.
Then he suddenly saw It. More importantly, It saw him and whispered, “Take me home, Izzy.” It was a small pistol, a tiny revolver made of black and white licorice, so cunningly crafted as to resemble the real thing in all but size and hardness.
Izzy knew the little gun couldn’t really shoot. But just imagine if it could, what fun it would be to show it to Barton Bigelow, muzzle first, next time they met.
“How much is that little gun, Mr. Grundy?” asked Izzy. The dime taken from his mother’s purse was starting to burn a hole in his pocket.
“That little beauty will cost you five cents,” said the old man.
Five cents! That’s less than a dime, thought Izzy. He started to unzip his snowsuit, to fetch the dime from his pants pocket. But suddenly, he remembered Barton Bigelow. The fact that the bullies had not yet appeared did not mean they never would. And when they did, a real dime would make a far better weapon than a candy pistol. He sighed and zipped up again.
“I guess not, Mr. Grundy,” he said.
“Say hello to your mother and father for me,” called the grocer as Izzy left the store.
***
That afternoon, just after Izzy and Mary Lou passed the store on their way home from school, Barton and his pals jumped out from beyond the store’s far wall and stood around them again. Again Mary Lou cried, but this time, Izzy was prepared.
“Hey, kid, where’s that dime?” demanded Barton, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking vigorously.
“I have it right here!” said Izzy, flailing frantically to unzip his snowsuit, as Barton continued to shake him.
“Wait a minute, Barton, it’s right here!” Izzy reached for his pants pocket, but Barton’s hands were already there, digging in, trying to empty the pocket of everything.
“Hey!” boomed a voice behind them. “What are youse doin’?”
It was Roger Pagelkopf, loping toward where they stood on the walk.
“Roger!” cried Izzy, with some relief.
“Iz, what are you doin’?” asked Roger.
“Paying rent,” Izzy explained.
“Rent!” Roger’s brow darkened. He glared at Barton and his friends.
“Come here, youse,” he said, and he led the four bullies away, into the vacant lot next to the store. The four followed warily, for Roger stood taller than any of them and also had a deeper voice.
Izzy and Mary Lou watched as Roger spoke earnestly to the bullies. He bent down to look Barton square in the eye.
“Listen,” he said. “Izzy is my friend. Youse lay off of him, see?”
They glanced around darkly and muttered.
“Leave him be,” Roger insisted, “or I’ll come after youse. Understand?”
Silence.
“Do ya?” he persisted.
The four grudgingly nodded their heads, none daring to look Roger in the eye.
“Get outta here, then,” he said. They ran off.
“It’s okay, Izzy,” said Roger. “They won’t bother you no more.” He trotted off towards home as Izzy and Mary Lou resumed their trek.
As if by a miracle, Izzy had been saved from the bullies — and he still had his mother’s dime. This unexpected windfall posed a problem: If he bought the little licorice gun, there would be money left over, which he could quietly return to his mother’s purse. But if Mary Lou were with him, friendship and courtesy would compel him to share the bounty, and probably the whole dime would be spent.
He stopped.
“I forgot something,” Izzy said. “I have to go back.”
“Go back? Where?”
“School,” Izzy quickly replied. “I forgot something at school. You go on, Barton and the boys won’t bother you any more.”
Mary Lou frowned at him, then pouted. But finally, she trudged away, down the sidewalk toward home. Half a block onward, she turned and looked back, only to see Izzy standing there watching her. Again he waved her onward, with greater urgency. When she was far down the path, Izzy doubled back to Grundy’s Store.
***
“Back again?” said Mr. Grundy. “Twice in one day.”
“Yes, I know,” said Izzy. “I’ve been thinking about that little gun. I want it.”
Mr. Grundy reached into the candy case, lifted out the darling little revolver, placed it in a small paper bag, and handed it across the counter.
“That’ll be five cents,” he said.
Once again, Izzy unzipped his snowsuit, but as he reached into his pocket and his fingers touched the thin, solitary piece of silver there, an image flashed across his mind: An image of himself stealthily returning the coin to his mother’s purse — and in that brief glimpse of the future, it was unmistakably the whole dime that Izzy would return.
Of course, he thought. That would be the perfect way to do it. If he gave back the whole dime, then it would be, to all intents and purposes, totally unstolen. But then, the sweet little licorice gun …
The solution came to Izzy in another flash — a brilliant inspiration, really. He withdrew his hand from his pocket, leaving the dime safely in place. He looked up at Mr. Grundy’s expectant face.
“Charge it,” he said.
The grocer raised his bushy gray eyebrows.
“Charge it?”
“Charge it,” Izzy said again.
“Okay, Izzy,” sighed Mr. Grundy. “Just for you — we’ll charge it.”
Izzy beamed.
“Thanks, Mr. Grundy,” he said. As he left the store, he was peeking in the top of the paper bag at his precious little candy pistol.
***
Later that afternoon, Izzy played in the kitchen with the little licorice gun. It was still intact, because he didn’t actually like licorice, as something to eat. Rather, having a little gun made of licorice charmed him. He was using it to shoot imagined enemies when his mother came into the room to start supper.
“What’s that?” she asked, towering above him.
Izzy explained that it was a little licorice gun he had gotten at Grundy’s Store.
“Mr. Grundy just gave it to you?”
“No,” said Izzy, in a matter-of-fact voice. “I charged it.”
She stood there, arms akimbo, and stared at him, tilting her head first to left and then to right, and Izzy began to get the first inkling that something might be amiss.
“Mr. Grundy let you charge it?”
“Sure, Mom,” he said. “Why not? You and Daddy always tell him to charge things.”
“Groceries, Izzy,” she said. “Not just things. Certainly not candy.”
It was deflating to learn that the ability to incur credit did not automatically make Izzy a grown-up in his mother’s eyes.
“Izzy,” she said, “do you know what it means to charge something?”
Here, thought Izzy, was his chance to shine, to redeem himself.
“Sure, Mom,” he said brightly. “It means you don’t have to pay. It’s free.”
His mother made a moue of disgust, exhaling roughly.
“You don’t understand at all, do you?” she said, instantly puncturing his self-regard. “It’s not free. You still have to pay; you just pay later, instead of right away.”
This was a whole new concept, and Izzy’s head swam. His struggle to grasp what she was saying must have been written on his face, because his mother made an extra effort, reducing the idea to practical terms for him.
“How much did that cost?” she asked.
“A nickel. Well, not a real nickel, ’cause I charged it.”
“Right,” she said. “And why did you charge it?”
“Because I didn’t want to pay a nickel.”
“But now, don’t you see? Daddy or I will have to go see Mr. Grundy and pay him a nickel — a real nickel — because you charged a nickel.”
They would have to pay a nickel for the nickel he charged. This was news to Izzy, and it electrified him.
“Do you see, now, how that works?”
Yes, indeed he did. Maybe he could make amends.
“I haven’t eaten it yet, Mommy,” he said with diffidence. “Not even a little bite. Maybe we could take it back.”
“No,” she replied. “You’ve played with it already.”
Now, aghast at his error and vaguely resentful that his All-Knowing Parents had not explained all this to him before now, Izzy made an all-out assault on the mountain of his mother’s disapproval.
“I only charged it so I wouldn’t have to use the dime,” he said. And the very moment the word left his mouth, he wished he could have it back.
“Dime?” asked his mother. “What dime?” She glared accusation at him from on high.
Izzy’s eyes darted to her purse, which still sat open on the counter.
Her eyes followed his eyes.
“Izzy Mahler! Did you steal a dime from my purse?” Her indignation was righteous, his offense vile.
“I was going to put it back!” he wailed. He dug furiously in his pocket. “Here! Look, here it is. You can put it back in your purse.” And he offered up the dime.
His mother accepted the dime from his hand, but instead of putting it back in her purse, she held it right in front of his eyes.
“You stole this dime,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
“Did I?” he said, squirming, looking for a loophole.
“Don’t talk back to me, young man,” said his mother. “I don’t recall giving you permission to take a dime.”
“But they were going to beat me up!” he cried, wounded by the unfairness of it all.
She paused to frown, as if trying to figure something out.
“So, how is it you still have the dime?” she asked. “If you stole it to give to those bullies, why didn’t you give it to them?”
Izzy’s back was against the wall. He didn’t know how he could possibly explain the whole, tangled mess to this implacable woman bearing down on him, in a way she would understand, accept, and forgive.
“Well,” he began, his eyes nervously scanning his mother’s face. “I —”
He didn’t get any farther, for her frown suddenly cleared up, as when a wind blows a thundercloud away and the sunshine reappears.
“Izzy!” she said, and the very pronouncement of his name seemed a wondrous celebration. “You did it! You changed your mind about the dime, and you stood up to those bullies and held your ground!”
Blessed, out of the blue, with a golden moment of creative misunderstanding, Izzy did his best to work with what he had been given. No need, at this point, he reasoned, to mention Roger’s well-timed intervention. He could see how that fact would only add to his mother’s confusion.
“Anyway,” he said smoothly, “since I still had the dime, I thought I’d buy this little gun. But then I thought, if I just said, ‘Charge it,’ it would be free — and I could put your dime back —”
“And I’d never be the wiser,” his mother said knowingly.
Never be the wiser? What does that mean? wondered Izzy.
“Is that okay, Mom? If you’d never be the wiser?”
Instead of answering him, she admonished.
“Don’t ever steal money again, you understand?”
“Yes,” he vowed. “I’ll never do it again.”
“And from now on, don’t charge anything at the store. That’s only for your father and me, who know how to do it.”
He nodded seriously.
Waving the dime once more before his face for good measure, she slowly, ostentatiously returned it to her purse. Then she looked upon him and smiled.
“But I’m glad you stood up to those bullies,” she said.
In the summer 1932, more than 17,000 American veterans marched on Washington, D.C., along with 26,000 family members and supporters, demanding payment of the bonuses promised in the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, or Bonus Act, of 1924.
The bonus, which was intended to make up the difference between what they were paid as soldiers and what they would have earned as civilians, entitled every veteran to $1 for each day of domestic service (up to $500) or $1.25 for each day of overseas service (up to $625). Veterans were issued certificates for these bonuses that totaled $3 billion in all, but there was a catch: The certificates couldn’t be redeemed until 1945.
Then the Great Depression hit. With the support of veterans’ groups, Congress, over the president’s veto, allowed veterans to borrow up to half the face value of their bonus certificates. But by 1932, veterans felt an urgent need for immediate full payment. So they marched on Washington to pressure Congress for an early disbursement.
The so-called Bonus Army crowded around the Capitol, camped out on public grounds, and built shantytowns on the banks of the Potomac River. In June, they presented their case to the House of Representatives, which soon voted for an early complete payment of the bonuses.
When the resolution moved to the Senate, though, it was defeated on June 17.
At this point, many veterans simply headed home. Other veterans stayed put, having very little reason to leave, and hoped President Hoover would help them.
On July 28, the Attorney General ordered the Washington police to remove the veterans from the capital. The veterans resisted; two were shot and killed by police. President Hoover, far from helping the remainder of the Bonus Army, ordered the current Army to complete the job. Commander Douglas MacArthur, disobeying orders, launched a full assault on the veterans. Cavalry and tanks backed up foot soldiers who drove the Bonus Army from their shanties, which were then burned.
Writing in the Post two months later, Al Smith, former governor of New York, blamed the summer’s calamity on the American Legion and the House of Representatives for encouraging the marchers in spite of the economic infeasibility of paying the bonuses early. But he names the overall politics that led to the Bonus Act and its various amendments and expansions as the larger perpetrator:
[blockquote]If left to the veterans themselves and to the officials of the Government who have to deal with it, there is no doubt that a just and equitable system of compensation and reward could be arrived at, but the unfortunate thing about it all is that it is bedeviled by politics. [/blockquote]
Smith believed it was irresponsible to offer benefits that the budget couldn’t afford. The politicians had used the veterans for their own purposes, and it would happen again.
Smith worried about the snowballing expense of veterans’ benefits. He estimated that, by 1945, the federal government will have spent $23.5 billion on veterans’ benefits. He couldn’t have known that amount would be dwarfed by the cost of caring for the next generation of veterans, from an even larger war.
Smith’s concerns remain a problem today. Between 2000 and 2011, aid to disabled veterans rose 166 percent, from $14.8 billion to $39.4 billion. The president’s 2017 budget includes more than $180 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, most of it dedicated to disability compensation and pensions.
In the 1930s, an economist predicted that the cost of armaments and lost production would soon make war too expensive to wage. That didn’t prove to be true. Perhaps the cost of caring for disabled veterans will eventually make war too expensive to be considered as a solution for international conflicts.
Veterans and Taxpayers
By Alfred E. Smith
Originally published on September 17, 1932
No questions in government are so difficult as those that give rise to emotions in the hearts of the people. Nobody will take the negative side of the question that the man who offers himself to the country in time of trouble should be rewarded. Nobody who remembers the returning American heroes who went to France to decide the war would be willing to subscribe to any theory that these soldiers should not receive from the hands of the American people the recognition for that service to which they are entitled. If left to the veterans themselves and to the officials of the Government who have to deal with it, there is no doubt that a just and equitable system of compensation and reward could be arrived at, but the unfortunate thing about it all is that it is bedeviled by politics.
It cannot be disputed that the recent gathering in Washington of veterans demanding the immediate payment of the bonus was certainly encouraged by the attitude of members of Congress. These men received the bulk of their encouragement from the fact that the House of Representatives, the popular branch of the National Legislature, that one which is closest to the people, actually did pass a bill for immediate payment of the bonus. Who can deny that politics entered there into an economic question? Public opinion throughout the country is absolutely right when it lays some part of the blame for what occurred in Washington upon the statesmen hi the Lower House who, by their votes, their speeches and their actions, lent encouragement to that gathering of the veterans. Though I dislike to say it, I feel it is true, also, that they did this in the face of the fact that they could not have believed that their action on the bill was to meet with final success.
The Growing Costs of War
Students of American history knew that when a large Army was being mobilized to strengthen the position of the United States in the World War, the American people for generations to come were incurring liabilities. That lesson was forcefully impressed upon the American people at the close of the Civil War, and the gradual increase every decade in appropriations for pensions revealed the activity of a group organized to exact as much as possible from the Government. Appropriations for Civil War pensioners, between 1880 and 1920, jumped from $55,000,000 to $203,000,000, and in 1930, after the passage of 65 years, the total cost of Civil War pensioners remained at the figure of $125,000,000. All this was brought about by a series of enactments extending veterans’ pensions and benefits, engineered through Congress by a powerful pension lobby.
Pension-Agent Activities
Bonus Marchers’ camp in Washington, D.C., 1932. Horydczak, Theodor, photographer. “Bonus veterans. Camp B.E.F.” 1932. Theodor Horydczak Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
There are times when newspaper cartoons more clearly depict the situation than do columns of reading matter, and while viewing the present situation with respect to veterans, my mind is carried back to a cartoon by Keppler in Puck.
The picture displays the pension agent auctioning off the soldier vote. The pension agent, with his arm around the veteran soldier, is offering him to the two political parties. The Democratic Party is represented on one side and the Republican Party on the other, and the pension agent exclaims: “What am I bid?”
At the time that cartoon was published, everybody knew exactly what that meant. It meant that the pension agent, who received a liberal commission for pensions which he was able to secure, was offering the soldier vote to the highest bidder of the two great political parties. There is within my own recollection a pension agent whose office was in my neighborhood. I remember people who sought him out and the thoroughly satisfactory income, which he appeared to be making from pressing their pension claims.
The United States was able to survive all the abuses that crept into the law as the result of the activity of organized pension agents, because of the phenomenal growth of the country and her industries and her population in the period that immediately followed the Civil War.
During the World War, President Wilson, a careful student of history, sought to protect the United States from the abuses that followed the Civil War by laying down a wise and farsighted plan for payments to soldiers. He began by obtaining a scale of payment for men in the service higher than anything ever paid before in this or in any other country. He established, as a further part of this program, the principle of full and complete care of those wounded or disabled during the war and those whose disabilities are traceable to the war, ‘full care and protection for widows and orphans of soldiers who lost their lives in the war, and a system of insurance for all veterans on a sound actuarial basis, with contributions by the Government and the veterans, so that, in 1917, Congress, desiring to avoid the abuses of our 100 years’ history of pensions, passed the war-risk insurance, disability and compensation act. This, as I have outlined, was planned to take care of veterans killed or injured in the line of duty, or their dependents, and to offer to all veterans term insurance upon an actuarial basis.
At the time that this program was put forth, it was accepted by the entire country, and the great army of American veterans subscribed to it 100 percent. In other countries it was regarded as the most generous plan of government cooperation in the pensioning and care of soldiers and their dependents ever offered in this or, for that matter, in any other Country. Within six years of the close of the World War, however, the bonus bill had been passed and hospitalization had been thrown open to veterans not disabled in line of duty.
When the Minority Rules
After the war, the organization of a formidable lobby not only brought about provision for Federal and state bonuses in addition to the other benefits, but the whole Wilson theory was scrapped by the large number of amendments to the veterans’ laws, all of which had for their purpose the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of veterans and their dependents, whose disabilities and other problems were not remotely connected with the war. It is a matter of fact, and can be proved — and let us hope that it will be — by the congressional committee charged with its investigation, that much of the huge sum now being paid is, in fact, given to men who never saw active service and to dependents of men who never had and never could have any legitimate claim on the Government.
Gradual changes in these laws have put the United States in the position of paying large sums every year to more than 400,000 veterans whose disabilities resulted from causes other than military or naval service. These figures have been issued by a group of veterans themselves, and have never been refuted. Undoubtedly they will form the basis for the congressional investigation, to take place in the fall, of all the statutes passed since the original Wilson plan was adopted by the country.
Now, it goes without saying that unless the rank and file of the American people, who must bear this burden through taxation, pay some attention to these statutes, organized groups will, from time to time, fasten new obligations upon the people, which will result in mounting costs, additional taxation and all the hardship growing from these. The return of prosperity by the encouragement of business and individuals to invest their money in commercial enterprises will thereby be the longer delayed.
It must be borne in mind that by no means all the veterans subscribe to this form of legislation. It is, in all human probability, the well-organized minority which has been successful in securing the enactment of these measures, which are entirely outside of the original program laid down, accepted by all, and adopted.
The real fact of the matter is that those in a position to know have made an unchallenged statement that 75 percent of the country’s veterans are not members of the American Legion and they may or may not agree with its views. This is in accordance with the history of the activity of the Grand Army of the Republic immediately following the Civil War. It presents another example of what can be accomplished in our country by the organization of a group, even though it may be a minority one. Nor is the American Legion the only active organization of veterans of the World War. There are a number of veterans’ organizations of the World War, to say nothing of those whose membership dates to other wars.
The Legion Falls in Line
Even the Legion as a whole, to do it justice, judging by the records of its conventions, came reluctantly to some of this program. At its first organization meeting in St. Louis, only a small minority favored a bonus payment to every soldier, and the plan was turned down. When a bonus resolution was introduced into the 1919 convention of the Legion, its action was reported as follows:
While the American Legion was not founded to promote legislation in its selfish interest, yet it recognizes that our Government has an obligation to all service men and women to relieve the financial disadvantages incidental to military service . . . but the Legion feels that it cannot ask for legislation in its selfish interest and leaves with confidence to Congress the discharge of this obligation.
It must have been the minority even in its own organization that finally forced it into action after the first bonus bill, entitled The Fourfold Adjusted Compensation Measure, was introduced in Congress. From that time on, through all its vicissitudes from 1920, through its postponement at President Harding’s request, and his veto of the bill when passed in 1922, until it was finally passed over President Coolidge’s veto in May, 1924, each successive Legion convention took a more and more decisive, positive and peremptory attitude.
This Adjusted Compensation Act was a compromise of the bonus idea. It gave extra compensation to every service man at the rate of a dollar for each day of home service and a dollar and a quarter for each day of overseas service. It limited the base amount to $500 for home service and $625 for overseas service. The money was to accumulate as an insurance fund for 20 years, the Government putting aside $112,000,000 a year to meet the total, which would be due in 20 years. The maximum amount due any one man would at that time be in the neighborhood of $1600. It was possible for veterans to borrow up to 22 percent of the full amount.
Agitating for Payment in Full
This compromise lasted for six years. Then came the business depression, and brought with it renewed demands to pay the full amount immediately and in full.
In February 1931, over President Hoover’s veto, a compromise was again made. It permitted veterans to borrow 50 percent of the face value of adjusted-compensation certificates. Nearly $1,500,000,000 has already been advanced in such loans, and the original purpose of using it as insurance has been defeated.
Nor was this enough. Agitation to pay all of it at once continued, and the President himself went to the last convention of the Legion at Detroit and succeeded in averting the demand temporarily. Still the Legion seemed to be ruled by indecision and was not unanimous. I quote an address made to the department commanders of the Legion at the end of 1931:
Now, on the so-called bonus legislation … some departments are for it, some are adamant against it, in some others a very close split. That is so right on throughout the Legion. Others cannot make up their minds as to what should be the proper procedure. … I do not think this Legion can afford to oppose the efforts of any group who are asking for the payment of the bonus, in full or in part.
At a very recent meeting of one of the Eastern departments of the Legion, resolutions were passed, from which I quote partially, which indicate that there is a growing consciousness in that organization of the situation and that they do not wish to be held responsible for all such abuses which they rightly say are often sponsored by other veteran organizations, “by politicians or by individuals, sentimental, thoughtless or self seeking.” In the resolution itself this department of the American Legion, to which I refer, “declares itself in favor of a return to the strict policy of liberal and just compensation to the actual dependents of those who lost their lives as a direct result of their war service, and compensation and care for those who were, in fact, disabled thereby; and declares itself opposed to all legislation giving special privileges, hospitalization and compensation to veterans or their dependents for death and disabilities not so incurred.”
Yet, in 1932, the bonus bill for full payment was passed in the House and defeated in the Senate. That is another evidence of the encouragement received by the bonus army in its advance on Washington. To cap the climax, President Hoover, on July 21, signed the bill, which broadens the power of veterans to borrow on their adjusted-service certificates and reduces the rate of interest charged by the Government on the money advanced. This will cost the Government an additional sum of $385,000,000, according to the Treasury statement.
How many people in the United States today have paid any attention to these various enactments as they have occurred since the time of President Harding up to the present? It is only when we run into a period of terrible depression and financial difficulty, when the burden of taxation means something to the people, that they begin to consider some of the things to which in the past they paid no attention whatever. In 1932 the people of the country have suddenly awakened to the burden placed upon them by additional taxation to meet the deficits in the Treasury of the United States, and are inquiring into the causes.
The Rising Tide of Relief Measures
In studying the Federal budget for 1933, let us pay some attention to the largest single item in it, which is for veterans’ relief. It amounted this year to $928,387,795, or approximately one-fourth of the total Federal appropriations for the conduct of the National Government in every detail. From the close of the war in 1918 to June 1931, more than $6,000,000,000 has been spent by the Federal Government in various forms of relief to veterans of the World War, their dependents and beneficiaries. State governments acting by themselves, either for hospitalization, special acts for relief of veterans or direct bonus, have spent more than $580,000,000 additional.
Statisticians have figured out that by 1945, only 13 years from date, the Government will have spent $23,500,000,000, even under existing relief commitments. It is noteworthy that this sum is practically equivalent to the total cost of this country’s actual participation in the war. Twenty years later, if Congress maintains the existing laws and should add the new laws, which are proposed by veterans’ organizations, the veterans will be costing the American people annually, not one-quarter of the present cost of the Federal Government but the whole of the cost of the present Government, which is close to $5,000,000,000.
There is probably no group in the United States today that would be more resentful of a dole system than would the American Legion and those veterans of the World War not members of it, but it is, nevertheless, the fact that the general tendency of all legislation changing the basis of veterans’ relief has had for its purpose diverting increasing amounts to men who suffered no disability due to war service. Veterans’ relief in this respect is certainly in danger of becoming a thinly disguised dole system. As a matter of fact, the United States spends in a single year nearly twice as much for veterans’ relief as the British Government spent in 11 years for its unemployment insurance — its so-called dole.
Unless and until all the facts are known, public men will be besieged on all sides by people who, for sentimental reasons, are with the soldiers without any understanding of what is sought to be done. I have had my personal experience. After I spoke about this situation in a nation-wide hook-up over the radio on May 16 of this year, I received a great many letters from well-meaning people finding fault with me for my attitude, and the general tenor of the letters was along the line that I was out of sympathy with the veterans and unwilling to be with the country in its attempt to take care of them. Of course, nothing could be farther from the fact. These letters came from people who, on the one hand, are finding fault with the cost of the Government and, on the other hand, finding fault with those who would point out injustice and inequalities and waste and extravagance because of the enactments fostered by an organized lobby and not approved even by the American Legion itself.
When Taxicabs Are War Risks
For instance, how many people know that under existing statutes a man who served for 90 days in an American cantonment and who never left this country, but received an honorable discharge at the close of the World War, if he was unable to pay income tax for a full year before he applies for relief, might be injured in a taxicab and, sustaining a permanent injury, become the beneficiary of a pension, ranging from $12 to $40 a month, during the rest of his natural life? One of the proposed enactments, passed in the House of Representatives, but defeated in the Senate, would grant a pension to the widow of a soldier whom she may have married any time after the war, upon his death from natural causes not traceable in any respect to his service to the country. He may also have been one who had never left the United States, but received an honorable discharge.
Headaches in the Pension Systems
In a recent publication, the example is cited of a former soldier who, for example, may get recurring headaches in 1923. He is told that if they can be traced to a wartime origin he can be paid for them. He then recalls that while unloading potatoes in training camp, a sack hit him on the head. He looks about for witnesses to support his story, and since the Government cannot prove that his headaches do not date from the potato-sack episode, he becomes the recipient of a monthly allowance.
The Disabled Emergency Officers’ Retirement Act, passed in 1928, awarded three-quarters retirement pay to civilians who were officers in the World War and who are now considered to be 30 percent permanently disabled because of their war service. Some 6000-odd emergency officers of this category are at the present time drawing an average of $139 a month. One of the ways this operates is shown in the case of a physician who receives a salary of $8000 from the Veterans’ Bureau. In view of his service as an emergency officer in the war, he requested a disability record. He was examined by the staff of the bureau, found partially disabled, and awarded $150 a month. Another doctor, earning $5000 a year as examining physician for the bureau, had himself examined, declared unfit for work and placed on the retired list; consequently, he gets, in addition to this salary, $125 a month.
I have not gone into the problems of preference to veterans in the civil-service laws of the nation and the various states, because I wish to deal here with the economic phase of the situation and the financial injustices brought about by these laws.
There is a vast difference in responsibility for the care of injured and disabled veterans who met with their disability in the war or who thereafter were rendered helpless or died from causes directly traceable to the war. They should be provided for to the limit of the country’s ability. Their dependents should also be cared for. It is an entirely different matter to pass out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to men — to say nothing of their dependents — who received no injury in the war, who saw no real service and who incurred no disability as a result of their enlistment under the colors of their country, pursuant to the call of the President.
It is, to say the least, a bit discouraging to the youth of the country to think that the high and idealistic patriotism spoken of during the time of the war is sought to be cashed in dollars and cents when the war is over by a small percentage of the people, who, in the height and glory of the situation calling for the defense of the flag and the principles for which it stands, were ready to take their place beside Nathan Hale, who regretted that he had only one life to give for his country.
When Leaders Are Misled
The distressing part of this whole thing is that it seems, to me, to be like a snowball going downhill. As it is encouraged, it gathers strength and momentum, and I am afraid that the public authorities in Washington have not heard the real facts from those in control. On the other hand, those agitating for these additional benefits have been encouraged by the attempt of the House of Representatives to make their pilgrimage to Washington successful. Every one of those who came to Washington with the bonus army must know of the present economic situation. Every one of them must have heard of the universal distress in all parts of the country; and certainly they would not, if their patriotism is genuine, desire to be made a favored class of the community to receive relief at the expense of countless millions just as unfortunate in their present position as they are. They were petitioning the Government, a fundamental American right.
The Government made no reply to the petition, as far as anybody is able to see, and, on the other hand, they were sufficiently encouraged to permit the situation to become so aggravated that the United States was compelled to assert its sovereignty by the force of arms.
In times of stress a great many well-meaning people — and they will be found particularly in the ranks of men willing to offer themselves to the Government in times of need — are ready victims of a false and misleading propaganda flowing from people who may not, deep in their hearts, have any great regard for the veteran himself, but who would seize upon such a gathering as the bonus marchers as an opportunity to give vent to some political doctrine contrary to the principles upon which this Government is founded. There is no doubt in my mind that many of the marchers who left the various big cities to camp in Washington were encouraged on their way by groups who had not themselves the desire or the courage to face the hardships.
It certainly must have encouraged the organized minority to have the economy bill suggested by the President — though only a drop in the bucket, with its possible saving of about 5 percent of the total veterans’ appropriations — entirely disregarded by the House of Representatives and immediately thereafter to find the House passing, without debate of any kind, a new bill to include “widows and children of deceased war veterans who die of a disability not acquired in the service.” This legislation, if adopted, would have added a further burden to the American people of $100,000,000 in the next five years, and more thereafter.
How many people in the United States today, paying these additional taxes, suffering silently because of their imposition, hidden and unforeseen victims of an impost on capital that prevents it from pouring its money into the channels of trade and increasing the chances for employment, really realize that the House of Representatives not only refused to relieve but voted to add to their burden?
Robbing the Just for the Unjust
I desire to have myself placed clearly and fairly on the record. I believe that unfair, unjust and inequitable payments to veterans who are not deserving tends to operate against the deserving veteran. It is impossible for any group to receive veterans’ benefits unjustly and unfairly without interfering with that group which is justly entitled to every single thing that this Government can do for them.
In my speech before the Jefferson Day dinner at Washington on April 13, this year, I made the definite suggestion that Congress should publicly air the whole question of veterans’ relief. I had in my mind not only economic but substantial justice to the deserving veteran as against a waste of public money to the organized group which succeeded in securing laws beneficial to those who were not entitled, by any stretch of the human imagination, to the money of the people of the United States.
Yet I deplore the published information that the investigation of the veterans’ laws by the joint congressional committee is to be delayed to a point where right and proper consideration cannot be given to it prior to the convening of Congress. It appears that the committee has notified at least one organization of veterans that it will not meet until the latter part of November, although it is to report to Congress on January 1, 1933.
Recently there has been organized a National Economy League, which is a nonpartisan citizens’ organization stating its general purpose: “To revive and restore the American principle that our Government shall truly be a Government for the benefit of the whole people — a Government of law and order economically administered for all the people, and not for the benefit or at the dictation of any special or sectional interest.” Though their immediate objective is to attempt to eliminate the abuses, which have crept into the administration of veterans’ laws generally, they state they desire, “to cooperate with other nonpartisan citizens’ organizations concerned with the reduction of governmental expenses and taxes.”
Veterans and Party Platforms
Their membership and their advisory board entitle them to the respectful consideration of thoughtful American citizens. I cite their advisory board because that should inspire confidence in the nonpartisanship and disinterestedness of the body. It contains Elihu Root, who, having been signally honored during his lifetime by the people of his own state, to say nothing of the Federal Government, must certainly be considered to speak for this country as a whole; Calvin Coolidge, honored by election to the presidency, must also be admitted to be able to speak for the country; Newton D. Baker, former Secretary of War, progressive, able and thoroughly acquainted with the problem from his personal experience in aiding with the drafting of the early legislation of President Wilson; Rear Admiral Sims and General Pershing, who must certainly have at heart the good of the men who served under them; I leave myself to the last because I am not actuated by any motive other than what is best for the whole country and all its people, including its veterans.
Another vital consideration at the present moment is where the two major parties stand with reference to this question. The Republican platform, citing the achievements of the Republican Party for the benefit of veterans and other dependents, ends the section dealing with the subject by saying:
Disability from causes subsequent and not attributable to war and the support of dependents of deceased veterans whose death is unconnected with war, have been to some measure accepted obligations of the nation as a part of the debt due.
A careful study should be made of existing veterans’ legislation with a view to eliminating inequalities and injustices and effecting all possible economies, but without departing from our purpose to provide on a sound basis full and adequate relief for our service-disabled men, their widows and orphans.
The Democratic platform is brief on the subject. It merely says:
We advocate the full measure of justice and generosity for all war veterans who have suffered disability or disease caused by or resulting from actual service in time of war, and for their dependents.
So much for the platforms. The American people have a right to know where the candidates stand. Let us have pretty plain talk — the American people are entitled to hear it. They should not only be afforded opportunity for study of what has happened in the past, and its relationship to the whole question of public money, but they are entitled to know what their candidates for high office intend to recommend with respect to the future.
There can be no mistake about the gratitude of the American people to the soldiers. Individual states, irrespective of Federal statutes, in the outpouring of their gratitude, incurred large bonded indebtedness for the purpose of showing the states’ individual gratitude to the soldiers who enlisted. In my own state of New York, the people themselves, by their own act, amended their Constitution so that they might bond the state for $45,000,000 to be distributed to the veterans of the World War who enlisted from the state of New York.
Nobody can question the feeling of the people generally for the veteran, but when the burden becomes so great that it oppresses everybody, these forms of gratuities and compensation that are not actually related to the disability or suffering as a result of the World War should be stricken out, and undoubtedly would not be found in the Federal statutes if it were not for the organized lobby.
Where Government Aid Belongs
It is also undoubtedly true that the veteran has a spirit of patriotism, and he must stand in the position of being entirely unwilling to have improper payments made for the benefit of less than 5 percent of the people of the United States when that relief must fall directly or indirectly upon 120,000,000 people through taxation.
I am satisfied that I reflect the opinion of a great majority of the veterans that they were fighting for a great principle when they offered themselves in defense of the flag of our country. They were striking at those who would question the sovereignty, the dignity and the majesty of the greatest republic in the world. They could not have had in their minds the fact that they were later to become favored charges upon the Government.
As to the men who were disabled, again I say, with emphasis: To those who were killed, to their relatives and their dependents and beneficiaries, the gratitude of the American people cannot even be expressed in dollars. For them, I say, everything; but, for those accidental beneficiaries of an organized lobby, it is time to call a halt.
I earnestly hope that a time will never come when the people of the United States will be lacking in expression of their gratitude to the men who offered themselves to the country in her time of trouble, but we must, of necessity, realize that this organized effort on the part of representatives of an organized group must cease when they go beyond the limits of justice, fair dealing and fair play to the rank and file of the American people who must foot the bills.
In 1915, Post editor George Horace Lorimer fished a short story called “Nature, Inc.” out of the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts and took it home to read that night. The next morning, he wrote an encouraging letter to its young author, Harry Sinclair Lewis, accepting his story for publication. Over the next several years, the Post would publish almost three dozen more stories by the young man.
Lorimer recognized not only good writing but a kindred spirit in Sinclair Lewis. Both men saw potential for exciting fiction in the adventure of American business, and Lorimer was attracted by Lewis’ ability to mix satire and sentiment with a knowledge of sound business practices. As Lorimer once wrote, “Every business day is full of comedy, tragedy, farce, romance — all the ingredients of successful fiction.”
While other writers used formulaic settings of romances and adventure tales, Lewis captured the realities of modern American life and found a wealth of material in the lives of salesmen and clerks. Much of what he learned about salesmen, including their manners and banter, came from listening to their accounts of life, work, and travel while he was on the job as a night clerk at a popular Minnesota hotel.
But as the teens gave way to the Roaring Twenties, Lewis saw the business virtues that Lorimer celebrated — hard work and thrift — begin to fade, and his observations made it into his writing. He began, to Lorimer’s displeasure, mercilessly satirizing the sham and hypocrisy he saw in American business. This work culminated in the most celebrated satires of 1920s American society, Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922).
Lorimer was outraged by Babbitt, which he saw as a mockery of the conventional American values that he so prized. He wrote a scathing review of the novel, and the Post stopped publishing Lewis’ stories — at least, until 1931, after the stock market crash gave his cynicism an air of prescience.
Yet Lewis was more than a cynic. He still admired business success, and he recognized that American readers, while enjoying strong social criticism, still looked for morals and sentiment in popular fiction. Both qualities are on display in 1916’s “Honestly If Possible,” a story that reflects Lewis’ belief in business, hard work, and love.
Despite being 100 years old, the story is surprisingly modern in the way it depicts the predatory and condescending attitudes some men direct at women in business offices. And it is a more successful romance than might be expected from a writer with such a caustic reputation.
Sinclair Lewis Library of Congress
Honestly If Possible
By Sinclair Lewis
Originally published October 14, 1916
Terry Ames didn’t own evening clothes, and there was no running water in his furnished room, but every Saturday evening he paid a dollar and a half for dinner, which he always ate alone. He was one of the 300,000 solitary and industrious young men in New York. He knew no one except the office force, his dentist and two insignificant “fellows from back home.”
This gray-eyed youngster with the waist and shoulders of a half-miler, the thin, firm jaw of a surgeon, and the eager, awkward step of a young poet, this frequenter of offices and movies and beef-stew joints, was facing the blankness of life as somberly as an anchorite in a parching desert cell. If he could only be heroic or tragic or criminal or anything that would make him feel things! Any sorrow rather than row on row of unchanging gray days. He wanted to do high, vague, generous things, and the city told him to attend strictly to his desk.
He was neither a success nor a failure. He was making thirty-two dollars and a half a week with the mail-order real-estate firm of Hopkins & Gato. He wrote advertising copy, dictated correspondence, and occasionally was sent out to close up a prospect. He did have the facts of his job; he knew the difference between a blueprint and a second mortgage; but he simply couldn’t get the philosophy of the job to hang right. You would have been amused — or touched or impatient or morally edified — to see Terry trying to find out what a good, clean life really meant in the case of a young man whose boss pompously encouraged him to write advertisements that were deliberate, careful, scientific lies. He would have been discharged as dishonest if he had smuggled the truth into a single advertisement of the Terrace Valley Development. Did goodness consist in lying, then? he wailed.
When he had first come to New York, Terry had solemnly attended institute lectures that told him to be good and he would be happy, or to work hard and he would be rich, or to study shorthand and he would be famous. But most of the lecturers weren’t happy or rich or famous — or interesting. And they always rushed down and shook hands with him. Terry hated damp handshakes.
He saved up his dessert money and bought a large, gilt-edged book called Punch the Buzzer on Yourself, which claimed to give all the latest and best brands of practical wisdom. It was a chatty book. It sneaked up behind you and yelled in your ear in 14-point italics. Yet all that it said was to be good and work hard and buy the other books by the same author.
At last Terry took to asking the men in his office what this business world was up to anyway. He had chosen a peculiarly dangerous field for truth hunting, for the Hopkins & Gato office was a cranky one, boisterous and fearful and full of plots. Offices differ as much as bosses, and in about the same way. There are quiet, assured offices filled with pride of achievement. There are offices like that of Hopkins & Gato, where everybody gibes and is nervous about the gibes of others.
Old Hopkins had the habit of damning all your officemates when he was talking to you, in order to make you feel that you were on the inside with the boss, as his most trusted adviser. That was his jolly little way of influencing you to confide all the scandal you knew. If you were aware of the trick and tried to defend Harry or Mac or J.J., Mr. Hopkins would comment on Harry’s shambling feet, or Mac’s sporty wife, or J.J.’s shiftlessness, with a thin, acid smile that made you feel naive and absurd, and, first thing you knew, you were trying to prove your shrewdness by giving away every below-stairs secret. The men in the office were good fellows at heart, but they were spoiled by the bitter flavor of Hopkins. They went the rounds of one another’s desks, making beastly little jests. And they played jokes, hid hats and arranged humiliating fake telephone calls. After a few years in Hopkins & Gato’s fine, solid, prosperous office, you were qualified to go right out to the trenches and join the poison squad.
This was the font of wisdom where eager, fresh-colored, wistful, hard-working Terry Ames fished for the truth about this honesty which sounds so simple in the books and works out so jaggedly in ordinary life. He was always going out to lunch with J.J., with Mac, shrewdest of the salesmen, and with ancient Harry, the bookkeeper, who had detachable cuffs and a preternatural shrewdness in collections. While they all got on a mild coffee drunk, as is the way at business lunches, Terry persistently tried to bring the conversation round to the question of commercial honesty.
The wise elders shrieked at him:
“Oh, give your conscience a rest!”
They gave their consciences a good, permanent rest and fed them soothing sirup if they waked and cried.
Sometimes Terry could get oracles out of old Harry, who defended the Hopkins system of exaggerating in advertisements, using much retouched half tones, hypnotizing old-lady customers, and selling jerry-built houses from which the concrete peeled off during the first winter.
Harry asserted:
“It’s all right to talk, but you aren’t in business for your health, are you? Besides, everybody does it.”
The others would nod approval of Harry’s pellucid philosophy and drop into Terry’s truth-begging palm such pearls as these:
“This bull about building homes for the future and making suburbs beautiful listens well in a high-school recitation, but how are you going to support the business meanwhile?”
“Why, we’re regular angels compared with most of ’em. Look at this free-if-you-pay-for-the-abstract scheme.”
“Why, if you did tell the people the truth they wouldn’t be satisfied.”
“I guess we’re as honest as the next fellow.”
“Yes, sure, honestly — if possible!”
“When you’re as old as I am —”
“Get the dough first —”
When Terry declared that other firms — big, reputable, national concerns — must surely have a higher standard of honesty than Hopkins & Gato, the men didn’t take the trouble to argue; they merely smiled and made him feel schoolboyishly credulous. By his constant inquiring he was in danger of becoming an office pest; but in nauseated horror he realized that fact, and tried to conceal his restless fumbling for understanding.
In the city’s somber corridor of brooding gods, gigantic graven idols with hands on their brutal knees and granite eyes insolently blank above his clerkly questioning, he prayed for guidance, but only an echo answered him, and over the temple brooded the shadow of Pilatus, still asking, “What is truth?”
You — philosophers and poets and iron-jawed statesmen, foreign observers of America, and clever ladies of the literary table d’hôtes and soldiers who demand that we take your military training — you know what our offices are — just desks and cigars and rubber bands, and derby hats over a slight baldness. Yes, you know there isn’t any grave and quiet nobility or glorious struggle of youth among us who are dollar chasers.
Oh! Oh, you do, do you? Then listen.
II
Hopkins & Gato were on the jump, booming a new development. They had sold most of their Long Island suburb to unfortunates who had never seen New York State; and now, lest they seem to neglect the suckers in New York, they were taking on Tangerine Springs, “the citrus city, the best orange district in Florida,” for mail and direct selling. Mr. Hopkins had a whole pamphlet of affable government figures about the yield in orange groves not more than ten miles from Tangerine Springs, figures so convincing that the Hopkins copy writer, Terry Ames, wondered where the flaw really was as he turned out notices about “Golden fruit and a golden bank account; the way out for the city man who is tired of offices and Northern cold. Own your own bungalow among the palms and hibiscus; easy work and big returns.”
“That’s me. ‘Tired of offices and cold.’ Wonder if there’s a single darn palm in Florida. Can’t be if a Hopkins ad says there is,” he grumbled as he viciously jabbed at his typewriter with two thin fingers.
Terry had grown accustomed to lying about the Long Island property, but he couldn’t get up much enthusiasm about this new fraud. He wanted to believe in Tangerine Springs as long as he could. But he discovered the facts soon enough.
A Brooklyn man wrote in that he knew Florida, that Tangerine Springs might perhaps be all right for trucking, but certainly was too wet and low for citrus fruits. His letter closed:
“Tell the bright young man who is guilty of your ads that he might catch more fools if he said less about sunshine and bungalows and more about kumquats and mandarins. There’s just one thing that saves the public from liars like you people — that is, you don’t know how to run your own business. I bet you don’t know flatwoods from hammock.”
Did Mr. Clyde Hopkins blush at this letter? No, Mr. Clyde Hopkins did not blush. He called in Terry Ames and snapped:
“If you can’t put a little more pep and novelty in your Tangerine copy, you better quit. Here, read this letter!”
Terry marveled, as he read, that Mr. Hopkins was willing to show this exposure of his own crimes. He stammered:
“But, uh, how — how about this ‘all right for trucking, bum for citrus fruit,’ Mr. Hopkins?”
“Rats; always got to have a few kicks. How does he know it ain’t good for oranges till he tries it? Now, get a good line about all the different kinds of oranges into your copy. And you might even write this boob, thanking him for the tip. Don’t let him think we’re sore.”
Terry wanted to resign. But, if he did, Hopkins would merely laugh and go on selling Tangerine lots. As he gloomed back to his desk, Terry sketched a moving picture of himself as the young hero who would convert the office to truth, single-handed. He saw Hopkins trembling before his denunciations, and even that old cynic Harry weeping down his alpaca coat sleeves and selling his agate scarfpin to get money to refund to Hopkins’ victims.
But — Terry wasn’t a Galahad; he was about like the rest of us; he wanted to be honest and also to get that little envelope next Saturday. So he studied a bulletin on orange growing till he had an artistic inspiration and was lost in composing a blurb which began:
“Do you know that the orange industry has just started? Do you know what a kumquat is? Do you know that the whole world is begging for the chance to give you money for the kumquats you could grow at Tangerine Springs?”
When the advertisement was glowingly finished, however, Terry gravitated to Mac’s desk and complained: “Say, hang it, I don’t like this Tangerine project. Land’s no good for citrus fruits. Why not sell it for truck —”
“Say, Ames, don’t you ever give your conscience an hour off? Do you know what’s the matter with it? You smoke too many cigarettes.”
Then Mac laughed for four minutes and hustled round the office, revealing his new joke to everybody: “So I says to him, ‘Do you know what’s the matter with you? Why,’ I says, ‘you’re getting smoker’s heart in the conscience!’”
When J.J. sent Terry an office “memo” next morning, he headed it:
“To the man with the ingrowing conscience and the outsticking cigarette.”
Watkins asked Terry why he didn’t smoke cigars, like a man, and Peter had some light, elephantine pleasantries about a pipe. In fact, Terry’s general childishness was the office joke, till they had a new topic in the expected arrival of a woman to try to do a man’s work.
This gave an almost perfect opportunity for them to dig out all the good old shady jokes about women’s foibles. Hopkins was, it seemed, going to get one Susan Bratt to manage the follow-up and circularizing systems — check up the lists, tabulate returns, get out form letters, direct 12 girl
assistants. She was to replace Peter. Whenever Peter was out of hearing, everybody insinuated that he was a loafer, a borrower of small sums till Monday; but, even so, Peter was certainly preferable to this Susan Bratt.
Terry pictured her as fat, 40, faded, dumpily industrious and wheezily sniffing, staring dully from behind thick glasses and making a bad precedent by staying late. He joined the others in referring to her as “the brat.” The forlorn and lonely seeker of honesty was preparing to make it as difficult as he could for the forlorn and lonely interloper.
On Monday morning Terry woke with the usual Monday-morning shock of discovering that the holiday was over, and groaned:
“Back to the mine! Oh, I can’t stand any more rotten chirping little 50-line ads about kumquats — but I will.”
Every day in his life would be just one more dinky page in an endless desk calendar.
He entered the office with Mac, who was the local ladykiller, and who stopped just inside the door to chuckle:
“Hey, Ames, the little Bratt has came. Some dame, kid, some chicken! Me for it! My lit-tle Sue, I could love you-oo.”
At Peter’s desk was the new office woman. She looked up. Terry caught the flash of her eyes. “Gee!” said he.
A slender, curly-haired girl of 23 or 24, with the untroubled brown eyes of a gallant boy, yet with curving shoulders in a blouse of white silk that looked as though it could never be anything but fresh. A quick-moving, self-possessed girl. Mac turned, as they separated, and winked at Terry, who hated the suggestive wink and the troublesome new girl about equally. He had, at least, grown used to his round of boredom. He had invented ways of pulling through the day — sneaking out for a cup of coffee round the corner, talking to old Harry, standing out in the hall at the mail chute and warning himself to work as though he did like it. Now, this satin-cheeked young Susan Bratt would inspire new jealousies and make the office intolerable.
All day long he watched Miss Bratt smile gratefully at the men who straightened their ties and went to introduce themselves to her. He saw Gato himself call for office supplies for her — even to blue and red pencils and a letter opener, tools which the rest of them had to steal from one another. He saw the bunch maneuvering to find things to explain to her, advice to give her. And she was pleasant to all of them. Terry had to admire her modulating voice, though he hated to hear it respond to the smirking, much married Mac, who leaned over her desk and flashed his diamond ring at her. Terry found that he, too, had the most surprising number of errands that took him up to her end of the office. But he wouldn’t introduce himself to her — no, not for anything!
When he left at 5:30, she was putting on a blue linen jacket with impudent white cuffs and collar, and a small toque which sat cockily on her brown, shining hair. All the Sir Walter Raleighs in the shop galloped up to help her, while the old dependables, the stenographers who had been with the firm since Hopkins was a yearling, somehow managed to struggle into their sateen-lined, tabby black jackets without assistance.
“Good Lord, look at them, everyone but old Harry and me and the firm! With J.J. holding her bag! Well, I know one person that isn’t going to fall for the Queen of the Rancho stuff,” Terry grumbled as he clumped out.
He walked down the Bowery and had dinner in Chinatown. He peered into pawnshop windows, he watched the bums, he chose the noisiest chop-suey den in town, he made much of ordering almond omelet and “sweet and pungent.” He wouldn’t admit it, but he was trying to flee from loneliness, the loneliness that usually was merely drab boredom but to-night was a tangible, pursuing presence.
Fear was creeping into him — fear of himself, fear of the cryptic city. He rushed out of the restaurant. Through streets deserted and foreboding he swung down to the Battery, listening to his own footsteps. Among the derelicts, dark shoddy figures writhing on the benches, he sat, neat and efficient and — a derelict. Beside him sat Fear.
A barge load of immigrants was bound for Ellis Island. One of them struck up on his accordion a wailing folk song, full of the melancholy of wide brown moors, and Terry’s frantic restlessness changed to a softer unhappiness in which every memory was tender and hopelessly sad. Then he knew that all this while he had been subconsciously reviewing Susan Bratt. Her harsh name changed to a sound of music. In the mist rising from the river he saw her face. He felt himself kiss her smiling lips. He sprang up, amazed at the force of his fancy. He exclaimed:
“Why, I’ve never seen her but just one day — flirt that tries to work everybody. Why, I haven’t even met her yet. … But, by Jiminy, I will tomorrow! No, I won’t either. All this kitten stuff!”
Her luminous eyes went home with him, and he could scarce sleep for longing to see her. Then it was morning again — same old prosaic awakening to the same old raucous alarm clock in the same old room, with the same old office details ahead. He plodded uptown. He already knew that his overnight fervor about Miss Bratt was a dream; that she was merely a business female, not a princess of romance. He glanced at her.
“Yup. Nothing but a pretty girl. Woods are full of ’em.”
She had no relation to the lighted passionate face that had looked at him from the fog of the harbor.
Not till 10 or 11 o’clock did he fall in love with her again!
J.J.’s desk was near Miss Bratt’s. With J.J., late that morning, Terry had to work out a new form letter to galvanize installment payments. When he was really on the job Terry tried to be crisp, alert, practical, and in such a mood of justice he wondered if Miss Bratt really was looking for flirtations.
She seemed very busy, cross-checking two lists of alfalfa-land inquiries to be used for the Tangerine Springs circularizing.
J.J. and Terry were sitting in one of those familiar poetic abstractions, trying to think of a better phrase to close the letter which they were planning — tilted back, tapping their teeth with their pencils, heads on one side, one eye closed, the other eye screwed up and anxiously regarding the ceiling, looking tremendously wise, and both of them passing the buck and plaintively hoping that the other fellow was going to hurry up and think of the phrase. Perhaps you’ve done it yourself. Through the trance, Terry heard Mac’s voice, honeyed but slightly hoarse:
“Well, little one, things going better today? Sorry I been out this morning. Meant to stick round and slip you some more pointers.”
Terry’s tilted chair came down sharply, and he stared. Mac was beside Miss Bratt’s desk, in his very best lady-killing attitude, as used successfully with waitresses, telephone girls, and young ladies at hotel news stands — hat on one side, both hands in his pockets, his trim feet doing a little private dance by themselves, all very gay and intimate.
Terry was groaning:
“Good Lord, what a simp I am, mooning over this girl, and she standing for Mac. Urgh!”
Mac took his hands from his pockets, leaned over her desk, picked up her pastepot and fondled it. To the absurdly squeamish Terry it seemed as though Mac would be taking her hand next. Mac murmured, like a cooing jackass:
“Well, did the girlie get her hooky-wookies into the job pretty good today?”
Miss Bratt laid down her list of names, put a paper weight exactly in the center of the desk, straightened the nest of pencils and pens in front of her inkwell, and said with startling clearness:
“Mr. Mac — MacDervish, isn’t it? — I’m very busy. I’m obliged to you for your pointers of yesterday, but I didn’t really need them. I’m afraid I’m horribly competent. So if you would — how would you say it in your language? — if you would ring off you’d save me lots and lots of trouble. I think that’s all.”
And she did not smile with a sugary prissy sanctity; she did not look about for applause. She rose rather quickly and stood straight, her fingers on the edge of the desk, while for a second she seemed to look far away, sadly. Then, eyes down, she passed Mac and quietly began to flip through a file of names. As Mac shuffled away she ignored him.
Terry was glowingly happy — that is, till J.J. grated:
“Cranky little hen. … Well, have you got that phrase yet?”
During the several million hours that had still to drag themselves past before 12:30, when he would be free to go out to lunch, Terry found the needed phrase, dictated some correspondence, and came back to study the big map of Florida that hung near Miss Bratt’s desk. He had convinced himself that he needed to examine that map immediately — so immediately that he left his draft of the big Tangerine circular in the middle of a sentence. As he went up the central aisle of the office he felt kindly toward his fellow workers, toward Harry and J.J. and Gato and Watkins and this new Miss Bratt. What a good, knowable bunch of human beings they all were — all except Mac. And except Hopkins, of course. Then the office changed to a hideous tangle of dead, gaunt trees, a wilderness filled with ambushes that threatened the unconscious Sue Bratt. Mac was talking to Watkins, Mac’s rival as office masher. The two men glanced at Miss Bratt and snickered.
While Terry was examining the map near her, Watkins came forward and oozily said:
“Uh, have you, uh, a date for lunch, Miss Bratt? Be glad tuh — ”
“I have!” said Miss Bratt.
This time she didn’t flee to the files. She sat still, a slight droop to her shoulders that were so smooth and rosy under her silk waist, and she looked Watkins up and down, quiet, a little perplexed, very cool.
“Well, uh,” he went on, “some day, if you could, uh, grace the feast with your charms —”
“No. Afraid not.” Her right hand picked up a list of names. But behind the list, as Terry could see from his station at the map, her left arm pressed anxiously against her bosom, while her eyes somberly kept Watkins in view.
Terry broke in:
“Say, Watkins, come here a second. Where’s the head of navigation on the Saint John’s River? Let’s see how much you know about Florida, old fathead.”
Watkins unwillingly came over. Terry generously accompanied him back to his desk. As they passed Mac, Watkins tittered:
“I buy!”
At 12:30, to the second, Terry grabbed his hat and hastened out to Henrico’s Chop House to meet J.J. and Harry and Mac and Watkins — and large, solid food with too much coffee. He was rather keen for doing something spectacular and heroic if Mac or Watkins so much as mentioned Miss Bratt. He pictured himself slapping Mac, and he was so exalted with newborn devotion that he might actually have done something of the kind, although office lunches are not commonly the scenes of anything
more melodramatic than spearing a toasted roll across the table. He waited, panting, inspired — though not fasting. But the only word of her was Mac’s growl at Watkins:
“Stung, all right. Pretty standoffish. Pass us the chutney, will yuh, Wat?”
Thus they dismissed the tale of the weeping fair one and the secret knight.
Terry Ames wasn’t always secret-knighting about the office. He really did get out copy and correspondence, you understand. But he contrived to see how, within less than three days, Miss Bratt made a place for herself. She was pleasant to old Harry, who chewed tobacco and collected from widows but did not try to flirt with babes. She was sturdily independent in an argument with Gato. In the murkiness of this cranky, distrustful office she was a clear light that shone into the dark carelessness of former attempts at system. Tenderly he watched her march on.
Terry wasn’t trying to pick acquaintance with her. He didn’t dare! However, he was careful to be on hand when she took the elevator down, a little after 5:30, a couple of days later. Just to ride with her, be near her, perhaps feel a casual touch of her magic arm that was of a more silken substance than the busy arms of the stenographers! She seemed unaware of him as she rang the elevator bell and waited. Her face was as serenely gallant as that of a boy crusader — fresh, smooth, rather round. She was so untiring, so incisively interested in her work. She would go far. … But wasn’t she, he wondered in dismay, almost too inhumanly efficient? It wasn’t quite decent to look fresh and competent after 5:30!
Her hand, which had remained on the iron box of the elevator signal, suddenly slumped to her side. She wiped her other hand across her eyes, which remained closed for a minute, the lids bunchy and trembling with weariness. No, she wasn’t too efficient!
It seemed to him, brooding beside her in the elevator, that her little, white, soft linen collar, the blue linen of her jacket sleeve, the line of her cheek, everything relating to her, was enchantment, set off from all the commonplace feminine things in the world, standing out as peculiar and perfect.
Next morning, Terry was drawing water at the cooler that served the office as patio, garden, village green and memorial fountain when he became agitatedly aware that Miss Susan Bratt was waiting beside him. He heard himself blurting out:
“G’ morning, Miss Bratt.”
She didn’t repulse him. Easily:
“Good morning, Mr. Ames.”
“W-w-why, I didn’t kn-know you even knew my name.”
“I didn’t, till you took Mr. Watkins away from me. I was very grateful to you. Then I knew you must be Mr. Ames — I could see what you were.”
“Yes, b-but —” desperately. “But what am I?”
“Mr. MacDervish had given me a chart of the office, and he told me that Mr. Ames wasn’t practical; he said you ‘seemed to think we were in business for our health — always yelping about honesty.’ And it was so very much for my health to lose Mr. Watkins that I knew my Good Samaritan must be you.”
“I wonder if maybe you and I don’t belong to the same race of people.”
“The —”
“Yes, the cranks, the people that aren’t content with just galumphing along and making a living, but have to fuss round and take all the joy out of life by wanting people to be honest or efficient or original, or some darn thing they don’t want to take the trouble to be.”
She hesitated a little over his youthful confidences. She inspected him — his flush, his lips open with eagerness. Then she nodded.
“Yes,” she said; “though I guess I’m a frightful outsider in that race of people — just a hyphenated citizen. But I do like to fight for — oh, I don’t know what to call it — sincerity, I guess. Hard to call it anything without getting into some kind of cant.”
“Yes, and it’s hard to know what the deuce it is. Take me! Oh, I’m a fine, walloping social reformer, I am! All day long I write lies to make poor devils buy swamp land.”
“And I send out the lies for you.”
“Let’s go dig ditches.”
“Let’s — only we won’t.”
Miss Brett was beginning to glance over his shoulder. He realized that he was keeping her out in the middle of the office, to the vast interest of Mac, Watkins and the battery of stenographers. He sighed:
“Prob’ly be a scandal if we go on holding the Society for the Promulgation of Ethics among the Heathen Bosses any longer. I — it’s — Please let me welcome you to this punk office.”
She did not answer in words, yet her smile, as she turned away, took him into her friendship.
The babes in the wood, lost in a thicket of useless industry, had recognized each other, and Terry had an impulse to take her hand, to run away with her who had, over two paper cups of water, become his playmate. But with Miss Rheinstein, the boss’ stenographer, watching you, you don’t take hands and run away. No, you parade back to your desk, you go over every word you have said to Sue, and worry lest you have started out by making a bad impression.
They met again and again. And they didn’t talk of office honesty more than reasonably often. Indeed, though Terry invariably took away the impression that they had been conferring on subjects of great intellectual value, their discussions were often limited to a couple of smiles, a couple of nods and “Tired?” “Yes, rather.” “Must be a perfectly corking day out in the country.” “Yes, must be.”
Lingering needlessly over letter files, laughing while he helped her to dig out old lists from the document safe, OKing the proof of a form letter, they came to depend on each other for fire that would kindle the dry wood of routine. He knew her square, dimpled hands that hovered accurately over papers; she knew his thin, stained fingers that made amusing manikins out of wire paper fasteners.
III
The Tangerine Springs circular was out, in its glossy envelope adorned with a sketch of an orange tree and a legend which in 10 words conveyed two lies, a financial misstatement and a botanical error. Now, Miss Susan Bratt’s corner of the office was filled with scrubby girls rented from an agency. They sat at long tables and blew their noses and chewed gum and addressed envelopes in elegant script all day long. Miss Brett was mother and drill sergeant and police officer to them. She had to keep them till 6:30 and had to fight Hopkins to get overtime pay for them.
It was 6:31 now, and every single addressing girl had already piled into the elevator. Sue sat among the long tables messily piled with circulars and lists.
There was no one else in the office except Terry, who was finishing an advertisement. The yoke of the job was on him. Till he sat back, his work finished, he was not Terry Ames, a person to desire and have dreams, but a little shaggy dog in a treadmill of advertisements. Then, because he had smoked too furiously all day, and the good old family remedy for that is to groan “Oh, I oughtn’t to smoke so much,’ and light another cigarette, he tried that remedy, slouching in his chair, ruefully wriggling his
tired fingers. Slowly, as humanness began to flow again into fingers and blurred eyes and beaten-out brain, he became aware that the person who was straightening up the addressing tables was not the executive Miss Bratt, but the golden Sue.
He loafed down the office, too conscious of the stiffness of his knees, which had been rigidly crossed all day while he was typing, to be a secret knight. And Sue showed in her crinkling brow the signs of that persistent, sneaking, office headache which pinches the back of your eyeballs every time you move. Her marvelously trim hair was beginning to be disheveled; her normally unerring movements were slow and pitifully fumbling. With her superiority was gone something of her self-dependence. She looked at Terry with a smile that was worn at the edges, forlornly welcoming his presence.
“All in?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Both of us are, I guess.”
He sat on the edge of a desk, his feet in a chair.
“Got a good bunch of girls to help you?”
“Punk.”
“Yup. Mostly are.”
“Poor darlings, we’d be as bad as they are if we worked just one week in a place, addressing circulars to Bazooza, Oklahoma, and Winnepowunkus, Maine.”
“Yup. Always said that if I were a day laborer I’d get drunk every Saturday evening to try to forget it. Say, as man to man, Miss Superior Bratt, does this cigarette make your head ache?”
“As man to man, nothing could make it ache more than it does now. If you’ll give me one, I think I’ll try one myself.”
In the muted hours after the office has closed, time ceases to register. There is nothing that must be done for Mr. Hopkins in 15 minutes. Miss Bratt, who usually went straight home, sighed into a chair. She took a cigarette, lighted it unskillfully, smoked it very badly, with rapid, shallow little puffs.
She crushed it out and grumbled:
“Hang it, now you see why offices wear out women and scrap ’em. They simply can’t do some things, though they bluff that they can. I’d be almost a good office man if I didn’t wear skirts and if I could learn to smoke. I can’t. I detest smoking. Yet whenever I get as tired as this I think I want to smoke. That’s how big a little fool your superior Miss Bratt is.”
“Poor kid! Guess we’re both done up with this office grind, and no fresh air. And the object of it all … I ask you, why should we contribute all our youth to getting out these cursed lies about Tangerine?”
“The old worry about honesty?”
“Yes. Always have it. And go on writing the lies. Ain’t husky enough to dig ditches. Course, if I were a noble fiction hero I’d beat it to the open and lead a free, untrammeled life; but bein’ just folks and not liking to roll my cigarettes, I suppose I’ll stick here and go on kicking. But I’ll worry, allee samee.”
“So shall I, I guess,” she said. “Poor tired Terry Ames and Sue Bratt what want to run and play in the meadows!”
“We are just kids, aren’t we, dear? “
“Yes, and the worst of it is we can’t complain. We aren’t picturesque and heroic and romantic, like raggedy vagabonds. Nobody would let us play mandolins and things in nice rose gardens — we’re too
clean and well paid. Yup. We’re just impractical, and any good business man would tell us we don’t know when we’re well off.”
They fell silent, and round Terry was the sweetest spell, the most delicate incantation of his life. Her soft shoulders drooped so pitifully and so near him. He was enveloped by her fragrance, here in the office that usually smelled of paper and typewriter oil and eraser dust. The building seemed incredibly still — the only noises were the jarring of the night elevator and the rustle of distant sweeping. Through the windows they saw a pink glow from the lights of Broadway, the Broadway of theaters and restaurants that had so little to do with the workers who in the silence were letting the wonder of life infuse their drained hearts.
The charm was broken by the rrrrr-ram-slam of the elevator stopping at their floor and voices passing the door.
Nervously prowling about, Terry talked office gossip, and while she put her own desk in order and reached for her hat and coat, she answered him, quietly, frankly — his office mate. The wonder of being man and woman, which had begun to steal over them, was broken. But the comfort of being understanding friends endured.
“Why, it’s almost seven!” she exclaimed as she headed for the elevator.
“And I’ve kept you,” he said regretfully.
“Terribly sorry — didn’t know how late —”
“Oh, I’m glad we did stay and talk. I feel like a human being again!”
Then the elevator was waiting for them, and the bored, noncommittal face of the old watchman who ran the elevator after 6:30 forbade any more youthful confidences. They were silent in the cage, and at the street door they parted.
And then for five months he didn’t get any nearer to her than he had that evening!
So long as he saw Sue only in the office he could never know her much better. She had never invited him to call on her, and though she seemed to have formed an alliance with him against the rest of the office, yet he knew no more of her private life than he did of Mac’s or J.J. ’s or Gato’s — rather less, for these men talked of “the wife” with startling frankness.
One evening he had suggested that he might walk with her to the subway or the elevated. She had refused rather abruptly. After that he had not dared to try again.
IV
A September day of almost midsummer heat. The office force had perspired all afternoon and secretly had tried to pull down garments which kept stickily and vulgarly crawling up their backs. They had no energy for work. Even Terry, who was becoming ambitious, guiltily put off every possible task. J.J. and Watkins stopped at his desk now and then to gasp, always in the same words:
“Hot enough for you today? Going to rain. That’ll cool it off.”
All day the sky had been a dirty, even gray.
Just before closing time, the sky — and, seemingly all the air itself — suddenly turned to a terrifying greenish black. Gusts of wind scattered papers. Everyone leaped to close windows. The roar of the blast was muffled as the windows went bang-bang-bang. They all stood looking out at the storm. It was night dark. A feeling of awe and terror held them.
Terry saw Sue staring out uneasily. He also saw Mac, the irrepressible, moving toward her. He ranged down and joined her, while Mac pretended that he had been heading for another window.
“I’m scared,” Sue said.
The air seemed to boil. But no rain came yet. The world was taut, waiting for it.
The city had warded off Nature, but here was Nature trying to recapture her domain. It seemed as though the walls must be beaten flat, and wilderness creep back among the ruins. Angry supernal hands shook the windows. Fear was abroad, and turned the busily insignificant office folk into a more heroic race, more primeval and tragic.
Terry boldly laid his hand over hers as they faced the storm. He pretended that they were in the open together. They stood motionless, their hands stirringly warm to each other, unconscious of the fact that the rest of the office were muttering, “Gosh, going to rain fierce,” or “Got an umbrella, Mac? Left mine home, doggone it,” or “Wonder how I’ll get to the L,” or, very often, “Ames and Miss Bratt seem quite chummy.”
Mr. Hopkins stalked out of his office and stared about, whereupon they all guiltily left the windows and got to work — all but Terry and Sue, oblivious, shoulders comfortingly close together at the window. They did not move till the office had returned to its ordinary indifference to mere Nature, with typewriters chattering and desk lights snapped on to combat the abnormal darkness.
The cheerful yellow glow through the office made them all inattentive to the moment when the rain finally smashed down.
Terry’s leaving time came 15 minutes later. But he waited at a window, watching the rain change from a black torrent to a sheet of gray nastiness. The disappearance of the terror of the storm let him down. … Tonight he couldn’t even have a walk. Too wet. And he was inexpressibly tired of movies and of his musty room. The prospect of another evening of boredom palsied him.
She passed him. She did not speak, but her smile was confiding.
He heard himself urging:
“Gee, it’s going to be dreary. Please let me come up to your house and see you. Tonight.”
She pressed her throat. “Why —”
“Please!”
“Oh, not — not now. Terry, I’m — I don’t like myself at home. Really! I prefer the Miss Bratt of the office. I’d rather have you know her.”
“Some time?”
“Oh, perhaps.”
She flickered past him, her cheeks colored.
Terry grouchily turned up his coat collar and left. From the lower hall he saw the whole street filled with flashes of rain. Gutters were full and pouring out fanwise at corners of the street. The street doorway was packed with a constantly growing crowd of sweatshop workers, anxious girls and men without umbrellas. They were pitiful. And Terry didn’t feel in the least superior to them as he was jammed in among them. He was muttering with inexpressible longing:
“If I could only see Sue tonight. There’s nothing to do, if I can’t see her. I’m going back up to the office and ask her again. No, I can’t do that.” He gazed out, moon-eyed.
A voice at his ear, a gay voice:
“Why, you poor baby!”
She was beside him.
“Festive city!” he growled. “Munition millionaires. Crowded cabarets. Fine! I’ll go home and play solitaire — if I can get anybody to play it with.”
“You round-eyed, little bunny rabbit sulking by yourself! Do you really —”
“Do I want to come up to your house? It scares me to think of how much I want to.”
Her eyes turned from his. Her voice, which had always been so clear, was uncertain:
“Oh, do come up then. Oughtn’t to let you, ought to leave office behind but — come. Blank East Eighty-seventh Street.”
She hastily pushed by him into the crowd.
The secret silver knight sat on a high stool at a lunch counter. He was so excited that he slopped too much catchup on his beans. Also he let the trolley carry him past the right street, in his perturbed worry as to what he should wear, what sort of ménage he would find. Was Miss Susan Bratt of a family poor or well-to-do? Did she have a wholesale family or a spinster flat? Should he wear evening clothes or be cheerful and democratic in a clean shave and just clothes? Incidentally, he didn’t own evening clothes. Of course he could hire them, but what was all this stuff about black and white ties, black and white waistcoats? In short, he had a perfectly tremendous and youthful time worrying, then put on the other suit, decided that his umbrella was no good, took said umbrella, and started for Eighty-seventh Street.
He found that she lived on cliffs above the East River, in a model tenement house of tapestry brick and many windows, a hygienic but stern cranny for his flower. He forgot clothes. He was the secret knight again, and he had found her castle. He trudged up several miles of steps, deciding, on alternate landings, that she would let him kiss her at the door, and that she would be icily stately. Then he changed from a romantic lover into a realistic and abashed young man calling on an ordinary girl. The Sue Bratt, in a white frock with a broad blue ribbon filleting her hair, who met him at the door, was not the keen and self-dependent comrade of the office, nor was she any known sort of a lady of dreams. She was just a young lady, who was not so very different from the young ladies he had known back home. She murmured:
“So glad you could come. My mother will be pleased to meet you. And Mr. Meehan. He comes from our town — Wiletta.”
“Uh —”
“It’s almost stopped raining, hasn’t it?” she droned as she led him down the hall to a living room that was filled with patent rockers and niceness.
Terry felt smothered as he ducked his head before Mrs. Bratt’s creaking inquiries about his respectable health, as he grasped the flabby hand of Mr. Samuel Meehan, a thin, indigestive, baldish business grinder of 38. … “Gee, but I’d like to smoke; nothing doing here though,” he groaned. He was piloted to a red plush chair flanked by a large Chinese vase of the department-store dynasty, and they all began to converse. How they conversed! They took up, methodically and thoroughly, the topics of the weather, the church back in Wiletta, the movies, the wave of prohibition, what Mr. Meehan’s boss thought about saving money, what Mr. Meehan thought about his boss, what Mr. Meehan’s boss thought about Mr. Meehan, vacuum cleaners, Sousa’s band, and the nutritious quality of Brussels sprouts.
Sue seemed somewhat absent-minded about it all, but she responded readily — and dully — enough. She carefully divided her smiles between Mr. Meehan and Terry. At first Terry hoped that she was bored, but he gave up the hope. She showed considerable interest in the burning questions of sauce hollandaise and the passing of the tango. He became sulky, and was almost rude in thwarting Mrs. Bratt’s desire to know all about his origin, income, habits, and church affiliations.
Mr. Meehan was kind enough to go at 9:30, after dabbling at Sue’s hand and, with a watery smile, bidding her: “Be our nice little Sue now, and don’t let the suffering cats make you lose your sweet womanliness — back in Wiletta we don t believe in this shrieking suffrage sisterhood, Mr. Ames. Goodnight, Susie, and goodnight, Lady Bratt. Pleased metcha, Mr. Ames.” Mr. Meehan kept up his chirping for at least five minutes more before he flowed out of the door.
Mrs. Bratt rather unwillingly made excuses to disappear, and the golden children were left alone.
Terry rushed to open a window. He drew a deep breath. He looked to her for an intimate grin that would banish all Meehans to the old ladies’ home and make this strange alien room happily familiar. But Sue was at the small piano and was flapping the leaves of thin musical-comedy pieces. She chose “The Nagasaki-saki Rag,” and started to play it brilliantly. Terry tried to look edified. She struck two false notes, stopped, tried again, then slammed down the lid and faced him.
“I’m too tired to play tonight,” she said complacently.
The outward Terry made a polite noise like a kitten sneeze, but a somber inward Terry complained:
“Why the deuce can’t she be frank, the way she is in the office, and admit she can’t play the thing, no more’n a rabbit.”
“Don’t you just love music?” she said.
“Why, why, uh, yes — gee, I don’t know whether I do or not. Now, she was becoming as strange to him as was the room. He was uncomfortable.
“You ought to. It’s so — uh, well, cultured,” she went on. “I always thought Mr. Gato would make a good pianist, he has such sensitive fingers.”
“He’s a sensitive crook!”
“Terry Ames, if you’re going to be so disagreeable you can go right home. It’s almost time anyway.”
“Oh, gee, Sue, I didn’t mean to be grouchy!” wailed the metropolitan philosopher, very much like a young man back home. “I just meant — Honestly, now, you know he’s a crook. Sensitive fingers! For picking pockets! Oh, say, speaking of Gato, I just learned yesterday why poor old Harry is going to be fired. Struck the firm for a raise. J.J. told me —”
“I don’t think it’s nice of you to talk shop when we’ve both had so much of it.”
“Why, you brought it in yourself — about Gato —”
“Well — well, I just mentioned Mr. Gato’s artistic fingers, and I don’t think it’s very nice of you to call them pickpocket fingers, when you’re always complaining about people in the office knocking. And I do think he’s got the strongest chin, he must be quite athletic.”
“Oh, I s’pose he’s husky enough.” Terry gloomily thrust both of his unathletic hands into his coat pockets.
Without providing him with the smallest conversational bridge, she leaped to:
“But anyway … Oh, you ought to see the Russian ballet and —”
“Uh, yes — yes — I must go see —”
“Though I’d almost as soon stay home and read. Oh, Terry, have you read any of Jessica Brentwood Pipp’s Southern stories? They’re so sweet and optimistic! Oh, I would like to see the Southland and the old plantations! Mrs. Pipp makes them so real, and the old darkies must be funny.”
“Why, uh, no, I haven’t read her books.”
Terry was stunned by this conversational cabaret. He wanted to be frank, but what could he be frank about in all this flood? He was outraged at the empty talk of his goddess. And the amazing thing was that he didn’t love her any the less. So he meditated, as she opened the piano again and struck occasional chords while pattering on: “Of course I don’t mean Mrs. Pipp is a great writer, but she’s so, so optimistic … Oh Terry, do you play tennis? Don’t you love Maury McLoughlin?”
She had touched on one topic regarding which he did have enthusiasms, and he brightened up enough to carry them over the questions of golf, the subway, Lakewood, and the charms of Ethel Barrymore.
He bobbed up from his chair, pretended to look at a colored photograph of scrubby woods reflected in a second-rate lake, played with the dangles on an idiotic lamp shade, broke one, apologized perspiringly; straightened a sofa cushion; stalked up to her and, snatching her hand from the piano keys, dared to lay a finger on her pulse. He could feel her blood suddenly race, her hand tremble. They were silent. They stared at each other, frightened.
She uneasily withdrew her hand. The hot room was electrically charged with fear, hope, timid understanding. He was again, as in the office months before, conscious of her peculiar magic, which seemed to grow and glow in the spellbound room. It wasn’t true; she hadn’t chattered like a parrot; surely she hadn’t! No, she was perfect, the true goddess, and, like a worshiper, he touched her hand.
Then she jumped up from the piano stool, dragged a photograph album from the table and began:
“Oh, I must show you the pictures we got on our vacation at Long Branch last summer. See, here’s where we stayed. Isn’t it the duckiest house! And here’s the bunch on the beach.”
They were off again.
The minutes were becoming terrible now. It was growing late. Already he ought to be going. Would he ever be allowed to come again, ever conjure up that spell of silence and love’s tense wonder?
“I do adore Nature,” she was saying. “I hate to be shut up in this horrid old city. It isn’t like Wiletta; there are such pretty maples there and the —”
“Is that where our friend Meehan comes from?”
“Yes. He’s always been such a good friend of the family. So kind to my mother.”
“Huh! It’s mother’s daughter that Br’er Meehan is interested in.”
She moved to the dingy brocade settee and hugged a sofa cushion, hid her lips with it, and looked over it with tempting bright eyes as she insisted:
“Well, perhaps I’m interested in him too. I’ve known him ever since —”
“Oh, sure. You sat on his knees. I know. And he taught you in Sunday school.”
“You shan’t make fun of him. Perhaps I’ll marry him some day.”
“Sue!”
He was stern, somber, no longer boyishly jealous.
“You couldn’t do that, Sue! You do want to be big. And you do care, because I want you to be big, not — oh, not Meehany. You make believe you don’t know how much I honor you, dear, but you do know, you do!”
She tried to keep up the coquetry. She brushed the silken cord of the cushion with her lips and murmured:
“Well, Mr. Meehan never contradicts me, as you do. I must think about him seriously. He’d be —”
She stopped. Terry came and stood over her, his eyes hot. A flush came up in her cheeks, slow, painful. He sat down beside her, took the cushion away from her, took her hand and pressed it against his cheek till her fingers curved and clung there. The spell of silence began to fill the room again. Then the window shade rattled like spiteful laughter and the room seemed close, sordid.
He cried: “Oh, come up on the roof in the mist, where there’s air and sky! I don’t care if it is time for me to go! I don’t care if it is raining! Oh, Sue, Sue darling, we’re letting life get dusty. You — you who can fight the whole office alone — you aren’t going to go on pretending about love, are you?”
She hesitated, but he put an arm about her, lifted her up, drew her to the door, down the hall, up a flight of stairs to the roof. Below them was the East River, fantastically lighted from barges; and in the distant fog the huge electric signs of a factory were a throne of fire. Above them the pale, rosy sky; about them a misty breeze that blew away pettiness. He put his coat about her, stood holding it close to her shoulders, then kissed her hair, in which the dampness brought out all the fragrance.
“Oh, Terry, you mustn’t!” she sobbed.
“I will! I won’t go through all this giggling and candy toting and love making and pretending. Leave that for Meehan and Watkins and people that can’t make up their minds about love — or honesty, or anything. We’ve worked together, not just gone to parties. We buck the office together. We’ll buck life that way. We will! Come out of Wiletta!”
He cupped her wet cheeks with his two nervous, fine hands. He kissed her eyes.
“You frighten me,” she quavered.
“Dear, listen! We agree that in the office we’ll be honest — if possible. Now you be honest in love — if possible. I don’t know how I know you love me; it’s something deeper than facts; it’s just the feeling that when we’re together here, there’s something so intimate between us. And you hide it from yourself by talking of books and vacations and Wiletta! You, the worker —”
“Oh, Terry, how you talk and talk and talk! I do love you! But I’m afraid you’ll talk me out of it again. When I just want to rest!” She pillowed her cheek against his shoulder, his damp, warm shoulder.
Not for many minutes did she say:
“I was honest — as possible. I knew I was talking rot about Jessica Silly Brentwood Pipp and all, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I was so excited at having you with me, there in that quiet room. And when I tried to express it, I was so embarrassed that all I could think of was Mrs. Pipp. Only I really do like her piffle. I can have that one fault, can’t I, my perfect man?”
“Gee, the way I try to make poor Sue into a little tin god! Gato’s right about my being a crank.”
“Gato?” She grated out the name savagely. “If he ever dared to tell me you were a crank! My Terry, my boy that wants to be honest!”
“Say! Why shouldn’t I leave Hopkins & Gato and start in new, some place else? I’ve always wanted to, but before you came — just got to drifting —”
“No. That would be running away. Do you know, I’m going to hang onto my job for a while, even after we’re married — I suppose you’re going to be so kind and condescend to ask the milkmaid to marry you, sir, when you happen to think of it. And so, my little man, you won’t have me depending on you, and you can put on your boy-scout uniform and go tell Mr. Hopkins to change Tangerine from an orange development to truck farming. Do that! Do it tomorrow!”
“Um. Maybe I’d dare to buck him now with you backing me. But — suppose he fired me? Now? When I need the job for — for us?”
“Let him! That’s why I’m going to keep my job. Oh, you won’t be like the others — get cautious when you fall in love! You started me wanting to be honest, and I’m afraid you can’t stop that sort of thing, once it’s really started. You will fight it out with him! If you don’t, I will!”
“Yes. I’ll see him tomorrow. Maybe he’d do it now. Tangerine isn’t selling anything extra. Might actually go better as a truck proposition. But what a rotten, petty victory — to persuade a boss to be honest because there’s money in it for him!”
“I guess there’s nothing but petty victories in life, that and the real big thing of going on fighting — Oh, Terry, Terry, we’re talking again! Talking, talking! Tomorrow you can fight with Hopkins, but now — I’m wet and cold and tired. I’m just a bedraggled little girl, and I want to creep into your arms. Is that honest and frank enough for you, crusader of my soul?”
Great tatters of fog shut in the city children on the smug tenement, as though they stood solitary upon the roof of the world, mountain lovers, mates and fellow builders rolling boulders to make an enduring home.
Portraying a boy with a black eye was commonplace enough. Here, Rockwell gives the schoolyard dust-up a then-modern twist by painting a girl combatant who, judging by her grin, was the victor. But as he worked on the cover illustration, Rockwell found himself in a jam because his model was not, in fact, injured. And painting a realistic shiner was challenging, since a truly “black” eye contains multiple colors, none of them black.
Rockwell halted work to visit several hospitals but found no patients in the right condition. An obliging photographer ran an ad in the local paper, announcing a search for a model with a black eye. This created another diversion as the media caught wind of the story, and soon Rockwell was getting offers from across the country. But then, a bit of luck came Rockwell’s way when Tommy Forsberg of Worcester, Massachusetts, fell down the stairs and blackened both his eyes. His father drove him to Rockwell’s studio, where his injury would be immortalized, albeit on a young girl’s face.
If you find yourself confused this fall, not knowing what year it is, you probably won’t be alone.
This week saw the annual Upfronts, the time of year when the TV networks unveil their new fall shows for advertisers and viewers. A lot of the shows are new versions of things we’ve seen before, including a reboot of MacGyver; an action-drama called Timeless that looks a lot like the ’60s series Time Tunnel; TV versions of the movies Lethal Weapon, The Exorcist, Training Day, and Time After Time (yes, more time travel); and for some reason, a show based on the early career of TV therapist Dr. Phil. He’ll be played by Michael Weatherly, who left NCIS this week after 13 seasons. If you liked The Good Wife, maybe you’ll be interested in the spinoff show starring Christine Baranski, which will be on CBS streaming service, CBS All Access.
Here are the new shows coming to ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, The CW, and TBS/TNT. By the way, Supergirl is leaving CBS but isn’t canceled; it’s moving to The CW, because it’s a better fit with existing shows like The Flash and Arrow. But CBS isn’t giving up on sci-fi. The new Star Trek is coming next year, and like The Good Wife spinoff, will be seen on CBS All Access. Maybe these shows will finally get viewers to pay for digital in a big way.
The shows that are going away? They include Nashville, Castle, The Grinder, The Mysteries of Laura, and CSI: Cyber. Here’s a complete list of the shows that won’t be coming back next season and the ones that have been renewed. Hopefully, your favorite show wasn’t canceled, though if CSI: Cyber was your favorite show … ahem.
The Catch, the ABC show I told you about a few weeks ago, was renewed for a second season. So I’m happy.
How to Embarrass a Meteorologist
What happens when viewers of a local news broadcast send in e-mails because they don’t like what the female meteorologist is wearing? Well, this:
I would think that if the station had a real problem with the dress that Liberte Chan was wearing and wanted to do something about it, they’d talk to her about it after she was finished, off-camera. But I guess if they did it that way, this whole thing wouldn’t have gone “viral.”
Morley Safer passed away yesterday. This is rather surprising news because it comes less than a week after his retirement from CBS and a special 60 Minutes tribute that aired last Sunday. CNN’s Brian Stelter is reporting that one of the reasons for that special tribute was because Safer had been in poor health recently. Safer worked for CBS for over 50 years and was the longest-running correspondent on 60 Minutes. He was 84.
Julius La Rosa was a singer, and a lot of people will remember him for songs like “Eh, Cumpari” and “Domani.” But he was also involved in one of the big radio controversies in 1953. La Rosa was a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s show and became a big star. Maybe too big. Godfrey thought that La Rosa had become ungrateful and actually fired La Rosa live on the air. It didn’t sound like a nasty firing. Godfrey tried to say that La Rosa had grown beyond the show and it was time for him to be on his own, but he actually didn’t like that La Rosa had hired an agent and “lost his humility.” Here’s audio of the incident:
The firing actually helped La Rosa, as the public seemed to side with him. He went on to guest host The Perry Como Show and appear on shows like TheEd Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. He had his own show from 1955 to 1957, and was even nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in 1980 for his role on Another World. La Rosa died in Wisconsin last week at the age of 86.
Bill Backer? He was one of the advertising giants of the ’60s and ’70s, sort of the real-life Don Draper of Mad Men. His name might not be familiar to you but his most famous commercial song will be. It was featured in the series finale of the show:
Backer passed away last week at the age of 89. He worked on ad campaigns for companies like Quaker Foods, Xerox, Philip-Morris, Miller Beer (“Miller Time”), and Lowenbrau (“Here’s to good friends, tonight is kind of special”).
When I was in my late teens, my best friend and I were addicted to the video games Centipede (and Millipede, its sister game) and Asteroids. We’d go to the arcade or bowling alley and play those games for hours. God only knows how many quarters we pumped into those machines.
Now we’ll be able to experience Centipede in theaters, as they’re making a big-screen version of the game. It will be done by Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films in partnership with Atari. I don’t know how well this movie will do. Movies based on video games are tricky. Sure, Lara Croft was big, but we all remember Adam Sandler’s Pixels. Or maybe we don’t.
They’re making a Missile Command movie, too, though that seems to lend itself to a big-screen action flick a little more readily than Centipede. I’m surprised they haven’t made a movie based on Asteroids, though maybe that’s what Armageddon was.
A Light in the Night
Have you ever gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and you’re tired and you turn on the bathroom light and get all disoriented because the light is too bright and you wish you could just leave the light off yet still go to the bathroom?
OF COURSE NOT. But that didn’t stop someone from inventing something for that very scenario. Introducing The Bowl Light (and a similar product, The GlowBowl). That’s right, it’s a light you put inside your toilet bowl! So you can actually leave the light off yet still do what you need to do!
This is the solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist. If you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you deal with the brightness for a few minutes. (And I don’t even want to discuss how dirty this light could get.)
One of the main selling points for this product is that it “lights up without waking you up.” Yeah, because who wants to actually be awake when they go to the bathroom?
How to Make a Strawberry Fool
May is National Strawberry Month, so here’s why you should brush your teeth with them. But you want a recipe too, right? How about a Strawberry Fool? This New York Times video shows you how to make it, and it’s pretty simple. The only ingredients are strawberries, cream, sugar, and vanilla.
Oh, and a bowl of some sort. You need a bowl to put it in. And it doesn’t even need to have a light in it.
Upcoming Events and Anniversaries
Norman Rockwell’s first Post cover (May 20, 1916)
Boy with Baby Carriage, Rockwell’s first Post cover, was the start of a long relationship that yielded 322 cover images over four decades. We’re marking the centennial with “100 Days of Norman Rockwell,” highlighting a different Rockwell cover every weekday for the next 20 weeks.
Richard Nixon becomes first U.S. president to visit Moscow (May 22, 1972)
In this Saturday Evening Post piece, Peter Bloch explains why Nixon was … a great President!
The voice of a bull is not the voice of the cow. The bull growls, a rumble like a train in a tunnel if a train could brood, menace, resent, and pine. He calls, groans, and screams. Pastured away from the herd, a bull who has been a silent lord in their midst bawls his rage and croons his mourning.
Severn Hatch had the farm that you saw on Google Earth as a green eye-patch on a huge gray face. The face was the roofs of 6,000 houses, the farm a round-edged square. From above, it made its statement: I won’t sell. From the roads bordering it, or streets as they were now, it was a kind of theme park. It had a gate and a painted sign SEVERN swinging from a post; it had a grate for keeping cattle in, a barn, a silo, and a pond. It had tractors that could be heard in the mornings, and a bull. Hatch kept his bull long after the herd was gone.
The place and the man were named for a town in North Carolina where Severn Hatch had been born, on his grandparents’ farm where his young parents were waiting out the Depression. After giving birth, his mother had died in her childhood bedroom. Along with both of her parents, who were already known to the bootleggers, his father had fallen by the wayside. But after a few years, the father dragged himself up to Virginia where his own people were. He sent for his son, at 8 already lost to the dazed grandparents and the Carolina schools. Schools did not try to hold onto a child as they do now. He never remarried, and his son never returned to school or married either, living on by himself on the dairy farm built up by the father.
Hatch never sold an acre. He sold his herd a few at a time as the demands of milking got too much for him and as tenants came and went in the little house his father had built and kept up. A dairy that size had to have a tenant or a hired man. Every few years, he went as his father had done and painted the house, working with whoever the tenant was, until he couldn’t find one for the job.
Severn Hatch’s last Holstein bull could get past a fence and did so, as bulls do, with some regularity. When his fields had bordered another herd’s fields — for the change to house lots proceeded in a slow, circling way at first — he was just a visitor. “Lucky to have him stop by and improve the herd,” Hatch would say when a neighbor complained. And in truth the bull came from a good line, and there were still a couple of farmers in the southwestern part of the state who used him as a sire, and that was why Hatch said he kept him, even though eventually he had to drive out some way to get feed and salt blocks.
In the early days, the bull could be brought in from his searching, run back onto his own land by Hatch, a waving stick, and a good dog. Now he was taller than a man and weighed something over a ton. Older and craftier, he was harder to get back in.
Up in his 70s, Hatch could be seen in the Walmart parking lot searching for his bull. He drove all over now instead of walking the fields and roads in a grid that had at one time taken him all day. Nobody outside a few stores knew him, so nobody knew his purpose, though everybody knew the farm, noted on zoning maps as “Severn Farm, Landmark,” and the bull on the highway or growling up a ramp into a battered truck at Walmart was part of county lore. People would get out of the way, but many did not know to be afraid of an animal. Hatch’s clothing did not give him away as the owner, as people of all ages dressed like farmers by then, even in the electronics parks.
At the far end of that parking lot one day, he had a stroke. He was found lying down beside his truck, and when he woke up in the hospital, he started raving about his bull. He got his words back right away, but all he did was call out “Tarnation!” The nurse figured out it was a name. She put it all together. She became the one he talked to in his dread over the next days, when no news of the bull reached them. She was a popular nurse known in the hospital as Kimberly One, because she claimed to be the first person in the U.S. to bear the name.
“Tarnation. I’ve heard of that guy,” she said. “My grandpa farmed here.”
“He’s got to eat,” Hatch said. “Got to have feed. Got to have pills.”
“You worry about your own pills,” Kimberly said. “I’ll find out where he is. Somebody has him, I know.”
“Who would that be?” said Hatch rudely. “Holstein bull is a dangerous animal.”
“Is he mean?”
“Mean he is not. Ah!”
“What? What hurts?”
“Everything,” said Hatch. “How old are you?”
“I’m 56.”
“He’s cute,” she said at the nurse’s station.
“To each his own.”
“No, really, there must be some news of this critter.”
They did find out. The bull had been bumped and thrown by a semi coming off the freeway. By some miracle, he was alive at a large animal vet in the next county, with some stitched-up gashes but no bones broken. Hatch left the hospital in his pressure socks — they had taken his shoes from him — but Kimberly caught up with him in her car and drove him so fast they got stopped for a warning. It was a clear day in March, and the construction sites thinned out as they drove until they were passing between fields starting to show the green of some leaf crop. She said, “What’s that?”
Hatch said, “Couldn’t say,” though he knew every green thing in state soil. Despite the seatbelt she had made him put on, he had himself pressed against the door.
To Kimberly’s eyes, the bull was as big as an elephant in the hoist, gleaming stark black and white against the bandages and tape. At Hatch’s approach, he rolled his eye back and then swung his huge head to see, knocking the vet’s assistant to his knees in the straw. The head was entirely black with long eyelashes shadowing the ball-eye with its wet red corner. Streaks ran down from the eyes as if he had cried.
Getting to his feet, the assistant had had a look at Hatch’s wet socks. He addressed himself to Kimberly, making the sign of writing a bill. “Come on in when you’re done with your visit.”
“He’s beautiful,” Kimberly said. “I bet you’re gonna say don’t touch him.”
“Better not.” Hatch placed his fingers behind the black jaw and bowed his head. “Heart going,” he said after a time.
“Fever.”
“I think he’s just worked up,” said Kimberly. “Because you caught up with him. Everything he’s been through and then you show up. You love this guy.”
Though movies and popular television like to depict acts of respect and chivalry for one’s adversaries on the battlefields of yore, the idea of nonpartisan, humanitarian aid to all victims of war and disaster is not as old as you might think.
When the Civil War began in 1861, Clara Barton was just another clerk at the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Barton’s great crusade, which helped define modern humanitarianism, began when she saw soldiers crowding into the city without food or shelter prepared for them. More importantly, there was not enough medical care for wounded soldiers returning from the front.
She began distributing food and supplies to sick and wounded soldiers in the area but soon realized there was an even greater need for her services closer to the battlefield. After receiving permission to travel to the front lines, she started delivering medical supplies and tending to wounded soldiers right on the fields of battle, often risking her life to do so. Eventually, army commanders recognized the good work she was doing and gave her responsibility for all the Union’s hospitals along the James River.
After the war, Barton continued her humanitarian work by helping relatives find the remains of 22,000 soldiers who’d been reported missing. She also helped identify — and bury — 13,000 casualties of the Andersonville Prison Camp in Georgia.
After four years of this work, Barton took a break and visited Europe. But any chance for a restful vacation ended when she learned of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which had been founded in Geneva in 1864. She was drawn to its mission of providing international aid to protect the sick and wounded on all sides in war.
Barton stayed to help civilians caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, and when she returned to the States, she urged the U.S. government to sign the Geneva Treaty that created the ICRC. U.S. approval to join the international organization came in 1881, and the American Red Cross was incorporated on May 21 of that year.
Now, 135 years later, the American Red Cross is still going strong, providing shelter, food, and healthcare services at roughly 70,000 disasters every year, from single-home fires to earthquakes that affect millions. Its blood program collects, tests, and types over 40 percent of the country’s blood supply. It delivers needed services to 150,000 military families each year, including training and support for wounded veterans. The Red Cross also provides training in first aid, CPR, and lifeguarding.
As part of an international organization, it joins the Red Cross in 187 countries to help over 100 million people worldwide every year.
In 1878, when the item below appeared in the Post, few readers would have heard of the Red Cross, which is why the author felt the need to describe the organization’s symbol and mission. Though the ICRC’s original focus was the treatment of war wounded, this uncredited news item shows that Barton already had a broader vision for the Red Cross. Under her direction, the American Red Cross — and eventually the ICRC — would provide aid to survivors of natural disasters, including forest fires, floods, and famines.
Note: The Howard Association referred to in this article was a relief organization set up in 1855 to help victims of the viral Yellow Fever epidemic in Norfolk, Virginia.
Clara Barton Elmer Chickering [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsOriginally published on December 28, 1878
Miss Clara Barton, who has been termed the Florence Nightingale of America, has issued a pamphlet on the subject of establishing a “Red Cross Society” in this country which will be a branch of that great international humane association whose symbol — the red cross on a white ground — has carried succor and help to so many scenes of distress.
While the aim of the relief societies which have carried on their work under the name of the Red Cross has been to ameliorate the condition of wounded soldiers, it is also intended to furnish relief and assistance to sufferers in time of great national calamities such as plagues, cholera, yellow fever, devastating fires or floods, railway disasters, mining catastrophes, etc.
The readiness of organizations like those of the “Red Cross,” to extend help at the instant of need, renders the aid of quadruple value and efficiency, as compared to that gathered together hastily and irresponsibly in the bewilderment and shock which always accompanies such calamities, and which prove to be obstacles rather than aids to the cause.
The trained nurses and also attendants subject to the relief societies, in such causes would accompany the supplies sent, and remain in action as long as needed. Organized in every state, the relief societies of the Red Cross would be ready with money, nurses and supplies, to go on call to the instant relief of all who were overwhelmed by any of those sudden calamities which occasionally visit us. In case of yellow fever, there being an organization in every state, the nurses and attendants would be first chosen from the nearest societies, and being acclimated would incur far less risk to life than if sent from distant localities.
The work of the Howard Association during the late Southern affliction is a substantial proof of the success of a trained relief organization, and the desirability of Miss Barton’s plan is so obvious, it should be heartily sustained by every state.
Throughout history, most great artists have been storytellers, whether in paintings scratched out on the walls of caves to chronicle the hunt or, later, in lush canvases and intricate frescoes to interpret scenes from the Bible or to record great battles. Norman Rockwell comes from just such a tradition.
Ordinary people doing ordinary things were his subjects for the most part. “The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art,” Rockwell wrote in 1936. “Boys batting flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jacks on the front steps; old men plodding home at twilight, umbrellas in hand — all of these things arouse feeling in me. Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative.”
The public adored Rockwell from the start, says Laurie Norton Moffatt, director and CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum. If, in the postwar world of abstract expressionism, folks stared in befuddlement at Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black canvases or Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings, Rockwell’s work was a breath of fresh air.
“We know from the fan mail received at The Saturday Evening Post that people were extraordinarily attentive to his work, even to the point of catching him out on details if something was a little off about the picture,” she says. “But most of the letters were accolades of how much they were moved, or touched, by a particular picture.”
Rockwell famously put in long hours, heading off to his studio seven days a week, holidays included. Joseph Csatari, who served for eight years as art director for Rockwell’s Boy Scout paintings, recalls that the artist needed a daily intervention just to pry him away from his easel: “Every day at 11 o’clock, Rockwell’s wife Mary would knock on the studio door to remind him to take a break. ‘If I didn’t,’ she would say, ‘he’d work through dinner.’”
Rockwell’s total production was staggering. In his lifetime, he painted nearly 4,000 images, including 800 magazine covers — 322 for this magazine alone — and ad campaigns for more than 150 companies.
Today his paintings are more popular than ever, commanding eight-figure fees from collectors and drawing crowds to museums. Among his better-known fans are film directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Both speak reverently of the artist’s storytelling skills, likening his paintings to film. “He was able to sum up the story and … understand who the people were, what their motives were, everything in one little frame,” Lucas said in an interview. “I think he’s left a legacy that’ll never be forgotten.”
But for all his popularity, and, in fact, because of it, Rockwell was for most of his lifetime a flop in the eyes of the art world. “His success was his failure,” wrote Arthur Danto in a 1986 review in The New York Times, adding, “He possessed a demonic gift for likenesses, but an appalling lack of taste.”
As Moffatt tells it, he was approached by young art students during a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and asked by one, “You’re Norman Rockwell, right?” Touched with pride at being recognized, he was stung by the comment, “My art professor says you stink!”
Rockwell was well aware that he was out of step with the elites of the art world. “I have always wanted everybody to like my work,” he writes in his autobiography. “I could never be satisfied with just the approval of the critics (and boy, I’ve certainly had to be satisfied without it).”
Understanding the criticism Rockwell endured for much of his career requires some perspective about the history of American art, which went through seismic upheavals during his lifetime. Early in the 20th century, classically trained illustrators were national celebrities and trendsetters — admired and emulated the way sports figures and actors are today. “When you look at the 1920s, illustrators like John Held Jr., who was setting flapper fashions, or his forebears Charles Dana Gibson, who created the Gibson Girl, or J.C. Leyendecker, whose ads for Arrow shirts defined the styles and the fashions of the day — these illustrators defined how people dressed and acted, and even shaped what they should aspire to be,” Moffatt says.
But change was coming. Art historians point to the 1913 Armory show in New York as a critical turning point. Today, it’s hard to imagine the uproar the show caused. Nearly 90,000 people came to see the exhibition, which featured then-unknown-in-America artists such as Georges Braque, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, and many others. The abstraction — Cubism! Fauvism! — was a pie in the face of the classical tradition, and many viewers were outraged.
“For the very first time, American artists were introduced to the breaking down of form, of color, anatomy not being presented realistically,” Moffatt says. “American artists realized they had a choice. Many went to Europe to study these new styles, and you began to have this division. Artists could stay in the narrative tradition, painting pictures that are about a recognizable subject — pictures that involve people or landscape — or you could choose to go into these more abstracted forms of art.”
Rockwell, born in 1894, also caught the modern art fever, if briefly. At 29, already an established artist for the Post, he traveled to Paris to study the latest fads. Right from the beginning, it was not a perfect fit, as he writes in his autobiography. But, on his return, he attempted an abstract cover for the Post that was quickly and mercifully rejected. “I don’t know much about this modern art, but I know it’s not your kind of art,” the famously taciturn editor George Horace Lorimer told him. “Your kind is what you’ve been doing all along.”
Rockwell did revert to form, of course, but throughout his life, he was occasionally troubled that he was an anomaly among the leading artists of his day. “I think any artist who is a creative genius will go through periods of self-doubt,” Moffatt says. “And what comes through in Norman Rockwell’s own autobiography, where he writes about these episodes of depression, is how he always came through them with a burst of creativity where he was painting his absolute best. It’s a measure of his great strength and of his talent and genius.”
That genius must have been evident immediately to Lorimer, who, 100 years ago, bought two of the unknown young artist’s works at first sight. “Even in those early works, Rockwell was already evidencing the deep sense of observation, that keen sense of just how people interact,” Moffatt says. “If you look at the Boy with Baby Carriage, at first it’s all about the humor — the jeering friends running off to play ball while the older brother is stuck babysitting his sister. But as you look more closely, you’re drawn to the detail: the baby bottle in his breast pocket, the bowler hat clipped onto his lapel. I think it is that attention to detail, the little things that spark the humor, and that always take you a little deeper into the picture, that is the hallmark of his great talent.
“So you have an editor who is very skilled and who knows what he likes, who knows what will work for the Post, and he gave Rockwell a tremendous chance, and of course Rockwell never looked back, and he never let Lorimer down.” (For the full story of Rockwell’s thrilling initial encounter with the Post, see “A Fruitful Relationship,” by granddaughter Abigail Rockwell.)
There is an additional layer of meaning when you consider the historical backdrop of many of Rockwell’s works. Citing Recruiting Officer, from the June 16, 1917, cover (above), Moffatt notes the obvious storyline — two kids are play-acting as soldiers out in the yard, and one kid isn’t measuring up: “He’s not tall enough to be recruited as a soldier, and the other young man has a wooden sword, and he has this bandana on, and he’s in his scout uniform. What one would have known at that time is that World War I was going on, so Rockwell is incorporating the larger narrative of world events into this narrowly focused microcosm of two kids in the backyard playing. There are so many things to talk about in these pictures beyond the first sort of joke that might stand out to us.”
But, always, the warmth shines through. “It has to be kept in mind that he’s doing all these paintings through the influenza epidemic, through the Great Depression, through the worst wars in the history of the world,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough. “Yet he maintains a positive theme. Rockwell is like the minister who gives an encouraging sermon every week, and keeps the faith in the American ideal.”
McCullough has a unique perspective on Rockwell, having spent a day with the artist when he was still a student at Yale and contemplating becoming an artist himself.
McCullough painted an illustration that was used for the cover of the program of the Yale-Dartmouth football game. “I was a great admirer of Rockwell, and the drawing — a father and son attending a football game — was very much in the Rockwell spirit.”
A classmate of McCullough’s who lived in the Berkshires near Rockwell arranged for the two to meet. “Rockwell could not have been nicer,” McCullough recalls. “I went up to meet him at his studio, above a store on the main street of the town. He was like a character from his paintings — a small, frail, bent-over man, physically not impressive at all, but his spirit was strong. There was no sense that I was in the presence of some great artistic genius. He struck me as a man who didn’t have much time for ego. He was too busy having the best of life through his work.”
McCullough spent the better part of the day with Rockwell. He watched him paint. Then they went to Rockwell’s home and had lunch, and Rockwell was quite encouraging about the young man’s artwork. “It could not have been a more memorable experience. He was one of my heroes,” McCullough says.
Today, the richness and depth — and yes, the earnest good nature — of Rockwell’s artwork is finally appreciated. (In 2014, Rockwell’s Saying Grace sold for $46 million, setting a record for his work.) But through much of the 20th century, while Rockwell was paid well, the paintings themselves had little or no value — they were merely the medium for delivering his pictures to the printed page. As an example, when the artist donated his canvas of Day in the Life of a Boy to the town’s Community Club for its annual raffle, the work raised a grand total of 50 cents.
Another anecdote that reflects Rockwell’s modesty about his own canvases comes from Csatari: “On one of my early visits to Stockbridge, I took a walk over to the Old Corner House museum to see some of Norman’s paintings while he took his nap. At the museum, I entered a room that held his Four Freedoms. I remember feeling as if I were in church. But in an instant, the reverence was broken. I saw painters on ladders slapping white latex on the ceiling and spattering the paintings below. I was stunned. I hurried back to the studio to tell Norman, who was back at his easel. He took a thoughtful puff of his pipe, then smiled and said, ‘Gee, Joe, maybe they’ll improve ’em.’”
How did Rockwell’s reputation rebound? As early as 1946, the renowned author of art instruction books Arthur Guptill published Norman Rockwell, Illustrator, a book that celebrated his work, notes Moffatt. But it wasn’t until 1968 that there was any serious interest in his original canvases. Rockwell was caught off guard when New York gallery owner Bernie Danenberg called him one afternoon in July 1968 to suggest mounting a show.
“I’m sorry,” Rockwell said, “but I think you have the wrong artist.”
Danenberg insisted he was not mistaken and drove up to Stockbridge the next day with his gallery manager. Arriving in town, they proceeded directly to his studio. Treasures abounded. Danenberg instantly fell for Lift Up Thine Eyes, a painting that depicted city people rushing past a beautiful old Manhattan church, oblivious to its beauty. The art dealer offered to buy the painting on the spot for $2,500. Rockwell at first refused to accept any money for the painting, saying, “I got paid for it once. I don’t need to be paid again.”
Danenberg persisted, and Rockwell ultimately agreed to sell the painting. He also agreed to schedule an exhibition for October of the same year. As art blogger Ann Restak writes, the exhibition marked the first time that Rockwell sold an original illustration as artwork.
There was a second gallery exhibition in 1972 and another traveling exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum. So one could regard the early ’70s as something of a turning point for Rockwell. “He went from being an artist on the cover of magazines to an artist who had his paintings on the walls of museums and galleries,” Moffatt says.
Collectors slowly began to take notice. “We see, around 1978, the very first auctions of Rockwell’s work in the major auction houses, such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s,” Moffatt says. “But it was still rare for American illustrators to be sold at art auctions. Honestly, it wasn’t greatly admired by the auctioneer. It would be shown on the back page of the auction catalogue, and sold for very little.”
It wasn’t until 1999, when the Norman Rockwell Museum and the High Museum of Art produced a large-scale exhibition titled Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, that opinion leaders in the insular art world finally came around. The show traveled to seven American cities, ending in New York at the Guggenheim Museum. Now, writes Restak, his work was finally legitimized “in the hallowed halls of a world-class art institution.”
It didn’t hurt that the exhibition catalogue included essays by such authorities as Moffatt; Ned Rifkin, director of the High Museum of Art; and Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his essay for the catalogue, Hoving argues that critics must take another look at Rockwell and “place him in his authentic position in art.” He calls Rockwell “one of the most successful visual mass communicators of the century” and points out that “art history, for snobbish reasons, has always been suspicious of artists considered populizers.”
Admiration for Rockwell has only grown as his paintings are exhibited with more frequency. “The experience of viewing an original Rockwell is very profound,” Moffatt says.
“The more people see Rockwell’s work in the original format, the more they are just wowed by what an extraordinary artist he was. You just can’t deny the artistry, the exquisite detail, and, of course, his keen observation of human nature.”
“He had a tremendous respect for the virtues of mankind,” Spielberg has said. “And there was a real sense of community, of family, and especially of nation.”
“Above all, Norman Rockwell was an extraordinarily kind person, and he genuinely loved people,” Moffatt says. “There’s so much anger in our nation today — and a certain amount of coarseness in the culture overall. But when people look at Rockwell’s work, not only do they respect it and like it, I think maybe they long for those qualities to be present once again. Not to go back in time, but to bring forward some of these guiding principles of how society could be.”
How will Rockwell be regarded 100 years from now? “Unabashedly I would say we’ll remember him the way we remember Rembrandt and Michelangelo,” Moffatt says. “Rockwell’s work will be held up and admired, and hold its own, alongside the greatest painters in the world.”
My grandfather once said, “The Post is my best and only opportunity to express myself fully.” He liked to come up with his own stories and tell them his way — and the Post covers were the best way for him to do that. With other illustration work, he was forced to rely on and stay true to someone else’s story. Without the unique opportunity that The Saturday Evening Post presented to him for so many years, it could be argued that Norman Rockwell would not have evolved into the incomparable and beloved storyteller we know today.
Pop, as we called him, always wanted to become a great illustrator — he was driven from the moment he started sketching while his father read Charles Dickens to the family, and later studying the work of other artists: “You start by following other artists — a spaniel. Then, if you’ve got it, you become yourself — a lion.”
His dream was to do a cover for The Saturday Evening Post, but he was haunted by doubts. Only the very best, like J.C. Leyendecker and Coles Phillips, did covers for the Post.
He began to sit alone in the studio he rented with his friend, the noted cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, a copy of the Post spread out before him, allowing himself to dream. He dared to visualize a picture he had painted on its cover. He imagined how many people would see it — one million, even two million? He pictured his name in the lower-right-hand corner. What would it be like if he were the man he wanted to be, a famous illustrator, adored by female fans, his covers displayed on newsstands and tucked in the mailboxes of families around the country? He pictured children fighting over who would get to see the cover first and explore all its details. He even saw himself dining with the Post’s larger-than-life editor, George Horace Lorimer.
One day Clyde found him on the sofa, suffering over the fact that none of this was even close to becoming a reality. Clyde had to convince Pop that he was indeed good enough to attempt a cover. Don’t be intimidated, he said: “Lorimer’s not the Dalai Lama.”
So my grandfather got to work. Two ideas came to him, conjured up from the kind of covers he had admired on the Post. The first was a Gibson Girl kind of painting with a dashing man bending over a sofa to kiss an irresistible, but removed, high-society woman; the second, a young ballerina bowing before an audience in a dramatic spotlight. Clyde took one look at the paintings and exclaimed dryly, “C-R-U-D.” The ballerina, he said, looked like a “tomboy who’s been scrubbed with a rough washcloth and pinned into a new dress by her mother. Forget about what you think the Post is looking for and paint what you do best — kids.”
Pop followed his friend’s advice, completing several paintings and rough sketches to take to the offices of The Saturday Evening Post. For his big meeting, my grandfather bought a brand-new black hat and new suit in a fashionable gray herringbone tweed. He had a custom-made “suitcase” created to take the paintings on the train to the Post in Philadelphia. The problem was, the case looked more like a small black casket. Despairing thoughts followed him all the way. But miracle of miracles, Lorimer accepted two finished paintings and okayed three sketches for future covers. His first cover, Salutation [also called Boy with Baby Carriage], would appear on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on May 20, 1916 — Pop was only 22 years old.
My grandfather used one of his favorite models, Billy Payne, for all three boys in this first cover. The boy pushing the pram is fully realized and rendered, but the other two boys are poorly done. He should have used three distinct boys to model for the painting. And the dark hollow of the pram and barely visible baby were probably the result of nerves. Pop must have been anxious about painting his first Post cover and perhaps couldn’t quite deal with getting an actual baby as a model with its very real wriggling and crying to contend with.
In later years, he often recalled the fun and hard work of pitching his ideas to Lorimer. He would place the sketches in front of Lorimer on his desk and then act them out to bring the whole picture and story to life in an exciting way:
I’d get up from the chair, shake myself and point to one of the sketches on the desk. “Springtime,” I’d say, “a little boy perched on a stump playing a flute.” And I’d sit on the edge of a chair, pull up my legs from the floor in a graceful pose, and make believe I was blissfully blowing a flute. “The kid’s happy,” I’d say. “It’s spring. The sun is warm upon his neck; the bees are buzzing in the flowers. And the little animals are dancing in a ring about the stump. A rabbit, a duck, a frog” — I’d kick up my heels and dance around the chair — “a turtle, a squirrel, an owl, a grasshopper. It’s spring. Everybody’s joyful.”
“Good,” Mr. Lorimer would say, scribbling OKGHL on the side of the sketch.
That particular sketch ended up as Springtime, 1927, the April 16, 1927, cover [above].
My grandfather’s time at The Saturday Evening Post can be divided into three periods corresponding to the three editors, along with one significant art editor, who oversaw the magazine until my grandfather quietly resigned in 1964. The first period, of course, was dominated by the commanding presence of Lorimer. Pop remembered always being greeted by Lorimer standing behind his desk, silhouetted by the light from the two expansive windows behind him. “The Great Mr. George Horace Lorimer, the baron of publishing,” as my grandfather would affectionately refer to him, had a strength and unwavering decisiveness that Pop so admired. Lorimer’s square jaw and commanding eyes projected power softened with kindness. Over the years, Lorimer became a father figure and mentor to my grandfather, even as Pop remained somewhat in awe of the man. (He even sought Lorimer’s approval when marrying his second wife, my grandmother Mary.) When Lorimer resigned in 1936, it was the end of an era.
The second period was a short and difficult one for Pop. Always in fear of the Post dropping him at any moment despite his growing fame, he felt even more precarious when Wesley Stout came on board as editor, succeeding Lorimer. Stout lacked Lorimer’s decisiveness. He seemed to look for what was wrong in each of my grandfather’s paintings instead of what was right. This whittled Pop’s confidence down until he didn’t feel good about any of the work he was turning in.
But five years later, Ben Hibbs replaced Stout as editor. He was a Midwesterner, much more casual, and he genuinely liked my grandfather’s work. He resurrected The Saturday Evening Post at a time when the magazine desperately needed it. He had the cover redesigned so that full paintings were shown, not just vignettes of one or two people with almost no background. The logo was streamlined into a more modern font in the top-left corner. This freed Pop to take his stories to a whole new level of detail, atmosphere, and character. And Hibbs supported Rockwell. He was the one, after all, who enthusiastically accepted and championed the Four Freedoms, publishing them inside the Post after the government rejected them. (The government would later relent, touring the paintings around the country to raise money for war bonds. The exhibition would raise more than $132 million.)
While Hibbs was editor, Ken Stuart came in as art editor in 1945, muddying the waters somewhat. He is credited with changing the direction of the content of the covers, moving them toward the celebration of America and loftier, more expansive ideas. But Stuart was a small man with a tremendous ego; he wanted to dictate ideas to his artists and control them. He had been an illustrator himself before becoming an art editor and perhaps felt entitled to have that much input. But my grandfather felt that Stuart over-directed at times. Their relationship was conflicted at best. The low point in their working relationship came when Stuart went so far as to paint a horse out of one of Pop’s covers, Before the Date, September 24, 1949, without telling him.
Pop threatened to leave the Post. And my grandmother, Mary, was absolutely furious; she had never liked Stuart. But things settled down after it was arranged that Bob Fuoss, the managing editor, and Hibbs would oversee all matters regarding my grandfather. Pop’s attitude then seemed to soften toward Stuart. He even did what he could to butter him up, inviting him to my parents’ New York City wedding in the ’50s.
Still, that long-ago bitterness between the two men lingers today. Stuart claimed that Pop “gifted” several paintings to him, Saying Grace, The Gossips, and Walking to Church. No communications were found from my grandfather to Stuart other than Pop asking for his paintings to be returned in the ’50s and Stuart refusing this request, citing company policy. My grandfather felt that Stuart simply took the paintings out of the Curtis building one day and held on to them. The Stuart sons recently sold Saying Grace, my grandfather’s most popular cover, and the two other paintings at Sotheby’s for $57.3 million, a figure that would have astonished and probably embarrassed my grandfather.
Most people today do not realize that during Pop’s tenure, The Saturday Evening Post prohibited its artists from painting people of ethnicity in any role other than a subservient one. This never sat well with my grandfather. He would sneak African Americans and people of other ethnic backgrounds into his paintings where he could — Statue of Liberty, July 6, 1946, for example. He cleverly turned this policy on its head in his December 7, 1946, cover, New York Central Diner. In it, a young boy in the train’s dining car is trying to figure out the check. But it is an African-American man, the waiter, who is the heart of this painting. The viewer’s eye goes to him because his presence is so immediately felt; he radiates such kindness and amusement at the boy’s dilemma.
In my grandfather’s paintings, everything is said without words. The entwined legs of the two lovers in Voyeur, August 12, 1944 (page 39), reveal a quiet, unspoken, and immediate intimacy — and are the most prominent visual — though the little girl in red sneaking a look at them is sharing in their secret. It is one of my grandfather’s more intimate works, yet it takes place in a very public space, the brightly lit passenger car of a train. This contrast makes the cover touching and effective. The exposing overhead light doesn’t matter to the two lovers who are in their own private world, not even noticing the little girl leaning over the seat in front of them. We feel we are an amused, unseen observer on that train. Note the contrast between the young woman’s polished, stylish shoes and the soldier’s lived-in service boots.
Like Van Gogh, Norman Rockwell was a master of shoes. Shoes can sometimes reveal more about the real life of a character than the face — the wear and tear, even with a good polish, still remains. One could say that the sole reveals the soul. Faces can hide aspects of personality through façades, cosmetic artifice, glasses, expressions, etc. There are many instances of Rockwell’s quiet focus on shoes in the Post — Breaking Home Ties, Tattoo Artist, Rosie the Riveter, The Game (April Fool 1943), New Year’s Eve, Willie Gillis Home on Leave, Hat Check Girl, The Cover Girl (Double Take), Dreams of Long Ago, Star Struck (Boy Gazing at Cover Girls), First in His Class, Full Treatment, Bookworm — as well as in advertising such as Crackers in Bed from the Edison Mazda series, and the list goes on and on. Bookworm actually shows a man wearing two entirely different shoes — a perfect, subtle way to show that this man is in his own world and too distracted to worry about matching shoes!
My grandfather loved to paint older people and children because of the clear contrast they represented: the old visited alongside the new, the unrelenting process of aging that we all have to move through. An older face reveals the trials and tragedies of a full life. There is either a softening or hardening of the features that occurs over time and forever etches itself onto the face — less artifice, even less of an attempt to hide the truth, the failures, the secrets and dreams. Children have an essential purity of reaction and an often unsuppressed sense of play, adventure, and possibility.
Pop always wanted to “get the feel of a place” that he was going to paint. He searched for the smallest details that would make his picture “ring true,” including the actual attire, props, and accessories of the period. That is what makes it so much fun to explore his paintings. Every detail is carefully chosen, a clue, a secret that is connected to the story. He was a “method” actor and director before anyone knew what “method acting” was. Many of his paintings and covers became a sort of sense memory exercise, capturing the atmosphere of the scene he had immersed himself in — whether the smells, sounds, and visuals of a prize fight in New York City or a blacksmith’s shop in a small town in Vermont.
All great art is a search for what is true. And Pop’s entire career was bound up in completing that search. In one example, he spent hours in Louisa May Alcott’s home for his series on Little Women, exploring the attic where she used to do her writing and contemplation. In another, he traveled to Mark Twain’s childhood town of Hannibal to prepare for illustrating Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. He even went to the extreme of being left alone in Tom Sawyer’s famous cave, where he sketched alone by the light of a flickering lamp.
Rockwell’s vivid imagination was the engine that drove him all those years, an imagination that never tired. But it was often a constant struggle because of periods of self-doubt, and the fear that there was a lack of expansion and growth in his work. It is indeed a revelation to see the progression of his work — to see his vision, technique, and storytelling skill deepening and expanding over the 322 covers he did for the Post between 1916 and 1964. One marvels at his refusal, successful as he was, to stay in one place.
Yet, even as he grew as an artist, his core values never changed. Through almost half a century with The Saturday Evening Post, his work was always rooted in his central belief in the goodness in people. His message: We are struggling, celebrating, learning, and growing each day, and we are all in this together. That is what lives in the best of my grandfather’s work and in the best of all of us.
“It is no exaggeration to say simply that Norman Rockwell is the most popular, the most loved, of all contemporary artists,” Post editor Ben Hibbs said. “While the face of the world was changing unbelievably, Norman has amused, charmed, and inspired a great many millions of Americans. The fact that he has managed to capture the hearts of so many people is easy to understand when you know him, for somehow Rockwell himself is like a gallery of his paintings — friendly, human, deeply American, varied in mood, but full, always, of the zest of living.”
Ring Lardner (second from left) with President Warren G. Harding, Grantland Rice, and Secretary Fletcher
If anyone ever compiles a list of Great Neglected American Writers, Ring Lardner’s name should be close to the top. For years, his short story “Haircut” was routinely included in collections of great American short stories. And Lardner’s book about a bush league pitcher, You Know Me Al, was once taught in American literature classes.
In his lifetime, Lardner was widely respected for his sports journalism and his fiction. He was especially admired for his ability to write vernacular humor, as seen in this story from the Post in 1916.
Baseball writing was his specialty, and he brilliantly captured the slang and accents of ballplayers, enabling him to write about the American sport with a truly American voice. (These stories also provide a rare written record of American informal speech of the 1910s and 1920s.)
He was highly praised by such writing talents as H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf. Ernest Hemingway was such an admirer that, as a high school student, he wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr. (The real Ring Lardner Jr. became an Oscar-winning screenwriter who was jailed and blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten who were accused of being communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
Though the popularity of his stories faded, the elder Lardner was longer remembered for his sharp, subtle wit, captured in such lines as these:
“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong—but that’s the way to bet.”
“He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn’t ordered.”
“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”
And there’s this frequently quoted exchange from “The Young Immigrunts,” published in the Post in 1920.
“‘Are you lost, Daddy?’ I asked tenderly. ‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
The magazine printed 66 of his stories, most of them featuring Jack Keefe, the bumptious farmboy-turned-pitcher who recounted his baseball career in letters to his friend Al.
What made Lardner’s stories noteworthy was an effective mixture of plotting, skillful dialogue, and deftly applied pathos. Humor doesn’t always age well, but Lardner’s stories have a unique sardonic tone, occasionally edged with sorrow, that put him on the same literary footing as Mark Twain and should earn him a second look today.
Carmen
By Ring W. Lardner
Originally published February 19, 1916
We was playin’ rummy over to Hatch’s, and Hatch must of fell in a bed of four-leaf clovers on his way home the night before, because he plays rummy like he does everything else; but this night I refer to you couldn’t beat him, and besides him havin’ all the luck my Missus played like she’d been bought off, so when we come to settle up, we was plain seven and a half out. You know who paid it. So Hatch says:
“They must be some game you can play.”
“No,” I says, “not and beat you. I can run two blocks w’ile you’re stoopin’ over to start, but if we was runnin’ a foot race between each other, and suppose I was leadin’ by eighty yards, a flivver’d prob’ly come up and hit you in the back and bump you over the finishin’ line ahead o’ me.”
So Mrs. Hatch thinks I’m sore on account o’ the seven-fifty, so she says:
“It don’t seem fair for us to have all the luck.”
“Sure it’s fair!” I says. “If you didn’t have the luck, what would you have?”
“I know,” she says; “but I don’t never feel right winnin’ money at cards.”
“I don’t blame you,” I says.
“I know,” she says; “but it seems like we should ought to give it back or else stand treat, either one.”
“Jim’s too old to change all his habits,” I says.
“Oh, well,” says Mrs. Hatch, “I guess if I told him to loosen up he’d loosen up. I ain’t lived with him all these years for nothin’.”
“You’d be a sucker if you did,” I says.
So they all laughed, and when they’d quieted down Mrs. Hatch says:
“I don’t suppose you’d feel like takin’ the money back?”
“Not without a gun,” I says. “Jim’s pretty husky.” So that give them another good laugh; but finally she says:
“What do you say, Jim, to us takin’ the money they lose to us and gettin’ four tickets to some show?” Jim managed to stay conscious, but he couldn’t answer nothin’; so my Missus says:
“That’d be grand of you to do it, but don’t think you got to.”
Well, of course Mrs. Hatch knowed all the w’ile she didn’t have to, but from what my Missus says she could tell that if they really give us the invitation we wouldn’t start no fight. So they talked it over between themself w’ile I and Hatch went out in the kitchen and split a pint o’ beer, and Hatch done the pourin’ and his best friend couldn’t say he give himself the worst of it. So when we come back my Missus and Mrs. Hatch had it all framed that the Hatches was goin’ to take us to a show, and the next thing was what show would it be. So Hatch found the afternoon paper, that somebody’d left on the street car, and read us off a list o’ the shows that was in town. I spoke for the Columbia, but the Missus give me the sign to stay out; so they argued back and forth and finally Mrs. Hatch says:
“Let’s see that paper a minute.”
“What for?” says Hatch. “I didn’t hold nothin’ out on you.”
But he give her the paper and she run through the list herself, and then she says:
“You did, too, hold out on us. You didn’t say nothin’ about the Auditorium.”
“What could I say about it?” says Hatch. “I never was inside.”
“It’s time you was then,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“What’s playin’ there?” I says.
“Grand op’ra,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“Oh!” says my Missus. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
“What do you say?” says Mrs. Hatch to me.
“I think it’d be grand for you girls,” I says. “I and Jim could leave you there and go down on Madison and see Charley Chaplin, and then come back after you.”
“Nothin’ doin’!” says Mrs. Hatch. “We’ll pick a show that everybody wants to see.”
Well, if I hadn’t of looked at my Missus then we’d of been O.K. But my eyes happened to light on where she was settin’ and she was chewin’ her lips so’s she wouldn’t cry. That finished me. “I was just kiddin’,” I says to Mrs. Hatch. “They ain’t nothin’ I’d like better than grand op’ra.”
“Nothin’ except gettin’ trimmed in a rummy game,” says Hatch, but he didn’t get no rise.
Well, the Missus let loose of her lips so’s she could smile and her and Mrs. Hatch got all excited, and I and Hatch pretended like we was excited too. So Hatch ast what night could we go, and Mrs. Hatch says that depended on what did we want to hear, because they changed the bill every day. So her and the Missus looked at the paper again and found out where Friday night was goin’ to be a big special night and the bill was a musical show called Carmen, and all the stars was goin’ to sing, includin’ Mooratory and Alda and Genevieve Farr’r, that was in the movies a w’ile till they found out she could sing, and some fella they called Daddy, but I don’t know his real name. So the girls both says Friday night was the best, but Hatch says he would have to go to lodge that evenin’.
“Lodge!” says Mrs. Hatch. “What do you care about lodge when you got a chance to see Genevieve Farr’r in Carmen?”
“Chance!” says Hatch. “If that’s what you call a chance, I got a chance to buy a thousand shares o’ Bethlehem Steel. Who’s goin’ to pay for my chance?”
“All right,” says Mrs. Hatch, “go to your old lodge and spoil everything!”
So this time it was her that choked up and made like she was goin’ to blubber. So Hatch changed his mind all of a sudden and decided to disappoint the brother Owls. So all of us was satisfied except fifty percent, and I and the Missus beat it home, and on the way she says how nice Mrs. Hatch was to give us this treat.
“Yes,” I says, “but if you hadn’t of had a regular epidemic o’ discardin’ deuces and treys Hatch would of treated us to groceries for a week.” I says: “I always thought they was only twelve pitcher cards in the deck till I seen them hands you saved up tonight.”
“You lose as much as I did,” she says.
“Yes,” I says, “and I always will as long as you forget to fetch your purse along.” So they wasn’t no comeback to that, so we went on home without no more dialogue. Well, Mrs. Hatch called up the next night and says Jim had the tickets boughten and we was to be sure and be ready at seven o’clock Friday night because the show started at eight. So when I was downtown Friday the Missus sent my evenin’ dress suit over to Katzes’ and had it pressed up and when I come home it was laid out on the bed like a corpse.
“What’s that for?” I says.
“For the op’ra,” she says. “Everybody wears them to the op’ra.”
“Did you ask the Hatches what was they goin’ to wear?” I says.
“No,” says she. “They know what to wear without me tellin’ them. They ain’t goin’ to the Auditorium in their nightgown.”
So I dumb into the soup and fish and the Missus spent about a hour puttin’ on a dress that she could of left off without nobody knowin’ the difference, and she didn’t have time for no supper at all, and I just managed to surround a piece o’ steak as big as your eye and spill some gravy on my clo’es when the bell rung and there was the Hatches.
Well, Hatch didn’t have no more evenin’ dress suit on than a kewpie. I could see his pants under his overcoat and they was the same old bay pants he’d wore the day he got mad at his kid and christened him Kenneth. And his shoes was a last year’s edition o’ the kind that’s supposed to give your feet a chance, and if his feet had of been the kind that takes chances they was two or three places where they could of got away without much trouble.
I could tell from the expression on Mrs. Hatch’s face when she seen our make-up that we’d crossed her. She looked about as comf’table as a Belgium.
“Oh!” she says. “I didn’t think you’d dress up.”
“We thought you would,” says my frau.
“We!” I says. “Where do you get that ‘we’?”
“If it ain’t too late we’ll run in and change,” says my Missus.
“Not me,” I says. “I didn’t go to all this trouble and expense for a splash o’ gravy. When this here uniform retires it’ll be to make room for pyjamas.”
“Come on!” says Hatch. “What’s the difference? You can pretend like you ain’t with us.”
“It really don’t make no difference,” says Mrs. Hatch. And maybe it didn’t. But we all stood within whisperin’ distance of each other on the car goin’ in, and if you had a dollar for every word that was talked among us you couldn’t mail a postcard from Hammond to Gary. When we got off at Congress my Missus tried to thaw out the party.
“The prices is awful high, aren’t they?” she says.
“Outrageous,” says Mrs. Hatch.
Well, even if the prices was awful high, they didn’t have nothin’ on our seats. If I was in trainin’ to be a steeple jack I’d go to grand op’ra every night and leave Hatch buy my ticket. And where he took us I’d of been more at home in overalls and a sport shirt.
“How do you like Denver?” says I to the Missus, but she’d sank for the third time.
“We’re safe here,” I says to Hatch. “Them French guns can’t never reach us. We’d ought to brought more bumbs.
“What did the seats cost?” I says to Hatch.
“One-fifty,” he says.
“Very reasonable,” says I. “One o’ them aviators wouldn’t take you more than half this height for a five-spot.”
The Hatches had their overcoats off by this time and I got a look at their full costume. Hatch had went without his vest durin’ the hot months and when it was alongside his coat and pants it looked like two different families. He had a pink shirt with prune-colored horizontal bars, and a tie to match his neck, and a collar that would of took care of him and I both, and them shoes I told you about, and burlap hosiery. They wasn’t nothin’ the matter with Mrs. Hatch except she must of thought that, instead o’ dressin’ for the op’ra, she was gettin’ ready for Kenneth’s bath.
And there was my Missus, just within the law, and me all spicked and spanned with my soup and fish and gravy! Well, we all set there and tried to get the focus till about a half hour after the show was billed to commence, and finally a Lilliputhian with a match in his hand come out and started up the orchestry and they played a few o’ the hits and then the lights was turned out and up went the curtain.
Well, sir, you’d be surprised at how good we could hear and see after we got used to it. But the hearin’ didn’t do us no good — that is, the words part of it. All the actors had been smuggled in from Europe and they wasn’t none o’ them that could talk English. So all their songs was gave in different languages and I wouldn’t of never knew what was goin’ on only for Hatch havin’ all the nerve in the world.
After the first act a lady that was settin’ in front of us dropped somethin’ and Hatch stooped over and picked it up, and it was one o’ these here books they call a liberetto, and it’s got all the words they’re singin’ on the stage wrote out in English.
So the lady begin lookin’ all over for it and Hatch was goin’ to give it back because he thought it was a shoe catalogue, but he happened to see the top of it where it says “Price 25 Cents,” so he tossed it in his lap and stuck his hat over it. And the lady kept lookin’ and lookin’ and finally she turned round and looked Hatch right in the eye, but he dropped down inside his collar and left her wear herself out. So when she’d gave up I says somethin’ about I’d like to have a drink.
“Let’s go,” says Hatch.
“No,” I says. “I don’t want it bad enough to go back to town after it. I thought maybe we could get it sent up to the room.”
“I’m goin’ alone then,” says Hatch.
“You’re liable to miss the second act,” I says.
“I’d never miss it,” says Hatch.
“All right,” says I. “I hope you have good weather.”
Geraldine Farrar as Carmen. Library of Congress
So he slipped me the book to keep for him and beat it. So I seen the lady had forgot us, and I opened up the book and that’s how I come to find out what the show was about. I read her all through, the part that was in English, before the curtain went up again, so when the second act begin I knowed what had came off and what was comin’ off, and Hatch and Mrs. Hatch hadn’t no idear if the show was comical or dry. My Missus hadn’t, neither, till we got home and I told her the plot.
Carmen ain’t no regular musical show where a couple o’ Yids comes out and pulls a few lines o’ dialogue and then a girl and a he-flirt sings a song that ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Carmen’s a regular play, only instead o’ them sayin’ the lines, they sing them, and in for’n languages so’s the actors can pick up some loose change offen the sale o’ the liberettos. The music was wrote by George S. Busy, and it must of kept him that way about two mont’s. The words was either throwed together by the stage carpenter or else took down by a stenographer outdoors durin’ a drizzle. Anyway, they ain’t nobody claims them. Every oncet in three or four pages they forget themself and rhyme. You got to read each verse over two or three times before you learn what they’re hintin’ at, but the management gives you plenty o’ time to do it between acts and still sneak a couple o’ hours’ sleep.
The first act opens up somewheres in Spain, about the corner o’ Chicago Avenue and Wells. On one side o’ the stage they’s a pill mill where the employees is all girls, or was girls a few years ago. On the other side they’s a soldiers’ garage where they keep the militia in case of a strike. In the back o’ the stage they’s a bridge, but it ain’t over no water or no railroad tracks or nothin’. It’s prob’ly somethin’ the cat dragged in.
Well, the soldiers stands out in front o’ the garage hittin’ up some barber shops, and pretty soon a girl blows in from the hero’s home town, Janesville or somewheres. She runs a few steps every little w’ile and then stops, like the rails was slippery. The soldiers sings at her and she tells them she’s came to look for Don Joss that run the chop-suey dump up to Janesville, but when they shet down on him servin’ beer he quit and joined the army. So the soldiers never heard o’ the bird, but they all ask her if they won’t do just as good, but she says nothin’ doin’ and skids off the stage. She ain’t no sooner gone when the Chinaman from Janesville and some more soldiers and some alley rats comes in to help out the singin’. The book says that this new gang o’ soldiers was sent on to relieve the others, but if anything happened to wear the first ones out it must of took place at rehearsal. Well, one o’ the boys tells Joss about the girl askin’ for him and he says: “Oh, yes; that must be the little Michaels girl from up in Wisconsin.”
So pretty soon the whistle blows for noon and the girls comes out o’ the pill mill smokin’ up the mornin’ receipts and a crowd o’ the unemployed comes in to shoot the snipes. So the soldiers notices that Genevieve Farr’r ain’t on yet, so they ask where she’s at, and that’s her cue. She puts on a song number and a Spanish dance, and then she slips her bouquet to the Chink, though he ain’t sang a note since the whistle blowed. But now it’s one o’clock and Genevieve and the rest o’ the girls beats it back to the coffin factory and the vags chases down to the Loop to get the last home edition and look at the want ads to see if they’s any jobs open with fair pay and nothin’ to do. And the soldiers mosey into the garage for a well-earned rest and that leaves Don all alone on the stage.
But he ain’t no more than started on his next song when back comes the Michaels girl. It oozes out here that she’s in love with the Joss party, but she stalls and pretends like his mother’d sent her to get the receipt for makin’ eggs fo yung. And she says his mother ast her to kiss him and she slips him a dime, so he leaves her kiss him on the scalp and he asks her if she can stay in town that evenin’ and see a nickel show, but they’s a important meetin’ o’ the Maccabees at Janesville that night, so away she goes to catch the 2:10 and Don starts in on another song number, but the rest o’ the company don’t like his stuff and he ain’t hardly past the vamp when they’s a riot.
It seems like Genevieve and one o’ the chorus girls has quarreled over a second-hand stick o’ gum and the chorus girl got the gum, but Genevieve relieved her of part of a earlobe, so they pinch Genevieve and leave Joss to watch her till the wagon comes, but the wagon’s went out to the night-desk sergeant’s house with a case o’ quarts and before it gets round to pick up Genevieve she’s bunked the Chink into settin’ her free. So she makes a getaway, tellin’ Don to meet her later on at Lily and Pat’s place acrost the Indiana line. So that winds up the first act.
Well, the next act’s out to Lily and Pat’s, and it ain’t no Y.M.C.A. headquarters, but it’s a hang-out for dips and policemans. They’s a cabaret and Genevieve’s one o’ the performers, but she forgets the words to her first song and winds up with tra-la-la, and she could of forgot the whole song as far as I’m concerned, because it wasn’t nothin’ you’d want to buy and take along home.
Finally Pat comes in and says it’s one o’clock and he’s got to close up, but they won’t none o’ them make a move, and pretty soon they’s a live one blows into the joint and he’s Eskimo Bill, one o’ the butchers out to the Yards. He’s got paid that day and he ain’t never goin’ home. He sings a song and it’s the hit o’ the show. Then he buys a drink and starts flirtin’ with Genevieve, but Pat chases everybody but the performers and a couple o’ dips that ain’t got nowheres else to sleep. The dips or stick-up guys, or whatever they are, tries to get Genevieve to go along with them in the car w’ile they pull off somethin’, but she’s still expectin’ the Chinaman. So they pass her up and blow, and along comes Don and she lets him in, and it seems like he’d been in jail for two mont’s, or ever since the end o’ the first act. So he asks her how everything has been goin’ down to the pill mill and she tells him she’s quit and became a entertainer. So he says “What can you do?” And she beats time with a pair o’ chopsticks and dances the Chinese Blues.
After a w’ile they’s a bugle call somewhere outdoors and Don says that means he’s got to go back to the garage. So she gets sore and tries to bean him with a Spanish onion. Then he reaches inside his coat and pulls out the bouquet she give him in Atto First to show her he ain’t changed his clo’es, and then the sheriff comes in and tries to coax him with a razor to go back to his job. They fight like it was the first time either o’ them ever tried it and the sheriff’s leadin’ on points when Genevieve hollers for the dips, who dashes in with their gats pulled and it’s good night, Mister Sheriff! They put him in moth balls and they ask Joss to join their tong. He says all right and they’re all pretty well lit by this time and they’ve reached the singin’ stage, and Pat can’t get them to go home and he’s scared some o’ the Hammond people’ll put in a complaint, so he has the curtain rang down.
Then they’s a relapse of it don’t say how long, and Don and Genevieve and the yeggs and their lady friends is all out in the country somewheres attendin’ a Bohunk Sokol Verein picnic and Don starts whinin’ about his old lady that he’d left up to Janesville.
“I wisht I was back there,” he says.
“You got nothin’ on me,” says Genevieve. “Only Janesville ain’t far enough. I wisht you was back in Hongkong.”
So w’ile they’re flatterin’ each other back and forth, a couple o’ the girls is monkeyin’ with the pasteboards and tellin’ their fortunes, and one o’ them turns up a twospot and that’s a sign they’re goin’ to sing a duet. So it comes true and then Genevieve horns into the game and they play three-handed rummy, singin’ all the w’ile to bother each other, but finally the fellas that’s runnin’ the picnic says it’s time for the fat man’s one-legged race and everybody goes offen the stage. So the Michaels girl comes on and is gettin’ by pretty good with a song when she’s scared by the noise o’ the gun that’s fired to start the race for the bay-window championship. So she trips back to her dressin’ room and then Don and Eskimo Bill put on a little slapstick stuff.
When they first meet they’re pals, but as soon as they get wise that the both o’ them’s bugs over the same girl their relations to’rds each other becomes strange. Here’s the talk they spill:
“Where do you tend bar?” says Don.
“You got me guessed wrong,” says Bill. “I work out to the Yards.”
“Got anything on the hip?” says Don.
“You took the words out o’ my mouth,” says Bill. “I’m drier than St. Petersgrad.”
“Stick round aw’ile and maybe we can scare up somethin’,” says Don.
“I’ll stick all right,” says Bill. “They’s a Jane in your party that’s knocked me dead.”
“What’s her name?” says Don.
“Carmen,” says Bill, Carmen bein’ the girl’s name in the show that Genevieve was takin’ that part.
“Carmen!” says Joss. “Get offen that stuff! I and Carmen’s just like two pavin’ bricks.”
“I should worry!” says Bill. “I ain’t goin’ to run away from no rat-eater.”
“You’re a rat-eater yourself, you rat-eater!” says Don.
“I’ll rat-eat you!” says Bill.
And they go to it with a carvin’ set, but they couldn’t neither one o’ them handle their utensils.
Don may of been all right slicin’ toadstools for the suey and Bill prob’ly could of massacreed a flock o’ sheep with one stab, but they was all up in the air when it come to stickin’ each other. They’d of did better with dice.
Pretty soon the other actors can’t stand it no longer and they come on yellin’ “Fake!” So Don and Bill fold up their razors and Bill invites the whole bunch to come out and go through the Yards some mornin’ and then he beats it, and the Michaels girl ain’t did nothin’ for fifteen minutes, so the management shoots her out for another song and she sings to Don about how he should ought to go home on account of his old lady bein’ sick, so he asks Genevieve if she cares if he goes back to Janesville.
“Sure, I care,” says Genevieve.”Go ahead!”
So the act winds up with everybody satisfied.
The last act’s outside the Yards on the Halsted Street end. Bill’s ast the entire company to come in and watch him croak a steer. The scene opens up with the crowd buyin’ perfume and smellin’ salts from the guys that’s got the concessions. Pretty soon Eskimo Bill and Carmen drive in, all dressed up like a horse. Don’s came in from Wisconsin and is hidin’ in the bunch. He’s sore at Carmen for not meetin’ him on the Elevated platform.
He lays low till everybody’s went inside, only Carmen. Then he braces her. He tells her his old lady’s died and left him the laundry, and he wants her to go in with him and do the ironin’.
“Not me!” she says.
“What do you mean — ‘Not me’?” says Don.
“I and Bill’s goin’ to run a kosher market,” she says.
Just about now you can hear noises behind the scenes like the cattle’s gettin’ theirs, so Carmen don’t want to miss none of it, so she makes a break for the gate.
“Where you goin’?” says Joss.
“I want to see the butcherin’,” she says.
“Stick round and I’ll show you how it’s done,” says Joss.
So he pulls his knife and makes a pass at her, just foolin’. He misses her as far as from here to Des Moines. But she don’t know he’s kiddin’ and she’s scared to death. Yes, sir, she topples over as dead as the Federal League.
It was prob’ly her heart.
So now the whole crowd comes dashin’ out because they’s been a report that the place is infested with the hoof-and-mouth disease. They tell Don about it, but he’s all excited over Carmen dyin’. He’s delirious and gets himself mixed up with a Irish policeman.
“I yield me prisoner,” he says.
Then the house doctor says the curtain’s got to come down to prevent the epidemic from spreadin’ to the audience. So the show’s over and the company’s quarantined.
Well, Hatch was out all durin’ the second act and part o’ the third, and when he finally come back he didn’t have to tell nobody where he’d been. And he dozed off the minute he hit his seat. I was for lettin’ him sleep so’s the rest o’ the audience’d think we had one o’ the op’ra bass singers in our party. But Mrs. Hatch wasn’t lookin’ for no publicity, on account of her costume, so she reached over and prodded him with a hatpin every time he begin a new aria.
Goin’ out, I says to him:
“How’d you like it?”
“Pretty good,” he says, “ only they was too much gin in the last one.”
“I mean the op’ra,” I says.
“Don’t ask him!” says Mrs. Hatch. “He didn’t hear half of it and he didn’t understand none of it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” says I. “Jim here ain’t no boob, and they wasn’t nothin’ hard about it to understand.”
“Not if you know the plot,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“And somethin’ about music,” says my Missus.
“And got a little knowledge o’ French,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“Was that French they was singin’?” says Hatch. “I thought it was wop or ostrich.”
“That shows you up,” says his frau.
Well, when we got on the car for home they wasn’t only one vacant seat and, o’ course, Hatch had to have that. So I and my Missus and Mrs. Hatch clubbed together on the straps and I got a earful o’ the real dope.
“What did you think o’ Farr’r’s costumes?” says Mrs. Hatch.
“Heavenly!” says my Missus. “Specially the one in the second act. It was all colors o’ the rainbow.”
“Hatch is right in style then,” I says.
“And her actin’ is perfect,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“Her voice too,” says the wife.
“I liked her actin’ better,” says Mrs. H.
“I thought her voice yodeled in the upstairs registers.”
“What do you suppose killed her?” I says.
“She was stabbed by her lover,” says the Missus.
“You wasn’t lookin’,” I says. “He never touched her. It was prob’ly tobacco heart.”
“He stabs her in the book,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“It never went through the bindin’,” I says.
“And wasn’t Mooratory grand?” says the wife.
“Splendid!” says Mrs. Hatch. “His actin’ and singin’ was both grand.”
“I preferred his actin’,” I says. “I thought his voice hissed in the downstairs radiators.”
This give them a good laugh, but they was soon at it again.
“And how sweet Alda was!” my Missus remarks.
“Which was her?” I ast them.
“The good girl,” says Mrs. Hatch. “The girl that sung that beautiful aria in Atto Three.”
“Atto girl!” I says. “I liked her too; the little Michaels girl. She come from Janesville.”
“She did!” says Mrs. Hatch. “How do you know?”
So I thought I’d kid them along.
“My uncle told me,” I says. “He used to be postmaster up there.”
“What uncle was that?” says my wife.
“He ain’t really my uncle,” I says. “We all used to call him our uncle just like all these here singers calls the one o’ them Daddy.”
“They was a lady in back o’ me,” says Mrs. Hatch, “that says Daddy didn’t appear tonight.”
“Prob’ly the Missus’ night out,” I says.
“How’d you like the Tor’ador?” says Mrs. Hatch.
“I thought she moaned in the chimney,” says I.
“It wasn’t no ‘she’,” says the Missus.
“We’re talkin’ about the bullfighter.”
“I didn’t see no bullfight,” I says.
“It come off behind the scenes,” says the Missus.
“When was you behind the scenes?” I says.
“I wasn’t never,” says my Missus. “But that’s where it’s supposed to come off.”
“Well,” I says, “you can take it from me that it wasn’t pulled. Do you think the mayor’d stand for that stuff when he won’t even leave them stage a box fight? You two girls has got a fine idear o’ this here op’ra!”
“You know all about it, I guess,” says the Missus. “You talk French so good!”
“I talk as much French as you,” I says. “But not nowheres near as much English, if you could call it that.”
That kept her quiet, but Mrs. Hatch buzzed all the way home, and she was scared to death that the motorman wouldn’t know where she’d been spendin’ the evenin’. And if they was anybody in the car besides me that knowed Carmen it must of been a joke to them hearin’ her chatter. It wasn’t no joke to me though. Hatch’s berth was ’way off from us and they didn’t nobody suspect him o’ bein’ in our party. I was standin’ right up there with her where people couldn’t help seein’ that we was together.
I didn’t want them to think she was my wife. So I kept smilin’ at her. And when it finally come time to get off I hollered out loud at Hatch and says:
“All right, Hatch! Here’s our street. Your Missus’ll keep you awake the rest o’ the way with her liberetto.”
“It can’t hurt no more than them hatpins,” he says.
Well when the paper come the next mornin’ my Missus had to grab it and turn right away to the place where the op’ras is wrote up. Under the article they was a list o’ the ladies and gents in the boxes and what they wore, but it didn’t say nothin’ about what the gents wore, only the ladies. Prob’ly the ladies happened to have the most comical costumes that night, but I bet if the reporters could of saw Hatch they would of gave him a page to himself.
“Is your name there?” I says to the Missus.
“O’ course not,” she says. “They wasn’t none o’ them reporters tall enough to see us. You got to set in a box to be mentioned.”
“Well,” I says, “you don’t care nothin’ about bein’ mentioned, do you?”
“O’ course not,” she says; but I could tell from how she said it that she wouldn’t run downtown and horsewhip the editor if he made a mistake and printed about she and her costume; her costume wouldn’t of et up all the space he had neither.
“How much does box seats cost?” I ast her.
“About six or seven dollars,” she says.
“Well,” I says, “let’s I and you show Hatch up.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
“I mean we should ought to return the compliment,” says I. “We should ought to give them a party right back.”
“We’d be broke for six weeks,” she says.
“Oh, we’d do it with their money like they done it with ours,” I says.
“Yes,” she says; “but if you can ever win enough from the Hatches to buy four box seats to the op’ra I’d rather spend the money on a dress.”
“Who said anything about four box seats?” I ast her.
“You did,” she says.
“You’re delirious!” I says. “Two box seats will be a plenty.”
“Who’s to set in them?” ast the Missus.
“Who do you think?” I says. “I and you is to set in them.”
“But what about the Hatches?” she says.
“They’ll set up where they was,” says I. “Hatch picked out the seats before, and if he hadn’t of wanted that altitude he’d of bought somewheres else.”
“Yes,” says the Missus, “but Mrs. Hatch won’t think we’re very polite to plant our guests in the Alps and we set down in a box.”
“But they won’t know where we’re settin’,” I says. “We’ll tell them we couldn’t get four seats together, so for them to set where they was the last time and we’re goin’ elsewheres.”
“It don’t seem fair,” says my wife.
“I should worry about bein’ fair with Hatch,” I says. “If he’s ever left with more than a dime’s worth o’ cards you got to look under the table for his hand.”
“It don’t seem fair,” says the Missus.
“You should worry!” I says.
So we ast them over the followin’ night and it looked for a minute like we was goin’ to clean up. But after that one minute my Missus begin collectin’ pitcher cards again and every card Hatch drawed seemed like it was made to his measure. Well, sir, when we was through the lucky stiff was eight dollars to the good and Mrs. Hatch had about broke even.
“Do you suppose you can get them same seats?” I says.
“What seats?” says Hatch.
“For the op’ra,” I says.
“You won’t get me to no more op’ra,” says Hatch. “I don’t never go to the same show twicet.”
“It ain’t the same show, you goof!” I says. “They change the bill every day.”
“They ain’t goin’ to change this eight-dollar bill o’ mine,” he says.
“You’re a fine stiff!” I says.
“Call me anything you want to,” says Hatch, “as long as you don’t go over eight bucks’ worth.”
“Jim don’t enjoy op’ra,” says Mrs. Hatch.
“He don’t enjoy nothin’ that’s more than a nickel,” I says. “But as long as he’s goin’ to welsh on us I hope he lavishes the eight-spot where it’ll do him some good.”
“I’ll do what I want to with it,” says Hatch.
“Sure you will!” I says. “You’ll bury it. But what you should ought to do is buy two suits o’ clo’es.”
So I went out in the kitchen and split a pint one way.
But don’t think for a minute that I and the Missus ain’t goin’ to hear no more op’ra just because of a cheap stiff like him welshin’. I don’t have to win in no rummy game before I spend.
We’re goin’ next Tuesday night, I and the Missus, and we’re goin’ to set somewheres near Congress Street. The show’s Armour’s Do Re Me, a new one that’s bein’ gave for the first time. It’s prob’ly named after some soap.
Nine years after his passing, Indianapolis native Kurt Vonnegut is still making a difference in the city that raised him. And if a fundraising effort is successful, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library plans to do even more good in his name.
In January 2011, in a 1,100-square-foot space donated by a local law firm, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library opened as “a nonprofit museum and cultural resource center dedicated to championing the life of Hoosier author Kurt Vonnegut and the principles of free expression, common decency, and peaceful coexistence he advocated.” From the beginning, the KVML was active in the Indianapolis community, promoting Banned Books Week, offering classes that teach teachers how to teach Vonnegut, sponsoring the annual VonnegutFest around his November 11 birthday, and hosting numerous arts and humanities events — 70 in 2015 alone. It quickly drew a nationwide audience of writers, artists, scholars, and book lovers.
“When the Vonnegut Library opened five years ago, it introduced a whole new generation to the life’s work of one of our city’s finest native sons,” Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett said. “The Library has been recognized as one of the things that makes Indianapolis so distinct. It is such a rare place, and indeed one of our great treasures.”
In partnership with the City of Indianapolis and other organizations, the KVML has announced that 2017 will be the Year of Vonnegut throughout Indiana’s state capital. One major milestone in this yearlong celebration will be the KVML’s move from the historic Emelie Building to its permanent and much larger home in Indianapolis’ arts district. The new location, at 646 Massachusetts Avenue, is just blocks away from both Pamela Bliss’ three-story-high Kurt Vonnegut mural and the Athenaeum Building, which was designed by Kurt’s grandfather.
[UPDATE: Because of some problems at the location, the KVML did not move to Massachusetts Avenue but to a wonderful, three-story space at 543 Indiana Avenue, not far from the Madame C.J. Walker Legacy Center.]
With the change in venue comes a change in name as well. When the new location opens on April 11, 2017, the 10th anniversary of Vonnegut’s death, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library will be renamed the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library — still the KVML.
About a quarter of the KVML’s collection — which includes family photos, first editions and autographed editions of Vonnegut’s works, the Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2200 typewriter he wrote on during the 1970s, his Purple Heart, and even an unopened pack of his favorite cigarettes his children found behind a bookcase after he died — is confined to storage. The KVML’s current location isn’t large enough to display everything. But their new digs, with 5,400 square feet of floor space, will allow more room to display the collection. The space will also be used for a new, interactive Slaughterhouse-Five exhibit called “Time Unstuck” and a permanent exhibit centered on book banning and censorship.
The new KVML will also serve as a voter registration location.
The Vonnegut Collection also includes an assortment of Vonnegut’s drawings and doodles, as well as rejection letters he received from popular magazines — a heartening sight for any aspiring author. One 1949 rejection letter for a story proposal came from The Saturday Evening Post, though it isn’t so much a rejection letter as a send-your-story-in-and-we-will-reject-it-later letter. Unfortunately, we don’t have any records of what story Vonnegut had proposed that prompted this letter.
Image courtesy of the Vonnegut Family Archive.
Over the years, the Post accepted more of Vonnegut’s stories than we rejected — nine in all. The first, “The No-Talent Kid,” was published in 1952, the same year his first novel, Player Piano, hit shelves.
While readers revel in the joy Vonnegut’s stories bring, it’s hard to deny that much of what Vonnegut wrote came from a place of pain and tragedy: from his mother’s suicide in 1944, from the ongoing effects of PTSD and depression brought on by several hellish months as a German prisoner of war during World War II, and from his sister’s death from cancer in 1957 just days after her husband died in a freak train crash.
For Vonnegut, writing was, in part, a form of therapy. In 1973, he told Playboy magazine, “Writers get a nice break in one way, at least: They can treat their mental illnesses every day.” Taking this wisdom to heart, the KVML plans to host a creative writing workshop for veterans to help them express themselves and cope with what they have experienced.
Image courtesy of the Vonnegut Family Archive.
It also plans to team up with Indy Eleven, Indianapolis’ North American Soccer League team, to address the fact that the state ranks No. 2 for teen suicide attempts. Through a suicide-prevention and anti-bullying writing program targeting Indiana’s middle school students, the KVML hopes to teach kids the power of the personal narrative as a more constructive and creative mechanism for coping with their problems.
But the KVML’s plans to continue Kurt Vonnegut’s legacy of humanity, compassion, and free expression are no foregone conclusion. Seeing these plans to fruition hinges on finding the funds to do it. To that end, the KVML has launched a capital campaign to raise $750,000 by July 1, 2016.
Though Vonnegut’s relationship with Indianapolis was complicated, and not always complimentary, the city was at the heart of his writing. “All my jokes are Indianapolis,” he said in 1986. “All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis.”
As Indianapolis was an integral part of Vonnegut’s view of the world, the KVML “is becoming an integral part of the City of Indianapolis’ identity,” said Kip Tew, former board chairman and now head of the capital campaign. “We are endeavoring to make Indianapolis his permanent home and the place where Vonnegut fans can make their pilgrimage. This city is where the tribute to one of America’s great writers should be.”
Sometimes bad things happen to good phones. Screens crack. Batteries die. Lint takes a deep dive down the headphone jack. And so on. When accidents happen, you can always head to the manufacturer — generally the safest bet if the phone is under warranty and the repair is covered. A local fix-it shop can probably handle the job, too. Or you can do it yourself. If you’re the hands-on type, a DIY phone repair can save you money. But before you crack open the phone case, check out these handy tips:
Do the research. Before you begin, make sure the fix is an easy one. iPhones, for instance, “started out being very difficult to repair — but they’ve gotten better over time,” says Jeff Suovanen, a technical writer for iFixit, a California-based company that sells repair parts and publishes DIY repair guides online. IFixit publishes Smartphone Repairability Rankings (ifixit.com/smartphone-repairability) for major mobile phones on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the easiest). For example, the iPhone 6S — rating: 7 — gets praise for its easy-to-replace front panel and battery, but a demerit for requiring a proprietary pentalobe screwdriver to open.
Get parts smart. The Internet is rife with vendors hawking smartphone parts, and it’s far too easy for DIYers to buy cheap and regret it later. “Not every part is made equal,” says Anthony Martin, chief of strategy and co-founder of iCracked, a Redwood City, California-based electronics repair firm. “If you go on Amazon or eBay, there are listings that sell you just the replacement cover glass for, say, $7.”
Don’t fall for that ruse. “The way a phone is assembled, there’s the display, and then a clear glass cover bonded to the top of it,” Suovanen explains. “You can’t separate the glass from the display without a lot of expensive equipment.” Instead, you need to buy a complete, pre-assembled display with the cover glass attached. For iPhone 6 users, you’re looking at a price of around $95 on Amazon — but with the right part, it’s a much easier repair.
Double up. A cracked screen and dying battery combined “make up probably 95 percent of repairs,” says Martin, who points out that if you’re already opening up the phone to fix a busted screen, it makes sense to replace the battery at the same time. That’s because a typical lithium-ion battery will last only 400 to 500 charge cycles before it loses a significant amount of capacity. If you’re anywhere close to that number, you might as well do the job while you have the phone open.
Find free help. IFixit, iCracked, and many other tech-oriented sites provide free video and text guides that step you through common repairs. You’ll find many more on YouTube, too. “Take advantage of that,” Suovanen says. “Learn from other people’s mistakes. Even those of us who do it professionally use guides for reference.”
Admit defeat. There’s a wonderful feeling of satisfaction that comes with doing it yourself. But sometimes it’s cheaper to go with a pro. In fact, even if your phone is out of warranty, a professional fix may actually cost less for some repairs. For example, Apple’s screen repair fee for the iPhone 6 is $109 plus $6.95 for shipping. By comparison, iFixit’s iPhone 6 LCD Screen and Digitizer Fix Kit is $124.95. Two additional tools needed for the job — tweezers and the “iOpener” device — bring the total parts cost without shipping to just under $150. Do the math: Apple’s repair is $41 cheaper, excluding sales tax. So even if you’re a do-it-yourselfer at heart, always remember to comparison-shop before turning the screw.
Now, this is the part of the celebrity obituary where I usually give a list of some of the TV shows and/or movies the person has been in, but if I were to do that for Schallert, it would take up the rest of the column. The man was in pretty much everything from 1947 until 2014, so I’ll just link to his IMDb page so you can read it for yourself. He received a Fulbright fellowship after graduating from UCLA and lectured at Oxford University, was a founding member of the Circle Theater, and was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1979 to 1981. His wife of 66 years, Rosemarie Waggner (who acted under the name Leah) passed away last year. They had four sons and seven grandchildren.
I was hoping that one of the cable networks would have a tribute marathon for Schallert this week or next, but I can’t find anything. And then I remembered that there’s a tribute marathon for him that’s on every single day. It’s called “television.”
Homer Simpson Will Be Live This Sunday
Stephen Colbert has a running bit right now on The Late Show featuring Cartoon Donald Trump, an animated version of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee that he talks to. It seems like the interview is done live, not one of those situations where it’s either prerecorded or Colbert asks the questions live and via good timing the answers were animated and taped beforehand and appear natural. Colbert actually has a live conversation with him, and the animation seems to change depending on what Colbert asks. I don’t really get how they do it.
Something similar is happening this Sunday night at 8 p.m. on Fox. There’s a new episode of The Simpsons, and Homer will actually be live on the episode, answering questions from viewers via phone. They’ll do two shows, one for the east coast and one for the west. Apparently, it’s done by “motion-capture filming.” Maybe that’s how they do the Colbert segment, too.
If you’d like to ask him a question, call (888) 726-6660 on Sunday between 8 and 8:30 ET or 8 and 8:30 PT. You have to be over 18, but if you’re reading this, I assume you are.
Also at 8 p.m. this Sunday: an hour-long 60 Minutes tribute to Morley Safer, who retired this week after 46 years with CBS.
Coming Soon: Judy Garland on Tour!
If you were too young to see Judy Garland sing live, you’re in luck. She’s going on tour again.
Don’t worry, this isn’t some Walking Dead scenario, it’s going to be Garland’s hologram. It will be called “Hologram USA’s Judy Garland Hologram Tour“ and will debut in Hollywood and London at the same time in 2017. She was chosen via a poll that asked people which celebrity they’d like to sing again via hologram. I would have picked Frank Sinatra, but then I wouldn’t have put the word hologram twice in the name of the tour either.
Like Homer Simpson, the effect will be done partly via motion-capture technology. Unlike Homer, you won’t be able to talk to her.
This Summer, Budweiser Is America
I know it seems like this election season has been going on for years, but remember that we still have seven months before we choose a new president. Imagine how loooooong this summer is going to be, with the speeches and the TV ads and the two conventions. People might want to drink to get through it all.
And you can be patriotic while you drink, because Budweiser is renaming their brew “America” for the summer. They could have waited a while and come out with two different beers, one named “Donald” and one named “Hillary” (or “Bernie” if you think it’s not over yet). They could have figured out which beer was more popular and given us a prediction for what’s going to happen in November. Hey, that would be just as accurate a prediction as we’ve gotten from the media pundits so far this election.
The “America” name will only be on beer sold in the United States, so if you don’t live here, you’ll have to just to live with the old Budweiser name, at least until Christmas or so.
It’s Finger-Lickin’ Good (Literally)
If you’re going to create a product based on a slogan, I guess this seems like a natural. KFC has made a nail polish that tastes like chicken, and it’s called Finger-Lickin’ Good. There are two varieties that line up with their menu: Original and Hot & Spicy. Unfortunately, there’s no Extra Crispy version for those of you who bite your nails.
Maybe this will start a trend, and we’ll see nail polish that tastes like Ring Dings or Lay’s Potato Chips or Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Budweiser should make a beer-flavored nail polish, though I guess that would lead to certain problems.
Space: 1969
The Gap has a new ad. You can probably see immediately what’s wrong with it.
Hi @gap. We're going to need to talk about this ad. Y'all know that the space shuttle didn't fly until 1981, right? pic.twitter.com/iTHBHPuwTx
In a defense, The Gap responded to that tweet saying they didn’t mean that there was a space shuttle in 1969. The ad just refers to the year they opened. Uh-huh. I don’t buy that explanation for the ad, and I bet you don’t either.
It’s National Apple Pie Day
It doesn’t seem quite right that Apple Pie Day is in May — feels more like a fall or winter food holiday — but it’s today. Here’s a recipe for a classic apple pie, and here’s one with a twist: a cheddar cheese crust.
Today is also Friday the 13th. So try to avoid black cats, make sure you don’t walk under any ladders, and remember to count to ten before opening a jar of pickles.
Okay, I made up that last superstition, but it makes just as much sense as the other two, and maybe we can start a new trend.
