News of the Week: Fallon, Phone Booths, and the Food of April Fools’

Jimmy Does Norman

The last thing I expected to see this week was Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon doing an impersonation of Norman Rockwell.

In the cover story for this week’s Parade, Fallon talks about the new Tonight Show ride at Universal Studios in Florida that opens on April 6. It’s called Race through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon and features Fallon and other cast members traveling through the streets of the city on “the scariest roller coaster simulator you’ve ever been on,” going past the show’s set, the East River, the subway, Times Square, and other New York City locations.

In a photo that accompanies the article in print and online, Fallon recreates Rockwell’s famous Triple Self-Portrait from 1960. I don’t know if Fallon knows what he’s recreating — Rockwell isn’t mentioned in the piece at all — but maybe it’s such a famous image that they assume that a lot of people will know where it comes from (though probably not Fallon’s core Tonight Show demographic). Still, it’s great to see the homage. Fallon needs a pipe though.

The Phone Booths of Manhattan

I don’t know if Fallon goes by any phone booths in the ride, but I miss them. That sounds like an odd thing to say in a time when we have our own personal phones and no longer have to shove dimes and quarters into a dirty box on a street corner. But it’s an item from another time and place that I wish would be preserved, maybe not in the numbers they once were but in some small way. (On a related note, I also like phone books.)

The always great Mo Rocca of CBS Sunday Morning takes a look at the last four outdoor phone booths that remain in Manhattan (though booths for smartphone privacy are popping up), and he interviews a man who has a website that actually keeps track of the payphones that remain around the country. The part where Rocca calls his mom on one of those new internet kiosks is just perfect:

In other phone news, a restaurant in Pennsylvania is offering a discount to diners who don’t bring their phones to the table.

More Spring Books

In our current issue, Amazon editor Chris Schluep gave us his top 10 picks for spring books. Here are a half-dozen others you might want to pick up (and not just pick up, but also read):

The Death of Expertise, by Tom Nichols (Oxford University Press, out now). Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an expert on foreign affairs and policy. In this book he examines how things like the internet and the transformation of news has led to an erosion of the trust people once had in experts. This is truly a must-read in today’s world, to help figure out how the heck we got to this point.

Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper (Pantheon, out now). If you’re a word geek like me and you love reading books on word origins and grammar, this looks like a fantastic read. Stamper tells us how dictionaries get made, not just what words to include but also how they go about defining them.

Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell (Doubleday, out now). There have been a lot of books written on President Nixon of course, but this promises to be the definitive biography, detailing how the decisions he made as president affect us even today.

Hemingway Didn’t Say That, by Garson O’Toole (Little A, April 1). The subtitle of this collection is “The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations,” and gives the stories behind famous quotes that actually were never said by people like Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen, Carl Sagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain.

Dangerous to Know, by Renee Patrick (Forge Books, April 11). This is the second book in the series of mysteries by Patrick (aka Vince and Rosemarie Keenan). It’s set in 1938 Los Angeles and features the sleuthing team of Lillian Frost and Edith Head (yes, that Edith Head). I got an advance copy, and like the first novel, it’s a terrific, fun read (bonus: The Saturday Evening Post is mentioned!).

Chuck Klosterman X, by Chuck Klosterman (Blue Rider Press, May 16). Klosterman is the author of a series of highly entertaining/often infuriating books that focus on various aspects of pop culture. This new one (his 10th) is a collection of various essays he’s written over the past several years for places like Esquire, GQ, The A.V. Club, and The Guardian.

New Dylan

Yesterday saw the release of Bob Dylan’s new three-disc set, Triplicate, which is a collection of 30 classic cover songs, including “Stardust” and other American standards. Here’s our 1968 cover story on Dylan’s career and how he changed rock by going electric.

RIP Sib Hashian, Lola Albright, Jean Rouveral, Tony Terran, Darlene Cates, and Chet Cunningham

Sib Hashian was the former drummer for the rock group Boston. He played on the band’s first two albums, on such songs as “More Than a Feeling,” “Peace of Mind,” and “Long Time.” Hashian passed away at the age of 67 after collapsing on stage during a Legends of Rock cruise.

Lola Albright
Lola Albright
NBC Studios

The beautiful Lola Albright is probably best known for her role as Peter Gunn’s singer girlfriend on the TV series Peter Gunn. She also appeared on shows like The Bob Cummings Show, Gunsmoke, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Peyton Place, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Columbo, as well as movies like The Tender Trap, A Cold Wind in August, The Good Humor Man, and one of the great sci-fi movies of the ’50s, The Monolith Monsters. Albright died last week at the age of 92.

Jean Rouverol was a writer and actress. She wrote for TV shows like The Guiding Light, As The World Turns, Search for Tomorrow, and Little House on the Prairie, and movies such as The Miracle, and Face in the Rain. She was blacklisted in the 1950s with her husband, writer Hugo Butler (Lassie Come Home, Young Tom Edison, The Prowler, and the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol), during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations, and the two fled to Mexico and lived there until 1964, when they returned to the U.S. She passed away last week at the age of 100.

Tony Terran was the trumpeter in Ricky Ricardo’s band on I Love Lucy. He was the last surviving member of the band and passed away last week at the age of 90. Besides his work with Lucy and Desi, Terran worked on The Carol Burnett Show. A member of the classic “Wrecking Crew” of studio musicians, he performed or recorded with The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Sonny & Cher, Peggy Lee, Elvis Presley, Perry Como, and many others. He also released his own solo album in 1966 and played the trumpet in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Enter the Dragon.

Darlene Cates was an actress best known for playing the mother of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? She died Sunday at the age of 69.

Chet Cunningham was a prolific writer who wrote over 300 books. That’s not a typo. He actually wrote over 300 novels of various genres: Westerns, thrillers, action-adventure, along with several non-fiction books, too (you can see a list of the books at his site). He also founded the San Diego Book Awards and helped other writers in their careers. Cunningham passed away March 14 at the age of 88.

This Week in History

Tennessee Williams Born (March 26, 1911)

You may know that the playwright wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, but Flavorwire has 71 things you might not know about him.

This guy from an episode of Wheel of Fortune last week might want to read that list:

President Reagan Shot (March 28, 1981)

Our 40th president graced the cover of The Saturday Evening Post a year after he was shot in the chest outside of the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. Press secretary James Brady was also severely wounded, paralyzed from a gunshot to the head. Secret Service Agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Tom Delahanty were also injured.

This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: Rainy Wait for a Cab (March 29, 1947)

Crowd waiting in rain under awning for a cabRainy Wait for a Cab
John Falter
March 29, 1947

John Falter is one of my favorite Post artists, along with Rockwell (of course) and Constantin Alajálov. Oh, and Stevan Dohanos and Thornton Utz and … well, the point is we’ve had a lot of great artists over the years. This Falter cover is one of his best. It’s so alive and captures the rain, New York City, and the ’50s so well.

April Fools’ Day

Tomorrow is the day we surprise and annoy our friends and family with pranks and jokes and hope they don’t retaliate in some way. One of my favorites is to stand in front of someone and point to their chest, and when they look down, flick their face with your finger (all adult men are still 11 years old inside).

This is usually where I give links to recipes for a food holiday so I looked around the web to see if there was such a thing as food to make for April Fools’ Day … and there is! Taste of Home has a bunch of recipes for foods you might not expect, such as this cake that’s actually meatloaf, this sunny side up egg on toast that’s actually a dessert, and this sushi for kids that’s actually made with Fruit Roll-ups, licorice, and marshmallows.

Because, really, who would want to eat actual sushi?

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

National Humor Month begins (April 1)

I think every month is National Humor Month, but April is the start of the official month of laughing, and there’s even an official site for it. When you’re done there, come back here and browse our humor section.

International Children’s Book Day (April 2)

This day was started in 1967 by iBbY, the International Board on Books for Young People. The day is timed on or around the birthday of author Hans Christian Anderson.

Celebrity Encounters: Wilt Chamberlain

Wilt Chamberlain
Wikimedia Commons

In 1962, I became chairman and general partner of the San Francisco Warriors, later to become the Golden State Warriors. The team was awful, but it did have 7’1″ “Wilt the Stilt” Chamberlain, the greatest player of all time as far as I’m concerned. Wilt and I became good friends. I owned harness horses in those days, and he loved to gamble, so he became my partner on several horses. Once, while at Roosevelt Raceway in New York to watch one of our horses race, he pulled out a huge stack of $100 bills, peeled off five or six, and handed them to a friend with betting instructions.

I pointed to the roll. “Hey,” I said, “put that away.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Someone’s liable to hit you over the head and grab that,”

I joked.

“Anyone who wants to hit me over the head is gonna need a ladder,” he snapped back. “If I see someone coming at me with a ladder, I’ll yell for help.”

–Matty Simmons
In our March/April 2016 issue, Simmons wrote “The Day Cash Died” about being one of the three men who invented the credit card and formed The Diners Club, the first credit card company.

This article is featured in the March/April 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Night Divine

On the Carrigaline Road, coming onto Carr’s Hill, traffic had slowed to a crawl. It was Christmas Eve, already after six, and full darkness had taken hold. Having made a promise to get home early, today of all days, I’d spent the afternoon trying to close off a particularly convoluted account, but because the phone kept ringing I was still the last one out of the office.

The rain of earlier had stopped, giving the roads a sheen inside the headlights, and the air was raw with the promise of worse to come, the outbreaks of sleet forecast for later in the night, possibly turning to snow on higher ground. In the car, with the heat turned up, I moved through the radio’s channels, but nothing held my interest, and I settled finally on a live choral performance of traditional carols, fixed the volume to an unobtrusive level and tried to relax.

Beside me, on the passenger seat, lay a small palm-sized parcel, wrapped in heavy gold paper and neatly ribboned. My wife’s Christmas gift. A month or so ago, when I’d broached the subject of shopping, Angie had suggested that we forego presents this year, because we were saving for a deposit on a house and really couldn’t afford the extravagance. Our plan was to rent for another year at least, and give the market a chance to settle. I shrugged and agreed, even though I was already, since early October, tied into a casual weekly installment plan on a beautiful quarter-carat diamond and crushed sapphire pendant necklace that I’d seen in the window of the jeweler’s on Castle Street. What she’d said made sense, but I didn’t want the first Christmas of our marriage to pass without some kind of gesture. And I knew how it would go. We’d argue but she’d be secretly happy. We’d argue, but then she’d lift her hair for me and ask that I fasten the clasp, and she’d admire the way it looked in the mirror, with me at her shoulder, and we’d kiss and make up. Because these are the kind of games played by people in love.

After a few minutes, I cleared the brow of the hill and saw the reason for the delay. Some 50 yards ahead, just at the turn-off to Hilltown, a two-car collision had taken place. One of the cars had run up onto the roadside verge and, from my distance, and in the darkness, looked relatively undamaged, but the other had turned over onto its roof. A fire truck was parked at a diagonal behind the wreckage, obviously a necessary maneuver but one that reduced the two-way traffic flow to a single available lane. Inside my car, the only sounds came from the radio, the choir segueing from “In the Bleak Midwinter” into something unmistakably Latin, the name of which escaped me though I knew the melody well enough to have hummed along, if I’d so chosen.

The heat built, and after a few minutes I was forced to crack a window. The initial flood of cold outer air felt good but then, in a lull between carols and through the rumble of car engines, I caught the angry sound of a machine, some sort of an electric saw, and through it, screams. A thin, wet voice, pitched at an angle that couldn’t be adult. Ahead of me, the cars again began to move, and I eased forward, into that sound, gaining perhaps 20 yards of road before once more coming to a stop. I could have shut the window, or turned up the music. There are times when denial is the only protection available to us. But I did neither. The choir began to sing one of my favorite carols, “I Saw Three Ships,” the voices in a deft arrangement folding together in a way that seemed to put an echo or a shadow around the words. I closed my eyes and drew three or four deep breaths. The machine groaned behind the music, a blade made for shredding metal, and the screaming came in gouts, filling every available pore of night. I focused on the music, not attaching anything much to the words but letting their sense evoke something older, the recollection of some bright night spent in front of the television as a child, sipping cocoa and watching George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge stride the sullen, snow-clad streets of London. Music has a way of attaching itself to particular and apparently random moments in time, sealing them into a permanent state. When the song ended I drew another deep, cold breath and switched off the radio.

Again, the car ahead began to move. I watched it veer right by instruction, but held back a moment, counting heartbeats, then crawled another 20 yards until a pale young woman in a dark cap, heavy clothes, and a luminous yellow traffic vest stepped in front of me, raising a hand for me to stop. I met her eyes, and nodded. Because of the temporary lighting that had been set up, I could see that she was chewing one side of her lower lip, and that her cheeks were wet with tears. The accident lay just beyond, with the wrecked car and the assembled rescue units blocking off the entire left lane. Beads of glass littered the road, gleaming with the burn of the rigged halogens. Two firemen crouched beside the upturned car, seemingly braced for a release or a sudden collapse, while a third lay on his back and worked a small hand grinder against some snagged knot of metal. Yellow sparks spun in gouts away from the cut, and within seconds the air took on the gun-heavy stench of oxidized steel. A few more uniformed types, police and medics, stood some paces back, watching, wanting to help but not knowing how, wanting more than anything, probably, to run. And to one side, away from everyone, a body lay on the road, covered head to shins in a white sheet. Beneath the low hem, the right foot was bare but the left still wore its shoe, something sleek and low-heeled, with an open toe, the single detail that from my distance helped define gender. And still the screams kept on, fragile, fueled by terror and probably pain, but maybe also by some understanding.

I considered the car’s exposed underbelly, something I’d never seen before, veined and channeled with a crisscrossing of cables and pipes, wheels black and wet hunched into their cradles. Coming from just the wrong angle, though, the window holes gave me back only darkness, even with the halogens spilling hard over everything in between. For three or four minutes then, I watched the traffic being directed, the young woman with a practiced beckon, speaking semaphore to the line of cars in the opposite lane. Even shaken to tears, the work had to be done. She had her back to me, and I wondered if she had somebody waiting, if she would come home this Christmas Eve to a happy situation, let her hair down and allow herself to be kissed and held, and loved. I hoped so because, even turned away from me, I could picture the way her cheeks shone wet with tears.

Something happened then. The grinding sound cut out and the car seemed to slump, or give, and all the men who were standing hurried forward to assist. The cluster of bodies made it difficult to see the details, but it seemed that one of the firemen had been able to wrench open the mangled door. With the others supporting the vehicle’s weight, the man who’d been on his back crawled part of the way inside. Ahead of me, the young woman had abandoned her traffic duty to watch the scene unfold and was leaning on the front left corner of my car, the glow of the tamped headlight spilling up across her midriff. The screams that we’d been hearing reduced, gradually, to a softer crying, and I leaned forward and stared, praying, I think, though not in any conscious way, until a child was lifted from the wreckage, a girl of about 6, barefoot in a white bell-shaped dress with narrow shoulder straps that offered nowhere near enough warmth for this weather. I only caught glimpses of her face, not enough really to set her definitively in my mind, but she had long dark hair almost to her waist and a delicate, spidery body. In the fireman’s arms, she appeared unhurt but held her shoulders hunched, the rounded bones visible through the spill of hair, as if still braced against an impact. As I watched, I saw her turn her head and stare past the men to where the body lay covered, but then the young woman in charge of directing the traffic stepped across my view and gestured at me to move. I nodded, put the car in gear and let her guide me around the accident site and away.

For a while, the silence felt right, but when it became suddenly too much I again switched on the radio. I’d expected something to have changed, but nothing had. The choir was still caroling, “In Excelsis Deo,” “Adeste Fideles.” The traffic into Carrigaline was heavy but moving, and I listened to the music and watched the footpaths on either side thick with pedestrians: mothers holding children by the hand, idling teens, young women in packs, laughing and full of freedom, with their coats worn open and dressed to catch the eye, probably on their way to the last or merely the latest of the Christmas parties. Ropes of lighting stretched above the road, slightly bellying, the bulbs a staggered order of reds, yellows, blues, and greens adding something splendid to the night, painting an atmosphere that felt warm and slightly melancholic. Most of the shop and pub windows boasted some shade of the season, too: a bauble and tinsel-clad tree, a slow-moving half-sized Santa, a Happy Christmas message stenciled to the glass in gleaming, artificial snow. I moved through the town and turned right halfway up the hill, to follow a darker road home.

 

 

Framed by the living room window, Angie stood lighting mantelpiece candles. I parked on the road, but kept the engine running because I didn’t yet want to lose the music, or interrupt the scene with silence. The colored lights of our Christmas tree shifted to a set rhythm, giving the otherwise dim room its own kind of movement. We’d decorated that tree together, a fortnight or so earlier, the night after my birthday, and I remember threads of tinsel clinging to her hair and a fleck of glitter that I kissed away from one corner of her mouth when, still warm from our exertions, we settled down together on the settee. It is the morsels of detail that fill memories, etching a permanence in our minds and hearts, even if the moments themselves pass so quickly. That night, we sat holding hands, content in the dancing colors of the fairy lights, sipping mulled wine, tired and overjoyed at being together, knowing that whatever we had was only just beginning. Tomorrow, though, would be a new day, and next year a new year, and we both understood that things could change, whether we wanted them to or not.

On the radio now, a soloist was taking on “O Holy Night,” and I could feel the rest of the choir readying themselves to fall in. But for these seconds there was only one voice, a soft, pure soprano swelling unhurriedly toward an immense climax and then holding that impossible top note for longer than I could ever hold my breath. When I closed my eyes I found only colors, and then, through them, I saw again the twisted metal, the glass like hail across the surface of the road, and the shape beneath the sheet. And somewhere among the highest notes of the music, I heard the screams. That was enough. I killed the engine, locked the car and went inside.

Angie, in a white short-sleeved chiffon blouse with its string-drawn throat a good four inches undone and a teal-colored wool skirt that came to just below the knee, blew out the match she was holding and came and put her arms around me. Her hair, gathered up in a loose, tousled ponytail, deliberately careless, seemed unusually dark, muddy. We kissed, and I caught cider and cinnamon from the shampoo she’d earlier used, as well as a hint of wine on the tip of her tongue, but the stench of the match, slightly sulfurous, lay against everything.

“You’re late,” she said, finally slipping free. “You didn’t forget that Brian and Liz are calling, did you?”

“I didn’t,” I said, releasing her. “Sorry. I couldn’t get away. It’s just been that kind of day. And then the traffic was so heavy.”

She turned to the window, and the long red-stemmed candle set into a chunk of holly-clad beech or elm, and struck another match. The candle’s wick took the flame, guttered and steadied, and a warm yellow sheen spread across the windowpane, sealing us off from the world beyond. Her feet were bare, and she’d painted her nails a red that in the darkness, and set against the pale taupe carpet, made me think of newly drawn blood. I tried not to stare, but even after eight months of marriage, her details continued to astound me.

I dropped down onto the settee, and held a hand out to her. She looked at me, but remained out of reach.

“I need to get something into the oven. Liz always puts on such a spread.”

“Just for a minute,” I said. The fairy lights made her seem restless, though she was standing still. “They’ll be late. I told you. The traffic is heavy tonight.”

With reluctance, she came and sat beside me, perching on the edge of the settee. I put my hand to the small of her back, but she either ignored it or had already grown so used to my touch that she did not react. I could feel the bones of her spine through the chiffon, and it was in my mind to talk about the accident but something about the serenity of the room and the perfection of the moment made me hold my words. And happy, I suppose, or at least content, we sat there together for a minute or more, watching the tree, the lights, the soft burn of the candles. Then the telephone began to ring, and she stood and left the room.

Recruiting Heroes for the Air Corps: 75 Years Ago

It caught the world by surprise: During the spring of 1941, Germany conquered Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, and France. It was a loud wake-up call for the U.S.

Suddenly, America realized that this new world war wouldn’t repeat the four-year stalemate of the last one. And, unlike World War I, military aircraft would play a crucial role in combat operations.

To meet the new challenge, President Roosevelt asked Congress to authorize construction of 50,000 modern aircraft. Many of these would be the Army Air Corps’ principal bomber, the B-17 Flying Fortress.

Military planners soon realized that flying one of these enormous bombers required better coordination between crew members, so they set out to change the training program.

Richard Thruelsen’s Post article “Heroes — Wholesale” introduced readers to the Air Corps’ “brand-new air force, 1942 style” and the “precision teamwork” it drilled into its air crews. The article describes the new selection process for pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners. And it describes the formidable defenses of the B-17, which had enabled crews to fight off attacking Japanese fighters in the Philippines.

The article sometimes reads as a recruiting brochure. It reminds young men who haven’t been drafted yet that the Army dropped the minimum age for aviation cadets to 18. The Air Corps had also relaxed the medical restriction and eliminated any requirements for formal education. Potential aviators learned that any aviation cadet had the chance to become a pilot. Also, using the word heroes to describe aviators would have made the Army Air Corps sound even more appealing.

The appearance of this article on March 28, 1942, was well timed. Since the U.S. had entered the war, it had been able to do little more than fall back and secure its defenses. Americans wanted to know when their military was going to strike back at Japan.

Just three week later, the U.S. took the fight to the Japanese heartland, delivered by the hands of Army Air Corps bombers.

First page of a magazine page
Click to read “Heroes — Wholesale” in the March 28, 1942, issue of the Post.

Featured image: Langley Field, Virginia. YB-17 bombardment squadron.
Library of Congress

Cartoons: Be a Sport!

Inside the team's locker room, the football coach asks his players where the correct touchdown goal was. Confused and embarrased players look at eachother, pointing fingers.
“During the first half, did any of you happen to notice that other goal, down at the far, far end?”
Ernie Garza
December 9, 1944

 

 

A boxer is on the fighting ring mat, and the ref is giving the knock-out count. The boxer, looking up at the ref, asks why the ref skipped '6' in the countdown.
“Hey! What happened to six?”
Mischa Richter
December 23, 1944

 

 

A woman is bowling in front of spectators. She is throwing the ball down the lane like a shot putter. A spectator comments that, although the form is uncoventional, she does manage to get the ball down the lane.
“Not much form – but she gets the ball down the alley.”
Zeis
December 28, 1957

 

 

A hockey goalie has his eyes covered by an opposing player's hand while another player takes a shot. A spectator leans to his friends and comments that the foward line is doing a great job working together.
“The new forward line really works well together!”

 

 

A golfer -- decked out in a golfer's shirt, pants, cleats, hat, and golf clubs -- speaks to his wife about his day at the course. He says that he lost balls, clubs, and his friends.
“I lost eight balls, two clubs, and three friends.”
Baloo
July 1, 1970

 

 

A tennis coach is watching one of his students play with the kid's mom. The kid is throwing a fit on the tennis court. The coach leans over to the boy's mother and says that the kid is acting like a champion would.
“He has the makings of a champion, Mrs. Simpson.”
Nick Downes
April 1, 1990

 

 

A boxer is laid out on a cot in his locker room. Medics and his trainer surround him. His trainer moves in close and tells him that he came in second in the boxing match.
“You came in second.”
Nick Downes
November 1, 1996

 

 

A shark on a fishing dock proudly displays his catch to his buddy: A confused fisherman. The shark friend takes a picture.
Cheney
January 1, 1998

 

 

A golfer is at the tee, thinking (with a visible thought bubble) that his shot will make a hole-in-one. His friends, however, are thinking that his shot will go into water, a bunker, or the jaws of an allegator.
Bill Maul
September 1, 2004

 

 

Three baseball players sit on a bench. Two skinny ones with the numbers '1' and '2' on the backs of their uniforms; the third one, who is very large, has a '345' on his uniform.
Mac
May 1, 2011

Cover Gallery: Rainy Days

The weather may be dreary, but these rainy day covers will make you feel cheery!

 

Baby underneath an umbrella during some rain
Raining on Baby New Year
December 31, 1927
J. C. Leyendecker

 

Artist J. C. Leyendecker was well known for his Baby New Year illustrations that graced many Post covers from the 1910s through the 1940s. Our 1928 baby awaits the possible repeal of Prohibition, symbolized by “wet” weather.

 

Two girls underneath an umbrella at a table with flowers in a rain storm
Flower Children
Ellen Pyle
May 4, 1934

 

 

The subjects in this illustration were likely artist Ellen Pyle’s own children; they served as the models in more than 20 of her Post covers.

 

Rain coats and hats on a coat rack
Loaded Coat Rack
John Atherton
April 14th, 1945

 

[From the editors of the April 14, 1945 issue] Norman Rockwell suggested the idea to Atherton. The hatrack is in the hall of the Community House at Arlington, Vermont. Neighbors contributed the hats, coats and galoshes seen in the painting.

 

Movie being shown to G.I.s during a rain storm
Army Entertainment
Stevan Dohanos
July 17, 1945

 

[From the editors of the July 17, 1945 issue] We imagine it is hard for anyone who has never sat on a Pacific spit kit of an island for months on end, contemplating the shapely curves of a can of tinned-pork products for emotional release, to understand Stevan Dohanos’ cover. After such soul-gnawing, a flickering, one-dimensional pin-up girl enlarged many times on an improvised screen must have the pulling power a naked electric-light bulb has for a moth. Most South Pacific movies are now first-run, sometimes world premieres; but when “Wilson” was shown on Okinawa before an audience just back from the front lines, there were eight air-raid interruptions, and the show assumed a three-and-a-half-hour Gone With the Wind proportion. Perhaps the reason why Dohanos’ G.I.’s are willing to sit in the rain is that their bucket seats are really magic carpets taking them home to Main Street for an hour or two.

 

Man fishing during rain at sea
Deep Sea Fishing in Rain
Constantin Alajalov
August 31, 1946

 

[From the editors of the August 31, 1946 issue] The man who has determined to go fishing, Constantin Alajalov observed when he was in Florida, will go fishing until he catches a fish, in spite of bad weather. Alajalov determined to paint this truth. There were a few things on which he needed to refresh his recollection, but to do this, he needed only to go out in a boat on a similar day. We don’t know how long the average determined fisherman has to wait for a sunny day. We do know how long Alajalov had to wait to catch a rainy one. One fair day followed another. He waited three weeks.

 

Three umpires notice rain starting to fall during a baseball game
“Bottom of the Sixth” (Three Umpires)
Norman Rockwell
April 23, 1949

 

[From the editors of the April 23, 1949 issue] This week’s Norman Rockwell cover depicts Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Here, the Dodgers are trailing the Pittsburgh Pirates 1-0 in the sixth inning. If the arbiters—left to right, Harry Goetz, Beans Reardon and Lou Jorda—call the game because of rain, the score will stand as is, and Pittsburgh will win. This irks the Brooklynites, who dislike having other teams win. In the picture, Clyde Sukeforth, a Brooklyn coach, could well be saying, “You may be all wet, but it ain’t raining a drop!” The huddled

Pittsburgher—Bill Meyer, Pirate manager—is doubtless retorting, “For the love of Abner Doubleday, how can we play ball in this cloudburst?”

 

Kids at a birthday party crowd in a garage due to rain
Rain-out Birthday Party
Stevan Dohanos
May 22, 1954

 

[From the editors of the May 22, 1954 issue] Rather than be depressed by Mr. Dohanos’ soggy scene, note how the deluge has improved the situation. Any birthday party is fun, even if nothing more happens than the duly expected games, grub and slight fights between incompatible little boys. But to arrange for the routine confusion to be stepped up into the joyous chaos of a garden party dispersed by a cloudburst, that’s a charming innovation indeed. And how delightful it is to throw a party in or into a garage, where tools and other weapons are available for favors as well as paper hats, where joy can he so much more unconfined than in an ordinary living-room hullabaloo. Even that pony thinks, Bless the rain—no more work. Fortunately, there isn’t space here for what mother thinks.

 

Mother watching her son put on cleats before football practice. It is raining.
Oh Mother!
Richard Sargent
October 5, 1957

 

[From the editors of the October 5, 1957 issue] Women can be such a handicap sometimes—“Aw, ma, halfbacks don’t wear rubbers. Next thing, you’ll want me to make touchdowns with my poncho on. Next thing, you’ll want me to run the end with an umbrella.” To which mother replies, “James, football men obey the quarterback’s signals or get benched. The bench is home. Now then, four, eleven, forty-four, hip—on rubbers!” Well, the maxim says that mothers know best, and if James catches cold by getting wet everywhere except his feet, let’s switch to the maxim that only Monday-morning quarterbacks think of everything. This might have been some action picture if Dick Sargent hadn’t rung in mother; yet let’s settle for the maxim that when it comes to painting, painters know best.

 

Scared children run to mom in bed during a thunderstorm.
Lightning Storm
Coby Whitmore
March 22, 1958

 

[From the editors of the March 22, 1958 issue] Of course, the children haven’t been frightened by Papa’s snoring, but by the awful sounds of Nature on an electrical rampage. So mother will gather them in her arms and love away their fear—mustn’t it be wonderful to be a mother? If that lightning is bedeviling a far-north state, it should signify the breaking up of a winter which certainly needed breaking up; and yet not long ago some northern areas had thunderstorms followed by the blankety-blankest descent of snow for thirty-something years. Let’s leave forecasting to the weatherman, who is welcome to it. Coby Whitmore’s man of the house, buried there in the bed, must be the deepest sleeper this side of the proverbial log. How does mother get him up mornings—rap on his head with the book?

 

Church goers file out of church during a rain storm
Sunday Rain
Melbourne E. Brindle
May 24, 1958

 

[From the editors of the May 25, 1958 issue] This wet cover had its origin in a drought. When crops withered in the Eastern states last summer, the Rev. Benjamin Axleroad, seen there at the door of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Bridgewater, Conn., included in his prayers a plea for precipitation. And one Sunday, just as his service ended, down came the rain, exit drought. Weeks later artist Melbourne Brindle, a St. Mark’s vestryman, puzzled some of the congregation by posing them at the church and refusing to tell them what it was all about—surprise, folks, you’re in the Post! Comments on the cover scene: (l) artistic license helped keep that grass green during the drought; (2) if any of the parishioners were out on a golf course during the deluge, how remorseful they must have been that they weren’t in church.

 

Man having fun with eachother in a rainy clubhouse
Clubhouse on a Rainy Day
Ben Kimberly Prins
July 8, 1961

 

[From the editors of the July 8, 1961 issue] How do you like that? On Saturday afternoon—prime time at any golf club—comes the deluge. Well, that’s par for the course, we suppose, and the course in this Ben Prins cover belongs to The Dunes Club of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. That wave in the background is a fringe of the Atlantic Ocean, not the crest of an oncoming flood. The three-wheeled vehicle under the umbrella is what is known as a caddy car, and its occupants are either fair-weather athletes scurrying toward the indoor recreation of the nineteenth hole, or spirited souls bent on challenging their fellow duffers to a game of motorized water polo. At any rate they’re not slowing down at the putting green. The weather being what it is, they’re probably less concerned about sinking putts than about sinking, period.

“The Life of the Party” by Irvin S. Cobb

Archive page from a magazine
Read ‘The Life of the Party,’ by Irvin S. Cobb Post.

After finding journalistic success at New York World alongside Joseph Pulitzer, Irvin S. Cobb reported on World War I with The Saturday Evening Post. Cobb traveled Europe extensively to cover the war, and he became known for his reporting as well as his humorous fiction. “The Life of the Party” follows the hapless Algernon Leary as he negotiates late-night New York City streets in ridiculous infantile garb after a Bohemian costume party. Cobb’s short story is filled with colorful language and dialect as Mr. Leary’s series of unfortunate events unfolds, or rather “unbuttons.” 

It had been a successful party, most successful. Mrs. Carroway’s parties always were successes, but this one nearing its conclusion stood out notably from a long and unbroken Carrowayian record. It had been a children’s party — that is to say, everybody came in costume with intent to represent children of any age between one year and a dozen years. But twelve years was the limit; positively nobody either in dress or deportment could be more than twelve years old. Mrs. Carroway had made this point explicit in sending out the invitations, and so it had been, down to the last hair ribbon and the last shoe buckle. And between dances they had played at the games of childhood, such as drop the handkerchief and King William was King James’ son and prisoner’s base and the rest of them.

The novelty of the notion had been a main contributory factor to its success; that, plus the fact that nine healthy adults out of ten dearly love to put on freakish garbings and go somewhere. To be exactly truthful the basic idea itself could hardly be called new, since long before some gifted mind thought out the scheme of giving children’s parties for grown-ups, but with her customary brilliancy Mrs. Carroway had seized upon the issues of the day to serve her social purposes, weaving timeliness and patriotism into the fabric of her plan by making it a war party as well. Each individual attending was under pledge to keep a full and accurate tally of the moneys expended upon his or her costume and upon arrival at the place of festivities to deposit a like amount in a repository put in a conspicuous spot to receive these contributions, the entire sum to be handed over later to the guardians of a military charity in which Mrs. Carroway was active.

It was somehow felt that this fostered a worthy spirit of wartime economy, since the donation of a person who wore an expensive costume would be relatively so much larger than the donation of one who went in for the simpler things. Moreover, books of Thrift Stamps were attached to the favors, the same being children’s toys of guaranteed American manufacture.

In the matter of refreshments Mrs. Carroway had been at pains to comply most scrupulously with the existing rationing regulations. As the hostess herself said more than once as she moved to and fro in a flounced white frock having the exaggeratedly low waistline of the sort of frock which frequently is worn by a tot of tender age, with a wide blue sash draped about her almost down at her knees, and with fluffy skirts quite up to her knees, with her hair caught up in a coquettish blue bow on the side of her head and a diminutive fan tied fast to one of her wrists with a blue ribbon — so many of the ladies who had attained to Mrs. Carroway’s fairly well-ripened years did go in for these extremely girlish little-girly effects — as the hostess thus attired and moving hither and yon remarked, “If Mr. Herbert Hoover himself were here as one of my guests tonight I am just too perfectly sure he could find absolutely nothing whatsoever to object to!”

TownIt would have required much stretching of that elastic property, the human imagination, to conceive of Mr. Herbert Hoover being there, whether in costume or otherwise, but that was what Mrs. Carroway said and repeated. Everyone came right out and agreed with her.

Now it was getting along toward three-thirty o’clock of the morning after, and the party was breaking up. Indeed for half an hour past, this person or that had been saying it was time, really, to be thinking about going — thus voicing a conviction that had formed at a much earlier hour in the minds of the tenants of the floor below Mrs. Carroway’s studio apartment, which like all properly devised studio apartments was at the top of the building.

It was all very well to be a true Bohemian, ready to give and take, and if one lived down round Washington Square one naturally made allowances for one’s neighbors and all that, but half past three o’clock in the morning was half past three o’clock in the morning, and there was no getting round that, say what you would. And besides, there were some people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally, though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight down.

So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon Leary, of the firm of Leary & Slack, counselors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very last to depart. Never had Mr. Leary spent a more pleasant evening. He had been in rare form, a variety of causes contributing to this happy state. To begin with, he had danced nearly every dance with Miss Milly Hollister, for whom he entertained the feelings which a gentleman of ripened judgment, and one who was rising rapidly in his profession, might properly entertain for an entirely charming young woman of reputed means and undoubted social position.

A preposterous ass named Perkins — at least, Mr. Leary mentally indexed Perkins as a preposterous ass — had brought Miss Hollister to the party, but thereafter in the scheme of things Perkins did not count. He was a cipher. You could back him up against a wall and take a rubber-tipped pencil and rub him right out, as it were; and with regards to Miss Hollister that, figuratively, was what Mr. Leary had done to Mr. Perkins. Now on the other hand Voris might have amounted to something as a potential rival, but Voris being newly appointed as a police magistrate was prevented by press of official duties from coming to the party; so Mr. Leary had a clear field, as the saying goes, and made the most of it, as the other saying goes.

Moreover, Mr. Leary had been the recipient of unlimited praise upon the ingenuity and the uniqueness expressed in his costume. He had not represented a Little Lord Fauntleroy or a Buster Brown or a Boy Scout or a Juvenile Cadet or a Midshipmite or an Oliver Twist. There had been three Boy Scouts present and four Buster Browns and of sailor-suited persons there had been no end, really. But Mr. Leary had chosen to appear as Himself at the Age of Three; and, as the complimentary comment proved, his get-up had reflected credit not alone upon its wearer but upon its designer, Miss Rowena Skiff, who drew fashion pictures for one of the women’s magazines. Out of the goodness of her heart and the depths of her professional knowledge Miss Skiff had come to Mr. Leary’s aid, supervising the preparation of his wardrobe at a, theatrical costumer’s shop uptown and, on the evening before, coming to his bachelor apartments, accompanied by her mother, personally to add those small special refinements which meant so much, as he now realized, in attaining the desired result.

“Oh, Mr. Leary, I must tell you again how very fetching you do look! Your costume is adorable, really it is; so — so cute and everything. And I don’t know what I should have done without you to help in the games and everything. There’s no use denying it, Mr. Leary — you were the life of the party, absolutely!”

At least twice during the night Mrs. Carroway had told Mr. Leary this, and now as he bade her farewell she was saying it once more in practically the same words, when Mrs. Carroway’s maid, Blanche, touched him on the arm.

“‘Scuse me, suh,” apologized Blanche, “but the hall man downstairs he send up word jes’ now by the elevator man ‘at you’d best be comin’ right on down now, suh, effen you expects to git a taxicab. He say to tell you they ain’t but one taxicab left an’ the driver of ‘at one’s been waitin’ fur hours an’ he act like he might go way any minute now. ‘At’s whut the hall man send word, suh.”

Blanche had brought his overcoat along and held it up for him, imparting to the service that small suggestion of a ceremonial rite which the members of her class invariably do display when handling a garment of richness of texture and indubitable cost. Mr. Leary let her help him into the coat and slipped largess into her hand, and as he stepped aboard the waiting elevator for the downward flight Mrs. Carroway’s voice came fluting to him, once again repeating the flattering phrase: “You surely were the life of the party!”

It was fine to have been the life of the party. It was not quite so fine to discover that the taxicab to which he must entrust himself for the long ride up to West Eighty-fifth Street was a most shabby-appearing vehicle, the driver of which, moreover, as Mr. Leary could divine even as he crossed the sidewalk, had wiled away the tedium of waiting by indulgence in draughts of something more potent than the chill air of latish November. Mr. Leary peered doubtfully into the illuminated countenance but dulled eyes of the driver and caught a whiff of a breath alcoholically fragrant, and he understood that the warning relayed to him by Blanche had carried a subtle double meaning. Still, there was no other taxicab to be had. The street might have been a byway in old Pompeii for all the life that moved within it. Washington Square, facing him, was as empty as a graveyard generally is at this hour, and the semblance of a conventional graveyard in wintertime was helped out by a light snow — the first of the season — sifting down in large damp flakes.

Twice and thrice he repeated the address, speaking each time sharply and distinctly, before the meaning seemed to filter into the befogged intellect of the inebriate. On the third rendition the latter roused from where he was slumped down.

“I garcia, Steve,” he said thickly. “I garcia firs’ time, only y’ hollowed s’loud I couldn’ und’stancher.”

So saying he lurched into a semi-upright posture and fumbled for the wheel. Silently condemning the curse of intemperance among the working classes of a great city Mr. Leary boarded the cab and drew the skirts of his overcoat down in an effort to cover his knees. With a harsh grating of clutches and an abrupt jerk the taxi started north.

Wobbling though he was upon his perch the driver mechanically steered a reasonably straight course. The passenger leaning back in the depths of the cab confessed to himself he was a trifle weary and more than a trifle sleepy. At thirty-seven one does not dance and play children’s games alternately for six hours on a stretch without paying for the exertion in a sensation of letdownness. His head slipped forward on his chest.

With a drowsy uncertainty as to whether he had been dozing for hours or only for a very few minutes Mr. Leary opened his eyes and sat up. The car was halted slantwise against a curbing; the chauffeur was jammed down again into a heap. Mr. Leary stepped nimbly forth upon the pavement, feeling in his overcoat pocket for the fare; and then he realized he was not in West Eighty-fifth Street at all; he was not in any street that he remembered ever having seen before in the course of his life. Offhand, though, he guessed he was somewhere in that mystic maze of brick and mortar known as Old Greenwich Village; and, for a further guess, in that particular part of it where business during these last few years had been steadily encroaching upon the ancient residences of long departed Knickerbocker families.

The street in which he stood, for a wonder in this part of town, ran a fairly straight course. At its western foot he could make out through the drifting flakes where a squat structure suggestive of a North River freight dock interrupted the sky line. In his immediate vicinity the street was lined with tall bleak fronts of jobbing houses, all dark and all shuttered. Looking the other way, which would be eastward, he could make out where these wholesale establishments tailed off, to be succeeded by the lower shapes of venerable dwellings adorned with the dormered windows and the hip roofs which distinguished a bygone architectural period. Some distance off in this latter direction the vista between the buildings was cut across by the straddlebug structure of one of the elevated roads. All this Mr. Leary comprehended in a quick glance about him, and then he turned on the culprit cabman with rage in his heart.

“See here, you!” he snapped crossly, jerking the other by the shoulder. “What do you mean by bringing me away off here! This isn’t where I wanted to go. Oh, wake up, you!”

Under his vigorous shaking the driver slid over sideways until he threatened to decant himself out upon Mr. Leary. His cap falling off exposed the blank face of one who for the time being has gone dead to the world and to all its carking cares, and the only response he offered for his mishandling was a deep and sincere snore. The man was hopelessly intoxicated; there was no question about it. More to relieve his own deep chagrin than for any logical reason Mr. Leary shook him again; the net results were a protesting semiconscious grunt and a further careening slant of the sleeper’s form.

Well, there was nothing else to do but walk. He must make his way afoot until he came to Sixth Avenue or on to Fifth, upon the chance of finding in one of these two thoroughfares a ranging nighthawk cab. As a last resort he could take the Subway or the L north. This contingency, though, Mr. Leary considered with feelings akin to actual repugnance. He dreaded the prospect of ribald and derisive comments from chance fellow travelers upon a public transportation line. For you should know that though Mr. Leary’s outer garbing was in the main conventional there were strikingly incongruous features of it too.

From his neck to his knees he correctly presented the aspect of a gentleman returning late from social diversions, caparisoned in a handsome fur-faced, fur-lined top coat. But his knees were entirely bare; so, too, were his legs down to about midway of the calves, where there ensued, as it were, a pair of white silk socks, encircled by pink garters with large and ornate pink ribbon bows upon them. His feet were bestowed in low slippers with narrow buttoned straps crossing the insteps. It was Miss Skiff, with her instinct for the verities, who had insisted upon bows for the garters and straps for the slippers, these being what she had called finishing touches. Likewise it was due to that young lady’s painstaking desire for appropriateness and completeness of detail that Mr. Leary at this moment wore upon his head a very wide-brimmed, very floppy straw hat with two quaint pink-ribbon streamers floating, jauntily down between his shoulders at the back.

For reasons which in view of this sartorial description should be obvious Mr. Leary hugged closely up to the abutting house fronts when he left behind him the marooned taxi with its comatose driver asleep upon it, like one lone castaway upon a small island in a sea of emptiness, and set his face eastward. Such was the warmth of his annoyance he barely felt the chill striking upon his exposed nether limbs or took note of the big snowflakes melting damply upon his thinly protected ankles. Then, too, almost immediately something befell which upset him still more.

He came to where a wooden marquee, projecting over the entrance to a shipping room, made a black strip along the feebly lighted pavement. As he entered the patch of darkness the shape of a man materialized out of the void and barred his way, and in that same fraction of a second something shiny and hard was thrust against Mr. Leary’s daunted bosom, and in a low forceful rumble a voice commanded him as follows: “Put up your mitts — and keep ‘em up!”

Matching the action of his hands everything in Mr. Leary seemed to start skyward simultaneously. His hair on his scalp straightened, his breath came up from his lungs in a gasp, his heart lodged in his throat, and his blood quit his feet, leaving them practically devoid of circulation, and ascended and drummed in his temples. He had a horrid, emptied feeling in his diaphragm, too, as though the organs customarily observable there had caught the contagion of the example and gone north.

“That’s nice,” spake the fearsome stranger. “Now stay jest the way you are and don’t make no peep or I’ll have to plug you wit’ this here gat.”

His right hand maintained the sinister pressure of the weapon against the victim’s deflated chest, while his left dexterously explored the side pockets of Mr. Leary’s overcoat. Then the same left hand jerked the frogged fastenings of the garment asunder and went pawing swiftly over Mr. Leary’s quivering person, seeking the pockets which would have been there had Mr. Leary been wearing garments bearing the regulation and ordained number of pockets. But the exploring fingers merely slid along a smooth and unbroken frontal surface.

“Wot t’ell? Wot t’ell?” muttered the footpad in bewilderment. “Say, where’re you got your leather and your kittle hid? Speak up quick!”

“I’m — I’m — not carrying a watch or a purse to-night,” quavered Mr. Leary. “These — these clothes I happen to be wearing are not made with places in them for a watch or anything. And you’ve already taken what money I had — it was all in my overcoat pocket.”

“Yep; a pinch of chicken feed and wot felt like about four one-bone bills.” The highwayman’s accent was both ominous and contemptuous. “Say, wotcher mean drillin’ round dis town in some kinder funny riggin’ wit’out no plunder on you? I gotta right to belt you one acrost the bean.”

“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” protested Mr. Leary in all seriousness. “If — if you’d only give me your address I could send you some money in the morning to pay you for your trouble — ”

“Cut out de kiddin’,” broke in the disgusted marauder. His tone changed slightly for the better: “Say, near as I kin tell by feelin’ it, dat ain’t such a bum benny you’re sportin’. I’ll jest take dat along wit’ me. Letcher arms down easy and hold ‘em straight out from yore sides while I gits it offen you. And no funny business!”

“Oh, please, please don’t take my overcoat,” implored Mr. Leary, plunged by these words into a deeper panic. “Anything but that! I — you — you really mustn’t leave me without my overcoat.”

“Wot else is dere to take?”

Even as he uttered the scornful question the thief had wrested the garment from Mr. Leary’s helpless form and was backing away into the darkness.

Out of impenetrable gloom came his farewell warning: “Stay right where you are for fi’ minutes wit’out movin’ or makin’ a yelp. If you wiggle before de time is up I gotta pal right yere watchin’ you, and he’ll sure plug you. He ain’t no easy-goin’ guy like wot I am. You’re gittin’ off lucky it’s me stuck you up, stidder him.”

With these words he was gone — gone with Mr. Leary’s overcoat, with Mr. Leary’s last cent, with his latchkey, with his cardcase, with all by which Mr. Leary might hope to identify himself before a wary and incredulous world for what he was. He was gone, leaving there in the protecting ledge of shadow the straw-hatted, socked-and-slippered, leg-gartered figure of a plump being, clad otherwise in a single vestment which began at the line of a becomingly low neckband and terminated in blousy outbulging bifurcations just above the naked knees. Light stealing into this obscured and sheltered spot would have revealed that this garment was, as to texture, a heavy, silklike, sheeny material; and as to color a vivid and compelling pink — the exact color of a slice of well-ripened watermelon; also that its sleeves ended elbow-high in an effect of broad turned-back cuffs; finally, that adown its owner’s back it was snugly and adequately secured by means of a close-set succession of very large, very shiny white pearl buttons — the whole constituting an enlarged but exceedingly accurate copy of what, descriptively, is known to the manufactured-garment trade as a one-piece suit of child’s rompers, self-trimmed, fastens behind; suitable for nursery, playground and seashore, especially recommended as summer wear for the little ones; to be had in all sizes.

Within a space of some six or seven minutes this precisely was what the nearest street lamp did reveal unto itself as its downward-slanting beams fell upon a furtive, fugitive shape, suggestive in that deficient subradiance of a vastly overgrown forked parsnip, miraculously endowed with powers of locomotion and bound for somewhere in a hurry; excepting of course no forked parsnip, however remarkable in other respects, would be wearing a floppy straw hat in a snowstorm; nor is it likely it would be adorned lengthwise in its rear with a highly decorative design of broad, smooth, polished disks which, even in that poor illumination, gleamed and twinkled and wiggled snakily in and out of alignment, in accord with the movements of their wearer’s spinal column.

But the reader and I, better informed than any lamp-post could be as to the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped through no fault of his own in one of the most overpowering predicaments conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good clubs; and had we but been there to watch him, knowing, as we would know, the developments leading up to this present situation, we might have guessed what was the truth: That Mr. Leary was hot bent upon retreating to the only imaginable refuge left to him; to wit, the interior of the stranded taxicab which he had abandoned but a short time previously.

Nearly all of us at some time or other in our lives have dreamed awful dreams of being discovered in a public place with nothing at all upon our bodies, and have awakened, burning hot with the shame of an enormous and terrific embarrassment. Being no student of the psychic phenomena of human slumber I do not know whether this is a subconscious harking-back to the days of our infancy or whether it is merely a manifestation to prove the inadvisability of partaking of Welsh rabbits and lobster salads immediately before retiring. More than once Mr. Leary had bedreamed thus, but at this moment he realized how much more dread and distressing may be a dire actuality than a vision conjured up out of the mysteries of sleep.

One surprised by strangers in a nude or partially nude state may have any one of a dozen acceptable excuses for being so circumstanced. An earthquake may have caught one unawares, say; or inopportunely a bathroom door may have blown open. Once the first shock occasioned by the untoward appearance of the victim has passed away he is sure of sympathy. For him pity is promptly engendered and volunteer aid is enlisted.

But Mr. Leary had a profound conviction that, revealed in this ghostly plight before the eyes of his fellows, his case would be regarded differently; that instead of commiseration there would be for him only the derision which is so humiliating to a sensitive nature. He felt so undignified, so glaringly conspicuous, so — well, so scandalously immature. If only it had been an orthodox costume party which Mrs. Carroway had given — why, then he might have gone as a Roman senator or as a pirate chief or an Indian brave or a cavalier. In doublet or jack boots or war bonnet, in a toga, even, he might have mastered the dilemma and carried off a dubious situation. But to be adrift in an alien quarter of a great and heartless city round four o’clock in the morning, so picturesquely and so unseasonably garbed, and in imminent peril of detection, was a prospect calculated to fill one with the frenzied delirium of a nightmare made real.

His slippered feet spurned the thin snow as he moved rapidly back toward the west. Ahead of him he could detect the clumped outlines of the taxicab, and at the sight of it he quickened to a trot. Once safely within it he could take stock of things; could map out a campaign of future action; could think up ways and means of extricating himself from his present lamentable case with the least possible risk of undesirable publicity. At any rate he would be shielded for the moment from the life which might at any moment awaken in the still sleeping and apparently vacant neighborhood. Finally, of course, there was the hope that the drunken cabman might be roused, and once roused might be capable, under promise of large financial reward, of conveying Mr. Leary to his bachelor apartments in West Eighty-fifth Street before dawn came, with its early-bird milkmen and its before-day newspaper distributors and its others too numerous to mention.

Without warning of any sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own volition. Mr. Leary’s gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped he gave voice in entreaty.

“Hey there!” he shouted. “Wait, please. Here I am — here’s your passenger!”

Two men talkingHis straw hat blew off, but this was no time to stop for a straw hat. For a few rods he gained upon the vehicle, then as its motion increased he lost ground and ran a losing race. Its actions disclosed that a conscious if an uncertain hand guided its destinies. Wabbling this way and that it wheeled skiddingly round a corner. When Mr. Leary, roweled on to yet greater speed by the spurs of a mounting misery, likewise turned the corner it was irrevocably remote, beyond all prospect of being overtaken by anything human pursuing it afoot. The swaying black bulk of it diminished and was swallowed up in the snow shower and the darkness. The rattle of mishandled gears died to a thin metallic clanking, then to a purring whisper, and then the whisper expired, dead silence ensuing.

In the void of this silence stood Mr. Leary, shivering now in the reaction that had succeeded the nerve jar of being robbed at a pistol’s point, and lacking the fervor of the chase to sustain him. For him the inconceivable disaster was complete and utter; upon him despair descended as a patent swatter upon a lone housefly. Miles away from home, penniless and friendless — the two terms being practically synonymous in New York — what asylum was there for him now? Suppose daylight found him abroad thus? Suppose he succumbed to exposure and was discovered stiffly frozen in a doorway? Death by processes of congealment must carry an added sting if one had to die in a suit of pink rompers buttoning down the back. As though the thought of freezing had been a cue to Nature he noted a tickling in his nose and a chokiness in his throat, and somewhere in his system, a long way off, so to speak, he felt a sneeze forming and approaching the surface.

To add to his state of misery, if anything could add to its distressing total, he was taking cold. When Mr. Leary took cold he took it thoroughly and throughout his system. Very soon, as he knew by past experience, his voice would be hoarse and wheezy and his nose and his eyes would run. But the sneeze was delayed in transit, and Mr. Leary took advantage of the respite to cast a glance about him. Perhaps — the expedient had surged suddenly into his brain — perhaps there might be a hotel or a lodging house of sorts hereabouts? If so, such an establishment would have a night clerk on duty, and despite the baggage-less and cashless state of the suppliant it was possible the night clerk might be won, by compassion or by argument or by both, to furnish Mr. Leary shelter until after breakfast time, when over the telephone he could reach friends and from these friends procure an outfit of funds and suitable clothing.

In sight, though, there was no structure which by its outward appearance disclosed itself as a place of entertainment for the casual wayfarer. Howsomever, lights were shining through the frosted panes of a row of windows stretching across the top floor of a building immediately at hand, and even as he made this discovery Mr. Leary was aware of the dimmed sounds of revelry and of orchestral music up there, and also of an illuminated canvas triangle stuck above the hallway entrance of the particular building in question, this device bearing a lettered inscription upon it to advertise that here the members of the Lawrence P. McGillicuddy Literary Association and Pleasure Club were holding their Grand Annual Civic Ball; admission One Dollar, including Hat Check; Ladies Free when accompanied by Gents. Evidently the Lawrence P. McGillicuddys kept even later hours at their roisterings than the Bohemian sets in Washington Square kept.

Observing these evidences of adjacent life and merrymakings Mr. Leary cogitated. Did he dare intrude upon the festivities aloft there? And if he did so dare, would he enter cavortingly, trippingly, with intent to deceive the assembled company into the assumption that he had come to their gathering in costume? or would he throw himself upon their charity and making open confession of his predicament seek to enlist the friendly offices of some kindly soul in extricating him from it?

While he canvassed the two propositions tentatively he heard the thud of footsteps descending the stairs from the dance hall, and governed by an uncontrollable impulse he leaped for concealment behind a pile of building material that was stacked handily upon the sidewalk almost at his elbow. He might possibly have driven himself to face a multitude indoors, but somehow could not, just naturally could not, in his present apparel, face one stranger outdoors — or at least not until he had opportunity to appraise the stranger.

It was a man who emerged from the hallway entrance; a stockily built man wearing his hat well over one ear and with his ulster opened and flung back exposing a broad chest to the wintry air. He was whistling a sprightly air.

Just as this individual came opposite the lumber pile the first dedicatory sneeze of a whole subsequent series of sneezes which had been burgeoning somewhere up in the top of Mr. Leary’s head, and which that unhappy gentleman had been mechanically endeavoring to suppress, burst from captivity with a vast moist report. At the explosion the passer-by spun about and his whistle expired in a snort of angered surprise as the bared head of Mr. Leary appeared above the topmost board of the pile, and Mr. Leary’s abashed face looked into his.

“Say,” he demanded, “wotcher meanin’, hidin’ there and snortin in a guy’s ear?”

His manner was truculent; indeed, verged almost upon the menacing. Evidently the shock had adversely affected his temper, to the point where he might make personal issues out of unavoidable trifles. Instinctively Mr. Leary felt that the situation which had arisen called for diplomacy of the very highest order. He cleared his throat before replying.

“Good evening,” he began, in what he vainly undertook to make a casual tone of voice. “I beg your pardon — the sneeze — ahem — occurred when I wasn’t expecting it. Ahem — I wonder if you would do me a favor?”

“I would not! Come snortin’ in a guy’s ear that-a-way and then askin’ him would he do you a favor. You got a crust for fair!” Here, though, a natural curiosity triumphed over the rising tides of indignation. “Wot favor do you want, anyway?” he inquired shortly.

“Would you — would you — I wonder if you would be willing to sell me that overcoat you’re wearing?”

“I would not!”

“You see, the fact of the matter is I happen to be needing an overcoat very badly at the moment,’ pressed Mr. Leary. “I was hoping that you might be induced to name a price for yours.”

“Certainly I would not! M.J. Cassidy wears M.J. Cassidy’s clothes, and nobody else wears ‘em, believe me! Wot’s happened to your own coat?”

“I lost it — I mean it was stolen.”

“Stole?”

“Yes, a robber with a revolver held me up a few minutes ago just over here in the next cross street and he took my coat away.”

“Huh! Well, did you lose your hat the same way?”

“Yes — that is to say, no. I lost my hat running.”

“Oh, you run, hey? Well, you look to me like a guy wot would run. Well, did he take your clothes too? Is that why you’re squattin’ behind them timbers?” The inquisitive one took a step nearer.

“No — oh, no! I’m still wearing my- my — the costume I was wearing,” answered Mr. Leary, apprehensively wedging his way still farther back between the stack of boards and the wall behind. “But you see — ”

“Well then, barrin’ the fact that you ain’t got no hat, ain’t you jest as well off without no overcoat now as I’d be if I fell for any hard-luck spiel from you and let you have mine?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that exactly,” tendered Mr. Leary ingratiatingly. “I’m afraid my clothing isn’t as suitable for outdoor wear as yours is. You see, I’d been to a sort of social function and on my way home it — it happened.”

“Oh, it did, did it? Well, anyway, I should worry about you and your clothes,” stated the other. He took a step onward, then halted; and now the gleam of speculative gain was in his eye. “Say, if I was willin’ to sell — not sayin’ I would be, but if I was — what would you be willin’ to give for an overcoat like this here one?”

“Any price within reason — any price you felt like asking,” said Mr. Leary, his hopes of deliverance rekindling.

“Well, maybe I’d take twenty-five dollars for it just as it stands and no questions ast. How’d that strike you?”

“I’ll take it. That seems a most reasonable figure.”

“Well, fork over the twenty-five then, and the deal’s closed.”

“I’d have to send you the money tomorrow — I mean today. You see, the thief took all my cash when he took my overcoat.”

“Did, huh?”

“Yes, that’s the present condition of things. Very annoying, isn’t it? But I’ll take your address. I’m a lawyer in business in Broad Street, and as soon as I reach my office I’ll send the amount by messenger.”

“Aw, to hell with you and your troubles! I might a-knowed you was some new kind of a panhandler when you come a-snortin’ in my ear that-a-way. Better beat it while the goin’s good. You’re in the wrong neighborhood to be springin’ such a gag as this one you just now sprang on me. Anyhow, I’ve wasted enough time on the likes of you.”

He was ten feet away when Mr. Leary, his wits sharpened by his extremity, clutched at the last straw.

“One moment,” he nervously begged. “Did I understand you to say your name was Cassidy?”

“You did. Wot of it?”

“Well, curious coincidence and all that — but my name happens to be Leary. And I thought because of that you might — ”

The stranger broke in on him: “Your name happens to be Leary, does it? Wot’s your other name then?”

“Algernon.”

Stepping lightly on the balls of his feet Mr. Cassidy turned back, and his mien for some reason was that potentially of a belligerent.

“Say,” he declared threateningly, “you know what I think about you? Well, I think you’re a liar. No regular guy with the name of Leary would let a cheap stiff of a stick-up rob him out of the coat offen his back without puttin’ up a battle. No regular guy named Leary would be named Algernon. Say, I think you’re a Far Downer. I wouldn’t be surprised but what you was anything else on the top of that. And wot’s all this here talk about goin’ to a sociable functure and comin’ away not suitably dressed. Come on out of that now and let’s have a look at you.”

“Really, I’d much rather not — if you don’t mind,” protested the miserable Mr. Leary. “I — I have reasons.”

“The same here. Will you come out from behind there peaceable or will I fetch you out?”

So Mr. Leary came, endeavoring while coming to wear a manner combining an atmosphere of dignified aloofness and a sentiment of frank indifference to the opinion of this loutish busybody, with just a touch, a mere trace, as it were, of nonchalance thrown in. In short, coming out he sought to deport himself as though it were the properest thing in the world for a man of years and discretion to be wearing a bright pink one-piece article of apparel on a public highway at 4 a.m. or thereabouts. Undoubtedly, considering everything, it was the hardest individual task essayed in New York during the first year of the war. Need I add that it was a failure — a total failure? As he stood forth fully and comprehensively revealed by the light of the adjacent transparency, Mr. Cassidy’s squint of suspicion widened into a pop-eyed stare of temporary stupefaction.

“Well, for the love of — In the name of — Did anywan ever see the likes of — “

He murmured the broken sentences as he circled about the form of the martyr. Completing the circuit, laughter of a particularly boisterous and concussive variety interrupted his fragmentary speech.

“Ha ha, ha ha,” echoed Mr. Leary in a palpably forced and hollow effort to show that he too could enter into the spirit of the occasion with heartiness. “Does strike one as rather unusual at first sight — doesn’t it?”

“Why, you big hooman radish! Why, you strollin’ sunset!” thus Mr. Cassidy responded. “Are you payin’ an election bet three weeks after the election’s over? Or is it that you’re jest a plain bedaddled ijiet? Or what is it, I wonder?”

“I explained to you that I went to a party. It was a fancy-dress party,” stated Mr. Leary.

Sharp on the words Mr. Cassidy’s manner changed. Here plainly was a person of moods, changeable and tempersome.

“Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, and you a large, grown man, to be skihootin’ round with them kind of foolish duds on, and your own country at war this minute for decency and democracy?” From this it also was evident that Mr. Cassidy read the editorials in the papers. “You should take shame to yourself that you ain’t in uniform instid of baby clothes.”

It was the part of discretion, so Mr. Leary inwardly decided, to ignore the fact that the interrogator himself appeared to be well within the military age.

“I’m a bit old to enlist,” he stated, “and I’m past the draft age.”

“Then you’re too old to be wearin’such a riggin’. But, by tripes, I’ll say this for you — you make a picture that’d make a horse laugh.”

Laughing like a horse, or as a horse would laugh if a horse ever laughed, he rocked to and fro on his heels.

“Sh-sh; not so loud, please,” importuned Mr. Leary in all humility, meanwhile casting an uneasy glance toward the lighted windows above. “Somebody might hear you?”

“I hope somebody does hear me,” gurgled the temperamental Mr. Cassidy, now once more thoroughly beset by his mirth. “I need somebody to help me laugh. By tripes, I need a whole crowd to help me; and I know a way to get them!”

He twisted his head round so his voice would ascend the hallway. “Hey, fellers and skoirts,” he called; “you that’s fixin’ to leave! Hurry on down and see Algy, the livin’ peppermint lossenger,before he melts away from his own sweetness.”

Obeying the summons with promptness a flight of the Lawrence P. McGillicuddys, accompanied for the most part by lady friends, cascaded down the stairs and erupted forth upon the sidewalk.

“Here y’are — right here!” clarioned Mr. Cassidy as the first skylarkish pair showed in the doorway. His manner was drolly that of a showman exhibiting a rare freak, newly captured. “Come a-runnin’!”

They came a-running and there were a dozen of them or possibly fifteen; blithesome spirits, all, and they fenced in the shrinking shape of Mr. Leary with a close and curious ring of themselves, and the combined volume of their glad, amazed outbursts might be heard for a distance of furlongs. On prankish impulse then they locked hands and with skippings and prancings and impromptu jig steps they circled about him; and he, had he sought to speak, could not well have been heard; and, anyway, he was for the moment past speech, because of being entirely engaged in giving vent to one vehement sneeze after another. And next, above the chorus of joyous whooping might be heard individual comments, each shrieked out shrilly and each punctuated by a sneeze from Mr. Leary’s convulsed frame; or lacking that by a simulated sneeze from one of the revelers — one with a fine humorous flare for mimicry. And these comments were, for example, such as:

“Git onto the socks!”

“Ker-chew !”

“And the slippers!”

“Ker-chew!”

“And them lovely pink garters!”

“Ker-chew!”

“Oh, you cutey! Oh, you cut-up!”

“Ker-chew!”

“Oh, you candy kid!”

“And say, git onto the cunnin’ elbow sleeves our little playmate’s got.”

“Yes, but goils, just pipe the poilies — ain’t they the greatest ever?”

“They sure are. Say, kiddo, gimme one of ‘em to remember you by, won’t you? You’ll never miss it — you got a-plenty more.”

“Wot d’ye call wot he’s got on ‘urn, anyway?” The speaker was a male, naturally.

“W’y, you big stoopid, can’t you see he’s wearin’ rompers?” The answer came in a giggle, from a gay youthful creature of the opposite sex as she kicked out roguishly.

“Well then, be thee, w’y don’t he romp a little?”

“Give ‘urn time, cancher? Don’t you see he’s blowin’ out his flues? He’s busy now. He’ll romp in a minute.”

“Sure he will! We’ll romp with ‘um.”

A waggish young person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary’s back the nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar counting game of childhood:

“Rich man — poor man — beggar man — thief — doctor — loiryer — “

“Sure, he said he was a loiryer.” It was Mr. Cassidy breaking in. “And he said his name was Algernon. Well, I believe the Algernon part.”

“Oh, you Algy!”

“Algernon, does your mother know you’re out?”

“T’ree cheers for Algy, the walkin’ comic valentine!”

“Algy, Algy — Oh, you cutey Algy!” These jolly Greenwich Villagers were going to make a song of his name. They did make a song of it, and it was a frolicsome song and pitched to a rollicksome key. Congenial newcomers arrived, pelting down from upstairs whence they had been drawn by the happy rocketing clamor; and they caught spirit and step and tune with the rest and helped manfully to sing it. As one poet hath said, “And now reigned high carnival.” And as another has so aptly phrased it, “There was a sound of revelry by night.” And, as the same poet once put it, or might have put it so if he didn’t, “And all went merry as a marriage morn.” But when we, adapting the line to our own descriptive usages, now say all went merry we should save out one exception — one whose form alternately was racked by hot flushes of a terrific self-consciousness and by humid gusts of an equally terrific sneezing fit.

“Here, here, here! Cut out the yellin’! D’you want the whole block up out of their beds?” The voice of the personified law, gruff and authoritative, broke in upon the clamor, and the majesty of the law, typified in bulk, with galoshes, ear muffs and woolen gloves on, not to mention the customary uniform of blue and brass, plowed a path toward the center of the group.

“‘S all right, Switzer,” gayly replied a hoydenish lassie; she, the same who had begged Mr. Leary for a sea-pearl souvenir.

“But just see what Morrie Cassidy went and found here on the street!”

Patrolman Switzer looked then where she pointed, and could scarce believe his eyes. In his case gleefulness took on a rumbling thunderous form, which shook his being as with an ague and made him to beat himself violently upon his ribs.

“D’ye blame us for carryin’ on, Switzer, when we seen it ourselves?”

“I don’t — and that’s a fact,” Switzer confessed between gurgles. “I wouldn’t a blamed you much if you’d fell down and had a fit.” And then he rocked on his heels, filled with joviality clear down to his rubber soles. Anon, though, he remembered the responsibilities of his position. “Still, at that, and even so,” said he, sobering himself, “enough of a good thing’s enough.” He glared accusingly, yea, condemningly, at the unwitting cause of the quelled commotion.

“Say, what’s the idea, you carousin’ round Noo York City this hour of the night diked up like a Coney Island Maudie Graw? And what’s the idea, you causin’ a boisterous and disorderly crowd to collect? And what’s the idea, you makin’ a disturbance in a vicinity full of decent hardworkin’ people that’s tryin’ to get a little rest? What’s the general idea anyhow?”

At this moment Mr. Leary having sneezed an uncountable number of times regained the powers of coherent utterance.

“It is not my fault,” he said. “I assure you of that, officer. I am being misjudged; I am the victim of circumstances over which I have no control. You see, officer, I went last evening to a fancy-dress party and — ”

“Well then, why didn’t you go on home afterwards and behave yourself?”

“I did — I started, in a taxicab. But the taxicab driver was drunk and he went to sleep on the way and the taxicab stopped and I got out of it and started to walk across town looking for another taxicab and

“Started walkin’, dressed like that?”

“Certainly not. I had an overcoat on of course. But a highwayman held me up at the point of a revolver, and he took my overcoat and what money I had and my card case and — “

“Where did all this here happen — this here alleged robbery?”

“Not two blocks away from here, right over, in the next street to this one.”

“I don’t believe nothin’ of the kind!”

Patrolman Switzer spoke with enhanced severity; his professional honor had been touched in a delicate place. The bare suggestion that a footpad might dare operate in a district under his immediate personal supervision would have been to him deeply repugnant, and here was this weirdly attired wanderer making the charge direct.

“But officer, I insist — I protest that — “

“Young feller, I think you’ve been drinkin’, that’s what I think about you. Your voice sounds to me like you’ve been drinkin’ about a gallon of mixed ale. I think you dreamed all this here pipe about a robber and a pistol and an overcoat and a taxicab and all. Now you take a friendly tip from me and you run along home as fast as ever you can, and you get them delirious clothes off of you and then you get in bed and take a good night’s sleep and you’ll feel better. Because if you don’t it’s goin’ to be necessary for me to take you in for a public nuisance. I ain’t askin’ you — I’m tellin’ you, now. If you don’t want to be locked up, start movin’ — that’s my last word to you.”

The recent merrymakers, who had fallen silent the better to hear the dialogue, grouped themselves expectantly, hoping and waiting for a yet more exciting and humorous sequel to what had gone before — if such a miracle might be possible. Nor were they to be disappointed. The denouement came quickly upon the heels of the admonition.

For into Mr. Leary’s reeling and distracted mind the warning had sent a clarifying idea darting. Why hadn’t he thought of a police station before now? Perforce the person in charge at any police station would be under requirement to shelter him. What even if he were locked up temporarily? In a cell he would be safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous ridicule; and surely among the functionaries in any station house would be one who would know a gentleman in distress, however startlingly the gentleman might be garbed. Surely, too, somebody — once that somebody’s amazement had abated — would be willing to do some telephoning for him. Perhaps, even, a policeman off duty might be induced to take his word for it that he was what he really was, and not what he seemed to be, and loan him a change of clothing.

Hot upon the inspiration Mr. Leary decided on his course of action. He would get himself safely and expeditiously removed from the hateful company and the ribald comments of the Lawrence P. McGillicuddys and their friends. He would get himself locked up — that was it. He would now take the first steps in that direction.

“Are you goin’ to start on home purty soon like I’ve just been tellin’ you to; or are you ain’t?” snapped Patrolman Switzer, who, it would appear, was by no means a patient person.

“I am not!” The crafty Mr. Leary put volumes of husky defiance into his answer. “I’m not going home — and you can’t make me go home, either.” He rejoiced inwardly to see how the portly shape of Switzer stiffened and swelled at the taunt. “I’m a citizen and I have a right to go where I please, dressed as I please, and you don’t dare to stop me. I dare you to arrest me!” Suddenly he put both his hands in Patrolman Switzer’s fleshy midriff and gave him a violent shove. An outraged grunt went up from Switzer, a delighted whoop from the audience. Swept off his balance by the prospect of fruition for his design the plotter had technically been guilty before witnesses of a violent assault upon the person of an officer in the discharge of his sworn duty.

He felt himself slung violently about. One mitted hand fixed itself in Mr. Leary’s collar yoke at the rear; the other closed upon a handful of slack material in the lower breadth of Mr. Leary’s principal habiliment just below where his buttons left off.

“So you won’t come, won’t you? Well then I’ll show you — you pink strawberry drop!”

Enraged at having been flaunted before a jeering audience the patrolman pushed his prisoner ten feet along the sidewalk, imparting to the offender’s movements an involuntary gliding gait, with backward jerks between forward shoves; this method of propulsion being known in the vernacular of the force as “givin’ a skate the bum’s rush.”

“Hey, Switzer, loan me your key and I’ll ring for the wagon for you,” volunteered Mr. Cassidy. His care-free companions, some of them, cheered the suggestion, seeing in it prospect of a prolonging of this delectable sport which providence without charge had so graciously deigned to provide.

“Never mind about the wagon. Us two’ll walk, me and him,” announced the patrolman. “‘T’aint so far where we’re goin’, and the walk’ll do this fresh guy a little good, maybe’ll sober him up. And never mind about any of the rest of you taggin’ along behind us neither. This is a pinch — not a free street parade. Go on home now, the lot of youse, before you wake up the whole Lower West Side.”

Loath to be cheated out of the last act of a comedy so unique and so rich the whimsical McGillicuddys and their chosen mates fell reluctantly away, with yells and gibes and quips and farewell bursts of laughter. Closely hyphenated together the deep blue figure and the bright pink one rounded the corner and were alone. It was time to open the overtures which would establish Patrolman Switzer upon the basis of a better understanding of things. Mr. Leary craning his neck in order to look rearward into the face of his custodian spoke in a key very different from the one he had last employed:

“I really didn’t intend, you know, to resist you, officer. I had a private purpose in what I did. And you were quite within your rights. And I’m quite grateful to you — frankly I am — for driving those people away.”

“Is that so?” The inflection was grimly and heavily sarcastic.

“Yes. I am a lawyer by profession, and generally speaking I know what your duties are. I merely made a show — a pretense, as it were — of resisting you, in order to get away from that mob. It was — ahem — it was a device on my part — in short, a trick.”

“Is that so? Fixin’ to try to be off now, huh? Well, nothin’ doin’! Nothin’ doin! I don’t know whether you’re a fancy nut or a plain souse or what-all, but whatever you are you’re under arrest and you’re goin’ with me.”

“That’s exactly what I desire to do,” resumed the schemer. “I desire most earnestly to go with you.”

“You’re havin’ your wish, ain’t you? Well then, the both of us should oughter be satisfied.”

“I feel sure,” continued the wheedling and designing Mr. Leary, “that as soon as we reach the station house I can make satisfactory atonement to you for my behavior just now and can explain everything to your superiors in charge there, and then — ”

“Station house!” snorted Patrolman Switzer. “Why, say, you ain’t headin’ for no station house. The crowd that’s over there where you’re headin’ fur should be grateful to me fur bringin’ you in. You’ll be a treat for them, and it’s few enough pleasures some of them gets — ”

A new, a horrid doubt assailed Mr. Leary’s sorely taxed being. He began to have a dread premonition that all was not going well and his brain whirled anew.

“But I prefer to be taken to the station house,” he began.

“And who are you to be preferrin’ anything at all?” countered Switzer. “I’ll phone back to the station where I am and what I’ve done; though that part of it’s no business of yours. I’ll be doin’ that after I’ve arranged you over to Jefferson Market.”

“Jeff — Jefferson Market!”

“Sure, ‘tis to Jefferson Market night court you’re headin’ this minute. Where else? They’re settin’ late over there tonight; the magistrate is expectin’ some raids somewheres about daylight, I think. Anyhow, they’re open yet; I know that. So it’ll be me and you for Jefferson Market inside of five minutes; and I’m thinkin’ you’ll get quite a reception.”

Jefferson Market! Mr. Leary could picture the rows upon rows of gloating eyes. He heard the incredulous shout that would mark his entrance, the swell of unholy glee from the benches that would interrupt the proceedings. He saw stretched upon the front pages of the early editions of the afternoon yellows the glaring black-faced headlines:

WELL-KNOWN LAWYER

CLAD IN PINK ROMPERS

HALED TO NIGHT COURT

He saw — But Switzer’s next remark sent a fresh shudder of apprehension through him, caught all again, as he was, in the coils of accursed circumstance.

“Magistrate Voris will be gettin’ sleepy what with waitin’ for them raids to be pulled off, and I make no doubt the sight of you will put him in a good humor.”

And Magistrate Voris was his rival for the favors of Miss Milly Hollister! And Magistrate Voris was a person with a deformed sense of humor! And Magistrate Voris was sitting in judgment this moment at Jefferson Market night court. And now desperation, thrice compounded, rent the soul of the trapped victim of his own misaimed subterfuge.

“I won’t be taken to any night court!” he shouted, wrestling himself toward the edge of the sidewalk and dragging his companion along with him. “I won’t go there! I demand to be taken to a station house. I’m a sick man and I require the services of a doctor.”

“Startin’ to be rough-house all over again, huh?” grunted Switzer vindictively. “Well, we’ll see about that part of it too — right now!”

Surrendering his lowermost clutch, the one in the silken seat of the suit of his writhing prisoner, he fumbled beneath the tails of his overcoat for the disciplinary nippers that were in his right-hand rear trousers pocket.

With a convulsive twist of his body Mr. Leary jerked himself free of the mittened grip upon his neckband, and as, released, he gave a deerlike lunge forward for liberty he caromed against a burdened ash can upon the curbstone and sent it spinning backward; then recovering sprang onward and outward across the gutter in flight. In the same instant he heard behind him a crash of metal and a solid thud, heard a sound as of a scrambling solid body cast abruptly prone, heard the name of Deity profaned, and divined without looking back that the ash can, conveniently rolling between the plump legs of the personified Arm of the Law, had been Officer Switzer’s undoing, and might be his own salvation.

With never a backward glance he ran on, not doubling as a hare before the beagle, but following a straight course, like unto a hunted roebuck. He did not know he could run so fast, and he could not have run so fast any other time than this. Beyond was a crossing. It was blind instinct that made him double round the turn. It was instinct, quickened and guided by desperation, that made him dart like a rose-tinted flash up the steps to the stoop of an old-fashioned residence standing just beyond the corner, spring inside the storm doors, draw them to behind him, and crouch there, hidden, as pursuit went lumbering by.

Through a chink between the door halves he watched breathlessly while Switzer, who moved with a pronounced limp and rubbed his knees as he limped, hobbled halfway up the block, slowed down, halted, glared about him for sight or sign of the vanished fugitive, and then misled by a false trail departed, padding heavily with his galoshed tread, round the next turn.

With his body still drawn well back within the shadow line of the overhanging cornice Mr. Leary coyly protruded his head and took visual inventory of the neighborhood. So far as any plan whatsoever had formed in the mind of our diffident adventurer he meant to bide where he was for the moment. Here, where he had shelter of a sort, he would recapture his breath and reassemble his wits. Even so, the respite from those elements which Mr. Leary dreaded most of all — publicity, observation, cruel jibes, the harsh raucous laughter of the populace — could be at best but a woefully transient one. He was not resigned — by no means was he resigned — to his fate; but he was helpless. For what ailed him there was no conceivable remedy.

Anon jocund day would stand tiptoe on something or other; Greenwich Village would awaken and bestir itself. Discovery would come, and forth he would be drawn like a shy unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was there? By night the part had been hard enough — as the unresponsive heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by the rude, revealing glow of the impending day how much more scandalous would it be!

His haggard gaze swept this way and that, seeking possible succor where reason told him there could be no succor; and then as his vision pieced together this out-jutting architectural feature and that into a coherent picture of his immediate surroundings he knew where he was. The one bit of chancy luck in a sequence of direful catastrophes had brought him here to this very spot. Why, this must be West Ninth Street; it had to be, it was — oh joy, it was! And Bob Slack, his partner, lived in this identical block on this same side of the street.

With his throat throbbing to the impulse of newborn hope he emerged completely from behind the refuge of the storm doors backed himself out and down upon the top step, and by means of a dubious illumination percolating through the fanlight above the inner door he made out the figures upon the lintel. This was such and such a number; therefore Bob Slack’s number must be the second number to the eastward, at the next door but one.

Five seconds later a fleet apparition of a prevalent pinkish tone gave a ranging house cat the fright of its life as former darted past latter to vault nimbly up the stone steps of a certain weatherbeaten four-story-and-basement domicile. Set in the door jamb here was a vertical row of mail slots, and likewise a vertical row of electric push buttons; these objects attesting to the fact that this house, once upon a time the home of a single family, had eventually undergone the transformation which in lower New York befalls so many of its kind, and had become a layer-like succession of light-housekeeping apartments, one apartment to a floor, and the caretaker in the basement.

Since Bob Slack’s bachelor quarters were on the topmost floor Bob Slack’s push button would be the next to the lowermost of the battery of buttons. A chilled tremulous finger found that particular button and pressed it long and hard, released it, pressed it again and yet again. And in the interval following each period of pressing the finger’s owner hearkened, all ears, for the answering click-click that would tell him the sleeper having been roused by the ringing had risen and pressed the master button that released the mechanism of the street door’s lock.

But no welcome clicking rewarded the expectant ringer. Assuredly Bob Slack must be the soundest sleeper in the known world. He who waited rang and rang and rerang. There was no response.

Eventually conviction was forced upon Mr. Leary that he must awaken the caretaker — who, he seemed dimly to recall as a remembrance of past visits to Bob Slack, was a woman; and this done he must induce the caretaker to admit him to the inside of the house. Once within the building the refugee promised himself he would bring the slumberous Slack to consciousness if he had to beat down that individual’s door doing it. He centered his attack upon the bottom push button of all. Directly, from almost beneath his feet, came the sound of an areaway window being unlatched, and a drowsy female somewhat crossly inquired to know who might be there and what might be wanted.

“It’s a gentleman calling on Mr. Slack,” wheezed Mr. Leary with his head over the banisters. He was getting so very, very hoarse. “I’ve been ringing his bell, but I can’t seem to get any answer.”

“A gentleman at this time o’ night!” The tone was purely incredulous.

“Yes; a close friend of Mr. Slack’s,” assured Mr. Leary, striving to put stress of urgency into his accents, and only succeeding in imparting an added hoarseness to his fast-failing vocal cords. “I’m his law partner, in fact. I must see him at once, please — it’s very important, very pressing indeed.”

“Well, you can’t be seein’ him.”

“C-can’t see him? What do you mean?”

“I mean he ain’t here, that’s what. He’s out. He’s went out for the night. He’s ginerally always out on Friday nights — playin’ cards at his club, I think. And sometimes he don’t come in till it’s near breakfast time. If you’re a friend of his I sh’d think it’d be likely you’d know that same.”

“Oh, I do — I do,” assented Mr. Leary earnestly; “only I had forgotten it. I’ve had so many other things on my mind. But surely he’ll be coming in quite soon now — it’s pretty late, you know.”

“Don’t I know that for myself without bein’ told?”

“Yes, quite so of course; naturally so.” Mr. Leary was growing more and more nervous, and more and more chilled too. “But if you’ll only be so very kind as to let me in I’ll wait for him in his apartment.”

“Let you in without seein’ you or knowin’ what your business is? I should guess not! Besides, you couldn’t be gettin’ inside his flat anyways. He’s locked it, unless he’s forgot to, which ain’t likely, him bein’ a careful man, and he must a-took the key with him. I know I ain’t got it.”

“But if you’ll just let me inside the building that will be sufficient. I would much rather wait inside if only in the hall, than out here on the stoop in the cold.”

“No doubt, no doubt you would all of that.” The tone of the unseen female was dryly suspicious. “But is it likely I’d be lettin’ a stranger into the place, that I never seen before, and ain’t seen yet for that matter, just on the strength of his own word? And him comin’ unbeknownst, at this hour of the mornin’? A fat chancet!”

“But surely, though, you must recall me — Mr. Leary, his partner. I’ve been here before. I’ve spoken to you.”

“That voice don’t sound to me like no voice I ever heard.”

“I’ve taken cold — that’s why its altered.”

“So? Then why don’t you come down here where I can have a look at you and make sure?” inquired this careful chatelaine.

“I’m leaning with my head over the rail of the steps right above you,” said Mr. Leary. “Can’t you poke your head out and see my face? I’m quite sure you would recall me then.”

“With this here iron gratin’ acrost me window how could I poke me head out? Besides, it’s dark. Say, mister, if you’re on the level what’s the matter with you comin’ down here and not be standin’ there palaverin’ all the night?”

“I — I — well, you see, I’d rather not come for just a minute — until I’ve explained to you that — that my appearance may strike you as being a trifle unusual; in fact, I might say, ‘droll,’” pleaded Mr. Leary, seeking by subtle methods of indirection to prepare her for what must surely follow.

“Never mind explainin’ — gimme a look!” The suspicious tenseness in her voice increased. “I tell you this — ayther you come down here right this second or I shut the window and you can be off or you can go to the divil or go anywheres you please for all of me, because I’m an overworked woman and I need my rest and I’ve no more time to waste on you.”

“Wait, please; I’m coming immediately,” called out Mr. Leary.

He forced his legs to carry him down the steps and reluctantly, yet briskly, he propelled his pink-hued person toward the ray of light that streamed out through the grated window-opening and fell across the areaway.

“You mustn’t judge by first appearances,” he was explaining with a false and transparent attempt at matter-of-factness as he came into the zone of illumination. “I’m not what I seem, exactly. You see, I — ”

“Mushiful Evans!” The exclamation was half shrieked, half gasped out; and on the words the window was slammed to, the light within flipped out, and through the glass from within came a vehement warning:

“Get away, you — you lunatic! Get away from here now or I’ll have the cops on you.”

“But please, please listen,” he entreated, with his face close against the bars. “I assure you, madam, that I can explain everything if you will only listen.”

There was no mercy, no suggestion of relenting in the threatening message that came back to him:

“If you ain’t gone from here in ten seconds I’ll ring for the night watchman on the block, and I’ll blow a whistle for the police. I’ve got one hand on the alarm hook right now. Will you go or will I rouse the whole block?”

“Pray be calm, madam, I’ll go. In fact, I’m going now.”

He fell back out of the areaway. Fresh uproar at this critical juncture would be doubly direful. It would almost certainly bring Switzer, with his bruised shanks. It would inevitably bring someone.

Mr. Leary retreated to the sidewalk, figuratively casting from him the shards and potsherds of his reawakened anticipations, now all so rudely shattered again. He was doomed. It would inevitably be his fate to cower in these cold and drafty purlieus until —

No it wouldn’t either!

Like a golden rift in a sable sky a brand new ray of cheer opened before him. Who were those married friends of Slack’s who lived on the third floor — friends with whom once upon a time he and Slack had shared a chafing-dish supper? What was the name? Brady? No, Braydon. That was it — Mr. and Mrs. Edward Braydon. He would slip back again, on noiseless feet, to the doorway where the bells were. He would bide there until the startled caretaker had gone back to her sleep, or at least to her bed. Then he would play a solo on the Braydons’ bell until he roused them. They would let him in, and beyond the peradventure of a doubt, they would understand what seemed to be beyond the ken of flighty and excitable underlings. He would make them understand, once he was in and once the first shock of beholding him had abated within them. They were a kindly, hospitable couple, the Braydons were. They would be only too glad to give him shelter from the elements until Bob Slack returned from his session at bridge. He was saved!

Within the coping of the stoop he crouched and waited — waited for five long palpitating minutes which seemed to him as hours. Then he applied an eager and quivering finger to the Braydons’ button. Sweet boon of vouchsafed mercy! Almost instantly the latch clicked. And now in another instant Mr. Leary was within solid walls, with the world and the weather shut out behind him.

He stood a moment, palpitant with mute thanksgiving, in the hallway, which was made obscure rather than bright by a tiny pinprick of gaslight; and as thus he stood, fortifying himself with resolution for the embarrassing necessity of presenting himself, in all his show of quaint frivolity, before these comparative strangers, there came floating down the stair well to him in a sharp half-whisper a woman’s voice.

“Is that you?” it asked.

“Yes,” answered Mr. Leary truthfully. It was indeed he, Algernon Leary, even though someone else seemingly was expected. But the explanation could wait until he was safely upstairs. Indeed, it must wait. Attempted at a distance it would take on a rather complicated aspect; besides, the caretaker just below might overhear, and by untoward interruptions complicate a position already sufficiently delicate and difficult.

Down from above came the response: “All right then. I’ve been worried, you were so late coming in, Edward. Please slip in quietly and take the front room. I’m going on back to bed.”

“All right!” grunted Mr. Leary.

But already his plan had changed; the second speech down the stair well had caused him to change it. Safety first would be his motto from now on. Seeing. that Mr. Edward Braydon apparently was likewise late it would be wiser and infinitely more discreet on his part did he avoid further disturbing Mrs. Braydon, who presumably was alone and who might be easily frightened. So he would just slip on past the Braydon apartment, and in the hallway on the fourth floor he would cannily bide, awaiting the truant Slack’s arrival.

On tiptoe then, flight by flight, he ascended toward the top of the house. He was noiselessly progressing along the hallway of the third floor; he was about midway of it when under his tread a loose plank gave off an agonized squeak, and, as involuntarily he jumped, right at his side a door was flung open.

What the discomfited refugee saw, at a distance from him to be measured by inches rather than by feet, was the face of a woman; and not the face of young Mrs. Edward Braydon, either, but the face of a middle-aged lady with startled eyes widely staring, with a mouth just dropping ajar as sudden horror relaxed her jaw muscles, and with a head of gray hair haloed about by a sort of nimbus effect of curl papers. What the strange lady saw — well, what the strange lady saw may best perhaps be gauged by what she did, and that was instantly to slam and bolt the door and then to utter a succession of calliope-like shrieks, which echoed through the house and which immediately were answered back by a somewhat similar series of outcries from the direction of the basement.

Up the one remaining flight of stairs darted the intruder. He flung himself with all his weight and all his force against Bob Slack’s door. It wheezed from the impact, but its stout oaken panels held fast. Who says the impossible is really impossible? The accumulated testimony of the ages shows that given the emergency a man can do anything he just naturally has to do. Neither by training nor by habit of life nor yet by figure was Mr. Leary athletically inclined, but a trained gymnast might well have envied the magnificent agility with which he put a foot upon the doorknob and sprang upward, poising himself there upon a slippered toe, with one set of fingers clutching fast to the minute projections of the door frame while with his free hand he thrust recklessly against the transom.

The transom gave under the strain, moving upward and inward upon its hinges, disclosing an oblong gap above the jamb. With a splendid wriggle the fugitive vaulted up, thrusting his person into the clear snace thus provided. Balanced across the opening upon his stomach, half in and half out, for one moment he remained there, his legs kicking wildly as though for a purchase against something more solid than air. Then convulsive desperation triumphed over physical limitations. There was a rending, tearing sound as of some silken fabric being parted biaswise of its fibers, and Mr. Leary’s quaint after sections vanished inside; and practically coincidentally therewith, Mr. Leary descended upon the rugged floor with a thump which any other time would have stunned him into temporary helplessness, but which now had the effect merely of stimulating him onward to fresh exertion.

In a fever of activity he sprang up. Pawing a path through the encompassing darkness, stumbling into and over various sharp-cornered objects, bruising his limbs with contusions and knowing it not, he found the door of the inner room — Bob Slack’s bedroom — and once within that sanctuary he, feeling along the walls, discovered a push bulb and switched on the electric lights.

What matter though the whole house grew clamorous now with a mounting and increasing tumult? What mattered it though he could hear more and more startled voices commingled with the shattering shrieks emanating from the Braydon apartment beneath his feet? He, the hard-pressed and the sore-beset and the long-suffering, was at last beyond the sight of mortal eyes. He was locked in, with two rooms and a bath to himself, and he meant to maintain his present refuge, meant to hold this fort against all corners, until Bob Slack came home. He would barricade himself in if need be. He would pile furniture against the doors. If they took him at all it would be by direct assault and overpowering numbers.

And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself of these unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and his undoing. When they broke in on him — if they did break in on him — he would be found wearing some of Bob Slack’s clothes. Better far to be mistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yet fancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing might be explained — and in time would be; but the other? He felt that he was near the breaking point; that he could no more endure.

He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten — the opening, or perhaps one should say the closing, was at the back. He twisted his arms rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.

Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and to undo again a garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this particular oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.

By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant buttonhole, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades, and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and snug and well-made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him. They eluded him; defied him; out-mastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he, lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and finally enclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been his own skin. Speedily he recognized this fact in all its bitter and abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the obdurate fastenings.

While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.

“There’s something — there’s somebody in the house!” At the top of its register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a keyhole on the floor below him. “I saw it — him — whatever it was. I opened my door to look out in the hall and it — he — was right there. Oh, I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn’t see him anymore and I slammed the door — and began screaming.”

“You seen what?”

The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths of the house, where the caretaker abided.

“Whatever it was, I opened the door and he was right in the hall there glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I — “

“What was he like? I ast what was he like — it’s that I’m askin’ you!” The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.

For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The main speaker — shrieker, rather — was plainly a person with a mania for details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.

“I was awake,” she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster than anyone following this narrative can possibly hope to read the words. “I couldn’t sleep. I never do sleep well when I’m in a strange house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage — Mr. Edward Braydon, you know — had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly all night, and my niece — I’m Mrs. Braydon’s unmarried aunt from Poughkeepsie and I’m down here visiting them — my niece was called to Long Island yesterday by illness — it’s her sister who’s ill with something like the bronchitis. And so he was gone and she was gone, and here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I couldn’t sleep well — I never can sleep in a strange house — and just a few minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I called down the stairs and asked if it was him and he answered back. But it didn’t sound like his voice. But I didn’t think anything of that. But of course it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn’t come in and I was just getting up again to see what detained him — his voice really sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then it ran — and oh, what if — ”

“I’m askin’ you once more what it was like?”

“How should I know except that — ”

“Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin’ scoundrel dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?”

“Yes, that’s it! That’s him — he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see him too? Oh, is it a burglar?”

“Burglar nothin’! It’s a ravin’, rampagin’ lunatic — that’s what it is!”

“Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!”

“Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and — ”

“Oh, whatever shall we do!”

“Hey, what’s all the excitement about?”

A new and a deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Leary recognizing it at a distance, where he stood listening — but not failing, even while he listened, to strive unavailingly with his problem of buttons — knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated still deeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbers remained very abhorrent to him. So he did not hear all that happened next, except in broken snatches.

He gathered though, from what he did hear, that Bob Slack and Mr. Edward Braydon were coming up the stairs, and that a third male whom they called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march, and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr. Slack’s rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft — or words from her to that effect — he had nevertheless managed to secure admittance to the house, and how he must still be in the house. And through all her discourse there were questions from this one or that, crossing its flow but in nowise interrupting it; and through it all percolated hootingly the terrorized outcries of Mr. Braydon’s maiden aunt-in-law, issuing through the keyhole of the door behind which she cowered.

Only now she was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead away.

With searches into closets and close scrutiny of all dark corners passed en route, the procession advanced to the top floor, mainly guided in its oncoming by the clew deduced from the circumstance of the mad intruder having betrayed a desire to secure access to Mr. Slack’s apartment, with the intention, as the caretaker more than once suggested on her way up, of murdering Mr. Slack in his bed. Before the ascent had been completed she was quite certain this was the correct deduction, and so continued to state with all the emphasis of which she was capable.

“He couldn’t possibly have got downstairs again,” somebody, hazarded; “so he must be upstairs here still — must be right round here somewhere.”

“Didn’t I tell you he was lookin’ for Mr. Slack to lay in wait for him and murder the poor man in his bed?” shrilled the caretaker.

“Watch carefully now, everybody. He might rush out of some corner at us.”

“Say, my transom’s halfway open!” Mr. Bob Slack exclaimed. “And by Jove, there’s a light shining through it yonder from the other room. He’s inside — we’ve got him cornered, whoever he is.”

Boldly Mr. Slack stepped forward and rapped hard on the door.

“Better come on out peaceably,” he called, “because there’s an officer here with us and we’ve got you trapped.”

“It’s me, Bob, it’s me,” came in a wheezy plaintive wail from somewhere well back in the apartment.

“Who’s me?” demanded Mr. Slack, likewise forgetting his grammar in the thrill of this culminating moment.

“Algy — Algernon Leary.”

“Not with that voice, it isn’t. But I’ll know in a minute who it is!” Mr. Slack reached pocketward for his keys.

“Better be careful. He might have a gun or something on him.”

“Nonsense!” retorted Mr. Slack, feeling very valiant. “I’m not afraid of any gun. But you ladies might stand aside if you’re frightened. All ready, officer? Now then!”

“Please come in by yourself, Bob. Don’t — don’t let anybody else come with you!”

If he heard this faint and agonized appeal from within, Mr. Slack chose not to heed it. He found the right key on his key ring, applied it to the lock, turned the bolt and shoved the door wide open, giving back then in case of an attack. The front room was empty. Mr. Slack crossed cautiously to the inner room and peered across the threshold into it, Mr. Braydon and a gray-coated watchman and a procession of half-clad figures following along after him.

Where was the mysterious intruder? Ah, there he was, huddled up in a far corner alongside the bed as though he sought to hide himself away from their glaring eyes. And at the sight of what he beheld Mr. Bob Slack gave one great shocked snort of surprise, and then one of recognition.

For all that the cowering wretch wore a quaint garment of a bright pink watermelonish hue, except where it was streaked with transom dust and marked with ashcan grit; for all that his head was bare, and his knees, and a considerable section of his legs as well; for all that he had white socks and low slippers, now soaking wet upon his feet; for ‘all his elbow sleeves and his pink garters and his low neck; and finally for all that his face was now beginning, as they stared upon it, to wear the blank wan look of one who is about to succumb to a swoon of exhaustion induced by intense physical exertion or by acutely prolonged mental strain or by both together — Mr. Bob Slack detected in this fabulous oddity a resemblance to his associate in the practice of law at Number Thirty-two Broad Street.

“In the name of heaven, Leary — ” he began. But a human being can stand just so many shocks in a given number of minutes — just so many. Gently, slowly, the gartered legs gave way, bending outward, and as their owner collapsed down upon his side with the light of consciousness flickering in his eyes, his figure was half-turned to them, and they saw how that he was ornamentally but securely accoutered down the back with many large pearl buttons and how that with a last futile fluttering effort of his relaxing hands he fumbled first at one and then at another of these buttons.

“Leary, what in thunder have you been doing? And where on earth have you been?” Mr. Slack shot the questions forth as he sprang to his partner’s side and knelt alongside the slumped pink shape.

Languidly Mr. Leary opened one comatose eye. Then he closed it again and the wraith of a smile formed about his lips, and just as he went sound asleep upon the floor Mr. Slack caught from Mr. Leary the softly whispered words, “I’ve been the life of the party!”

What Happens When a Supreme Court Justice Goes Rogue?

As we all know by now, there’s a big difference between the federal government as it’s supposed to be and federal government that is. Nothing illustrates this better than the selection of Supreme Court justices.

In principle, judges are above politics, chosen for their ability to objectively apply the Constitution to legal questions.In real life, though, judges are often selected (or rejected) for their history of partisan decisions. Once approved, these judges are expected to bring their conservative or liberal biases with them into the court. For some, political slant shapes their decision so dependably that observers can predict how they’ll vote on an issue.

However, like most things in Washington, this arrangement doesn’t always work out as planned. Supreme Court justices can be unreliable servants of political parties.

Take Earl Warren for example. When nominated by President Eisenhower on September 30, 1953, the three-term governor of California and former vice-presidential candidate was a faithful Republican. In naming Warren, Eisenhower said, “He represents the kind of political, economic, and social thinking that I believe we need on the Supreme Court.”Years later, after Warren had overturned legal traditions covering race, religion, sex, reproductive rights, and criminal procedure, Eisenhower privately admitted that his choice of Warren was “the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.”

Within a year of coming to the Court, Warren brought the justices into a unanimous agreement on the ground-breaking Brown v. Board of Education case. The decision overturned the legal fiction of “separate but equal” citizens. Among other results, the decision opened the doors of well-funded “white only” schools to black children.

In following years, the Warren court outlawed mandatory school prayer, struck down the ban on interracial marriage, overturned state laws preventing the sale of birth control, compelled states to provide legal counsel to defendants who couldn’t afford a lawyer, and required police officers to inform suspects of their rights at the time of arrest.

Eisenhower’s misreading of Earl Warren was understandable. Everything about the man suggested he’d be a safe, predictable justice who’d support traditional interpretations of the Constitution. But as Stewart Alsop pointed out in his 1967 article, the Court has a curious effect on a judge’s outlook. Liberal judges can grow more conservative on the court, and conservatives can become more liberal.

And sometimes, a judge completely steps out of character and shakes up everything.

Image of Lady Justice
Click to read “The Supreme Court Asks a Question: Is It Fair?” in the October 21, 1967 issue of the Post.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Connie Mack Remembers the Early Days of Baseball

This article and other features about baseball can be found in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition, Baseball: The Glory Years. This edition can be ordered here.

Baseball manager Connie Mack in the dugout in 1914
Philadelphia Athletics longtime manager Connie Mack (left) with coach Ira Thomas in the Philadelphia dugout in 1914.
Bain News Service/Library of Congress

Cornelius McGillicuddy, aka Connie Mack, is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Athletics. Mack managed the team for the baseball club’s first 50 seasons of play, starting in 1901. He finally retired in 1950 at age 87. He was also a player for 11 seasons, beginning in 1886, primarily in the role of catcher. In the following piece, he recalls the very different game he played in those days.

We made two rings 30 feet apart, with a batter in each ring. The pitcher stood outside of the ring and lobbed the ball weakly in to the batter. He wasn’t trying to make the batter miss it. That would spoil the fun. After hitting it, the batter would spring madly for the opposite ring. He was out if he was tagged with the ball between the circles. He could be put out by being hit with a thrown ball, and if the ball was caught on the fly, he was out. We used a flat bat and a soft, covered ball. Later on, when I grew a little older and taller, we began to play a game much nearer the present game of baseball and less like cricket. We had a home plate and three bases and a big bat and a leather-covered ball.

When I was 16 I went to work in the Green & Twichell shoe factory. I remember in that summer we chipped in and bought a glove for $2. It was made of buckskin and had no fingers. It was used in turn by one player after another, since it was common property. Up to that time we had played with our “meat” hands, and the catcher caught the pitcher’s offerings on the first bounce.

My father, who had worked in the shoe factory, had died when I was in my teens, leaving the business of feeding a sizable and hollow-legged Irish family squarely on my hat rack shoulder blades. Naturally, there was a pretty serious family conference in our little East Brookfield home when I told my mother I was thinking about signing with the Meriden club, of the Connecticut State League, in 1884. She gave her consent at last, reluctantly and with secret misgivings. But she made me promise I wouldn’t drink. She felt better after that.

Meriden was a big jump up from the little horse-and-buggy league called the Central Massachusetts League in which I had been playing, and which supported itself by passing the hat at the games and by the take from social functions, such as clambakes. With the Meriden club, I received my first professional baseball salary, the noble sum of $90 a month. And I was afraid to let the other boys on the club know.

In 1886 I broke into the major league as a member of the Washington club, then in the National League. When I started as catcher, we still took the ball on the bounce. The pitcher was 45 feet from the batter. He would turn his back and take a hop, step, and a jump, swinging his arm in a wide circle and letting the ball go with his hand below his hip, in a sort of underhand delivery. But from 45 feet away that ball came mighty fast, especially with all of the momentum worked up by the hop, step, and jump behind it. The fielders were still catching them meat-handed.

In the 1880s the rule for major-league batters was seven balls and three strikes, except for one year, 1887, when it was four strikes. The rules were in a constant state of flux. Up to 1880, a foul ball caught on the first bounce was an out.

When I first began to play for the Washington club, a batter was allowed to tell the pitcher what kind of ball he wanted pitched to him. Under those conditions, the pitcher was just a man who tossed them up the alley for the batter to hit. He was the hitter’s stooge. I liked high-ball pitching, and I got along pretty well lashing away at a steady stream of balls that floated up to me waist high or just under my chin. I would walk up there calm and confident, knowing that I could call for the kind of ball I wanted, and when at last it came along, I would take a cut at it and give it a ride.

But this pleasant state of affairs didn’t last long. During the winter of ’86 and ’87 the present rule was adopted which allows the pitcher to pitch to a point anywhere between the batter’s shoulder and knee. Under the new rule, I couldn’t hit for sour apples, and I wasn’t the only one. A flock of big-league batting heroes found the going too rough for them. Of course, some of them — the “naturals” — couldn’t be bothered. A natural hitter didn’t care one way or the other. It was all one to them. If the pitcher had been allowed to fling bird shot at them, they would have stepped up there and taken a cut at it, supremely confident that they could whale it up against the center field fence.

In those days a player bought his own glove, shoes, and bats. The club supplied the uniform. Those were the tools of your trade, and you were supposed to report for work with them just as a plumber or carpenter must show up with his own monkey wrench and saw and hammer. If you were unlucky enough to run into a pair of flying spikes, you brought out your own iodine and arnica and fixed up your own wounds. And you kept on playing, injury or no injury. There were no extra players lying around to take your place. You played if you could stand up. That was the custom, and we accepted it as a matter of course.

There was only one umpire, and he had to be tough. He stood behind the plate. Then, when a batter got on the bases, the umpire walked out into the middle of the diamond and stood behind the pitcher. Before 1882 an umpire was allowed to take testimony from a player or bystander to help him decide a disputed play.

If a ball was lost, strayed, or stolen, prior to 1886, the umpire called a recess of five minutes while all engaged in a hunt for the missing projectile. After five minutes had gone by with no success he was allowed to put a new ball into play.

It wasn’t until after the catcher moved up close to the plate that the big catcher’s mitt came into general use. The small finger glove worn by the catcher wasn’t enough protection when a catcher was taking them steaming hot instead of on the bounce. The first catchers to use the big mitt were held up to scorn as being softies by the old-timers, but when I think back and conjure up a mental picture of the average old-time catcher’s hands, the only wonder is that we didn’t start to use the big mitt sooner. Some of them kept on catching fireballs with their meat hands to the bitter end, although their fingers were gradually pounded into gnarled and twisted claws that looked like nothing human and had to be strapped together before a game. My own hands would not exactly qualify for a beauty show, as a matter of fact, and my fingers seemed to go off in odd directions from one another on private errands of their own, and then curl back unexpectedly toward one another at the tips.

— “The Bad Old Days” by Connie Mack, April 4, 1936

Is the Working Class Getting Soft?

100 years ago ribbonA booming economy had business leaders fretting that employees were living in luxury and the country was growing soft and spoiled

For two years hardly a champagne cork has popped east of the Alleghenies but it has been attended by a sigh over the appalling effeminacy of the Teamsters’ Union and the Amalgamated Association of Freight Handlers. Luxury has engulfed the country; but above the flood, like Noah on Ararat, we see bands of stern and impervious patriots who never think of mere creature comforts — having carefully provided themselves with a butler, a housekeeper, a valet, a lady’s maid, two footmen, four parlor maids, six chambermaids, a cook, two second cooks, and three chauffeurs to think of those base subjects for them.

The only sure way to escape being enervated by luxury in the United States, it seems, is to spend a hundred thousand dollars a year.

—“A Few Sound Spots Left,” Editorial,
March 10, 1917

This article is featured in the March/April 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

News of the Week: Chuck Berry, Changes with Monopoly, and Costly Comma Mistakes

RIP Chuck Berry, Jimmy Breslin, Chuck Barris, David Rockefeller, James Cotton, Derek Walcott, Colin Dexter, Lawrence Montaigne, Robert Day

What else do you need to say about Chuck Berry except that he was one of the inventors of rock ’n’ roll? When you think of rock in the ’50s one of the songs you think about is probably “Johnny B. Goode,” later made famous for a younger audience in Back to the Future. His other classics include “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little 16,” “School Day,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and many others.

Berry died Saturday at the age of 90. He has a new album coming out on June 16. It’s his first in 38 years, and it’s titled Chuck.

If Berry was the classic rock ’n’ roller then Jimmy Breslin was the classic newspaperman. The Pulitzer Prize winner wrote a column for The New York Daily News for 50 years, focusing on the everyday workers of New York City. It’s a cliché to say that we probably won’t see another guy quite like Breslin, but we probably won’t see another guy quite like Breslin. He wrote for The Saturday Evening Post too, including this 1965 humor piece about credit cards and this account of Jackie Kennedy’s final moments with JFK in Dallas.

Breslin passed away Sunday at the age of 88.

Chuck Barris
NBC Television Network.

You’ll remember Chuck Barris as the host and creator of the bizarre ’70s game show “The Gong Show.” He also produced “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game” and wrote a book, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, that became a movie directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Barris. He passed away Tuesday at the age of 87. A new version of “The Gong Show” is coming to ABC.

Barris was also a songwriter and wrote a song you might remember.

David Rockefeller was a billionaire, philanthropist, banker, and member of one of the country’s most famous families. He ran the family bank, Chase, for many years, and along with his brother Nelson, governor of New York, was instrumental in getting the World Trade Center towers built. He was the grandson of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. He died Monday at the age of 101.

James Cotton was a legendary blues harmonica player who performed and recorded with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Keith Richards, and many others over his seven-decade career. He passed away last week at the age of 81.

Derek Walcott was an influential Caribbean poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work. He died last Friday, March 17, at the age of 87.

Colin Dexter created the popular detective Inspector Morse, hero of a series of popular books and TV series. He passed away this week at the age of 86.

Lawrence Montaigne was an actor who appeared on several shows, including two episodes of the original Star Trek, where he played both a Vulcan and a Romulan. He was actually going to replace Leonard Nimoy in the second season if Nimoy had accepted an offer to join Mission: Impossible, but Nimoy decided to stay (he joined Mission: Impossible when Star Trek ended). He also appeared on shows like Batman, The Outer Limits, Lassie, I Spy, The Fugitive, and Dallas, as well as movies such as The Great Escape. Montaigne passed away last week at the age of 86.

Robert Day was a veteran movie and TV director. He directed the films First Man into Space, The Haunted Strangler, Two-Way Stretch, along with four Tarzan movies, and TV shows like The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Buccaneers, The Avengers, The Invaders, The F.B.I., Brackens World, The Streets of San Francisco, and Matlock. He died last Friday at the age of 94.

How Does a Thimble Become a Dinosaur?

I haven’t played Monopoly in years, but like most people I wanted to be the race car. I mean, who, if given a choice, would want to be the thimble? Maybe someone who sews.

If you didn’t care for the thimble, you’re in luck. After a poll, Parker Brothers has replaced that piece, along with the wheelbarrow and the boot. Instead of those pieces — hey, I kind of liked that boot! — we’re going to see a T-Rex, a rubber duck, and a penguin (and no, I have no idea why they call it a “rubber” duck and not just a duck). They’ll join the surviving pieces: the car, the dog, the top hat, the battleship, and the cat, so you might have a dinosaur and battleship square off, which I’m sure will be the basis for that Monopoly movie.

And if a big-screen film isn’t enough for you, the board game is also going to be musical.

Daniel at Breakfast

I’m reading a book of essays by Phyllis McGinley titled Sixpence in Her Shoe. It came out in 1963 and was a response to what people like Betty Friedan and other feminists were saying and publishing at the time. McGinley was a housewife and proud of it, and actually celebrated domesticity and suburban life. She also happened to be an acclaimed poet, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her collection Times Three and writing several children’s books and poetry for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and she wrote quite a bit for The Saturday Evening Post. It’s a shame that her books have gone out of print and she’s pretty much forgotten now (even though she was on the cover of Time at one point). But one of her books is remembered and celebrated every December: She wrote the original story for The Year Without a Santa Claus, the basis for the animated holiday TV classic of the same name.

Her birthday is March 21, which also happens to be World Poetry Day. On that day CNN anchor Jake Tapper posted this on Twitter. I don’t know much about poetry, but I like McGinley.

 

The Dangers of Not Using the Oxford Comma

We’ve all read examples of how omitting an Oxford (or serial) comma can lead to misunderstandings. One of my favorite examples is on a Tails magazine cover from a few years back that had the headline “Rachael Ray Finds Inspiration in Cooking Her Family and Her Dog.” They didn’t just forget that last comma, they forgot all of them — which makes me not want to eat at Rachael Ray’s house.

Forgetting it can also cost you a lot of money, which a Maine dairy company found out this week. Three truck drivers looking for overtime compensation filed suit against the company and could win a judgment of up to $10 million because of the way a contract was written.

Meet Julia

The iconic children’s show Sesame Street has debuted a new character. She has orange hair and her name is Julia. She also happens to be autistic.

I grew up watching Sesame Street and I learned a lot from it, not just basic knowledge like words and math and why some puppets like to live in trash cans, but also how to treat people. A character like this could really help kids understand.

Julia was already a character in Sesame Street books and stories, and producers decided to also add her to the TV show, which now runs first on HBO and then on PBS several months later.

This Week in History

Patrick Henrys Give Me Liberty Speech (March 23, 1775)

Here’s the full text and the story behind Henry’s famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” speech. It was given at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

Harry Houdini Born (March 24, 1874)

When I was a kid I was obsessed with Harry Houdini. I read every book I could find on the magician, and at one point even thought of becoming a magician like Houdini (without all of the “escape from a milk container filled with water while handcuffed” stuff). Check out Saturday Evening Post Archives Director Jeff Nilsson’s article on Houdini and “The Art and Crime of Illusion.”

This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: First Crocus Cover (March 22, 1947)

First Crocus by Norman Rockwell
First Crocus
Norman Rockwell
March 22, 1947

I’m not entirely sure what a “crocus” is. It almost sounds like a car. Introducing the Ford Crocus, new for 2017! Anyway, 50 years ago this week the Norman Rockwell work appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Read the story behind the cover here.

Pecan Day

Pecans? Not a fan. Almonds? Sure. Peanuts? Yup. Cashews? Great! But I never got a taste for pecans, really. I was going to make a joke that someone should do an ad campaign for pecans with the slogan “YES PECAN!” but something like that already happened.

Tomorrow is Pecan Day. Here’s two recipes for shortbread cookies that include pecans, and here’s one for a crunchy sweet potato casserole.

Maybe I’ll try these sugar-coated pecans. Even though I’m not a pecan fan, I find that most things are improved when you cover them in sugar.

Next Weeks Holidays and Events

National Doctors Day (March 30)

This is the day when we honor the men and women who keep us alive. If you happen to have an appointment on this day, maybe you can bring your doctor some of those sugar-coated pecans.

World Backup Day (March 31)

If you’re like me, you often forget to back up the files you have on your computer (I once lost an entire novel I wrote because I didn’t have another copy). Today’s the day to remember to do that. Well, every day is the day to remember that, but maybe after an official day to remind us, we’ll actually start doing it. And I don’t mean just a cloud backup.

Before I Go

Rabbit
Shutterstock

Maudie wants to kill a hare. Even in her bell-clear moments she hangs onto the idea with something like a death grip. Maudie’s in a death grip now herself. Death’s grip. The doctor and the people from the hospice take turns telling me it’s just a matter of time now — as though for the past 66 years it had been a matter of something else.

I sit by Maudie’s bed, sometimes all night. She heaves herself and thrashes and calls out to Thomas and to Mama and to me. “Make him give me that ax. Make him let me do one.” And then when she’s awake, she reasons with me, slivered in between the fretting and the rambling. She couldn’t kill a rabbit. She couldn’t heft a kitchen knife. I saw her try to pull a comb across the fuzzy tufts of down that have just started to grow back. She can’t lift a thing. I feed her. Have for weeks.

“Let me kill one rabbit,” Maudie says.

“When you get your strength back.”

“When you’re rested.”

“When you’re fresher.”

Maudie scowls at me. My sister’s not a fool.

I kill all the rabbits now. I have been killing things for my whole life. Time was we had pigs and ducks and geese and tame game hens, but nowadays all the fowl that lays in plastic cellophane down at the A&P comes here in big mud-splattered trucks from warehouse stores in other states. You don’t know if those chickens ever were alive. So nowadays it’s just the rabbits that stand in all but pure defiance between us and total expendability.

Rabbits. Lapin. Until she got sick, Maudie hand-printed the labels: LAPIN, in black calligraphy. I kill and clean and package them in cellophane and drive them into town to sell them to the Frenchman. He sells hard bread rolls and liver spreads and salads, ready-made, in what was the hat shop, next door to the bank. He buys our rabbits. Lapin. That’s his word. Gives us $3 a pound, sells some in the store, ships out all the rest.

When our brother Thomas was sick for the last time, Maudie and I phased out the birds. Maudie begged me, Don’t you tell Thomas the birds are gone, he’ll get his mind in one huge uproar, and carry to the grave the worry we might starve, which even then I doubted seriously. I think worry is the first thing a person doesn’t carry with him when he goes. I cannot make myself believe a person dies and then the next day wonders about who will pay the light bill or the money to the feed store. I think a person looks down from heaven, shrugs his shoulders, figures everything will probably be all right.

Or it won’t.

“Just one puny rabbit.” Maudie’s voice gets whiny, like it did when we were girls.

Maudie’s never killed a thing. Papa let her go off in the house every time we did the hogs, and she would crawl underneath that metal bed and lie straight as a board until I ran upstairs singing out, “It’s finished. They’re all done,” as I moved slowly around the room, pretending to search bureau drawers and closets until I found her always in the same place — moving slowly, leaving in my wake my scent, that smell of outdoors and animals and blood. “You can come out now, scaredy-cat. I know you’re there.”

It’s evening now. Maudie’s time of day. This whole day’s got away from me somehow. The kitchen’s gone all dark while I’ve been sitting here, but when I pass out through the screen door to the back porch, there’s still light enough to see the wind move through the trees. I drop down on my Richmond chair beside the railing and lean way back to look up at the sky.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills; from whence cometh my help?

I read that verse a thousand times before I ever saw the question mark was there.

I groan the words out a second time, out of habit more than anything. I know where’s my help tonight. She’s dying and for sure there is no succor residing on any mountain I’m aware of.

When Maudie and I were small, our father would take us up that big hill, there, behind the slaughterhouse. The ground was full of rocks, all sizes, so there was always a firm piece jutting out to make your footing sure, a thousand different sharp or rounded steps to make the climb secure. At the top was one big rock, as wide across as three or four fat sows, all fed up ready for the slaughter, and my father told us, Maudie and me, that our grandmother was buried underneath that stone. He told us that was why no one in our family could ever leave this place, because we could not move away from her. He said it was a two-way street. We kept faith living here, and this woman, dead long years, watched over us, protected us from every ill and evil.

Maudie told me one night as we lay in bed that that dead grandmother was what all the killing was about. The animals we killed were sacrifices, Maudie said, appeasements to her spirit. The next day she showed me a verse in the book of Hebrews that said without the shedding of blood, there could be no remission. I asked her what remission was, and she gave me a look and said what did it matter what it was. For a time I had it worked out that remission was that part of the tractor that made it go, but then Maudie told me that was transmission. Trans, which I heard as trance, which only served to muddle me up further.

Violence can be such a quiet thing, one slender little sin that keeps another person from her life.

Off and on for years Maudie and I would argue the particulars. Like two old Jesuits or Jews. Discussed the thing to death. I knew that in the Bible Israelites had sacrificed goats and sheep and doves to God. Not rabbits, though. For sure not pigs. No cloven hoofs. Unclean. I knew that no Jew, not even one in West Virginia, could eat a pork chop or a piece of bacon even if he starved to death. So it hardly figured that my father butchered swine for sacrifice to his dead mother; in addition to which, this woman wasn’t God, which, I argued, would make her an idol if you did sacrifice to her, which would mean hell for certain, and very likely extra punishment on top of that.

Personally, I think the reason Maudie hid underneath the bed every blessed time there was a slaughter was her sheer and certain terror that one day my father would decide to make a switch to human sacrifice and grab him any person who happened to be handy. He had a certain fiercesomeness.

My own concerns were otherwise: I worried that at any time the old grandmother buried on the hill would take it in her head to roll the swine-humped stone away and come tearing down the mountain hell-bent for leather — or perhaps retaliation, long-considered, even justified. I saw her in a long white nightgown, hair in two thick gray braids, and in her hand a torch like the Statue of Liberty. So if it took the sacrifice of a few chickens to keep that woman happy and contented to stay put lying there, well, to my way of thinking, that was livestock well-invested.
I give my head a serious shake. I came out here tonight to think of Richmond — not dead grandmothers, not dead lambs or pigeons. Richmond. I’ve had my mind on Richmond just about forever now. Sweet Richmond. I look down at my lap. It’s dark now. I can’t even see me. But I know that I’m still right here.

I get me up and walk inside; I let the screen door slam. The last one who would care was buried years ago. Maudie used to slam the thing a hundred times a day. I light a fire and put the kettle on.

It was in the third grade that I got this thing for Richmond. Before that, I was going to Africa to be a foreign missionary. Then Mrs. Lowe, the new librarian, moved to the farm just up the road. Mrs. Lowe hated that farm like malaria, and every Tuesday when I would go in to change my books, Mrs. Lowe would tell me about Richmond, her hometown, the place she was a stupid fool to have ever left. I made my mind up that same summer to go off to Richmond the second I was grown, and did my worst to make up Lucille Harris’ mind to go with me.

I dump some dried sassafras in the teapot and splash the scalding water on.

I was in high school when my mother first started in with her nerve problem. By the time I graduated, we were calling it M.S. Miss, we always said. Like, I wish this Miss had missed us, say, or, How’s the Miss today?

And what do you think? Lucille Harris ended up in Richmond. Married a salesmen, like in the stories, a man from Richmond. Lucille lived there all her life. She told me once when she was home to visit, that Richmond wasn’t what you’d think. Now what would Lucille Harris know about what I would think?

“Go for a visit,” Mama would say. “Go see the place.”

But I didn’t want to dip my toe in, I didn’t want to see it just from the outside. I wanted to belong there, to go and live forever. I pour some tea and catch a whiff. I love that bitter smell. When Mama did, after forever, die — I was just 32 — I sat down and wrote Lucille Harris one long letter, and I said, would she consider a paying houseguest, just till I could get set up on my own. Lucille never answered me. I never heard from her again. I saw her cousin in the post office late last year; she told me Lucille had just died. A fast cancer, the cousin said.

Sixty-seven days.

After Mama, someone was always getting sick and dying, or getting sick and recuperating, which would take even longer. My brother Thomas got T.B. — was sick with it for 20 years — then Papa, who begged and begged me not to leave. He always did hang onto everyone. Kept his own mother underneath a rock, and I remember Mama saying once, toward the end, she wanted so to die, but Papa never would let her go anywhere.

But I’m not nearly 70. I read a story in a magazine about a lady who at the age of 67 met up with her childhood sweetheart after he was widowed, and she married him and had a rich, full life. No children, of course. Of course no children, but a rich, full life. Now myself, I don’t have any childhood sweetheart to meet up with. No one in my family ever had much luck in that department, but anything gets possible once I start to think of Richmond.

“It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.” Maudie is all tangled in the sheets. She is sweated wet.

“Nancy will be here today,” I say. “The nurse you like. The one with good bones, Mama would have said. I made the custard you’re so partial to.”

“Just one stupid rabbit.” Maudie’s drifting off again. “Just one, Papa.”

“It’s not unusual to get these ideas at the end. To get fixated on one thing. Go along with her as much as possible,” the doctor tells me. Dr. Julio, who is without a doubt the shortest grown-up person I have ever seen, not counting any dwarfs. “She can take the medicine for the smallest reason. I’ve told her that. She acts like she needs to make it last, to stretch it out. And don’t forget the aspirin.” He shuts the door, and fresh cold air moves in to take his place.

A person dying can be like some child who commences in to whine at breakfast time and has the wherewithal to keep it up all day. That bored tenacity, that cumbersome embarrassment of time.

Myself I think a person has a right to peevishness when she’s caught up in dying. She’s got a right to lightning-white outrage, if it comes to that, and rancor, and frank spite, and brittle incredulity. Besides, if you can concentrate yourself on one small single fret, it might supplant, or at least, for the time, forestall your bumping blunt and inadvertent up against the idea of your beginning now to end.

“Oh dear Lord in heaven,” I say to myself, “What am I going to do?”

In fact, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to sell up after Maudie’s gone, clear out the rabbit hutches and blunt axes and chopping blocks and 12-inch knives. A lifetime of possessions, four lifetimes, five, if you count mine. I’m going to sell up the lot for hard cash and move myself to Richmond. Desire waits a long time, the thing can travel underground for years. I’ll never once look back. Not like the story in the Bible of Lot’s wife. She’s the one I always wanted the most not to be. I would be Job with boils, or Samson without a lick of energy before I would be her. When Maudie dies I’m moving to Virginia, just like I was supposed to with old Lucille.

“How’s your sister?” everybody asks.

“Fair,” I say. “Just fair.”

I first get the idea of the guillotine from a mention of the French Revolution in a magazine, and the next time I take in a load of rabbits, I ask the Frenchman and he draws me a careful diagram on a torn-off piece of brown wrapping paper. He doesn’t even think the what-for question. A foreigner, a person from another place, will take you at face value every time. He has had to take entirely seriously any number of queer, harebrained ideas to get where he has come to be.

We have a whole shed full of hardware, old wood, and blades to every purpose, but the manufacturing of any contraption, the simplest apparatus, will never once conform to your idea of how the thing’s to go. First off, the blade is not supported properly and drops and nearly takes my hand off at the wrist. Then the wood frame lists to one side so the blade jams halfway down. I finally finish it well after midnight, working against time, or up against its brevity.

You’d think a person would be all wore out after that, but I am wide awake. I’m not a fool. I know full well what Maudie’s on about with all her fretting. Fixing it so she can kill the rabbit is just the same as pulling out the plug on one of those hospital life-support machines. This is the last night my little sister and I will both occupy this planet. She still believes the stories we made up to scare ourselves. No surprises there. A person’s childhood can hang on for dear life, cling clawing like some sharp-toothed creature that you can’t shake loose, no matter how you try.

I know I will not sleep tonight. It is my sister’s wake. That’s what the word means. I wander room to room. Maudie’s snore follows me, an ugly rasping thing. I go into the room we slept in when we were just girls, before our lives. It’s cold, damp smelling. I walk over and bend down beside the little bureau Mama painted that sad shade of blue, a bureau with a single drawer that Maudie has kept locked for her whole life. I used to say at routine intervals that she could stop with all the secrecy and protest. I told her that I had already looked inside and seen her stupid treasures there. For ages then she’d wear the key to the bureau drawer on a chain around her neck, till finally, in the end, the thing got lost. I bet that drawer has sat there locked up 30 years.

I go fetch the screwdriver that I keep for the sticky window in the bathroom, but when I go to pry the darn drawer open, it slides out easy, opens with a touch. It wasn’t locked at all, a fact which for some reason makes me spitting mad. At Maudie? At me? I get down on my knees to have a look inside. My heart does the little thing it does.

And what was all the fuss about? Her stupid treasures. A little pink leather change purse with a click clasp and four pennies inside: 1921, 1917, 1914, another 1921. A white bead bracelet my mother wore, an empty book of savings bond stamps with an unshaved Uncle Sam glowering on the wrinkled cover, a blue marble, a little tablet of paper with the picture of a bird on every page, a feather, a couple gray stones, a 50-year-old pine cone, a blue ribbon with JESUS SAVES in blood-red letters. I pull the drawer out, upend the whole thing into the trash. I am that disappointed. An old blue envelope falls to the floor. I pick it up. June 11, 1959, the postmark, and the return address reads Mrs. Lucille Harris Wilson, 209 West Winton Street, Richmond, Virginia.

I pull myself to standing. The basket slips out of my hand, spilling Maudie’s trash across the floor.

I open up the letter:

My dear friend,
Of course you can come, yes come. You can live with us forever. Bill says so too, and bring a pillow for yourself. You write when you’re coming. We’ll be ready. Love you,
Your friend Lucille

I turn the envelope over, and written in Maudie’s tight round hand: Forgive me. It’s like writing a note to God in the hopes He’ll find it on the morning of the final judgment day. Hoping it catches Him in a forgiving mood. Now whatever made Maudie keep this souvenir of treachery?

There is secrecy and there is treachery and they are not the same, they are not distant relatives. Violence can be such a quiet thing, one slender little sin that keeps another person from her life.

Maudie would have known that I’d be on the midnight train the day the letter came. Maudie, Maudie. You’ll need more than the blood of rabbits for that one, old girl. More than the blood of many rabbits for remission of that sin.

Suddenly I’m all played out. I’m sleepy, sleepy like I’ve had a sleeping pill. I fall into bed still fully clothed.

As I drift off, I imagine I will dream tonight of fitting Maudie’s skinny neck into the guillotine with not an inch of space to spare and letting fall the ax blade weight to take off Maudie’s head.

“It is a fitting punishment.” I hear those words. I’m running down an empty street and crying this. I’m all alone in a big city and it’s the middle of the day, but the whole town is vacant.

“Lucille. Lucille.”

I shout out loud, but there is no one left alive to hear, and then I realize it’s the end of the world and I’m the last person left alive. Up in the distance I see something black that moves across the road. A raccoon, I think, but I run up to it to find it’s only Mitsy, the cat we had when we were girls. A fat cat, raccoon-shaped, and pregnant half the time. “Oh, Mitsy.” I try to pick her up, but off she goes, and I am running after her so fast it hurts my side, and then I’m at the farm, back home, and I see Mama hanging out the wash, Papa cutting wood, Thomas circling on the gravel on his old green bike. “I thought the world had ended,” I cry out. “Oh, no,” Mama says. “It didn’t end. They just changed it.” And I run into the house, screaming, “Maudie, Maudie.” I thunder up the stairs. Somehow I know she’s hiding. Underneath the bed. “Maudie, girl, come out now. The world didn’t end. It didn’t end at all.”

The dream circles the kitchen while I make tea. I dress, then I wrap Maudie up and wheel her to the shed. There has never been a slaughter in the house. There won’t be one today. The ground is rough, the paving stones uneven. Once, the wheelchair tips and all but empties Maudie on the ground.

“Now you just pull out this wood support when I say. I’ll hold the hare,” I say.

“Quit telling me. I understand,” Maudie says. “Don’t tell me anymore.”

I wheel Maudie across the raised wood frame of the threshold, a bounce and drop proposition.

“I’ll get up,” she says.

“You sit,” I tell her.

In the end she has to raise herself and take two steps ahead while I lift the metal wheels across the frame.

“Now sit,” I say.

I wheel her over to the table.

“That’s it?” she says.

“That’s it,” I say.

“Humph.”

When Maudie was a little girl, she said “Humph” just like it’s written out, as fully formed as any word. I haven’t heard her say it in I bet 40 years.

Maudie struggles and stands.

I grab the fattest rabbit, sluggish, old, and hold its head beneath the blade, and Maudie raises up out of the chair and reaches out and grabs the ax from the table at her side. She can’t support the weight. The metal head drops like a two-ton anchor pointed at the ground. She stands there without moving, then lifts the old ax inches at a time and brings it down with one clean cut across the rabbit’s neck.

“Fair’s only fair,” she says and slumps back in the chair. She looks awful. She looks dead.

“I ask forgiveness, but I am not sorry.” Maudie glares at me. “I’d do the same again.”

She makes a noise that I don’t like the sound of. Her next words come as gasps, in little puffs of putrid air. “All I ever wanted in this lifetime was to keep you near. Now you go.” She shuts her eyes. “You hear me?”

I look down at the dirt floor and then at the ceiling beams. I don’t look at the rabbit.

“I said, you hear me?” Her left arm starts its thumping twitch.

“I hear,” I say. “I hear.”

Another snippet of my dream. I’m standing on the stone that keeps my dead grandmother firmly underground, up on the mountain out back, and it is the highest mountain in the world. I can see the whole Earth at one time, the splashing ocean, Richmond — a little flyspeck on the plain — and then our farm and it’s enormous.

I float down from the mountain, closer to see me and Maudie sitting with our heads together on the back porch steps. Maudie is about 10 years old, which means I’m 8 or 9 depending on what month it is. We’re dressed in red-and-blue plaid cotton dresses with round white collars and limp ties tied in back. Our shoes, brown Buster Browns, scuffed and dusty, our brown hair, straggly. We’re sitting with our heads together. Maudie’s humming, but we’re in dead earnest, sitting there. We’re making something with our hands. It will have been our lives.

Linda McCullough Moore is the author of the novel The Distance Between (2010) and the short story collection This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon (2011). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including O the Oprah Magazine, House Beautiful, and The Boston Globe. Her last story for the Post was “People in My Life” in the July 2014 issue. For more, visit lindamcculloughmoore.com.

This story is featured in the March/April 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

A Troubling View from Vietnam: 50 Years Ago

Ribbon with the words, "50 Years Ago"In the years since the Vietnam war, the U.S. has repeatedly sent its military into conflicts around the world. But the human and economic toll of these other conflicts is minor when compared with Vietnam.

That war, which was still ramping up 50 years ago, brought about several changes in American thinking. The failure of the Vietnam mission forced the administration to reconsider how it would oppose communism. The endless, seemingly pointless deaths of recruits gave many draft-age Americans a hostile attitude toward their government and authority in general. This attitude, in turn, produced a rift between American youth and its elders. The older generation, which had brought victory to the U.S. in World War II, couldn’t recognize how much had changed in 25 years.

It was the members of that generation who were developing the strategy for the Vietnam War. They believed in the invincibility of our military and the inevitability of American victory. Their faith led them to keep pouring men and money into the fight that achieved little or no progress. By 1967, 8,694 Americans had died in the war, and it hadn’t even reached its hardest years. Before the U.S. withdrew from the country, another 38,000 Americans would be lost.

Not all military personnel were blind to the actual course of the war. You can hear some of their voices in the article “The President’s Next Big Decision,” from the March 25, 1967, issue of the Post. Reporter Stewart Alsop visited a vulnerable, isolated unit near the Demilitarized Zone with guns pointing in all directions. The Marine battalion commander who led him around commented, “Looks kind of like Custer’s last stand, doesn’t it?”

The article shows that some reporters and soldiers already saw that Vietnam wasn’t going to be the short, decisive, or victorious war that Washington expected.

First page of an article
Read “The President’s Next Big Decision” from the March 25, 1967, issue of the Post.

Featured image: From “The President’s Next Big Decision” from the March 25, 1967, issue of the Post. Photo by Michel Renard

Are You Smart Enough to Be a Citizen?

Are you smart enough to be a citizen? That question was posed 71 year ago by Robert M. Yoder. He realized that democracy in the postwar world needed well-educated voters.

In the past, he wrote, there had been little demand for Americans to be well informed. The average American “didn’t have to think hard four times in his lifetime.” The country enjoyed a steady run of breaks that allowed it to “muddle along pretty well even with a population of sleepwalkers.”

But the postwar world brought complicated questions that required thoughtful answers: How could the U.S. feed the starving people of Europe and Asia; how would we face the communist threat; and what were we supposed to do with this mysterious new creature, the International Monetary Fund?

The problems were both “terrifically important and terrifically dull. They may kill, but they don’t interest.” Americans would need to study hard, Yoder wrote, “and it is dry stuff.”

If smart voters were needed in 1946, they’re certainly in demand now. International hacking conspiracies, intricate healthcare proposals, and thorny foreign entanglements are the types of complex problems that average citizens are required to comprehend today. So how have American citizens, and voters, done in educating themselves? Not very well, according to the reports.

In 2010, a report from Yale University uncovered these discouraging facts:

In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 American citizens to take the citizenship test. Nearly 40% failed.

Just how difficult are the questions?

Before answering that question, note that the “civics test” is only one of four different tests an applicant must pass before citizenship is granted.

Applicants must first be able to speak sufficient English to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer during an eligibility interview. Next, they must prove an ability to read English by reading aloud one of three sentences correctly. Then they must write out one of three sentences to prove an ability to write in English. Last, they must answer 6 out of 10 questions taken from a list of 100.

Below are 10 questions from the big list. If your citizenship rested on your ability to correctly answer 6 of them, would you be able to vote in the next election? Click here to see the answers.

  1. What does the Constitution do?
  2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?
  3. How many amendments does the Constitution have?
  4. What is the economic system in the United States?
  5. Who makes federal laws?
  6. The House of Representatives has how many voting members?
  7. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
  8. Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?
  9. What happened at the Constitutional Convention?
  10. Name one U.S. territory.

Too easy? See all 100 questions.

Page for a magazine article
Read “Are You Smart Enough to Be a Citizen” from the September 21, 1946, issue of the Post.

Featured image: A naturalization ceremony at Grand Canyon National Park, September 24, 2010 (Wikimedia Commons, Grand Canyon National Park via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Citizenship Test Answers

These are the answers that the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service will accept for the ten questions we chose.

  1. What does the Constitution do?
    • sets up the government
    • defines the government
    • protects basic rights of Americans
  2. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
    • the Bill of Rights
  3. How many amendments does the Constitution have?
    • 27
  4. What is the economic system in the United States?
    • capitalist economy
    • market economy
  5. Who makes federal laws?
    • Congress
    • Senate and House (of Representatives)
    • (U.S. or national) legislature
  6. The House of Representatives has how many voting members?
    • 435
  7. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
    • 6
  8. Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?
    • provide schooling and education
    • provide protection (police)
    • provide safety (fire departments)
    • give a driver’s license
    • approve zoning and land use
  9. What happened at the Constitutional Convention?
    • The Constitution was written
    • The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution
  10. Name one U.S. territory.
    • Puerto Rico
    • U.S. Virgin Islands
    • American Samoa
    • Northern Mariana Islands
    • Guam

The Art of the Post: How Magazines Revolutionized the Art World

We are pleased to introduce the first of a biweekly column on art and illustration by art critic and historian David Apatoff. David will share exciting and interesting illustrations, reveal colorful stories about Post artists and their methods, and offer insights into why art and illustration are such an important part of our culture. We hope you enjoy it! 

For 10,000 years, artists were hired by the wealthy and powerful. Kings, priests, pharaohs, and popes commissioned art for cathedrals, palace walls, sacred caves, and public spaces.

God touching Adam's finger
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The church was a major sponsor of art for millennia.

Then, gradually, this market for art faded away. Kings began to vanish from the Earth; churches stopped commissioning altar paintings and chapel ceilings; princes no longer hired artists for flattering portraits or murals of glorious military victories. Their castles were handed over to public trusts in exchange for tax deductions.

Artists had to find new places to sell their art.

Page of The Saturday Evening Post
An example of the Saturday Evening Post from 1821. Early magazines used wood engravings to bring images into our homes.

Fortunately, a new breed of sponsor arose to replace those historical patrons of the arts. The growth of capitalism and the invention of the corporation gave private citizens the wealth to commission art. Businesses began purchasing “commercial art.” Even more importantly, new technologies for mass-producing pictures and distributing them to wide audiences enabled working families — whether rich or poor — to enjoy great art in their homes. Rather than compete to become a royal painter, artists could now publish millions of copies of a picture and sell them to large numbers of customers for pennies apiece.

In the 19th century, The Saturday Evening Post was one of a small handful of American magazines, along with Harper’s Weekly, Century, and Life, that were densely printed black-and-white periodicals with wood engravings for illustrations.

By the 20th century, the magazine industry had blossomed into dozens of popular and well-designed color periodicals. Historians have dubbed this the “magazine revolution.” The quality of reproductions, and the newly sophisticated vehicles for delivering them to the public, transformed the economics of art and inspired new bursts of creativity. Public enthusiasm for new pictures grew dramatically as technology for reproducing pictures in magazines improved.

American magazines such as Esquire, American, Life, in a pile
There was an explosion of picture magazines in the early 20th century. Photo by David Apatoff

The Post soon became the most widely circulated magazine in America. This was largely due to editor George Lorimer’s vision of taking advantage of the newly available technologies for printing images.

The most talented artists learned they could become wealthy by creating pictures for the new mass audiences. Illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, J.C. Leyendecker, and Charles Dana Gibson received handsome sums illustrating magazines. Their covers became a popular topic of conversation across the country. The art inside the magazines — ranging from story illustrations to imaginative advertisement pictures — shaped popular taste, too.

Illustration of a man in a yellow shirt
Illustrations for magazine advertisements were also bold and stylish. Clothing advertisement by Bob Peak.

Several of the images created by these illustrators became cultural icons. In this way, the modern magazine became one of the world’s greatest platforms for art.

Great painters of the era aspired to be magazine illustrators. In letters to his brother, Vincent van Gogh praised the quality of illustrations in magazines such as Harpers Weekly and Illustrated London News, and he clipped out their drawings and pasted them in portfolios for further study. The great abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning came to America to become a commercial artist.

As the technologies continued to evolve, the next generation of illustrators was able to make images that moved and spoke. At animation studios such as Disney and Pixar, they painted with computers rather than brushes. Today, illustrators are pioneers in computer games employing virtual reality. But no matter how advanced the technologies become, illustrators continue to look back and gain inspiration from their artistic roots in magazine illustration.

Men in a cafe
Illustrations became bolder and more colorful as technology improved. Editorial illustration by Bernie Fuchs.

With all these changes in the landscape of art, it’s fair to ask: Who was the greatest art patron of the 20th century? If we measure by the size of the audience and the influence of the art, one good candidate is The Saturday Evening Post.

The Post’s circulation in the first half of the 20th century was far greater than the audience enjoyed by any museum or private collection of the period. Every week, the Post delivered a cornucopia of pictures, not just to audiences in big cities but to people in small towns with no museums, libraries, or televisions. Many of its illustrators recognized this fact and took their artistic obligations seriously. Post illustrator Robert Fawcett said, “We represent the only view of art and beauty that millions of people get a chance to see. If we do less than our best, we cheat them.”

For many years, the weekly audience for the Post was larger than the audience for Picasso, Matisse, or any other giants of 20th century modern art. Furthermore, the art in the Post’s illustrations had more of an impact on day-to-day lives, shaping cultural identity and political beliefs in ways that museum artists never did. They drove consumer choices, sold war bonds, persuaded young men to join the army (“Uncle Sam Wants You!”), and affected our standards of beauty, patriotism, love, and ethics. And as Lionello Venturi, the foremost historian of art criticism, has pointed out, “What ultimately matters in art is not the canvas, the hue of oil or tempera, the anatomical structure and all the other measurable items, but its contribution to our life, its suggestions to our sensations, feeling and imagination.”

Uncle Sam pointing at the viewer
James Montgomery Flagg’s Army recruiting poster.

Several fine art critics of the 20th century have argued that in order to be accessible to a wider audience, illustrators sacrificed avant garde art principles, making illustration a lesser art form. But the passage of time has caused experts to re-examine that view. Today, illustration is increasingly respected by museums, academics, and collectors. Meanwhile, so-called “fine” art is viewed by many as esoteric, self-absorbed, and irrelevant. Noted writer and art critic Tom Wolfe said in a speech at the National Museum of American Illustration, “I feel very comfortable predicting that art historians 50 years from now … will look back upon illustrators as the great American artists of the second half of the 20th century.”

As Shakespeare proved, broad appeal to a popular audience is not incompatible with greatness.

A wealth of 20th-century illustration lies behind us, largely unexamined and underappreciated. It is one of my great pleasures to help unearth that art and consider its qualities afresh, on a level playing field with other art forms. I hope you will join me here for an interesting ride.