Tag: 1933 Page 1 of 6

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 12, 1933.

“I wish,” said Jimmie Frise, “I knew of some innocent amusement us summer bachelors could engage in. Something quiet and domestic and not expensive.”

“In times like these,” I said, “we summer bachelors ought to devote our summers, free of family cares, to making a little money on the side.”

“Poker, you mean?” put in Jim.

“No, no, some quiet, gainful occupation.”

“Like raising rabbits or something?” cried Jimmie suddenly.

“Rabbits, by George!” I exclaimed. “There’s an idea.”

“Listen,” exclaimed Jimmie, “with the family all away for July and August, and no kids in the back yard, I bet we could raise enough rabbits, high-class fur-bearing rabbits, to buy a new car by the time the family gets back from the cottage.”

“Say, how often do rabbits multiply?” I asked excitedly. “Isn’t it every ten days or so?”

“I think it’s every two weeks there’s a new litter,” said Jim, who was raised on the farm. “Now, at this time of year, rabbits will be cheap. We could put in perhaps five pair…”

“Make it ten pair,” I said. “Our yards are big.”

“And at the end of two weeks, ten pair will give us a litter of say six each. There’s sixty rabbits each, plus the original ten pair. Then in two weeks more, forty pair will give us two hundred and eighty rabbits…”

“Hold on, Jimmie,” I cried, “you’ve got to let those young rabbits grow up.”

“Rabbits are very prolific,” replied Jim. “I forget how old a rabbit is when it gets married. But it is only a few weeks.”

“Let’s get some information on the subject, anyway, Jim,” I said. “And we can amuse ourselves for the summer, in an innocent and profitable way, watching rabbits multiply in our back yards.”

A day or two later, Jimmie brought into my office a small gentleman with whiskers, said to be one of the biggest rabbit men in Canada. He did look like a rabbit.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I assure you there is nothing you could think of more profitable than rabbit-raising. I predict a big future for the rabbit fur trade this coming winter. Rabbit fur will take the place of seal, coon, muskrat, mink and other costly fashions. If you gents will just raise rabbits this summer and have a good supply of prime rabbits for the fall trade, I assure you, you will turn your money over very nicely.”

“Are they any trouble?” I asked.

“Trouble?” the little man cried. “Are rabbits in the bush any trouble? No, sir, all you do is put them in your yard, throw in a little feed in the morning before you go off to work, and when you come home at night, there will be twice as many rabbits as when you left in the morning.”

“It certainly sounds interesting,” said Jim, “What kind of rabbits do you suggest?”

The best fur rabbit is the white Andalusian Malooka rabbit” said the little man, “and fortunately I have a few pairs I can spare you.”.

Launched On a New Career

“How much do they cost?” I inquired.

“A dollar each,” said the little man. His face twitched just like a rabbit’s.

“What kind of pens will we have to build?” asked Jim.

“No pens,” said the little man. “If your yard, as you say, has a wire fence around it, you need not worry. Just let them loose in the yard.”

“Won’t they destroy the garden flowers?”

“Rabbits don’t eat flowers,” said the little man. “Feed them plenty of lettuce and other rabbit foods, and all they will do will be to eat your grass and keep it cut, thus saving you the work of mowing the lawn.”

“How many could you spare us at a dollar apiece,” said Jim, “assorted sexes?”

“How many would you want?” asked the little man.

“Ten pairs?”

“Each?” said the little man, his face twisting again.

“Yes.”

And the next evening, a motor truck called at Jim’s house and mine, and from a chicken wire cage on the truck, little Mr. Whiskers hauled out twenty rabbits for each of us. They were large, white rabbits with blank expressions. They had crinkled ears and trembling noses, and the first thing I saw one do when we put it in the yard was hop over to the perennial border and bite one of my delphiniums.

“Hi!” I yelled.

But the delphinium fell with a crash, like a lordly Douglas fir, and by the time I had paid the whiskers $20 the delphinium was set upon by the whole twenty, and they consumed it, bloom and all. You could almost hear them snarling like wolves.

I chased into them with a stick and scattered them, and in the pleasant evening, they sat about, all over the lawn, with their backs to me, ignoring me completely.

“They’re a little nervous at first,” called the little man with the whiskers from over the fence. “But they’ll soon get used to you.”

“I thought you said they didn’t eat flowers?” I demanded.

“With a few exceptions,” said the little man. “Well, good evening.”

I sat in the garden chair, armed with a stick, and commenced my career as a rabbit rancher. The white rabbits did look lovely in the twilight, hopping about the garden, hiding amidst the flowers and shrubs, kicking their hind ends up in the air very quaintly. But when I saw another delphinium staggering in the dusk, I got busy with the stick and chased them around for a while until I felt they were ready for bed. Then I left and walked over to Jimmie’s house.

Jim was busy preparing shelter for his twenty rabbits. He had the empty dog kennel, and two old-fashioned round tubs propped upside down on the lawn, with a clothes peg holding up one edge of each tub. He was chasing the rabbits relentlessly, in the hope that they would take shelter either in the dog kennel or under the tubs. But when I arrived at dark, the rabbits were still scampering around the garden and none had taken refuge in the habitations he had prepared.

So we went out to his front steps and sat there for an hour or so smoking and talking about fur prices. When we crept stealthily around to the back garden, there were the rabbits hopping around in the dark, and apparently having a good time, bed or no bed. So I said good-night to Jim and went home. I decided not to look out the back windows at all, but just go to bed with the feeling that all was well.

Like a Battlefield

I was waked early in the morning by a dog barking fiercely, and I leaped out of bed in time to see a strange dog standing outside the fence barking at my rabbits. So I chased him away by shouting from the window and then visited my pets, with a basketful of lettuce, carrots, and some patent fur-promoting feed in a bag which the little man with whiskers had sold me for a dollar.

As the rabbits fed on the lettuce – and it is curious how a rabbit seems only to be playing with his food, when in reality it is vanishing at a tremendous rate – I made a tour of the garden and found not only had the rabbits eaten half my zinnias, all my delphiniums and a whole garage wall of sweet peas, but they had dug holes in some of the flower beds as if they were intent on tunnelling out of my premises altogether. I was looking at one of the holes when I discovered to my delight a litter of eight baby rabbits cuddled at the bottom of the hole.

“Jimmie,” I telephoned excitedly, “come on over! I’ve got my first litter!”

“I’ve got two litters,” replied Jim proudly.

We went to the office feeling a little like bankers.

That evening, Jim had a total of three. litters and I had two. The garden was now dug up like a battlefield, a nasturtium bed that I planned to have at perfection by the time my wife got home from Muskoka was entirely vanished. When Jimmie came around to visit me toward dark, I was sitting in the middle of the garden with a clothes prop, directing traffic and keeping the rabbits on the move past some of my phlox and early chrysanthemums. I set the alarm clock for 5 a.m.

“Jimmie,” I said, “I detect a curious odor in the garden. Do rabbits smell?”

“I don’t imagine,” said Jim. “But now that you mention it, there is a kind of zooey odor, isn’t there?”

The next morning at 5 a.m. I had five litters, and the members of the first litter were already up and hopping about in the general neighborhood of their mother.

I need not dwell on the remainder of the week, except to say that neither Jim nor I went up to the cottage for the week-end. We decided to stay at home and build chicken wire enclosures for our rabbits. We each had garages behind which a chicken wire runway would not be too unsightly. Jim helped with mine and I went over and helped him. We got the rabbits inside the enclosure by the simple device of putting the feed in there and nowhere else.

“That will be better,” said Jim. “Now we can plant a few more flowers and nobody will be the wiser.”

In the morning, when I looked out the back window, I saw nearly forty rabbits hopping all over the garden as usual. They had dug burrows underneath the wire.

That night, when I arrived home, Jim was waiting on my front porch.

“The neighbors,” he said quietly. “Mine have dug into the yards on either side. “How about yours?”

We took a cautious sortie into my yard, and I could see the lady on the east running wildly around her yard with a broom, while in the yard to the west, the head man was sitting on a kitchen chair on the lawn, armed with a shotgun.

“We’ll have to have proper rabbit hutches built,” said Jim, as we crept out the side drive. “There is no use trying to raise rabbits on the cheap.”

“They’ve destroyed the garden anyway,” I said. “I’m not going to waste money on rabbit houses.”

Jim and I ate a lingering supper at a Chinese restaurant down on Bloor St.

The Neighbors Are Heard From

When we came home, my two neighbors were standing in front of their homes waiting for me.

“Sir,” said the neighbor to the west, “I have shot two of your rabbits!”

“Any rabbit that escapes from my property belongs to whoever can get him,” I said.

“They are ruining my garden!” shouted the neighbor.

“I can’t be responsible for rabbits once they are off my property,” I said. “If they get shot, that is their own lookout.”

The lady next door said she had telephoned to her sister in Hamilton to lend her a savage brindle bulldog. It was arriving in the morning.

“I will not be in a position to sue you,” I admitted, “even if the bulldog does catch any of my rabbits. After all, they are trespassing when they leave my premises.”

Both neighbors retired.

“This is going to cost us money,” said Jim.

“I’m going out and talk to those rabbits,” I said, and we parted for the night.

I lost track of all litters. The last count I made showed fifty-five rabbits of all sizes in my yard.

But I was unprepared for what I saw the next morning when I looked out my window, at my wrecked garden, with the chicken wire enclosure sagging, and all dug under with holes.

By a conservative count, there were over a hundred rabbits leaping and frolicking in the dewy grass of my yard!

There is something so horribly silent about rabbits. I wish they would bark or mew or even cough. But there is something ghostly and unreal about a hundred white rabbits filling your yard with lively silence.

What little was left of my garden was out of reach of the rabbits, and they had eaten the bark off all the lilac trees as high as they could reach. Next door, a bulldog was making silent and dogged efforts to push the wire fence down and get at my pets. On the other side, I could see the legs of my neighbor sitting on his back steps, and he had one of those heavy English air rifles resting on his knees. I could see a couple of snow white forms lying along his perennial border.

I went to work without even feeding the rabbits. I hurried out the door and dashed for the bus.

I visited all my friends that night and stayed out until after midnight. I crept into the house and up to bed, and through the open windows came perfume that would never associate with so sweet and delicate a creature as a white rabbit.

In the morning I took a swift glance out the window, and you could not see any yard at all for rabbits!

I dressed and went down and charged from the back door right into the whole herd, armed with a floor mop. I shouted and chased, and the rabbits fell over each other getting to the fences and down the holes. Standing in the centre, I started to count, a well as I could, for rabbits are the least impressionable of all creatures. They ignore you. They do not even take fright for more than two or three hops.

But by the time I had counted along the east fence, down the south and up the west fence as far as where the hollyhock bed had been, I had counted one hundred and thirty-five rabbits. And that was only part of them.

The Old Nerve Cracks

Jimmie appeared tiptoeing down the side drive, and he signalled me to come and get into his car to drive to work. We didn’t want to disturb the neighbors.

“Jimmie,” I whispered, “a hundred and thirty-five! This is terrible. It looks as if we are going to be smothered with rabbits. I had no idea.”

“If you can just keep them till the fall,” said Jim.

“Man, by the fall, this garden will be three feet deep with rabbits!”

“A little patience…” began Jimmie.

“A little patience!” I cried. “How many have you got? Aren’t they getting on your nerves? Aren’t you seeing things at night? Has your appetite left you? Do you see black dots dancing before your eyes?”

I decided to face the problem that night. I had supper at an orange juice place on the way home. When I got in front of my house I lost my nerve momentarily and drove right on past over to Jimmie’s house.

I walked around to the back.

There was Jim with the hose in his hand watering his back lawn. Not a rabbit was in sight. All the borders had been raked and prettied, and what remained of his plants had been fixed up quite handsomely. All the holes and mounds had been levelled.

No rabbits.

I stood dazed at the gate and Jim turned and saw me.

“Where are they?” I asked, for I had expected to see a layer and a half of rabbits in Jim’s yard.

“Oh, they all got out,” said Jim, brightly. “All gone.”

He waved a hand airily, as if he wanted to change the subject.

I looked at Jim. He was flushed. I thought of the enormous increase in my yard. I thought of waking in the morning and seeing more than a hundred and fifty.

“So,” I said. “So.”

I went over and sat down heavily on the lawn bench.

“If you will tell me how you caught them,” I said, “I will forgive you for putting them in my yard.”

“I used my landing net,” said Jim. “My bass net. It took me all the night before last. I caught them in the net and carried them over four or five at a time in the parrot cage. Believe me, Greg, I didn’t know what I was doing! I was desperate. I was not myself. I am sorry I did it, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had ninety rabbits by the night before last.”

“Where do we find that little man with the whiskers?” I asked.

“I’ll telephone him,” said Jim.

The little man called with his truck at my house.

“If I give you these rabbits,” I said, showing him the spectacle of my yard, “will you take them?”

“Who will catch them?” asked the little man, his face twitching as usual.

“I’ll help you,” I said, “and Jimmie.”

“Profit and loss,” said the little man. “It will cost you $5 for my time. But I’ll do it.”

It was ten o’clock at night when we caught the last rabbit in a neighbor’s yard.

“There’s a fortune in rabbits,” said the little man, as we wished him good-night. “But you’ve got to know how to handle them.”

“And us,” said Jimmie.

But the little man climbed on to the truck and drove away in the night without repartee.

By Gregory Clark, illustrated by James Frise, June 17, 1933.

“Nothing,” said Jimmie Frise, “demonstrates the general stupidity of mankind like hitch hiking.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, every hitch hiker goes through the same motions. They even use the same thumb. They thumb with the same gesture. They stand the same way, look the same way, all have the same expressions on their faces. You take a thousand different men, all ages, sizes and shapes, and set them along the side of a road, and instantly, they become as alike as posts in a fence.”

“That’s true,” I admitted.

“The nature of man,” said Jim,” “is to be as alike as dandelions. But the way man has got anywhere has been by being different. Why don’t hitch hikers realize that the way to attract notice and get a lift is by being different?”

“I guess there isn’t much difference possible,” I suggested.

“I bet,” said Jim, “I could get a lift from here to Montreal in less time than it would take me to drive myself.”

“You would make a poor hitch hiker,” I said. “If the first fellow picked you up was going to North Bay and you wanted to go to Buffalo, you’d go to North Bay with him just to be agreeable.”

“No, I’ve got a great idea,” said Jim. “I have a contribution to make to the hitch hiking public, and if you haven’t anything better to do this afternoon, we could investigate the hitchery business.”

“It’s all work,” I said, reaching for my hat.

“Just a minute,” said Jim, setting to work at his drawing board. He took two large sheets of heavy drawing paper, and in bold black printed letters, six inches high, he wrote:

“Give us a lift to Prescott¹.”

“Now,” said Jim, “we take a string, and we fasten these two notices on our backs.”

“Great!”

“And we just get out on the highway, walk right down in the middle of traffic, heading east. Everybody coming from behind sees these signs. It won’t be long until somebody comes along who is going to Prescott. He will see the sign, and instantly, his reaction will be to take us with him. The average driver is not inclined to pick up hitch hikers, because they may be only going to the next village, or a couple of miles down the road. A driver headed for distant parts hates to waste the time stopping to pick up short haul passengers, whereas, if he knows we are going to the same place he is headed, he will be immediately interested in us.”

“By George, Jimmie, I think you have hit on a wonderful idea. It will revolutionize hitch hiking.”

We took our two big signs and got Jim’s car and drove out the highway well beyond the city limits, and then parked at a gas station we know.

“We’ll be back in an hour or two,” said Jim to the gas man.

“Aren’t we going to Prescott?” I asked.

“No, no,” said Jim. “This is an experiment. My idea is that we should see how many times we can get picked up for Prescott between here and Whitby.”

“Won’t the people be sore at us for stopping them?”

“We’ll explain it to them.”

Cars were snoring eastward as we stepped out on the pavement and side by side walked off, our signs staring boldly back at the oncoming traffic.

Fifteen cars went by, and in every case, the cars slowed up while passengers turned and stared back at us.

“We are certainly attracting attention,” I said.

“Sixteen, seventeen,” said Jim. “I’m counting the cars.”

Eighteen came roaring from behind and just as it swept past us, we heard the brakes go on and the big sedan slowed to a stop on the side of the road ahead.

“We’ll take a little ride with him,” said Jimmie. “To get his reactions.”

We ran ahead to the car and the driver, who was alone opened the door with a grin.

“That’s a new idea, boys,” he cried. “And a swell one.”

“Going to Prescott?” asked Jim.

“Through Prescott,” said the driver, who was a small, weasel faced man with glittering eyes. “Do either of you drive a car?”

“We can both drive,” we said.

“This is swell,” said the weasely man.

“You boys might give me a rest by taking the wheel for a spell after we get going.”

“Sure,” said Jim, who loves to drive other people’s cars.

“Hop in,” said the driver.

We hopped in the front seat with him.

He slammed the gears and the big car leaped away.

“What are you boys going to do in Prescott?” asked the stranger.

“As a matter of fact,” said Jim, “we aren’t going to Prescott at all. We are a couple of newspaper men and we are experimenting with this hitch hiking business. We are introducing some new ideas.”

The stranger looked sideways at us.

“Newspaper boys, eh?” he said. “H’m, h’m!”

He put on more speed.

“How far were you figuring on going?” he asked.

“We thought we would see how many lifts we could interest between here and Oshawa or some place.”

The big car started to slow, but instead of taking to the side of the road to let us out, it turned down a side road towards the lake, and as soon as we were out of sight of the highway, the weasely man stopped it, slid quickly and smoothly out of the driver’s seat and when Jim and I looked out at him, he was holding something in his coat pocket. And pointing it in at us!

“I Got a Gun Here”

“Boys,” said the little man, “you are going for a little longer ride than you intended. I got a gun here. I’m getting in the back seat. You two are going to take turns driving me until I get ready to kick you out.”

“Just a minute,” said Jim. But I slid smartly into the driver’s seat.

“That’s right,” said the little man, opening the rear door and hopping nimbly in. “Now no fooling. We are not going through any towns. We are going around all of them. I know the side roads. When I tell you to turn, you turn, get me?”

“Yes, sir,” said I.

“Just a minute,” said Jim.

But the small man tapped him on the back in some way that caused Jim to sit up very straight in the car and close his mouth tightly.

“Now, start her,” said the little man, “and we’ll go down here and around Whitby, see?”

We jogged around the country road, making a detour past both Whitby and Oshawa.

Then we regained the highway and headed east.

“Make it fifty,” said the little man in the back seat.

I made it fifty.

He sat hunched forward, and kept peering in the reverse mirror over my head. Whenever cars overtook us, the little man crouched down in the seat until they were past. He detoured us around Bowmanville, even around the little gas station towns along the highway.

“Slow up,” he commanded sharply. Ahead we could see a brown uniformed man on a motorcycle. “Go around him.”

We took to the country roads again and went right around a township to avoid the motorcycle cop.

Port Hope, Cobourg, Grafton were neatly circled, the towns and villages ticking by as the big car snored on. Jim sat rigid beside me, never opening his mouth. The little man in the rear had nothing to say beyond giving me directions.

“Prescott,” he said, softly. “Give us a lift to Prescott, heh, heh, heh!”

“This is a good joke on us,” I laughed.

“Shut up.” said the little man.

I attended to my driving.

“Anyway-” I said.

“Shut up,” repeated the little man.

He was half standing up staring in the reverse mirror. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see another big car overtaking us.

“Put her up to sixty,” said the little man.

I put her up. It was a good car.

The car continued to crawl nearer.

“Step on it,” said the little man.

“We’re coming to a town,” I called.

“Shut up,” said the little man.

I reached out with my foot and shoved down. The car seemed to lift.

We went through a town that was just a blur of red gas tanks and white shop fronts.

I heard the car behind sounding its horn in a long, steady blast, faint over the sound of the racing engine.

Then the little man placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Easy now,” he said. “We are coming to a bush. As we come into it, I want you to slow her down. Take the left side of the road and make these guys come up on our right side. Easy now.”

The woods swept up to us. I slowed the car, veering to the left of the road, and the car behind rushed alongside of us. I caught a glimpse of men waving and shouting in it, and at the same time felt the draft as the left-hand door opened, and the little man took a flying leap. Just as I slowed to a stop, he vanished like a rabbit into the brush.

In an instant we were being boarded by big angry men who put handcuffs on Jim and me and locked us together.

“Well, hitch hiker?” I sneered at Jimmie.

“Where’s your partner?” asked one of the big fellows.

But already three of them were shouting off into the bush.

Jim and I were sat down on the roadside.

“What’s the idea of them signs?” asked our new boss, examining our backs.

“We’re a couple of hitch hikers and this bird picked us up,” said Jim. “Then he pulled a gun on us and made us drive.”

“That’s a good story,” said the boss.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “we are not hitch hikers at all. We are a couple of newspapermen out getting a story about hitch hiking.”

“Yeah? Why don’t you think up a story that both of you can be stuck with?” asked the boss, taking out a cigar.

“We can prove it,” said I.

“Well, maybe so. But I can prove you were driving a stolen car.”

“Do you think your friends will catch that little guy?” I asked anxiously.

“You’ll do, even if they don’t catch him,” said the boss.

Presently, the three other men came out of the woods bringing the little weasely man with them.

“Here,” I commanded, as they brought him close, “tell these gentlemen to turn us loose! Tell them you picked us up on the highway.”

“What are giving us?” cried the little man in astonishment. “I tell you, gentlemen, these two men picked me up outside of Oshawa where I signalled them for a lift. When I saw by their actions and their conversation that they were crooks, I naturally jumped out of the car when it slowed, and tried to hide on you. Just human instinct.”

“He had a gun.” I yelled.

“Nonsense,” said the little man, angrily. “If I’d had a gun I would have forced them to stop, wouldn’t I?”

He looked the picture of outraged innocence.

“These birds,” said the big man who had stayed with Jim and me, “say they are hitch hikers. Then they say they are newspaper guys. Now, gents, just reach in and show us some identification.”

Jim reached into his pocket and felt around. The first thing he found was his little pass to the race track, a sort of little round book on a string.

“Here you are,” he said.

The cop took the pass and read the name on it.

“Lou Marsh²!” he read, staring at Jim.

“Wait a minute,” cried Jim. “I borrowed Lou’s pass.”

“Oh, you borrowed it, huh!”

They put another set of handcuffs on Jimmie and pushed us into the stolen car.

“This is Clark and I’m Frise,” shouted Jim, as we were being bundled in. “We can prove it.”

“Never heard of you,” said the boss cop. “Get in and tell it to the judge.”

“Can I go now?” asked the weasely little man in an injured voice. “I got to be in Prescott to see my old mother who is dying. I’m just a poor man hitch hiking my way home to see my old mother.”

“Do we need this guy?” the cops asked each other, sympathetically.

“Bring him along just as evidence against these two,” they decided.

It was supper time, so we stopped in Grafton for sandwiches. The cops brought them out to us in the car.

Jim always makes sketches in villages for use in Birdseye Center. He took the card off my back and with his handcuffs on, made a few sketches on the back of it.

The cop sitting in with us sat up and watched. He called the others over.

“What did you say your name was?” asked the boss.

“Frise,” said Jim.

“Oh, I thought you pronounced that Freeze,” said the boss³. “I didn’t get you at first. Wait a minute till I take off them bracelets so you can draw better.”

He unlocked the cuffs.

“Draw him,” said the boss, referring to one of his large colleagues. “Make him look like Pigskin Peters in that derby.”

There we were parked on the roadside, with several of the villagers coming and looking in the windows.

“Draw old Archie,” said another of the cops.

And that was the way Jimmie drew us out of the jam.

“You say this little bird here picked you two up in this car?” asked the boss.

“He did,” we said.

The little weasely man knew when he was cooked. He had art, but it wasn’t as good as Jimmie’s.

“Oh, all right,” he said. They took the handcuffs off me and put them on him.

So they drove us home to Toronto, and on the way, I took the sign off Jim’s back, turned it over and printed on it:

“Give us a lift to TORONTO.”

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on June 22, 1940 as “Sign Language”.

1. Prescott Ontario is about 350 km east of Toronto. ↩︎
2. Lou Marsh was the Sports Editor of the Toronto Star in 1933. Since he died in 1936, they had to change the name to Andy Lytle for the 1940 reprint. ↩︎
3. I make the note on the website that it is pronounced “fries”. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 9, 1933.

“How,” asked Jimmie Frise over the telephone the other evening, “do you like oysters?”

“Love them,” I replied.

“Come on over!” cried Jimmie. “Some- body has sent me a whole barrel of oysters from the maritimes.”

“In their shells?” I asked, excitedly.

“How else would they send them?” retorted Jimmie.

“Well,” I explained, “you see those jugs of naked oysters out in front of the grocery stores.”

“These are in the shells,” said Jimmie. “Come on over. I’ve selected about forty of the best ones and I’ve got them in the sink.”

“It’s only an hour since dinner,” I said, “but I’ll come over.”

There was Jim in his kitchen. His shirt sleeves were rolled up. And with a small brush he was scrubbing the shells of a sink full of the loveliest great big oysters you ever saw. Through the open back kitchen door I could see a huge barrel, foretelling feasts for nights, to come.

“Grab that other nail brush,” cried Jim, “take off your coat and lend a hand here. We’ve got to scrub them nice and clean under the tap first. And then we’ll open them up and we’ll each have a platter of twenty oysters in the ice box. How’s that?”

“Twenty is my lucky number in oysters,” I said, removing my coat.

With the cold tap running merrily and Jim and I scrubbing the coarse, rugged shells of the oysters, our appetites began to stir, even though it was only a little after eight o’clock.

“I wonder,” said Jim, “who the intrepid hero was who first ate an oyster?”

“It was likely one of our cave-men ancestors,” I said, “because eating oysters is as old as the hills. They find heaps of oyster shells in the ruins of ancient cities, and even in the caves in which primitive man dwelt.”

“Maybe,” said Jimmie, holding up and polishing a particularly huge oyster, “it was eating oysters that started man on the upward climb from the half gorilla to what we are to-day.”

“Perhaps we ought to feed oysters to those of us that are still gorillas,” I suggested.

Oysters Not Prepossessing

“Still,” said Jim, speculatively, “I’d like to know how the very first man came to eat an oyster, because, until you get to know an oyster, it isn’t a very prepossessing creature. You don’t feel drawn toward an oyster at first sight as you do toward a roast partridge.”

“I reckon,” I said, as I scrubbed a nice fat-shelled one, “that some poor starving cave man, or maybe it was a poor starved cave girl, was walking along the sea shore one day and she saw the sea birds digging the oysters out of the mud, when the tide was down, and dropping them from a height on to the rocks and then gobbling the cold, salty oysters when the shell broke. Probably, if it was a poor starved cave girl, she shuddered and closed her eyes as she gulped down the first one. Then, opening her eyes in astonishment and joy, she dashed down to the beach and grabbed huge armfuls of oysters, and rushed back to the rocky shore and cracked them open and guzzled them down. I bet one thing, and that is that the first person ever to eat an oyster probably holds the world’s record for the number eaten at one sitting.”

“I bet she was a nice girl,” mused Jimmie.

And when she returned to the cave,” I went on, “all swollen up with oysters, and beginning to look more beautiful already, everybody, caveman and cavewoman, began wondering at the marvellous improvement in her. Day by day, as she continued to eat her new-found food, she grew lovelier, her chin got bigger, the coarse hair all over her began to moult off, and inside of a year, she was walking upright all the time. Hardly ever walking on all fours.”

“The beginning,” said Jim, scrubbing away.

“And then the secret was out, and the whole cave colony started eating oysters, crying ‘oy, oy,’ hence the name oysters,” I recounted. “And this tribe became so strong and powerful that they conquered all the surrounding tribes. Of course, this is ages ago, Jimmie. Long before history began. But each tribe they conquered, they introduced to oysters, and so began the rise of man from a mere meat-eating beast to an oyster-eating epicure.”

“Let’s,” said Jimmie, “scrub up a few more. You could eat thirty, couldn’t you?”

“Make it the even three dozen,” I suggested.

So Jimmie went out to the barrel and dug out another heap of oysters for the sink.

“It’s a long cry,” said Jim, as we started in scrubbing the new lot, “from the cave-men sitting in the tidal mud guzzling oysters to shipping a barrel of oysters a thousand miles, in a refrigerator car, to the descendants of the cave-men standing beside fresh running water out of a tap, in a modern kitchen.”

“Lit with electricity,” I said.

“And with a mechanical ice box to chill them,” said Jim. “But isn’t it funny how few new things to eat we have discovered? I guess our ancestors were great explorers in the realm of food, even if they didn’t discover North America until just lately.”

“With my delicate stomach,” I said, “I shudder to think of some of the things my ancestors must have eaten.”

“Or tried to eat,” added Jim.

It was now nine o’clock.

“Well,” said Jim, gazing fondly at the huge pile of beautifully scoured oysters heaped on the drain board beside the sink, “let’s open them.”

“Where’s your oyster knife?” I asked.

“I’ve no oyster knife,” said Jim. “I got a couple of screw drivers. They’ll do.”

He produced two screw drivers, a short one and a long one, from the pantry drawer. And he laid out two large platters on the kitchen table.

“No cheating now,” said Jim. “Take them as they come, large and small. And we’ll each fill our own platter.”

I picked up a chubby one. I looked for a good place to insert the screw driver. But an oyster is a very deceitful creature. Instead of having one clear-cut crack down its side, it has itself concealed with a half a dozen or more cracks, each one of which looks like the right one.

I shoved. Scraped. Tried here. Tried there.

“H’m,” said Jimmie. I looked at him, and he was standing over under the kitchen. light, narrowly examining his oyster.

“They’re awfully tight, aren’t they?” he said.

“It’s a trick,” I explained. “Once you find the hinge, it’s nothing to open them. I’ve seen a good oyster bartender open a dozen in two minutes. Just like that.”

“Have you ever opened any yourself?” asked Jimmie.

“I seem to have,” I said, “but I can’t recall.”

“Your unconscious memory, from your cave men ancestors,” said Jim, laying his oyster down and coming over to watch me. I laid the oyster down on the drain board, pressed with all my weight on one hand, while I gouged with the screw driver.

“Try the other side,” suggested Jim.

I turned it over and tried the other side.

The screw driver slipped and I gave myself a nasty gouge on the hand I was pressing with.

“Ouch!”

Jim got the iodine and some gauze upstairs and bandaged my left hand.

“I’ll get the hang of it,” said Jimmie, taking my place at the drain board.

He took a fresh oyster. It had a more innocent look than the first one. Jim studied it. He placed the screw driver against the most vulnerable point. He shoved. He twisted. He wiggled and jabbed.

“Ouch,” said Jimmie. He had cut himself. So I bandaged him.

“What we need,” I said, “is an oyster knife.”

So Jim went to the hall and telephoned half a dozen neighbors, but none of them had an oyster knife.

Jim came back and with the screw driver, he chipped off the edge of a new oyster, a still more childish and smooth-faced one. And then he peered along the chipped edges. But there was no sign of any relaxation.

It was now nine-twenty o’clock.

“If we are going to have an oyster supper,” said Jimmie, “we ought to get busy and open some of these.”

“It was your suggestion,” I reminded him.

Bending down and jamming the oyster firmly against the corner of the wall and the drain board, Jim inserted the screw driver, and slowly, relentlessly, he shoved and twisted the blade of the tool at the place in the oyster shell where there is a kind of hollow.

“Nnnhhh!” he grunted.

The screw driver slipped. Jim’s hand slammed up against the corner, with the oyster and screw driver hopelessly mixed up in the collision. And there was another hunk of skin off his one good hand.

“Bandage me,” said Jim. “Now I’m out of action!”

So while Jim stood by with two bandaged hands, I, with my remaining hand, decided to approach the problem with intellect rather than with physical force.

I sorted through the pile of oysters, seventy-two of them, all scrubbed and ready for the feast, until I found one that seemed the silliest, goofiest, Oliver Hardy¹ sort of an oyster in the whole heap.

Placing it in the corner of the drain board, with its back to the wall, I crept the screw driver into its hinge, and with a slow, prying pressure, I suddenly got a slight squirt of juice out of the edge.

“Hurray!” I shouted.

Another pry and twist.

And there, in its pearly glory, lay the, oyster, open and above board.

We beamed on it. We held it under the light. We smelled it. Boy, how cool and lovely it smelt!

“Let’s eat it right now,” said Jim, “to give us courage!”

“How could we both eat one oyster?” I exclaimed, scornfully.

“You take that round fat bit,” said Jim, “and I’ll take the ears, or whatever that crinkly part is.”

“Nothing doing,” I stated. “I eat an oyster whole. You won’t catch me dissecting any oyster. I’ve got the hang of it now, and in no time I’ll have the platters filled.”

But I was sanguine. I had to pass up three more before I got another one open. And after I got it laid bare, five more defied me before the accident happened.

It was very brief and simple. My hand slipped. And there was I with my right hand cut, too. And Jimmie was bandaging it, after a dash of iodine.

“Now,” said Jim, “where do we go? We’re both out of action.”

Because, really, you can’t open oysters with your hands wrapped up like a hobo’s feet in winter. “Let’s eat these two to start with, anyway.”

So Jim ate one and I the other, with careful and delicate applications of lemon juice, salt, pepper and ketchup.

“Mmmmm,” we said. Glurp. Plop. The oysters were ours.

We both tried to continue the opening, with our bandaged hands, but somehow we were too clumsy.

The Original Way

“I tell you,” cried Jimmie. “Let us resort to the ancient and original way of opening them. The way our cavemen ancestors, the discoverers of oysters, did!”

“How’s that?” “With a hammer!” said Jim. “They used rocks. But we’ve got hammers. Don’t tell me there isn’t some advance in civilization.”

So Jim got a hammer and a big heavy monkey wrench.

We laid the oysters on the drain board. But that only made big ugly nicks in the wood, and he was afraid his wife might complain.

“In the cave days,” explained Jim, “what a wife thought didn’t matter.”

He went outside and brought in two bricks, which we washed thoroughly, and then, squatting down on the kitchen floor, like the men of old must have done along the tidal shores, Jim and I proceeded to open oysters. It is not, I might say, the correct way. After hitting the oyster eight or ten times too lightly, you hit it one awful smash too hard, and there you have oyster squashed all over the brick, with broken shell imbedded in it.

After half an hour’s pounding, which caused neighbor’s dogs to howl and no doubt a lot of the neighbors to come and peer out their back windows, Jim had five oysters that were recognizable as such, and I had four. Of course, they weren’t on the half shell. We had to pick up the remains as best we could and carry them to the tap and wash off the brick dust and pick out the shell fragments. And then we put them in a tumbler. So to all intents. and purposes, we had those naked oysters such as you see in front of the grocery stores.

Anyway, such as it was, we held our oyster supper, after putting the rest of the seventy-two back in the barrel.

They went pretty good, too, although there was a mild flavor of iodine, and some slight trouble with shell splinters, and if there is any trick trickier than holding an oyster in your mouth while you feel around for a shell splinter with a bandaged hand, I don’t know it.

“This proves one thing,” said Jimmie, as we sat back from the feast. “And that is, we aren’t the men our ancestors were.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Every man to his trade. All we’ve got to do is go and take a few lessons from some chef.”

“From what I’ve seen of the art of opening oysters,” said Jim, “I imagine it is a life’s work. Maybe they have high-paid officials in the restaurants. Oyster openers. With fancy costumes. Maybe oyster opening is one of those family secrets, handed down from father to son.”

“It’s quite an art,” I said, imagining I felt a sharp stab inside of me from a splinter I had not detected.

“The problem is,” said Jim, “what am I going to do with all that barrel full of oysters?”

“You’ve got a lot of friends,” I reminded him. “They would just love a couple of dozen oysters, fresh from the sea.”

“I guess that’s the solution²,” said Jimmie.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on February 17, 1940 as “Sea Shells”.

1. Of the famous Laurel and Hardy duo. ↩︎
2. Or just buy an oyster knife… ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 24, 1933.

“Jimmie,” I said, “this Hitler business in Germany ought to teach us a lesson.”¹

“Which way?”

‘Well, you never can tell when people will get tired of things the way they are and suddenly turn everything upside down and the first thing you know somebody will be trying to make you and me drink castor oil because of our beliefs. Or they will invade our houses and squeeze our fingers in the door crack. Or beat us up.”

“Wouldn’t we be on the other side?” asked Jim.

“Oh, no, we’re capitalists,” I said. “We live by our wits.”

“What is the lesson?” asked Jim.

“The lesson Hitler teaches,” I said, “is that in times like this, every man ought to know the principles of self-defence. Every man ought to be able to take care of himself, quietly, neatly and efficiently.”

“I have two shotguns and one rifle,” said Jim.

“No, no!” I cried. “Guns are too noisy. And anyway, you would soon run out of shells. I am talking about boxing. The manly art.”

“At our age?” asked Jim scornfully.

“I’m not talking about making money at it,” I explained. “I am merely suggesting that we ought to take lessons in boxing, so as to know where to hit a guy so it hurts. Right now, if I got into an argument, all I would do would be clinch.”

Jim looked at me with one of those poker face expressions he assumes when he is having a funny idea.

“I wouldn’t mind taking a few boxing lessons,” he said. “With you.”

So we asked Lou Marsh² where we could. find a gentlemanly prize-fighter who would teach us the rudiments of fighting.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lou. “Is somebody’s brother laying for you?”.

“Oh no, just exercise,” we said. So Lou telephoned a fellow named Harry “Dirty Neck” Mulligan, who kept a small gymnasium in the cellar of his house on Berkeley St., and arranged for us to take our first lesson the next evening.

“Do we need to buy costumes?” we asked Lou.

“Oh, no. Just strip to your shorts,” said Lou.

Dirty Neck Mulligan was not a big, thick, short-necked man with a pug face, as we expected. He was a slim, foreign-looking young man with what appeared to be two glass eyes. Their expression never changed. He was pale and dead looking. He spoke with a cold in his head, and invited us down cellar.

“Gents,” he said, ‘to-night we will learn the position first. Just stand opposite each other, put your left foot forward balance easily on both feet, and now take this position with your arms.”

And he stood in the boxer’s pose, weaving and swaying with a curious snake-like rhythm. We imitated him.

“Youse Guys are Soft”

For ten minutes he explained positions, and lectured us on the broad general principles of defence.

“You must practise this position all week,” said Dirty Neck. “Get your waist muscles loosened up. Sway. Stretch. Get on your toes. Youse guys are pretty old, but I think I can make youse at least a couple of imitations.”

Jim and I practised shadow boxing at each other, but of course, not touching.

“Another thing,” said Dirty Neck, “youse guys have got to get used to being hurt and not minding. Just let me show youse a thing or two here.”

He squared off in front of Jimmie.

“Now,” said Dirty Neck, “see if you can stop me hitting you. It won’t hurt.”

Jim put up his guard. Dirty Neck just flicked out one hand, there was a loud slap and Jim fell back against the cellar wall with a look of astonishment on his face.

“Now, you,” said Dirty Neck, dancing in front of me.

“Easy, there,” I said, putting up my arms which seemed to have become as thin as soda straws as I waved them all over in front of me, wishing I had arms like a centipede. I didn’t see anything. I just felt a stinging slap on my jaw and I joined Jim against the cellar wall.

We got dressed. We paid Dirty Neck a dollar apiece³ and practically without a word, we went up and got in the car and drove away.

About six blocks off, Jim said:

“I didn’t see it.”

“It was his open hand,” I said.

“If he can teach us to do that,” said Jim, “and with our fist closed, we could knock a man six feet off the ground.”

“I never felt anything like it in my life,” I admitted. “It didn’t hurt. It just was sort of numb.”

“That’s it,” said Jim. “Numb.”

All week, Jim and I went turn about to each other’s cellar after dinner and in our underwear practised positions, shadow boxed and limbered up our waist line, and then we went back to Dirty Neck’s for our next lesson. He had a little fellow about my size there who looked as if he had been through a stone crusher at some time or other.

“Meet Mr. McGiverin,” said Dirty Neck. So McGiverin took me and Dirty Neck took Jimmie and with gloves on we boxed slow motion, each position being explained, each blow, each place to hit for, while at the same time, covering up with the other forearm.

“Youse guys,” said Dirty Neck, “are soft. Between now and the next lesson, you got to do some road work. Every night, you got to go down to Sunnyside and run a mile.”

The evening ended with McGiverin, with his mouth slightly open showing his broken teeth, batting me all over the cellar while Dirty Neck slapped Jimmie up against all the walls of the cellar and finally punching him, laughingly, into the coal bin.

“Just a little work-out,” explained Dirty Neck as he helped Jimmie to his feet, and as McGivvern sat me down on a box to stop the whirling.

Jim and I religiously got up at 6 a.m. all week and did a fast half hour walk. And after dinner, we went down and alarmed all the beachcombers at Sunnyside by running steadily from the Humber to the Exhibition Grounds.

The next lesson, Dirty Neck and McGiverin, whose first name was Boo, on account of the reception he used to get when he was in the fighting business, gave us another lesson and then faced Jim and me off to each other, they acting as seconds.

“He’s got the reach on me,” I protested.

“Work for the body,” said Boo. “If youse guys are learning the art of self-defence, you won’t always be matched with a guy your own weight, will youse?”

We admitted that. And squared off.

Jim spotted me several on the beezer, as they call the nose and I socked him several just where his ribs curve up to join on his chest.

Then, second round, Jim made one of those short, snappy punches straight out, and I happened to be wiping my nose with my mitt, the way the experts do, so this punch slid off sideways, hurt my eye severely and sort of snapped my head backwards. I was dazed for an instant, and then I got mad.

“Git mad!” hissed Boo, as I staggered back.

But I was already that way.

I crept at Jimmy and wove around him, watching for an opening. Jim had a queer grin on his face. It irritated me. I aimed at the grin and before it got there I felt something catch me low down and lift me in the air. Boo caught me, and when I got my breath back, I shouted:

“He kicked me!”

Dirty Neck just laughed.

“With a nice one to the body,” he sneered.

“Git mad!” hissed Boo, steadying me on my feet.

“How do you think I am?” I snarled.

I made a rush at Jim and swung for his body, to give him the same as he gave me. Jim landed two quick ones on my mush, and I was pushed back as if he had shoved me. Again Boo steadied me.

“Don’t swing,” he said.

I pulled myself together and crouched down. I circled around Jim, who was leaning back, his arms weaving.

I made a feint at his middle and was just drawing back to sock him, when everything stopped, darkness fell, I was swept softly and sweetly away on a sort of cushion, and the heavens were filled with bright stars and music seemed to fill the firmament.

When I came to, Jim and Dirty Neck and Boo were all kneeling around me, slapping me with wet towels.

“Ah,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Jim. “Gee, I’m sorry!”

“It’s all in the game,” said Dirty Neck.

“Sure, it’s all in the game,” I repeated, and it was quite a lot of trouble to smile. But I was a good fellow. I reassured Jimmie that it was quite all right and that next time I would put him to sleep.

When we got home, I had a black eye. and my wife was very angry with me. We had several engagements the next few nights and how could we keep them now? I stayed home from the office next day and my eye got green, my body felt as if I had been blown up by a shell, my head ached and I had all day to sit there and think about Jimmie.

That night I telephoned to Dirty Neck and asked him to get McGiverin to give me a ring. McGiverin called on the phone later and I explained the scheme to him.

“You get here about seven o’clock,” I said. “Jimmie will arrive about seven-thirty.”

I called Jim and asked him to come over and have a workout next evening. McGiverin arrived at seven and I took him down cellar and hid him in behind the furnace.

Jim came about eight-fifteen, which is the best seven-thirty he ever did in his life, and we sat around while he explained to me how sorry he was he knocked me out. A big fellow like him.

We boxed a little, friendly, and shadow-boxed and took it easy until it began to get dark.

“Jimmie, I said, “the great thing we are trying to do, after all, is not to learn prize-fighting, but to learn how to look after ourselves in case of trouble.”

“We’re learning,” said Jim.

“Well, here we are shadow-boxing and sparring. But just for fun,” I said. “let’s turn the lights out and have a tussle in the dark. You have got the advantage of me in size, but with the lights out we could see how far we’ve got in the business of taking care of ourselves.”

Be Sure Your Gang’s With You

To my delight, Jimmie agreed at once. He seemed eager for it.

“It’s just a little variety,” I explained, as I went out of the fruit cellar into the hall to turn off the switch. And to give McGiverin the signal.

I turned off the light and opened the furnace cellar door. McGiverin leaped out and I led him back into the pitch-dark fruit cellar. I proposed to wait at the door until McGiverin went in and found Jimmie and then I could lean up against the door and listen to the fun.

But as I reached the door I got a stinger right on the nose.

“Hey!” I cried. “Not so sudden, Jimmie. Wait until we both get in the room and I say ready, go.”

“Oh, all right,” said Jim, in the dark.

“Ready, go!” I called, leaping for the door.

I heard a couple of grunts and a thud, and then I felt an arm go around my neck in the dark and I was yanked right into the middle of the fruit cellar. I got down on my knees and started to crawl for the door again when two arms got me under the arms and hoisted me to my feet and I was sent staggering into the corner with a jolt on my chest. And all the while the room was fairly hissing with thuds, grunts, sniffs and the other music of the manly art.

“Hey!” I hissed, to give McGiverin the sign that he was busy with the wrong man.

And as I hissed a glove socked me right on my sore eye.

So I started to punch in all directions. Every punch hit something and every punch I got spun me the length of the cellar. I could hear thuds and gasps, I was pushed over, stepped on, punched, hoisted, and I realized something had gone terribly wrong.

In the midst of it all, as I tried to get my directions so as to reach the hall and turn on the light, I heard a creak and a groan and then an awful, long-drawn-out crash as the fruit shelf collapsed and about a hundred jars of pickles, fruit and preserves landed on the cellar floor.

I got to the hall. I snapped on the light.

And there was Jim amidst the crockery.

And there was Boo McGiverin sitting on the floor.

And there, standing in the middle of the room, his lean chest heaving, and his two glass eyes fixed on Boo McGiverin, stood Dirty Neck Mulligan.

“Dirty Neck!” I cried.

“You bum!” said Boo from the cellar floor.

We heard feet running upstairs, so I knew we would be in trouble in a few seconds.

“Grab your clothes,” I cried, leading for the cellar stairs.

We got out the alley and into Jim’s car. We drove around the corner and then parked under a street lamp. We still had our gloves on and four of us were half-dressed and panting and sniffing.

“Double crossed,” said I.

“I figured it out,” said Dirty Neck, proudly. “When you called up for McGiverin I telephoned Mr. Frise, and he and I figured what you were up to.”

“I didn’t think you would offer to fight in the dark,” said Jim. I thought you would accidentally break the light or have the power go off.”

“So Dirty Neck?”

“Dirty Neck was waiting at the top of the cellar stairs,” said Jim, “with instructions to come down the minute the light went out.

“Well,” I said, “my eye is closing again.”

“Sorry,” said McGiverin. “That was me that done that. When I found it was a pro beating on me I thought you had framed me.”

“The lesson of this,” said Jim, at the wheel, “is if Hitlerism ever gets going here make sure you got your gang with you.”

 And they let me out at my side drive to go back and peek through the fruit cellar window.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. At the time of this article, Adolf Hitler had become German chancellor, the Reichstag was set on fire, and the Enabling Act was enacted giving the Nazis absolute control. Obviously Greg and Jim had no idea what this would lead to. ↩︎
2. Lou Marsh was the Toronto Star’s Sports editor at the time. ↩︎
3. $1 in 1933 would be $23 in 2025. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 25, 1933.

“Marlene Dietrich,” said Jim Frise, “has taken to wearing men’s clothes, hats, trousers, everything.”

“She looks lovely,” said I. “I saw her picture in The Star.”

“That’s the point,” said Jim. “She looks lovely. She dresses up like a man, but she only looks like a pretty woman dressed up in men’s clothes.”

“Well, what of it?” said I.

“If she dressed like a man and looked like a man there would be some point to her dressing funny. I don’t see,” said Jim, “that we should pay any attention to her when she still just looks like a woman.”

“You don’t understand human nature,” said I.

“Of course I do,” cried Jim. “If Marlene Dietrich dressed up like a man and looked like a man there would be some point in printing her picture all over the country.”

“Well, anyway, she couldn’t,” said I.

“I bet,” said Jim, “I could dress up like a woman and really look like one.”

“With a wig and a lot of powder and paint,” I admitted.

“No, no,” said Jim. “I mean I could just put on a woman’s clothes and one of those tin pot hats they wear and I could walk through the streets and everybody would think I was a woman.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Listen,” said Jim, “I bet you $5¹ we could both do it.”

Which is a double-edged kind of a bet!

I offered to be his gentleman friend if Jim would dress up and walk down Bay street with me. But Jim thinks we never get the full flavor out of an adventure unless we both take part in it.

Over on Queen street west Jim found a store where they had hundreds and hundreds of women’s second-hand coats and hats and dresses where the gentleman in charge would gladly rent us an outfit for an afternoon for $1 each and a deposit of $10.

So after lunch Jim and I crept off to Queen street west and in the back room of this strange and jumbled store changed into ladies’ clothes.

Jim selected a green cloth coat with fur collar, a small brown hat that pulled down well over his head, a kind of shapeless old Jersey dress of a color neither gray nor brown. I think the owner said it was booge. We decided to keep on our own underwear and socks.

“How about shoes?” I asked. “I wouldn’t try to walk in those high-heeled things.”

“Come on,” said Jim; “they would add to your height.”

“Do I Look Like a Lady?”

I chose an old fur coat, imitation seal, a red dress that was long enough to hide rather noisy socks, and a beautiful hat. It did not pull down over my head like a pillowslip on a pillow. It sat well up. It had plumes and flowers on it and was a little large, perhaps, for the present day pancake style. But it gave me a certain dignity.

The only shoes I could find that I felt safe in, with high heels, were a little shabby. In fact, when I stood in front of the mirror I looked a little like a cartoon in Punch of a lady from Limehouse².

“Now,” said the owner of the store, “gents, if there was only a public meeting for you to break up–“

“Do I look like a lady?” asked Jim.

“You certainly do,” said the owner. “All you need is some sort of handbag.” And he gave Jim a large parcel carrier of black oilcloth trimmed with red.

After a little practice walking up and down the store in the wobbly shoes and parading in front of the old mirror in the back room, Jim and I decided to go to the big department stores and do a little shopping.

Out on Queen street there were Chinese, Macedonians, cigarette-butt-picker-uppers, old men with beards, urchins, ladies of color³. But nobody paid us the compliment of a glance.

My feet were chilly and as I don’t wear garters I felt my socks slipping down a little on my underwear⁴, and I feared the dignified effect of the large hat and the seal coat was somewhat spoiled by a dowdy appearance at the extremity. The pavement was wet and the old shoes flip-flopped on the pavement. But old Jimmie was beautiful. He strolled along with little steps, pausing to look in the windows, and he never made the mistake even of looking at a cigar store window or a pet shop. He spent three minutes peering into a lingerie window.

“This is the first time,” said Jim, “I have ever had a real look in one of these windows.”

“I ought to step in and get a pair of garters,” I mumbled to him.

Farther along Queen, as we neared the department stores, a gentleman who was slightly brewed⁵ swayed over toward us. “Get out o’ me way!” he growled, hilariously.

Jim and I drew ourselves up the way ladies do and glared at him.

“You look like my wife,” said the gentleman, mildly astonished.

“Which of us?” asked Jim in a high voice.

“Are there two of you?” asked the gentleman.

“Can’t you see me?” I demanded in my own voice, which has still got the old army whisper in it, like a rip-saw.

And the gentleman, after a sudden stagger, hurried into a doorway on Queen street and hid.

A policeman stopped and looked sternly at us, so Jim and I walked on, a little unsteadily on account of the shoes, and headed for the stores.

We had a grand afternoon. We visited the basement and looked at all the things we had never had any reason to look at before, household utensils, kitchenware in red, blue and green, big wicker clothes baskets. Ladies’ wear, perfume, drapes, furnishings! China, fancy goods, my goodness! We priced everything. We got into dandy arguments with salesladies, especially the elderly ones.

We had an afternoon. We didn’t buy anything, but we saw and felt and fingered and patted more things in one afternoon than we had in a lifetime.

And about a quarter to five Jim said we ought to go and turn our clothes in at the store and get our deposit back.

We went out on to Queen street again, and we walked along in the dense crowd, our feet pretty weary, the big muscles on the backs of our legs aching, but there was life in the old gals yet.

There was a store with dresses in the window and a very pretty girl with gold hair looking out.

“Let’s go in and have a fight with her,” said Jim.

So, perhaps a little draggly looking, we stepped into the store.

As we closed the door the girl with the gold hair, with that perfectly cold look that women give to women and which men scarcely ever see, walked over to us and said:

“This way, please.”

She was an extremely good-looking girl. We followed her to the back of the store, into a dark and shabby hall, up a rickety old wooden stairs and along an upper hall. Jim and I click-clacked up after the pretty girl. We were a little wheezy.

“In there,” said she.

We stepped, not into a lovely fitting room, but into a dim and untidy small room filled with pails, brooms, mops, scrubbing brushes and smelling of strong soap.

Over a sort of sink a large, angry man was bending in his shirt-sleeves.

“Hurry up,” he yelled. “Hang your coats up and get busy.”

“What’s the idea?” asked Jim. And as he had been practising a high voice all afternoon he still used it. It was slightly cracked.

“Come on, get goin’; don’t you know four-thirty is the time you should get here?”

He whirled suddenly and took a fierce step toward us.

“Hey!” he roared. “Off with the coats!”

It was not a time to do anything hasty, so we took off our coats and hung them on nails on the wall.

I started to take off my hat, but Jim eyed me not to.

“Where are your aprons?” yelled the large, bleary man.

“We didn’t bring any,” squeaked Jim in his old lady voice.

“Didn’t bring none?” corrected the big man. “Here!”

And he yanked a couple of gray and terrible aprons off the wall and threw them at us.

“What a pair of birds you are!” howled the big man. “I’ll speak to Adams about this. Pick ’em up and come on.”

He led us down the dismal hall, we carrying pails and mops he had thrust at us, and went into the front store, where the girls were covering up the dresses with sheets and the girl with the gold hair was fixing her hair at a mirror.

“Start at the front and work back,” said the big man. “Get your hot water there.”

When a Lane Comes in Handy

Jim and I had not had a chance to converse, so I filled my pail and Jim crowded up behind.

“How far is this going?” I asked Jim under cover of the tap.

“I didn’t like to reveal ourselves as men to that bird,” said Jim. “You don’t know what he might have done. He might have flung us down those stairs. We’d have torn the clothes and lost our deposit.”

I stood aside to let Jim fill the pail.

“Are we going to scrub?”

“For a little while,” said Jim. “Then one of us can take sick and the other of us will have to see us home or something.”

We went back into the store, where the girls had finished covering up; the big man had disappeared and the girls were relaxing around the room on chairs to engage in a few minutes’ intimate conversation before departing for the night.

We rolled back the rug, set the chairs aside and started slathering up a good suds in our pails. Jim put his mop in the pail and the water went bloop all over the floor. We both dashed at it with our mops, but in the excitement I stepped backwards against my pail and upset it.

The girls screamed for the big man, who came running.

“Here,” roared the red-faced man. “Here. Hyah! Heeyah!”

And he treated us like no charlady⁶ should be treated.

But we got the water sopped up, not without getting our dresses wet and my large hat fell off into the pail and looked rather soggy. But just as we got organized and the girl with the gold hair was still standing staring at me, mostly at my feet and legs, there came from the back of the store, through the back entrance I suppose, two ladies looking a little flustered, carrying large shopping bags and looking as if they knew which end of a mop was for what.

“What is it?” demanded the purple man of them.

“We was engaged, sir,” said they.

“Who sent you?”

“Mr. Adams, sir.”

He whirled on us, glared, and Jim and I, walking sideways and wiping our hands on our pinnies⁷, hurried for the hallway, clattered up the stairs, got our coats and then went out the back way into a lane.

We found our way out, went along Richmond street, up York and back to the store where we had got outfitted. The owner charged us $2 each off our deposits for wetting the dresses and other injuries.

“We could have escaped that humiliation,” said I.

“But you couldn’t think of any way on the spur of the moment, could you?” asked Jim.

“So that’s what we looked like?” I mused.

“You did; not me,” said Jim.

“It was you went into the store first,” I retorted. “The girl with the gold hair decided about us when she saw you.”

“You owe me five bucks,” said Jim. “We looked like ladies.”

“I think you ought to wire Marlene some flowers with it,” said I.

“No,” said Jimmie, “I’ll wire her a hand-painted moustache cup⁸.”

---

Editor’s Notes: To explain this story, you have to understand that Marlene Dietrich was one of the biggest movie stars of the time. Starting in late January 1933, she was seen wearing men’s clothing including trousers.

Then she wore a tuxedo as seen in the article. Well, this caused quite the uproar! It was all the gossip columnists could talk about for a while.

Some people thought she was doing it for publicity, others thought she should not go out in public like that. Greg and Jim were commenting on all of this talk. She remained famous for sometimes wearing mannish clothing, most famously the tuxedo she wore as a nightclub singer in a movie to be released that November called Morocco.

1. $5 in 1933 would be $113 in 2025. ↩︎
2. I think at the time a Limehouse lady would be a term for a poor woman, perhaps even a prostitute. ↩︎
3. Yes, this sentence had to be cleaned up due to the language used at the time. ↩︎
4. Not sure what this means, but some men did wear garters to hold up their socks as the elasticity could not be that great depending on the material. ↩︎
5. “Brewed” meaning “drunk”. ↩︎
6. So “charwoman” was a common term to refer to a cleaning woman who was brought in for a job then left. They would use the term “maid” for someone who was live-in. This term was used up until the 1960s. ↩︎
7. Pinnie is slang for apron. ↩︎
8. A moustache cup is a drinking cup with a semicircular ledge inside. The ledge, called a moustache guard, allows the passage of liquids and serves as a guard to keep moustaches dry. ↩︎