Tag: 1934 Page 1 of 5

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 3, 1934.

“Can you run over for a minute?” asked Jimmie Frise on the telephone.

“I’ve just settled down,” I said, “for the night, with a good fishing book.”

“Well, I’ve got a poor chap here, I wanted you to see him,” said Jimmie. “It’s a pathetic case.”

“A friend?’ I asked.

“No, he just came to the door,” said Jimmie, in a guarded voice. “He is selling necktie racks. A very nice article. But he lacks salesmanship. He hasn’t got the punch. And he broke down on my porch. Run over for a minute, will you?”

“I’m no good in cases like that, Jimmie,” I demurred. “I always break down, too.”

“Come on,” begged Jim, “we’ll go into a committee on him.”

So I threw on my coat and walked over to Jimmie’s.

Jim had him in his little study at the side of the house. He was a man in his thirties, not badly dressed, but with that drawn look of despair and defeat on his face that is familiar to any of us that answer our front doors. Beside him on the floor was a paper bundle containing about a dozen objects made of wood with numerous pegs sticking out of them. They were painted pink, or blue or white.

“This gentleman,” said Jimmie, when I walked in, “makes these tie racks himself.”

I examined one critically.

“It’s a very attractive article,” I said with a professional air.

“But,” said Jimmie, “this gentleman can’t sell them. He simply can’t sell them. He has gone from door to door all through this well-to-do neighborhood and he hasn’t sold one!”

“I guess I’m not cut out for a salesman,” muttered the tie rack man huskily.

“Wasn’t anybody interested?” I inquired sitting down sympathetically.

“Most of them just opened the door, and before I could say a word, when they saw me hold out the tie rack, they shut the door,” said the man. His mouth was working, and tears stood in his eyes.

“It isn’t,” said Jim, hastily, “as if these were some commonplace junk. These are an original conception. Made by hand. Designed to fill a long-felt want in almost every home.”

A Surprise Selling Line

“Yes, sir,” said the man, sniffing loudly, “I thought them up myself. And I made the first model myself. And I perfected it myself. And I produced them in quantity myself. Painted and all.”

“Well,” I said, “nowadays you have to have a selling idea as good as the idea in itself. It’s no longer true that the world will beat a pathway to the door of a man who makes a better mouse trap. Nowadays, the only pathway, beaten to any mouse trap manufacturer’s is to the one who advertises and has worked up a smart selling line. In fact, the only pathways at all are those beaten by tireless salesmen driven by a tireless sales manager. To-day, the best mouse traps in the world aren’t catching any mice if the inventor is simply sitting at home looking out across the lawn for a path to appear.”

“You mean,” said Jim, “that this gentleman ought to get some manufacturer to adopt his idea?”

“Not if this gentleman wants to make any money out of it,” I replied. “I was merely suggesting that we think up some smart idea for him. This is old territory he is working. Every door in this neighborhood has been opened ten times a day for the past three years by somebody with something to sell, useful or otherwise. He has got to have some way of keeping that door open for half a minute, for even fifteen seconds, until he sinks the harpoon of interest into his prospective customer.”

“That’s true,” admitted Jim. “Now what would you suggest?”

“For one thing,” I said, “I’d have a couple of nice snappy ties hanging in one of these racks when I hold it up as the door opens.”

“Great!’ exclaimed Jimmie.

The other poor chap sat up with interest.

“Then I would say something like this,” I said, getting up and holding one of the tie racks in my hand, as if I were at a door. “‘Surprise, madam, a surprise for your husband. This tie rack hanging handy to his dresser, with all his ties neatly and tidily displayed. Only fifty cents. It will keep his dresser tidy. It will tend to make him interested in his appearance. Only fifty cents. In three colors. To match your furnishings!’”

I sat down amidst applause.

The man was impressed and flushed.

“Gents,” he said, “I sure am grateful. I’m sure I can do it. You’ve put new life into me. But I don’t think I’ll try to-night. I’ll wait till to-morrow. I’m all in tonight.”

“No, no,” cried Jimmie. “Try it to-night. While the idea is fresh upon you. Why, you can get rid of this dozen to-night in half an hour.”

“I’d rather tackle it to-morrow when I’m fresh,” said he.

Making a Poor Start

“Think of going home to-night with six bucks in your pocket,” said Jimmie, earnestly. “I believe in striking when the iron is hot.”

“Gents, if you don’t mind,” said the poor fellow anxiously.

“Listen,” cried Jim. “I know how you feel, this salesman stuff is terrible at first when you aren’t used to it. I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll go with you for the first few calls and get you started.”

“Would you!” exclaimed the tie rack man joyfully. “Would you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We certainly would,” said Jim. “We’re interested in human nature experiments like this.”

Jim dashed out for his coat and hat and the man picked up his bundle of tie racks.

We went out, taking Jim’s car.

“We’ll drive a little way,” said Jim, “just to get away from this immediate neighborhood where we’re known.”

We drove up a couple of blocks and parked in a comfortable neighborhood and began at the first house in the block.

“Now you be the salesman,” said Jimmie to me, “and we’ll come right with you, carrying the stock of merchandise.”

We rang the bell. I cleared my throat.

A lady came to the door.

“Surprise,” I said, bowing slightly and employing a regular salesman smile. “Madam, here is a surprise for your husband. This tie rack hanging handy to your husband’s dresser…”

The lady, who had been looking with astonishment from one to the other of us, slowly closed the door. She didn’t even say scat.

In silence we walked down the steps.

“There you are, gents!” said the tie rack man. “That’s it.”

“One swallow doesn’t make a summer,” said Jimmie. “The bad beginning means a good end.”

Nobody was home but the young folks at the next house, they were dancing to the radio and the seven or eight of them who answered the door didn’t have fifty cents.

The next house, only the maid was in.

The next one, only the man of the house was in, and he had the book he was reading in his hand, and you could see his mind was not on what we were saying.

“Surprise,” I cried, holding the tie rack up in front of him. “Sir, a surprise for yourself. This handsome tie rack hanging handy to your dresser with all your ties neatly and tidily arrayed . . .”

“What the heck!” he said suddenly. And as suddenly slammed the door.

We went back out to the pavement.

The tie rack man was getting impatient. You could tell by the way he kept silent and stared off down the dark street moodily.

“Think of a new line,” said Jim. “Try some other approach.”

Trying the Heart Appeal

“How about this?” I exclaimed. “All three of us stand in the doorway, each one of us holding out a tie rack, you the blue one, you the pink one, and me the white one. What you call mass appeal. And then I will say: “Madam, these are tie racks. They are a useful and ornamental object for every man’s room.’ “

“No good,” said Jimmie, “we would only frighten the woman.”

“I guess you gents had better let me get along,” said the tie rack man in a melancholy voice.

“No, sir, once we put our hand to the plow,” cried Jimmie.

“Look here,” I cut in, “why not employ the one appeal that has worked to-night? What got this man into your house and brought us out into a committee of the whole? Why, the heart appeal.”

“Tears,” cried Jimmie.

“The breakdown,” I said. “We will call at this next house and we will all three stand there, with tears in our eyes, and appeal to the lady to buy a tie rack, we haven’t sold one to-night!”

“And that would be true,” added the tie rack man.

“Don’t overdo it,” warned Jimmie.

We went up to the next house. We turned up our coat collars and stood in an abject huddle while we waited for the bell to be answered.

A bald-headed man in shirt sleeves came to the door.

“Mister,” I said, exhibiting the poor pink tie rack, “us three have been all over this neighborhood trying to dispose of these tie racks, we only ask fifty cents, they’re a lovely thing, handy as anything, and we made them ourselves (here I let a little quaver get into my voice) and painted them ourselves, our own idea, too, and we thought we could make an honest dollar or two out of them…”

The bald-headed man stood looking at us silently. The tie rack man was the picture of woe. Jim had his chin ducked down in his collar, his hat over his eyes, a look of desperation in his attitude.

“You haven’t sold one, eh?”

“No, sir,” I said, brokenly. Jim gave what sounded like a muffled sob. The tie rack man lifted his wan face into the light.

“By george,” said the bald-headed man, “step inside here a minute.”

Generous With Advice

He held the door wide, and we three trooped into the hall. Beyond, there was a table, through a haze of cigar smoke, at which sat three men playing poker.

“Just a minute, boys,” called the baldheaded man. “Step out here.”

The poker players got up and came into the hall.

“These three poor chaps,” said the baldheaded man, “have a very handy little article here, a tie rack. See? A handy little gadget. They made them themselves. They thought up the idea themselves. They painted then. They have been all over this district and haven’t sold one! Now, here’s a case where we ought to help, don’t you think?”

All four of them regarded us with deep sympathy.

We all sat down in the front room.

“You follows look like pretty respectable men,” said the baldhead.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We’re all good honest mechanics, and we thought we could make a few honest dollars to help along. But it seems we can’t sell these things.”

One of the men opened the bundle of tie racks and they all passed them around, admiring them.

“A smart idea,” they said. “A first-rate article. A thing you would imagine would sell in any house.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Any man would appreciate having a thing like that to keep his ties in order.”

“Sure,” said one of the poker players, “my ties are all hanging on a knob by the mirror on my dresser. All in a mess.”

“I tell you what,” said the-bald-headed man, “you fellows have got a good article here, but no matter how good your article you have got to have a selling talk to go with it. It isn’t enough just to show them at the door from house to house.”

“That’s true, sir,” I said. And Jimmie nodded brightly.

“Now, we four men,” said the baldheaded man, looking around at his three friends who were regarding us sympathetically and curiously, “are in the merchandising business. In fact, this gentleman is something of a wizard at selling. I think we could get together right now and give you a sales talk on these articles which would work magic. You could dispose of this lot in no time, the three of you.”

“You’re right, Bill,” said the others, nodding.

“Now, let’s see,” said the bald-headed man. “How about this: you walk up to the door and when the lady comes you are holding the tie rack up like this, see? And you say, right off: “Madame, the problem of keeping your husband’s ties in order is one of the banes … no, not one of the banes…”

“The problem of keeping your husband’s ties in order,” stated one of the other poker players, a tall, thin, thoughtful man, whose tie was all skew-gee, “is promptly solved by this simple, attractive and handsome little article, only fifty cents.”

“That’s better,” cried the bald-headed man. “Or how about this: “Madame, how often do you have to sort out your husband’s ties, all in a tangle in his bureau drawer? This handy little article, etcetera, etcetera…” Do you see?”

The New Message

Jimmie and the tie rack man and I all saw, but the tie rack man had a slight bulge in his eyes that I did not like.

“I tell you what we’ll do, boys!” cried the bald-headed man. “We’ll go with you! This is most interesting to us, as sales experts. We’re not in the mood for cards to-night anyway, are we, boys? No. So just wait a jiffy and we’ll step out with you and see those racks vanish with a little snappy sales approach.”

“Good idea,” agreed the others, rising.

“Won’t there be a lot of us calling from door to door, sir?” I asked respectfully.

“I was going to suggest,” said the tall, thoughtful man, “that we might each take two racks apiece and we will scatter along the block and make a game of it. See who disposes of his racks first. Eh, boys! And so select the best sales talk.”

His friends all snapped up the challenge.

“How about it?” asked the bald-headed one, genially. “Will you trust us?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” I assured him, nudging the tie rack man, who seemed to be on the point of saying something.

We trooped out the front door.

“You chaps work right along here,” said the bald-headed one, “but as we others are known around here we’ll walk a couple of blocks north and start. When you’re through wait here, will you? We’ll be back in no time!”

We divided up the package of tie racks, giving each of the four gentlemen two apiece. Pinks and blues.

They walked eagerly away and Jim and the tie rack man and I started down to the corner of the block for Jim’s car.

“Now for a getaway,” I exclaimed.

“Where do I get off in this?” demanded the tie rack man loudly.

“Ssssh!” said Jim. “We’ll pay you for the lot. Three bucks each, me and my little friend. Am I right?’

“Right,” I said, opening the car door and hastening my two companions into it.

“But where do you get off in this?” asked the poor tie rack fellow, bewildered.

“It’s worth three bucks each to us,” I explained as Jim drove quietly but smartly away from there, “for the lesson.”

“Lesson?” said the tie rack man.

“Sympathy and advice aren’t enough,” I said. “We are all learning that now. Those four guys right now are learning it, too! It’s the new message of good times returning.”

“Yes,” said Jim, “we’ll buy your stuff even if we don’t need it.”

“And even,” I added, “if we haven’t got it!”

“Well, sir,” said the tie rack man, “I do believe things are on the mend!”

---

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in Silver Linings (1978).

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 29, 1934.

“AAAAAAGHHH,” said Jimmie Frise.

“What is it?” I asked anxiously.

“Ughh,” groaned Jimmie, this Christmas-New Year’s week gets me down. Over eating. Over eating. I feel like a boa constrictor that has eaten three goats. One goat. Two goats. Three goats.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know that lumpy feeling.”

“I could just lie down somewhere and let those colossal gorgings digest,” said Jimmie. “I feel drowsy. Or is it just that I have eaten so much, my skin is tight all over me, and that is what is making my eyes half close?”

“What we need,” I declared, “is exercise.”

“I never felt less like exercise in all my life,” replied Jim, resting himself in another slouched position on his chair.

“Big meals,” I said, clearing my throat, “big meals, Jimmie, should be forbidden by the public health legislation of this country. They should be a crime. In ancient times, when nature was our only law, men, like any other animal, ate whenever they could, but lots of times they went for days and days without a bite to eat.”

“I wish I was starving to death, right now,” moaned Jimmie.

“Lots of times,” I went on, “when game was scarce, whole tribes of men were slowly starving to death. Then all of a sudden, a herd of prehistoric reindeer or a couple of mammoths came along…”

“Ughh,” protested Jimmie.

“A herd of mammoths came along,” I continued, “and the whole tribe rushed out of the caves and slew a couple of them. And what a feast there was then! Up leaped the fires, and great juicy steaks of mammoth went on the pointed sticks to be roasted…”

“Please, please,” begged Jimmie, rising. “If you don’t change the subject, I’ll have to leave.”

“Very well,” I said. “But you see the point. Mankind, in the long-drawn-out early history of us, used to feast only after long fasts. I should say that in the ancient days mankind ate, as a rule, very little, and only once in a long while did they get a square meal. In these days, when we all eat regular meals, we should never, never feast.”

“Agreed, agreed,” said Jim, yawning and groaning at the same time.

“Having all and more than we need to eat, as often as we like,” I said, “it is against the ancient law of nature for us to gorge ourselves. It should be a public crime to stuff.”

“I’m a criminal all right,” said Jim, closing his eyes heavily.

“I’m a criminal, too,” I assured him. “Christmas Day, I started with two fried eggs and bacon, toast, cherry jam, two mugs of coffee and a beaker of orange juice. Then, about two p.m., we sat down to a turkey. Such a turkey. I ate three full-size slices off the breast, cut with a sharp knife. A gobbin of dressing about the size of a grapefruit…”

“Erp,” said Jim, “pardon me.”

“Then mashed potatoes with dark bright brown gravy, and turnips and cranberry sauce with the skins left in, for sharpness….”

Planning a Cellar Gym

“You were saying,” said Jim, heaving himself to an upright posture in his chair, “something about exercise. Talk about exercise. Tell me about walking five miles in the crisp winter afternoon, amidst bright pine trees along the frosty roads.”

“Walking,” I said, “about 120 to the minute, short, strong-legged paces, swinging a cane, with a tartan muffler around your neck, a pipe in your mouth, and steam blowing from your nose.”

“Aaaahhhh,” sighed Jimmie, looking better already.

“And big stout boots on your feet,” I pictured, “and the ground frozen and lumpy underfoot, and chickadees and maybe a redpoll or two in the trees for you to pause and look at, and maybe a pheasant, all dark and burnished, running across the road ahead of you.”

“Get away from pheasants, raw or roasted,” warned Jim.

“In the olden days,” I stated, “when we used to alternate feasts with long periods of enforced fasting, we got plenty of exercise. Hunting the mammoths must have been an arduous sport. Through bogs and swamps and through terrible jungles, with your poor stomach flat against your backbone from emptiness.”

“Beautiful,” murmured Jim.

“And you weary from carrying an immense club studded with bronze nails to kill the mammoths with.”

“Keep the mammoths alive,” urged Jim. “A dead mammoth gags me somehow.”

“I tell you what,” I suggested, “let’s go for a good walk right now. Let’s lock the office and go. Let’s drive as far as the Jail Farm¹ and then go for a big tramp about five miles west, along one of those lovely winter York county dirt roads.”

“I’d die,” said Jim. “I’d just sit down by a snake fence and die. I haven’t enough strength in my legs right now to stand up.”

“The only thing to cure you,” I informed him, “is exercise. A brisk, long walk. A swinging walk through country with cold wind in your face and pushing against your chest.”

“It’s lovely to hear about,” said Jim, “but I couldn’t do it. Just let us talk about exercise.”

“Can’t we do something about exercise?” I asked. “Instead of merely talking about?”

“I’ve often thought,” pursued Jim, “of making a sort of private gymnasium in my cellar. It’s a big cellar, with a nice high ceiling. I could erect a horizontal bar, and rings on ropes, you know?”

“And my wife,” I said, “has one of those rowing machines stored in the attic. I’d lend

it.”

“And a horse,” said Jim. “You know those leather horses for leaping over.”

“Why don’t we just join a gym?” I asked.

“It’s too public,” demurred Jim. “I couldn’t bear showing off my shape in front of a lot of beautiful young fellows built like gods.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Make it a cellar gym.”

“There,” said Jim, relaxing a little, “we two could meet of an early morning, fresh from sleep and before starting for the office. We could do a crisp half hour of swinging and whirling. We could shake all the stale blood out of our limbs.”

“And heads,” said I.

“We could start our pulses working,” went on Jim. “Evenings, we could do tricks, slowly reviving the lost talents of our muscles. Saturdays we could hold private and personal gymkhanas², competing with each other to see who had the most strength, the most skill.”

“You have me interested,” I admitted.

So that when we broke off work early and went home in the bright afternoon, we called at my house and got the rowing machine out of the attic of my house, and I also contributed a length of big half-inch rope that once I bought for an anchor, not knowing how big half-inch rope really is. An old army saddle I also dug out of the attic, relic of my war days when I tried to ride horses.

“This,” I explained to Jimmie, “will do instead of a gymnasium horse. We can prop it up some way between two chairs or something.”

Jim had timber to make horizontal bars. Old curtain poles of the kind all houses used to have between the living room and the dining room, and all of which are now stored in the attics of the world, Jim produced and we made series of bars on which we could swing like Tarzan, from limb to limb, strengthening our arms and dilating our chests and lungs.

Jimmie’s stuffiness passed off as we got the material assembled in his cellar.

“I feel better already,” said Jim, removing his coat and vest and producing an old box full of hammers, saws, nails and dusty old brackets and things.

First we had to sit down to plan it. We sat down on boxes and planned, with gestures. Over in the corner would be the rowing machine. Along the back of the big cellar would be a series of parallel bars for swinging, grand circles, short arm balances and chinning.

“I haven’t,” said Jim, “chinned myself for so long, it will be a treat to do it again.”

“And rings,” I cried. “Jimmie, when I was at school, I could travel faster around the rings than any boy in the school. I love rings. To swing at arm’s length on rings, gaining momentum and speed. I wonder if we couldn’t get so expert, we could set up two sets of ropes and rings, and swing from one to the other, like trapeze artists?”

“Vaulting the horse,” said Jim. “Now there’s a thing that tests your mettle. You take a run at the horse, place one hand on the saddle, and vault cleanly over it. I would rather see a man vault the horse than see a whole team of military jumpers take the hurdles on horseback.”

So we planned. We would have the horse in the middle of the cellar. I got up and set boxes and things and rested a broom across, and balanced my old saddle on the broom to show Jimmie just how it would look. Then I sat down again.

“It isn’t big enough,” mused Jim, “for a running track down here. But we might get some whitewash like they use on tennis courts and mark off the floor in rings and squares, to make it look gymnasiumy. You know, half the inspiration of a gymnasium is the look of it. It must look appetizing.”

“I thought you were tired of appetite,” I said.

“Now, how about a chest expander,” said Jim, shifting on to the floor and resting his back against the box. “We could attach a couple of bricks to some strong sash cord, and run it up through pulleys. A first-rate chest expander.”

“Swell,” said I. “And how about a rubbing-down table? I could rub you down and then you could rub me down.”

For Fresh Inspiration

“Boy,” said Jimmie, “that rub-down makes me feel good. What would we use for a rub-down?”

“Liniment,” I decreed. “A good cool stinging liniment. With a pungent, turpentiney odor.”

“Ach,” said Jim, “the smell of it fairly catches my breath. I feel like a new man already, just thinking about it.”

He sat up and stretched. He stood up. He walked around the cellar and patted the saddle.

“Think,” he said, “of that grand fresh, feeling of doing twenty minutes fast work on these bars, those rings, that horse, then five minutes on the rowing machine, then a quick rub-down with liniment and so to work!”

“I tingle,” I assured him. “Try a few pulls on that rowing machine.”

Jim stood above the rowing machine, looking down at it.

“Sit on it,” I urged him. “Take a few pulls and see how strong and elastic those springs are.”

“In a few minutes,” said Jim. “I’ve got to run upstairs for a second.”

Left alone, I lay there visualizing the gymnasium. Seeing Jimmie and me in our underwear lithely whirling and twisting, swinging and bending and wheeling. Upstairs I heard Jim’s feet to and fro in the kitchen.

He came down, just as the light from the cellar windows was fading, with a large tray.

On the tray were onion sandwiches, and the tail end of the turkey. The onion sandwiches were Spanish onions sliced thin, as only Jimmie knows how to make them, with salt and pepper, a dash of vinegar laid on with a teaspoon to get it just right, a faint dash of wooster sauce, between well-buttered thin bread.

The turkey was on its last legs, but hidden about its colossal carcase were large gobbets of meat, some white, some dark. Inside were large hunks of dressing still adhering to the ribs.

Jim had also a pot of coffee and a jug of thick cream.

“Ah,” said I, sitting forward.

We just laid the tray on the gymnasium floor and sat to it on our boxes.

After we had finished, I locked my fingers behind my head and leaned back against the wall.

“Well,” I said, “how about the gymnasium? How about doing something for a start?”

“New Year’s dinner will be in a few days,” said Jim, picking a last thread of white meat off from along that big keel bone sticking up drily. “What do you say if we wait until after New Year’s before going on with the gym? It will be a sort of fresh inspiration for us?”

“O-kay,” I agreed.

So before going upstairs to listen to the radio from the chesterfield and the big fat chair to match it, we pushed the bars and ropes and boards and saddle and stuff into a corner where they would be handy.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story appeared both in So What? (1937), and Silver Linings (1978).

1. The “Jail Farm” was the Langstaff Jail Farm. In today’s terminology, it was a minimum security facility for inebriates, first offenders, and petty criminals, an alternative to the dreaded Don Jail.  ↩︎
2. Gymkhana is a British Raj term which originally referred to a place of assembly. The meaning then altered to denote a place where skill-based contests were held. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 3, 1934.

“As servants of the people,” said Jimmie Frise, “we are not paying enough attention to the weightier problems of to-day.”

“I guess we haven’t got the equipment,” I agreed.

“We waste our time,” went on Jim, “making little unimportant experiments with pickling, furnace pipes, rabbit hunting and other minor domestic quarrels.”

“I would love,” I said, “to be a great authority.”

“It is easy to become a great authority,” stated Jimmie. “You just give up everything else, you forget about money, about your wife and family, you just concentrate yourself on one subject, like humming birds or radio tubes or something, and work sixteen hours a day at it and dream about it fitfully all night, year after year for thirty-five years. And then, when you are seventy-one years old and hump-backed and half blind and your family has all grown up and left you a quarter of a century ago, and you have no friends left, and you die, you get your picture in the papers and underneath it says, “The great authority on humming birds.””

“I don’t mean that kind of authority,” I hurried. “I mean a sort of authority that just comes by his knowledge instinctively, like poets – you know? – just born with an understanding of some of the mysteries of this life. I feel I have such an instinctive knowledge about the poor and oppressed. I sort of feel that, but for the grace of God and a little accident somewhere in my boyhood, I would have been a tramp myself.”

“I often feel that way,” mused Jim. “Sometimes I marvel that I have a house to live in.”

“Maybe everybody feels that way,” I suggested.

“I doubt it,” said Jim. “I think you and I have a deep sympathy with bums because we know, deep in our own hearts, that if it hadn’t been for some guidance we got as children or some friendly expectation we felt from our olders, we would have been hoboes.”

“And all the world to see,” I cried. “There is no reason to suppose that a hobo does not appreciate landscape as much as we do, and we have to pay big money and reserve expensive berths and staterooms to go abroad to look at mountains and the sea.”

“If we were hoboes,” went on Jim, “we could just climb aboard a freight train and dangle along through the lovely country and whenever we saw a beautiful lake or a lovely range of hills, all we have to do is jump off and stay there until our eyes and souls were filled. Maybe, by jove, maybe hoboes are artists at heart, poets and dreamers, who surrender all the world that they may saturate themselves in beauty!”

It Ought to Be Law

“Most artists I know,” I submitted, “look just one jump removed from hoboes.”

“Did you ever hear of the Sabbatical year?” asked Jim.

“I probably did as a child,” I guarded.”

“In ancient Biblical days,” says Jim, “every seventh year was a year of rest, like the seventh day. In the sabbatical year, nobody was allowed to work or till the earth. It was a year of rest. Some of the universities allow their professors a sabbatical year, and they go on holidays, with full pay, for the whole year!”

“I missed my calling,” said I.

“The old Hebrews were a wise bunch,” said Jimmie. “We make a big mistake when we aren’t fundamentalists. We should take Moses whole. We should have never surrendered the sabbatical year. Every seventh year, every man in this world ought to be allowed to turn hobo. Bankers, mechanics, newspapermen.”

“Where would you head for, Jimmie, if you turned hobo?”

“I’d head for California,” said Jim. “First, I would go to California and visit Tia Juana and then, at the right season, I would amble across to Kentucky and see the Derby and lie around on the blue grass for a month or two. Then, maybe, I’d stow away for England and see Ascot. Ireland, I’d like to see Ireland too, and spend a couple of months around one of those famous studs where they raise Irish hunters. But what about you? What would you do?”

“I’d start my sabbatical year,” I said, clearing my throat, “in May. I’d start via the Nipigon and then across to fish British Columbia, up to Alaska, finishing Alaska about August. Then I’d catch a boat for New Zealand, arriving there just as the brown and rainbow trout season opens about October first. I’d fish all around New Zealand until maybe February, and then stow away for the south of France, fishing through the Pyrenees and up and across into Devonshire by the first of April, then slowly, stream by stream, up to Scotland…”

“Wait a minute!” cried Jim. “Your sabbatical year is up!”

“Won’t you let me catch one salmon in Scotland?” I asked indignantly.

“You’ve got to be back in Toronto on May first,” stated Jim. “But it is a swell idea, that sabbatical year.”

“It ought to be law,” I declared.

“We ought,” said Jim, with that thoughtful, looking-away expression he wears when he is putting something over, “to just try a little of the hobo life, to see what it is really like. I mean, here we set ourselves up as the friends of the poor, but we don’t bark our shins grabbing freights. How about some day putting on some old clothes and going for a short trip on a freight?”

And that is how it came about that last Monday Jimmie and I sneaked off at lunch hour and went heme and put on our old hunting clothes and peak caps.

Grabbin’ a Freight

“Better take a few dollars each to get home on,” I suggested, as we admired ourselves in the mirror in Jim’s hall.

“Not on your life,” said Jim. “As artists, we must not only play the part of hoboes, we must be hoboes. Don’t let us take more than about 30 cents each, in dimes.”

“Suppose we get away off by Orillia or some place?” I inquired.

“Don’t be silly,” said Jim. “We aren’t going more than twenty miles. Freights always stop at sidings. We’ll go an hour or so one way, then hop off and catch another one coming into the city. Just to get a taste, not a bellyful.”

Jim had found out that one of the best places in the world to catch a freight is in the Mimico yards. There vast hundreds of acres of train tracks and sidings, thousands of empty box cars, long trains of loaded cars are assembled.

“We have to watch out for dicks,¹” said Jim, as we headed for the railway yards.

“O-kay, bo²,” said I, slouching.

With caps pulled over our eyes and shoulders tough and legs kind of bowed, which is any man’s way of feeling tough, we slunk through Mimico to Church St. and up to the subway. We were instantly in the core, the centre, the heart of railroadom. Turning in at the subway, we found ourselves in a vast region densely striped with hundreds of tracks and thousands of cars, with engines slowly puffing through, some drawing immense endless strings of cars, others steaming fussily about alone, and gauntletted railroad men, in overalls and peaked caps, leaning athletically out from cars and engines.

Hidden from us by strings of cars, engines puffed by us, and we heard the crunch of gravel under the feet of men which we could see by stooping down and looking under the cars. But they were railroad men’s feet. No bums did we see in the half hour we spent prowling up and down.

Two tracks away, we heard a string of cars shunt.

“Dere’s one haulin’ out, pardner,” hissed Jim. “Let’s scram on board, huh?”

We crawled underneath two strings of motionless freights and came out alongside the train that was still creaking from the shunt.

Three cars to our left, we saw an empty box car with its door ajar about two feet.

“Dere she is, buddy,” hissed Jim. “Lemme see how smart you are at grabbin’ a freight, huh?”

We scrunched low and made the dash.

Jim boosted me through the open door, and swung himself inside with professional smoothness.

“She’s headed west,” said Jim. “That means either Detroit or maybe Winnipeg. We’ll go as far as Brantford or Aurora.”

Cr-rash! shunted the train. You could hear it coming, but still it nearly knocked you off your feet.

“These freights are rough,” said I.

“You get used to it,” said Jim, walking to the door to peek.

“Nix!” he hissed. “Flat against the wall! Here comes a brakeman!”

We hugged the wall of the freight car as we heard footsteps crunching nearer on the gravel.

The footsteps stopped. We held our breath.

Then the brakeman reached up and with a grunt slammed the car door shut, and we heard a metallic clink and he threw home seme kind of a bolt or latch.

The footsteps died away.

“He locked us in!” I whinnied.

“Take it cool,” said Jim. “We’ll figure this out.”

“But we may not get out until we get to Vancouver,” I wailed, “or Des Moines!”

“We stop plenty of places,” soothed Jim. “All we have got to do is holler.”

“One brakeman and one engineer can’t hear us holler half a mile away,” I said loudly. “Let us holler now!”

“Hey,” roared Jimmie promptly. “HALP!”

“Halp, HALP!” I echoed, kicking the wall of the box car.

I will not embarrass you with a full stenographic record of the noises, yells and signals that we engaged in for the next ten minutes. Then we stopped because we were hoarse.

“She hasn’t started yet anyway,” said Jim.

“Maybe, Jim,” I said, as we sat on the floor, resting our lungs, “maybe this is one of those empty cars they store at Mimico until next summer.”

“It might be,” agreed Jim.

“Maybe nobody will come by,” I quavered, “and we will die of hunger and thirst. And maybe this car will not be used until they move the wheat next July.”

“Cut it out,” warned Jim.

“And we will be missing until next August,” I went on; “when they will find our desiccated and mummified bodies out in Weyburn, Sask.!”

The Free-Faring Life

“Stow it,” warned Jim.

“We have no identifications in these clothes,” I went on. “I’m going to spend what strength I have left now in carving my name on the wall of this box car, Jimmie, and if I am spared long enough, by the pangs of hunger and thirst, I will carve on the wall the details of our horrible experience. So people will know what became of us.”

An engine came puffing in the distance.

“Get ready,” cried Jim, leaping up in the dark. “Hoy, HOY, HAAALLLPPP!”

But the engine went thundering and hissing by.

“No use,” said I, sadly. “Let us save our strength and listen for footsteps. Surely some bum will come by.”

So we sat and listened. Occasionally, to break the monotony of conversation, we hallooed and yelled.

“It must be getting evening,” surmised Jimmie.

At about what must have been nine o’clock by the silence of the world, broken only by the thunder of passing trains, Jim suggested we take turns at having a little sleep. I slept first. But cinders are poor mattresses. I woke to find Jim snoring by my side.

“HAAALLLP!” I roared, but really to wake Jim.

“It must be getting towards morning.” Engines went by, trains, long, long trains, went by, going to Winnipeg, Vancouver and Des Moines.

“This,” said Jim, heavily, “might be one of those silk trains that make non-stop runs across the continent.”

“It is like being lost in the middle of the Sahara desert,” I said, hollowly. “Here, in the midst of a great freight yard, on the edge of a mighty city, we are lost as if we had flown in a rocket to the moon!”

We dozed again.

“Clink!”

We both sat up to face a foot-wide strip of God’s morning light streaming in and dazzling us. We made out the head of a man, a villainous, stubble-covered face peering at us with amazement.

“Hullo, said he. “Did I startle ye?”

Jim and I swallowed, poising for a spring.

“Kin I come in?” he asked, reaching up for a hoist.

“We’re getting out,” said Jim.

“All right,” said the hobo, “make it snappy. She’s just about to pull.”

Jim and I went through the narrow crack together. The tramp hoisted himself up and in.

“I hope yer not leavin’ on my account,” said he, looking down at us.

“No, no,” we assured him.

We hurried toward the Church St. subway.

“Ah,” cried Jim, as we hastened down toward the street cars in the fresh dawn, “the free-faring life of the hobo!”

But I was thinking about bacon and eggs and I didn’t want to be interrupted.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was reprinted in Silver Linings (1978).

1. Here Jimmie means Railroad police, who would look for hoboes to remove them from the trains. They could also get quite rough. ↩︎
2. “Bo” is short for hobo and is part of hobo slang to refer to each other. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 28, 1934.

“Did you ever,” asked Jimmie Frise, “do any flying?”

“In the war,” I said, “I once went up by accident.”

“By accident?”

“Yes,” I explained. “Out of curiosity I visited an aerodrome and there I bumped into a chap I knew. He said he would like to drive me down to see my brother at an aerodrome about fifty miles away. That was four days’ march for us infantry. So I said swell. He led me over to an aeroplane. He assisted me in. He got in front. Before I came to I was rushing through the air, with the earth tilted up on its edge below me, and he couldn’t hear me yelling to stop.”

That must have been awful,” sympathized Jim.

“It was,” I assured him. “You have to think fast in this life. When he said ‘drive me down’ I thought he meant in one of those numerous trucks, motorcycle sidecars and so forth that the air force was equipped with. But there I was, pushing through the air at a frightful speed, with towns and slag heaps of mines zipping past underneath, and me clinging to a piano stool in the back end of a sort of a box kite called a Bristol Fighter¹. Phew!”

“Did you like it?” asked Jim.

“After I got down,” I explained, “I liked it fine. That is the main thing about flying. Once you are on the ground flying is a lovely sensation.”

“Do you get giddy?” inquired Jim.

“I can’t hang a picture from a step- ladder,” I assured him, “without either losing my balance or having to go and lie down for half an hour.”

“You get sea sick too,” pointed out Jim.

“Indeed I do,” said I.

“It is all imagination,” declared Jim.

“Is that so?” I sneered.

“Absolutely imagination,” repeated Jim. “All those feelings of giddiness, dizziness, sea sickness, car sickness are just the result of having a soft and limp mind. You can control almost everything by your mind.”

“Listen,” I said, “if I get on a merry-go-round I get so dizzy I can’t walk straight for two or three hours. My knees turn to jelly. My heart flutters. My head swims. I feel I am still on the merry-go-round, going round and round. I walk in big curves, thinking I am going straight.”

“All nonsense,” stated Jim loudly. “Perfect nonsense. Your imagination is playing tricks with you. Probably always has. What you need is a little discipline of your mind. You must get it into your head that mind has power over matter. You can will yourself to be warm when you think you are cold. Or to be cool when you think you are hot.”

“Rubbish,” I said, unbuttoning my vest, because it was a hot day.

On the Neck of a Giraffe

“A man of your intelligence,” said Jimmie, “should know the power of his own mind. You could be a steeplejack. You could be an ironworker on some of those thirty and forty storey buildings away up there in the sky…”

“Stop, Jimmie, stop!” I commanded. “I am getting slightly ill just thinking of it.”

“Really,” declared Jim, “you ought to do something about it. You have been letting your mind go limp for so long, by George, you some day may not be able to control it at all. Why don’t you try to control your feelings?”

“I am what I am,” I stated.

“Free will,” retorted Jim. “You have free will, haven’t you? Just say to yourself, I can climb the tallest ladder and not feel dizzy.'”

“I feel dizzy just thinking about a tall ladder.” I replied.

“Tell you what we’ll do,” said Jimmie. “To-night we’ll go down to Sunnyside². We’ll get aboard the merry-go-round and I’ll sit beside you and keep your mind drilled. I’ll take charge and keep saying. ‘You’re not dizzy, it can’t make you dizzy, you are enjoying the breeze, you are enjoying the fun,’ and if you get dizzy, after really making-up your mind not to, I’ll draw your nose without that jag in it after this.”

That jag in the nose happens to be the one sore spot in a long and happy friendship.

“I’ll try,” I agreed.

Jimmie and I both love amusement parks. We like the smell of them and the sound of them and the sights of them. We love to see our fellow men unawares. We love to watch men and women and youths and children and babies all off parade, going along with never a thought or a care. And you can see them more careless at amusement parks than anywhere else. In their eyes is the true expression of themselves, unaware, unguarded. And those expressions are so much more lovely than the expressions they put on.

Jimmie, a man of action, led me resolutely to the merry-go-round. It was mostly occupied by young girls in fluffy dresses who stand holding on to the neck of a giraffe or a lion and whirl round and round with a breeze against them, and by perspiring young fathers holding two-year-old pop-eyes on the back of a zebra for a tiger.

The music slacked, the merry-go-round slowed and in the rush of people off it and on Jimmie and I got discreetly aboard the inner ring of animals, I choosing a giraffe and Jimmie a lion. Jim sat crossways and with easy grace. I got my feet in the stirrups and took a good warm clutch on the long neck of the giraffe.

“Ha, ha,” I laughed excitedly. “It can’t make me dizzy.”

“Atta boy,” said Jim.

A lone lady, middle-aged, thin and anxious looking, struggled to climb aboard a prancing horse just ahead of me and found it too difficult. She turned and, with a nervous smile, held her purse out to me.

“Pardon me,” she said, “would you hold my purse, please?”

“Certainly, madam,” said I, remembering I have an honest face.

I took the purse, a brown, rather young-looking purse for so lean and severe a lady. She tried to mount the horse again; last-minute people were scampering aboard, grabbing what was left. The merry-go-round started and the lady, moving away from the horse, with a little gesture of fright, took a quick run and jumped off just as the machine got going.

Whirling Through Space

“Hey, lady!” I called, above the music, waving the purse.

But I had to attend to other matters. The merry-go-round started its wild surging, round and round, and I was busily engaged in getting a good strong hug, with both arms and both elbows, around the neck of the giraffe.

“Atta boy,” came Jim’s voice from behind me: “this can’t make you dizzy! You’re o.k. You’re enjoying it. The breeze. The whirl, eh!”

There was a wild blur of faces and bodies passing me and to look for the lady who had given me her purse was out of the question, so every time I came past where I thought she had got off I waved the purse slightly to reassure her.

Blur, music, surge, blur, blur, blur. I began to feel rather damp and the familiar sensation of weakness at the knees, elbows and wrists began to creep over me.

“Atta boy,” cried Jim, above the rowdy music. “From now on, no crook in your nose. It’s a promise!”

I clung tighter to the giraffe’s neck. I felt myself leaning far out to the edge, though I knew by the feel of the giraffe’s neck that I was still square on top of it.

Blur, blur, blur. Would the fool thing never stop! I ceased waving the purse. I hoped the lady would be right handy when I got off, because I did not want to have to weave my way amongst any crowd when I got off. I had no feeling any more, but just a vast empty wheeling sensation. My eyes felt permanently crossed. I gripped the giraffe’s neck until my arms ached, yet I felt as if I were leaning at an incredible angle far off to the right.

“Hold tight; it’ll soon be over,” assured Jimmie.

I felt he could tell I was not earning a straight nose.

I felt the whirling machine start to slacken. I clung all the tighter. Slowly it came to a stop, but I and the giraffe kept whirling straight onward, forever and forever, round and round. I could see the crowds climbing down and off and new ones scrambling on and up. But I just held grimly until Jim came and helped me off.

“Not so good, eh?” asked Jim, steadying me.

“WooooOOOOOooooo,”I assured him. I wove dimly amongst the wild beasts.

Two young ladies got in front of us.

“That’s my purse!” hissed one of them. She made a snatch at it.

“Pardon me,” I said unsteadily, “but it is not. A lady much older in a gray woollen dress gave me…”

“Give me my purse or I’ll scream police,” cried the young lady, angrily but quietly.

“Hush!” interposed Jimmie. “Come outside, please. There is some mistake.”

“I’ll scream police,” warned the young lady, while she and the other girl followed me, close.

“I’ll Call the Police”

But in the dimness of the merry-go-round we paused.

“You are not the person who gave me this purse,” I said, while Jimmie held me up.

“That’s my purse. My name is in it and five dollars,” said the young lady shrilly. “And it was snatched out of my hand in the crowd here not ten minutes ago!”

“Miss,” I said, “so help me, a middle-aged lady gave it to me to hold.”

“Look in it. My name is Brown. It’s written inside the cover.”

I opened it. There was “Brown” written inside the flap.

“There,” she said. “And five dollars.”

I opened it.

There was nothing in it at all. Not even a copper.

“Oh,” wailed the young lady. “I’ll call the police.”

“Wait a minute,” cautioned Jim. “Just a second. I tell you I saw the lady give him the purse!”

“You’re both thieves,” cried the young lady more loudly, and her friend started taking a deep breath to let out a yell.

“Shhhh!” I begged. “Look, won’t you believe that this purse was given to me? Maybe the other lady snatched it from you and then got me to hold it.”

“Will the police believe that?” asked the girl suspiciously. “We’ll see.”

And she started to swell up for a yell.

“Here,” cried Jim, “don’t be foolish. It will just create a lot of trouble. Here, give her five dollars.”

“I won’t be gypped,” I cried, while around me the lights whirled and the music of the new revolving merry-go-round made me lurch and cling to Jim’s arm.

“How dare you?” cried the young lady.

I reached in and gave her my one bill, a five.

She put it in the purse.

“The very bill,” said she, glancing at it easily, “that was in it before.”

She and her friend whirled their skirts at us and vanished in the throng.

“Let’s,” said Jimmie, “follow them. I bet you any money in the world that the older woman is working with them and that you were framed. I bet they are a gang. I bet she wouldn’t have yelled for the police for five hundred dollars. Come on.”

“WhoooOOOOoooo, Jimmie,” I begged. “Don’t let go of me.”

We went over to a bench and while Jim sat, talking loudly about how one woman planted the purse and another one claimed it, I went on a private journey, round and round, round and round, sitting on that magic bench that went nowhere, yet went round and round.

After about half an hour of silent prayer, concentration, contemplation and sitting with eyes squeezed tight shut I asked Jimmie:

“How about the twist in my nose?”

“That,” said Jim, not unkindly, “is not a jag or a twist. It is a crook in your nose. And it stays in, in memory of this night.”

Which I suppose is only fair to a man with a limp mind.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. This would be a Bristol F.2 Fighter. ↩︎
2. The Sunnyside Amusement Park existed from 1922 until 1955. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, May 26, 1934.

“Ho, hum,” said Jimmie Frise, tossing a wedding invitation on to his drawing board. “That makes five wedding presents I’ve got to buy next month.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I’ve got three.”

“A fellow really ought to save up for June,” went on Jim, “the way he does for Christmas.”

“I suppose June is the nicest month to get married in,” I mused. “Nice weather for the honeymoon. Nice weather to set up house.”

“No coal bills,” added Jim. “No ashes to take out. No nasty getting out of bed in the frosty February mornings. In June, everything not only looks rosy. Everything is rosy. It is the logical month to get married.

“I wonder what is the favorite month for proposals?” I inquired. “In what month of the year are all these June weddings arranged?”

“I’d say January,” said Jim.

“I’d say August,” said I.

“In January,” argued Jimmie, “parties are at their height. Girls are at the peak of their beauty. They got their new dresses in November. But by January, they have got over the newness of their dresses and are willing to sit out the dances. See?”

“But August is so languid,” I demurred.

“No,” said Jim. “In January, a girl has got over taking care of her party dress and she begins to act naturally. She dances with grace and joy, not stiffly and carefully, the way she does in December with her new frock and her new shoes. Her shoes, as you might say, are broken in by January. So, in January, she begins to let herself go. She dances gaily. Think of all the young people coming home from dances at three o’clock in the morning in January. The biting cold of February is not yet here to chill the young couple. They come home, as I say, through the bright mystic night of January. No. I maintain that perhaps sixty per cent. of June weddings are arranged about the fifteenth of January, either in the car driving home from the dance. Or in the front porch.”

“There aren’t any more front porches,” I reminded Jim. “Now let me sing the praises of August. Think of it. The August moon. The languid soft August air. The purple night. Girl and boy in a canoe. No matter how ill-fitting the boy’s clothes may be in January, how sadly they remind the girl of the poor job the boy has, in August he is radiant in white flannels and blue blazer. Even a boy getting $18 a week, working temporarily for his uncle, looks romantic in a blue blazer and white flannels in August.”

Is Love-Making Different Now¹?

“You are very mercenary about love,” said Jim. “You make out girls to be awfully hard-boiled.”

“Girls are hard-boiled,” I assured him. “Back in the days when the only means a girl had of escaping from home was by marrying, there was lots of room for romance, free and untrammelled. But nowadays, when a girl can get out of housework by taking a job as an office clerk, she can afford to use her head in picking her man.”

“So what has that to do with August?” asked Jim.

“In August,” I said, “everything in nature conspires to confuse a girl. Boys can more easily disguise their true condition in August than any other month. In fact, all they need is a bathing suit. And then, old Mother Nature turns on the languid air and the torrid moon to exert their ancient forces upon the girls.”

“What do we know about love?” cried Jimmie. “We did our courting back in the horse and buggy days!”

“It is the same now,” I said. “Love-making to-day is just the same as it was when the Pyramids were being built.”

“I doubt it,” said Jim. “If there was any way we could find out, it would be very interesting.”

“Well, where do young people go to make love?” I asked. “We could go there and observe them.”

“Where did they used to make love?” demanded Jim. “You say nothing has changed.”

They used to make love anywhere,” I admitted. “In street cars, walking down the street, sitting on front steps, anywhere.”

“Where did you make love?” asked Jimmie.

“On a balcony,” I said, rather shyly.

“Where?” asked Jim.

“The old house is torn down,” I said. “Where did you?”

“In a dinghy,” said Jim. “It’s sunk now.”

“We could go down to Sunnyside,” I said. “There are thousands of young people down there. We could observe them. And if we see a typical young couple, obviously in love, we could sort of detach them from the mob and follow them about, discreetly, you know.”

“A very good idea,” said Jimmie.

It was a balmy May evening. The world was filled with the sense of arrival, the trees were heavy with their first soft leaves, the robins sang in the throaty voice that means the nest is jewelled with blue, the children’s voices were music far off, the cars drove more slowly along the block, it was as if all the world were a little hushed and conscious that God must be somewhere near to behold this masterpiece of an evening.

Jim drove me down to Sunnyside and we parked and joined the strolling throng. It was still early enough for large numbers of babies and small children to be assuming possession of the place, and all the young mothers were beautiful in that slightly damp and flustered fashion which makes them more lovely than they know. It was a little early for Youth to be abroad, so Jimmie and I sat on a bench alongside an elderly couple sharing a bag of peanuts, and we watched the passing show.

Youths Mystical Flowering

“Some people,” said Jimmie, “are so beautiful they hurt just to see them. Others are so perfectly homely, you wonder who on earth had the nerve to give them birth.”

“The homely ones,” I remarked, “don’t know they are homely.”

“But how,” asked Jimmie, “could the beautiful ones not know they are lovely, brushed all day long with a thousand soft glances!”

So we sat, while the gathering throng surged past us, and the traffic behind us grew thicker and more short-tempered, and blue night fell slowly over the cool shining lake.

Then, as if some invisible Piper had sounded his call, Youth appeared. Like an orchestra that played only with horns and clarinets and drums, suddenly the strings, the violins, the violas, the cellos, started to sing in that moving picture before us. Sing and throb, divine, upreaching. Youth suddenly diffused itself amidst the throng, the tune changed, the tone and pitch altered, and we beheld, from our bench, the mystical flowering of human kind.

“Jimmie,” I said, huskily, because the lake is cool at nightfall, “they are the whole meaning of life.”

Old Jim, being an artist, said nothing but sat quite still.

Threes and fours of girls, pressing forward into the evening arm in arm; fives and sixes of boys, hands in pockets, leaning back, brave and indifferent.

“Notice, Jimmie,” I said, “how timid the boys are, they are in sixes and sevens, but the girls are in twos and three!”

Pairs went by and double pairs, teeth flashing, eyes glowing. But none suggested to us two old vultures sitting on the bench that we might follow them and discover how changed or changeless are the years.

Music, traffic, the soft thunder of the throng filled the night. Presently all the threes, and fours of girls were mingled with the sixes and sevens of boys. And Jim and I rose from our bench and fell in step with the night.

“You na-asty man!” and “Don’t ever DO that!” seemed to be the theme of the conversation of all mankind under thirty. Yells and giggles from both girls and boys seemed to be the battle cry.

“When I was young.” I hollered into Jim’s ear, “we could make love quietly!”

“A distant train whistle,” said Jimmie, “was about the only thing to disturb us in the quiet.”

In and out of the multitudes we wove our way, looking for the perfect, the ideal, the idyllic couple.

Then we saw them. The boy, tall and slim and solemn. The girl, winsome but sturdy and free-gaited, but with that same intent, grave expression.

“That’s ’em,” we hissed and cut in behind them.

Gravely they stalked ahead of us, looking in at the merry-go-rounds and the games, the rides and the booths. What little they had to say to each other, they said quietly and low. They seemed to be a prince and a princess out to see how the common people enjoyed themselves.

Wherever they paused, we paused. We stood as near them as our Victorian politeness allowed. We tried our best to eavesdrop on their conversation, but they spoke in murmurs.

“That’s it,” I whispered to Jimmie. “That’s the way we used to be! Just walking along, with not much to say. Just murmuring.”

“Yes,” whispered Jim. “That was it.”

With That Faraway Look

They stood a long time at the bowling alley, but they were looking, not at the bowlers, but at the heaps of red and yellow roses which were the prizes.

They took hands after that, just their fingers entwined, and walked rather shyly, not looking much at anything, but with roses in their hearts.

“You see, Jim?” I muttered. Jim bending down to hear me. “Even in all this racket and riot and confusion, it is just the same as it was in the Garden of Eden!”

They paused. We paused.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to look, and there, with blazing eyes, stood a quite young man, his fist clenched.

“What are you two old buzzards up to?” he snarled. He had a girl with him and she was standing back frightened.

“Where, how, what, who?” I stuttered.

“Bill,” called this young man. And the young fellow we had been following, leaped towards us, all dark and ready.

“Bill, these two old alligators have been following you and Marilyn for the last ten minutes,” shouted the blazing-eyed young man. A crowd was assembling. “Jill and I have been walking right behind you. At the rifle range, these two elderly hornbills swung in between us, and we have been watching them. They have been right close behind you trying to overhear what you said…. What say if I pop them on the snoot?”

“Er, ah, oh, um,” said Jim and I, harmonizing it.

“What’s the idea?” asked the tall young boy we had been following. “What’s the idea?”

“Why,” I stuttered, “we thought you were our friend, Bill Anderson’s, boy. An old school friend. We were just wondering if you were his boy. You look like him.”

“Does he sound like him?” asked the other lad, sarcastically. “Sticking your old noses into young people’s affairs!”

“Let’s throw them in the lake,” suggested a voice from the crowd. I looked at the crowd around us. It was all Youth.

“Let’s drown ’em,” agreed others.

Jim took my arm and thrust me through the mob.

We started slow and gained speed. We lost any pursuers about the place they run those little motor cars around and around. We kept right on until we found our own automobile and got into it.

“After a certain age,” said Jim, “it is not wise to evince too much interest in love. Even in other people’s love. Even in abstract love.”

“They were all youth,” I said. “They might very well have thrown us in the lake.”

“Young people do not like to think that old weasels like us are even interested in love,” said Jim. “It seems to them somehow ridiculous. It offends them.”

“Can’t we even sit on benches and watch them pass?” I asked.

“We mustn’t appear interested,” said Jim. “We should just sit and with a faraway look, as if we had forgotten something.”

“Forgotten everything, you mean,” I said.

“As a matter of fact,” said Jimmie, putting her in low and steering out into a gap in the long grinding procession of cars, “it is nearly everything, isn’t it?”

So we went home and pretended to be very cranky helping our various children with their home work.

---

Editor’s Note:

1. It must be remembered that at this time, love making referred to courtship or wooing. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 31, 1934.

“What are we giving our children?” demanded Jim, leaning back with chin lifted in that fashion he learned sitting on barrels in the village store of his boyhood. “Are we giving them the old simplicities on which we were nursed? No, sir! We are giving them the radio, movies, newspapers, magazines that are filled with the pep of this third decade of the twentieth century. When you and I were children, the fastest thing on the street was that high two-wheeled butcher’s cart. If we wanted music, we had to make it. Newspapers were solemn, stuffy things consisting of solid columns of dignified print. The only pictures were a few ads of ladies in corsets, or ladies with wavy hair.”

“Don’t forget,” I put in, “the fellow that drove around each morning in a little cart, changing the carbons in the arc lights¹ that swung high over all the street corners. Remember the squeak of the pulleys as he lowered the ropes the arc light was on? And we used to all come running when we heard the pulleys and pick up the bits of carbon he threw away. Big pencils for writing on brick walls. Eddie loves Mary, we used to write.”

“Personally,” said Jim, “I was raised far from any arc lights. But we used to write on walls, even in Birdseye Centre.”

“I really think,” I said, “that for all the evils of the twentieth century, there is less writing on walls now than when we were children.”

“Yes,” agreed Jim. “But don’t let details deflect us from our true course. What I say is, we are giving our children the full benefit of the high-pressure twentieth century, and then we expect them to be as child-like as we were!”

“I don’t allow my children to go to movies, anyway,” I stated.

“That’s funny,” said Jim. “I saw them there the night before last.”

“You were mistaken,” I said. “The night before last they were out at a little meeting of a club some of the boys of the neighborhood have organized. A harmless little club.”

“One of us is mistaken,” said Jim.

“Hmmm,” said I. “What was the show?”

“The Loves of Marianne, or something,” said Jim.

“Well, what else is there for the poor little things?” I cried indignantly. “The only show I saw until I was about twenty was a Punch and Judy show.”

To Rescue Childhood

“There’s an idea!” shouted Jim. “You’ve hit the problem on the head! What else is there for them to see? We are neglecting them. It is the selfishness of our generation that is the fault. If we provided Punch and Judy shows for children, they would be just as interested in them as we were, and just as interested as they would be in modern love triangles!”

“That’s it,” I said.

“Well,” said Jim, “I’m an artist. You’re a pretty fair actor. Why not let us build a Punch and Judy show and lead the way. We might start a revolutionary movement. Something to rescue childhood from the dangers our selfishness has flung them into. A movement that might spread all over the world!”

“I’m game,” I said. “I think I can remember most of the Punch and Judy action and dialogue. And if I can’t, I can make it up.”

“We can start in our own neighborhood, with our own children,” said Jim. “And if It goes, we can go about the streets of the city giving free Punch and Judy shows, attracting hundreds, maybe thousands, of kids. And rescuing them from dear knows what their parents carelessly let them get into.”

“Jimmie,” I said, “at last I believe we have got hold of something real and beautiful and high-minded!”

So we started immediately drawing rough plans on Jimmie’s drawing board.

We built a little frame skeleton booth about the size of a Sunnyside ticket booth: Over it we tacked canvas and painted it pretty colors. About half way up the front side of the booth, we left the open space, surrounded by scallops of canvas, which would be the tiny stage on which Punch would run the exciting and murderous course of his brief life.

With old socks, bits of colored cloth and plasticene, Jimmie and I fashioned Punch with his long nose, Judy with her round beet red cheeks, Mr. Toby the dog, Scaramouche, the policeman, the doctor and the hangman.

And for two days and two nights while the paint and putty dried, I studied my lines. Ah, what a dear, forgotten story! Ah, how like life itself is the career of Mr. Punch.

Jimmie painted up some signs and tacked them around the neighborhood, inviting all and sundry, from eight years of age down, to attend a benefit performance, admission, two pins, to be held in the Frise backyard Saturday.

We got the show set and were in the backyard by one-thirty, and as no children but our own were on hand, we sent them out to invite any children they might meet with on the streets and bring them in.

More Jeers Than Cheers

By two-fifteen we had seven other children besides our own and a nice little audience for the beginning of a great reformation.

“All great movements had a small beginning,” explained Jimmie as I got in behind the booth and cleared my throat and sorted out all the characters ready to my hand, with their little stubby bodies and the sticks that supported them.

I rolled up the little curtain.

Cheers, Jimmie leading.

“Hallo, hallo, hallo!” I began, in the squeaky voice of Mr. Punch, popping the little, gentleman on the stage with his club under his arm.

“Louder!” came small voices from without. “And funnier!”

“When is Judy coming back with the baby?” I cried, walking Mr. Punch up and down agitatedly.

Mr. Toby, the dog, popped on. In a moment, Mr. Toby had Mr. Punch by the long red nose and a terrible tussle ensued, which ended by Mr. Punch belaboring Mr. Toby with the club unmercifully, amidst what I thought was a pretty good imitation of a dog fight.

“Haw, haw, haw!” came from without. It was more jeering than cheering.

Scaramouche enters. Is beaten and flung out of the stage. Judy and the baby are both beaten and flung out. I was giving them plenty of action, but the applause was mixed.

Then the policemen enters, slowly on heavy feet.

“I didn’t send for you.” cried Mr. Punch, in the time-honored repartee that I remembered across the years.

“No, I’m sent for you,” retorts the policeman.

“But I don’t want a policeman!” cries Mr. Punch shrilly.

“But a policeman wants you,” says the cop in a deep voice.

And of course Mr. Punch leaps on the policeman and beats him with the club, and flings the policeman off the stage, with a kick.

Outside I could hear tumult and children shouting, and Jimmie speaking to them loudly and commandingly. I peeped out around the canvas booth.

“Aw, nerts,” one of the small boys was saying. “That’s the bunk. It’s the cheese. It isn’t even as funny as Charlie Chase²!”

The children were clustered around Jimmie, paying no attention to the show.

“Here!” I shouted. Even my own boys paid no attention.

“We want Clark Gable³!” shrilled several little girls all together.

“What do you think we are?” shouted another small boy with candy goo all around his mouth. “A bunch of babies? Hey?”

Just the Form Changes

I popped back in the booth and stuck my head over the stage and said:

“Ladees and gentlemen! The most exciting chapters in the life of Mr. Punch are now to be presented. He is arrested and taken before the hangman! The hangman!”

But they paid no attention whatever. They were rearranging some quilts that were out airing on Jimmie’s clothesline. I went out and consulted Jim.

“It’s all right,” said Jim, “they have just decided to put on a show of their own.”

The quilts were drawn together for a curtain. Boxes, chairs and boards were rushed from the back kitchen and from Jim’s cellar. After a violent quarrel, the actors were divided from the spectators, and all in three minutes, they were putting on a show.

The curtains parted.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a six-year-old, standing on the boxes, “we will now present a play called the Loves of Marianne. Certain incidents in this play have been taken from Flying Down to Rio⁴ and Eskimo⁵, and the final scene is from Dinner at Eight⁶.”

He drew the quilts together, and after fifteen seconds, the curtains parted and the show was on.

There were two stabbings and five love scenes in the first minute. All the men were villains and all the ladies were heroines. There was a marriage and one aeroplane ride in the second minute. The Germans attacked with machine guns in the third minute. Count von Richthofen flew over and carried off two of the best-looking heroines in the fourth minute.

And the quilts were drawn to, amidst deafening cheers both from in front of and from behind the quilts.

My boys came over sympathetically.

“See?” they said. “See, daddy?”

“See what?” I demanded.

Jim took my arm.

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

We sat in the living room and listened to the sounds of act two.

“Punch and Judy,” I declared, “has got all the elements of modern drama in it. Wife beating, child beating, murder, the gunman, the escape from the police, the gallows. It is exactly the plot of nine-tenths of the movies you see to-day.”

“There isn’t much difference in the plot of drama from generation to generation,” said Jim. “It is just the form of presentation that changes.”

Which wisdom was emphasized by shrill cheers from the backyard which indicated that act two was ended.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Arc lights were used in early street lights in cities after gas lamps. They gained popularity in the 1880s. They were much taller and brighter than modern street lights, so fewer were needed. ↩︎
2. Charlie Chase was a movie comedian. ↩︎
3. Clark Gable was an actor and popular among the ladies. ↩︎
4. Flying Down to Rio was a 1933 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, ↩︎
5. Eskimo was also a 1933 film. ↩︎
6. Dinner at Eight is also from 1933. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 6, 1934.

“If you had a million dollars,” said Jimmie Frise, as we sat over our cigarettes and dirty dishes in a downtown lunch place, “what would you do with it in times like these?”

“I have a great idea,” I replied. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it this last couple of years.”

“Let’s have it,” said Jim, sitting back.

“If I were a millionaire I would go down around Port Hope or maybe north of Brampton,” I said, “and I would buy 2,000 acres of farmland.”

“Old stuff,” said Jim. “Rich man buys a farm.”

“Wait a minute,” I protested. “You haven’t heard my scheme yet. I’d buy 2,000 acres of fine farmland, with various kinds of soil – clay, clay loam, sandy loam, swamps, pasture, and so forth.”

“Mixed land,” said Jim.

“Yes, and then I’d divide it up into small farms. I would have 100-acre cattle ranches and 10-acre market gardening farms, five-acre chicken ranches and 100-acre mixed farms, for grain and roots, and so forth.”

Real estate racket, eh?” asked Jim.

“On each of these farms,” I went on, “I would build a beautiful modern farm house, of brick, with good barns and buildings, with all modern conveniences like running water and septic tanks and everything. The cattle farm would have modern stables. The small farm suitable for chicken raising would be all chicken runs and houses.”

This has been done before,” said Jim.

“In the midst of this two-thousand-acre estate,” I said, “I would build my own house, the Manor, a large and beautiful house, in the old fashion, but with every convenience, with garages and stables and kennels for all my dogs. From this manor house would radiate drives to all parts of the estate.”

“Ah, you’re going to have a large family?” guessed Jimmie.

“No, sir,” I said. “When I had it all laid out, I would advertise the farms for rent on five-year leases. I would invite the sons of farmers, graduates of the agricultural college and the better class of young farmers who had no land of his own, to come and lease these specialized farms from me. In no time, I would be surrounded by young men, with their wives and little families, working ideal farms provided with every aid to modern agriculture.”

“And what would you do?” Jim inquired.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I would then hire a professor from the agricultural college to act as manager of the estate. He would have a nice house a little way from the Manor. He would do the dividing up of the estate into proper lots of land. He would select the tenants. He would act as adviser to the tenants and to me. Instead of there being an agricultural representative for the county, I would have our own resident adviser, and it would be written right in the leases that the Professor, as we would no doubt call him, would have the right to oversee all operations.”

Lord of the Manor

“Yes, and what would you be doing all this time?” asked Jimmie. “Sleeping? Or gone fishing maybe?”

“I would be the Squire,” I said. “I would be seen in the early mornings, with the dew on the grass, riding a nice quiet little horse about the lanes and roads, amidst the hedges. I would get myself made a J.P.¹, so that I could do all the marrying and so forth. I would just visit around all the tenants inspiring them, joking with them, taking a great interest in the children, acting generally as the lord of the manor.”

“And collecting the rents,” said Jim.

“Yes,” I said, “I have figured out that the rents would give me a good return on my million dollars, especially as I would have a clause in the lease that would let me break it if they didn’t come through.”

“You would certainly have a good time,” said Jim.

“Yes,” I cried. “Think of it. I could pack of beagles and I would forbid any of the tenants to shoot my rabbits. Two thousand acres would provide me a lot of rabbit hunting.”

“How about giving me a job?” asked Jimmie.

“If you really knew anything about farming,” I said, “I might make you the manager of the estate. But you were only born and raised on the farm. How about you renting one of my small farms? There’s an idea.”

“One of the five-acre chicken ranches,” said Jimmie.

“Then,” I went on, “think of the social activity around the manor house! The parties! The tenants coming and going; the people from the city, all my city friends, driving out for the week-ends.”

“You would have to turn Tory,” said Jim.

“Yes, I suppose I would have to,” I said. “I can’t imagine even a Liberal, let alone a Radical lord of the manor. One has to be firm about one’s rents, and you can’t do that if you have any funny political ideas. Yes, I’d be a Tory. And I have thought, too, that I would build a church on the estate. We would have our own church and our own minister. It would be nice to have a front family pew, perhaps raised a little, with me and all my children and grandchildren in it.”

“Ah, grandchildren?” said Jimmie.

“Yes,” I said, “I can picture myself growing pleasantly old around that large and happy community, loved and respected, and perhaps, if titles ever come back, I might have a grandson that would be Lord Clark.”

“Ah, Lord Clark!” cried Jimmie, waving his cigarette. “Lord Clark of Brampton or Port Hope!”

“Mind you,” I cried, “an old-fashioned lord. A lord of the old school. Not one of these industrial lords, in shipping or manufacturing.”

To Recover a Lost Happiness

“But you would still collect the rents,” said Jimmie.

“Yes, and I’d have a community general store on the estate,” I said. “The storekeeper would draw a salary, and he would sell everything at cost to the farmers. I might even have a co-operative marketing office, like the U.F.O.² A fleet of trucks to carry the produce of the farms to the city.”

“Your tenants would never really have to go to town at all,” said Jimmie. “They could just sit there in the peace and quiet of your magnificent estate, and worry about nothing.”

“What would they want go to town for?” I demanded. “You miss the point of the whole scheme. It is to recover a lost happiness. To bring back a former glory. Yes, the professor would manage the co-operative marketing system. There might be even a little profit there. In time, one of my sons might get a good job right on the estate as marketing expert, at a good salary. A salary that would keep him in a condition that befits the son of the manor.”

“And maybe you could bring up one of your sons in the ministry, and he could run the community church?” said Jim.

“Self contained,” I agreed. “That’s the idea.”

“It’s a great idea,” said Jimmie. “I know of no safer way to invest your million. Your family would be fixed for generations to come. How about the sons of your tenants?”

“They could inherit the leases,” I explained.

It was time to go. The waitress was leaning over us piling the dishes on her tray.

We put on our coats and walked out to the street, and I must say, I was surrounded by a kind of pearly-colored glow. I felt benign and serene. I felt kindly toward all mankind, and if any bum had caught me right then, as we stepped out on to the street, I would have given him a shilling or maybe even half a crown, as you might call a fifty-cent piece, along with some sound advice. Yes, sir. I wished I had a walking stick, as I stepped out on to Yonge St.

We walked over to Jimmie’s car that was parked on the kerb, and there was a truck parked ahead of it, with its engine running.

“Drat the truck!” said Jimmie, surveying the way we were trapped by cars behind and in front. It was the usual street scene.

“The man will be out in a moment,” I said. “Don’t be impatient, Jimmie. No gentleman is ever indignant. Or impatient.”

We got into Jimmie’s car and sat there. Three, four, five minutes went by, and still the big truck stood right in front of us, prisoning us, with its body gently jiggling all over with the engine running.

“Look here, Jim,” I said. “There’s an opening across the road. I’ll just get out and drive the truck across to that space.”

“If you like,” said Jimmie.

Back To Reality

I got out and looked about. There was no sign of any truck driver.

I got in the cab of the truck. It was just the same as an ordinary car. I let go the brake, let in the gears, and drew carefully out from the kerb and steered for the open space across the road. But just as I got into the middle of the street, a car slid along and parked itself in the opening I was aiming for.

I drove on slowly. There were no more spaces in the block!

So I drove around the block, carefully, trusting that by the time I got back, there would either be a new opening along the kerb, or else Jimmie would see the situation, move out of his place and let me in and wait for me.

But all down the block there was no open space, and there sat Jimmie, solemnly waiting at his wheel. I drew alongside of him with the truck and stopped.

“Hey!” I cried. “I’ll go around the block once more, and you watch for me coming. And when you see me. draw out of the kerb here and let me drive in. Then wait for me a jiffy.”

“Right-o!” cried Jimmie.

So I drove around the block once more. I ran into a few delays. There was a traffic jam on a side street. And I was held up at all three corners of the block.

And then I got back on to Yonge St, and started slowly for Jim, watching ahead to see if he saw me coming. Jimmie is forgetful.

But there he was, turned in the driver’s seat and watching me approach. I slowed.

Suddenly, I saw a figure running beside me.

He was big and hairy, he had on overalls, his arms were bare and dirty, and he had the most terrible expression I have seen on a human face since the last of the great war cartoons.

“Aaarrrrnnnnnhh!” he snarled, galloping alongside the truck.

I surmised he was the truck driver.

“Just a minute, my good man!” I cried down to him, trying to handle the brakes, gears and steering wheel and also to keep an eye on traffic, though both my eyes were strongly attracted down to this man snarling below me on the pavement.

“Gearrrratttt!” roared the big brute. And while I clung helpless to the big steering wheel, he leaped on the step and laid hold of my shoulder.

He chucked me out over his shoulder as if I were a pillow. As I felt myself passing over his head, I sensed him sliding as if in masterful hands, gain speed and leap down the street.

At that moment, I landed. I landed in slush and mud and cigarette butts and old chewing gum.

Independence Highly Prized

I landed right in front of Jim’s car. I slid quite a piece, gathering slush as I slid. I lay still.

Jimmie was out and beside me in an instant. I felt him wiping my face off with his handkerchief.

“Ah,” cried Jimmie, “as I live! If it isn’t Lord Clark of Port Hope!”

“Jimmie,” I spluttered, “get me out of this!”

He assisted me to my feet. He hastened me into his car. Only a few of the common people had gathered around to see me. “Take me somewhere,” I cried, as we drove off. “Take me to a cleaner’s and presser’s or something.”

“How about a Turkish bath, milord?” asked Jimmie.

“Did you ever see anything so brutal?” I demanded, holding my hands in the air, because I was all gooey. “That truck driver might have known by my appearance that I was not a car thief!”

“Well, if you were a truck driver,” said Jimmie, “and you came out and saw your truck vanished, and then all of a sudden saw your truck driving along the street with a stranger at the wheel, what would you do?”

“Throw him to the street!” I said hotly. “I never saw such outrageous conduct!”

“Ah, times have changed,” said Jimmie. “In the old feudal days, in the days of the manor house, for example, truck drivers knew their place and they knew the lord of the manor when they saw him. Now in the old days, that truck driver would merely have tipped his cap to you. And curtseyed!”

“Jimmie!” I said.

“But you see,” explained Jimmie, “times have so changed. There is a great independence abroad in the world. Men want that independence even more than they want comfort and security.”

“It was outrageous,” I said.

“Sure,” said Jimmie, “but no matter how honest your intentions, you can’t monkey with a truck driver’s truck nowadays. That big guy would rather drive a truck and have the right to throw a benign old squire like you in the mud, than be your flunkey and live on the fat of the land.”

“If I had a million dollars,” I said, “do you know what I would do with it?”

“What?” said Jim.

“I’d buy a fleet of trucks, and by George, I would teach those truck drivers manners!”

“Ah, well,” said Jim, “the main thing is you haven’t the million dollars.”

---

Editor’s Notes:

This story was repeated on March 23, 1940 as “Times Have Changed”.

1. Justice of the Peace. ↩︎
2. United Farmers of Ontario. This party formed the Ontario government from 1919-1923. By the time of this article, they were in decline and dissolved by 1944. ↩︎