Tag: 1937 Page 1 of 5
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 28, 1937.
“Look,” said Jimmie Frise, “at all these pathetic little roadside stands.”
“Pin money,” I explained, “for the farmer’s wife.”
“If only,” cried Jim,” the farmers could be taught the art and craft of salesmanship.”
“Craft of salesmanship is right,” I agreed.
“They’re in the selling business,” went on Jimmie, “yet they know nothing of the science of selling. They’re years and years behind the times.”
“Wouldn’t a high pressure farmer look silly,” I protested.
“Listen,” cried Jim, slowing the car so we could have a better view of the little wayside stands as we passed, “we could make a fortune out of a correspondence school of salesmanship for farmers. Teaching the farmers the principles of modern salesmanship in twenty lessons.”
“If farmers were interested in selling,” I pointed out, “they would have quit farming long ago. The ones interested in selling have gone to the cities and are now our big executives in department stores and advertising agencies. The ones not interested in selling have stayed here on the farm.”
“Look,” said Jim, slowing still more. “Look at that outfit. A few mouldy old planks. A couple of untidy crates for support. And a few baskets of fruit and vegetables. And a woebegone lady sitting abjectly behind it.”
“The fruit looks swell,” I objected.
“Contrast that,” cried Jim, “with a modern city fruit store. The bright modernistic decoration of the shop front. The vast gleaming plate glass window. The beautifully patterned layout of the fruit and vegetables, all arranged in geometric design, making without question the most beautiful merchandise display in any city anywhere. And ready to wait upon you, a smart pretty girl in a snow white uniform.”
“Yeah,” I argued, “but the fruit has been packed and shipped and trucked and unpacked and handled and displayed and must have lost all its true freshness and tang. It is pretty but soft. It is ten days old.”
“That’s just the point,” insisted Jim. “If only these farmers knew a little about merchandise display. If they only woke up to what every little two-by-four shopkeeper in cities and towns knows. Here they’ve got the fruit fresh and lovely from their orchards and gardens. Here are highways, upon which flood ten thousand cars filled with consumers, not potential consumers but actual, daily, three times daily consumers. Yet they can’t make the contact. Why?”
“People like their stuff delivered,”1 I suggested.
“Poff,” snorted Jim. “It’s because the farmers don’t know the first thing about salesmanship. For instance, instead of these measly little shake-down platforms they build with old disused planks and a few boxes, why don’t they erect a neat, well-built little shelter, painted a bright attractive color? Put a roof over it to shelter the buyer from the sun and to create in the public’s mind the impression that the vegetables and fruit are sheltered from dust and cow flies and things?”
Woebegone Wayside Stands
“How much would a shack like that cost? A hundred bucks?” I demanded.
“They could build it themselves, in their spare time, with material lying about every farm,” declared Jim. “Five dollars’ worth of bright paint, white, yellow, green and red, would cover every telltale stick of cast-off lumber. Make it modern. Make it snappy, fresh, vivid, like the very fruits and vegetables offered. Bright red like apples, frosty green like squash or corn on the cob. Yellow like pumpkins, white like onions.”
“I get you now,” I confessed, for almost every quarter-mile, as we ticked along, we passed a wayside stand in the ditch, each more dilapidated than the last one, more woebegone, more completely out of tune with the bright and pleading bounty on display.
“Why?” demanded Jim, “Why doesn’t it stop us? We go right by. Yet in the next town, we’ll probably be beckoned by some tawdry bright soft drink shack and go in for a bottle of pop. Or worse, we’ll be halted by some bedizened2 fruit store, run by some guy who couldn’t make sunflowers grow, and there we’ll buy some fruit…”
“I feel like a nice sweetish, sourish harvest apple,” I said, “right now.”
“It is the same principle,” said Jim, “as the little country girl in a faded gingham frock as compared with some salty city jade done up in the latest snazzy slip covers… which does a man prefer?”
“The snazzy city jade, I’m afeared,” I feared, “but how about stopping along here somewhere for a few of those yellow harvest apples? The kind all wet at the core, you know?”
“O.K.,” said Jim, “but I think something ought to be done about it. I think the government ought to start a course of training in salesmanship for farmers.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and lose all the city merchants’ votes. Governments believe in leaving things sitting pretty.”
“I suppose it’s all a case of natural selection,” said Jim. “If a farmer had any ideas about selling, he wouldn’t be a farmer.”
“Yes, and a lot of people who are trying to sell,” I added, “and haven’t any ideas about it, ought to be farmers. It’s a matter of patience. The patient ones are on the farm, watching things grow. Waiting for things to get born. All the impatient ones are in the cities, dashing about, hustling, promoting, urging, stepping up.”
“Like us,” sighed Jimmie.
And then we hove into sight of the saddest and most derelict wayside shrine of agriculture either of us had ever seen. It was by a gate, half in the ditch and half out. It was built of odds and ends that included old fence rails, boxes, crates and pieces of thin board that might once have been part of a chicken coop but couldn’t stand the gaff.
On this rickety and skewed platform were laid, without any decorum or sense of straight from crooked, sundry baskets of apples, four green squash, two baskets of corn and some sundries.
A Little Shrine Does Wonders
Almost hidden from sight behind this poor spread sat a middle-aged woman, bowed as if in grief. She did not lift her face as cars went by, but sat as if counting beads or picking at her fingers, an object of complete symphony with the raggedy table before her.
“Aw,” said Jim, compassionately, as he started to slow the car.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I hissed. “Those don’t look like much apples to me.”
But ignoring me, Jim stopped the car on the shoulder of the road and stepped out. I followed.
“Well, lady,” said Jim, cheerfully. “How’s business to-day?”
The lady did not answer at once. She slowly struggled back to consciousness from the dim place she had been.
“No business,” she said at last. “Three days I been sitting here and you’re the first.”
I noticed the apples, while large and firm, were dusty and some of them had dry mud on them. The squash were muddy.
“Those apples aren’t windfalls, are they?” I inquired.
“No, indeed,” said the lady, now quite restored to consciousness, and getting up to her feet. “Hand picked. I picked them myself. They’re just a little dusty. I laid them on the ground while I put them in their baskets.”
“They’re not very attractive looking,” I muttered.
“Ah,” smiled the lady, “it ain’t the look of an apple.”
“Oh, but it is,” cut in Jimmie, who selected a big yellow one and polished it smartly on his sleeve. “Look at that, now.”
He held the apple up and it gleamed in the sunlight like lacquer.
“Aw,” said the lady, “people aren’t fooled by a little shine.”
“Oh, yes they are,” said Jim, leaning up against the stand in a friendly and conversational way. “Ninety per cent. of the apples you people grow are eaten by city folk. And city people are trained and schooled and brought up to expect a lot of shine on what they buy. Look at cellophane. Why you can hardly buy a shirt or a dozen eggs or anything in the world now that isn’t all wrapped up in the perfectly transparent shine and glitter of cellophane. It’s nothing but shine.”
“Aw,” said the lady, shifting the baskets a little but not improving their arrangement. “I don’t believe in fooling people. A good apple is a good apple, and I know it and they know it, and it’s a fair deal.”
“But how much better,” cried Jim, “if these good apples of yours were made beautiful to look at, attractive and appetizing to the eye?”
“You don’t taste with your eyes,” said the lady.
“In a way, you do,” argued Jim.
“Well,” I interjected, “we’d better be trotting along, Jim.”
“Wait a minute,” said Jim, standing back a little and surveying the rickety layout. “Now, lady, look at the facts. Hundreds of cars are passing here every hour. Full of people who eat three times a day. Yet in three days you say nobody has stopped at your stand.”
A Miracle of Art
“There’s too many of us along the highway,” said she.
“It’s not that,” said Jim, kindly. “Either way along this highway are dozens of stands.
We’ve been looking at them. And the stands where the cars are stopped are the ones that look the brightest, the most attractive.”
“Aw,” said the lady.
“It’s a fact,” cried Jim. “People, like bees, are attracted to the brightest flowers.”
“Yes,” argued the lady, “but where’s the best honey? In buckwheat, and how bright is it?”
“Madam,” said Jim, “let’s just experiment. Look, have you got any kind of a cover, any bright cloth, we could use to cover this stand?”
“I’ve got a patchwork quilt,” said the lady, after a moment, “the loveliest one I ever saw, and I made it myself when I was a young woman. It is red, with stars on it, and bright red roses.”
“Look,” cried Jim, “get it, and a platter or big dish,”
“I have a beautiful blue platter,” said the lady, “about this big, see?”
“Perfect,” cried Jim. “Now, I’ll tell you what we do. I’ll straighten up and strengthen this stand, see. Have you got an axe?”
“It’s in the shed,” said the lady.
“I’ll straighten up this stand,” said Jim. “You fetch the quilt and the platter and my friend here will polish up these apples and those squash.”
“What with?” I demanded.
“Polish them, polish them,” said Jim, urgently. “Take them back to the pump and wash them, first, and then polish them. Put a high glossy polish on them. Do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind, but…” I said, for I am one who lives by my brains, not by my hands, and I find my brains never hurt me or get blistered or ache.
“Get going,” said Jim. “It won’t take ten minutes to do it.”
“What will I polish them with?” I repeated.
“Look around the house,” said Jim.
“Is there a dog?” I inquired.
“No dog,” said the lady, and she and Jim each took a basket and a squash and helped me back to the pump and then they went indoors while I carried the rest of the stuff. They came forth with quilt and platter and axe and some stakes of wood and I went in to look for polishing materials. There were dish towels on a rack and after hunting through drawers and cupboards, I came on a tin of floor wax, mostly used and pretty dry, but still capable of giving a little when I softened it with my finger.
I went out to the pump and took off my coat and set to. I pumped and let the fresh cold water gush over the apples as I held them two at a time in my hands, turning them. I washed the squash free of all dried mud. I then sat down and dried them with the towel and, with my finger nail, carefully applied a tiny bit of polish.
I could hear Jim thudding and banging down at the gate and could hear exclamations of delight from the lady, as she beheld the miracle of art happening before her eyes. I polished apples until never in my life had I seen such a polish even on red peppers. No apple ever glowed as these did. in their reds and yellows. I was careful not to put too much polish on, and I smelt each apple when complete to make sure no odor remained.
The squash came out of my hands so green and silvery gray and beautiful, so gleaming and shining, I lost all my distaste for the job, and when Jim shouted to me to hurry up, I him I was coming when my job was done.
I carried the first baskets of apples down gate, and if Jim was proud of his remodelling job, he certainly had to share it with me for the apples.
“Good heavens,” Jim cried, “what a shine!”
“They hardly look like my apples,” the lady said, in astonishment.
So I went back and got the rest of the apples and the squash and they were laid out triumphantly on the reorganized stand, and we were standing back admiring the transformation when a big car that was speeding by suddenly jammed on its brakes, skidded to a stop and backed up to us.
A big smiling fellow leaped out and stood staring in delight at the display.
“I’ll take a basket of the apples,” he said briskly, hand in pocket.
The lady made change trembling. Jim and I stood back, proud.
“Make it two baskets,” said the gent, and I snatched up a second basket for him. He selected a choice apple and bit it.
“Ug.” he choked, “guh, guh, thpew!”
“What is it?” Jim cried.
“Poison, arsenic,” shouted the man, gasping and grabbing his throat. “Did you spray these apples, woman? What with quick?”
All was confusion, the man dropped his basket and clutched his face, his neck, his Adam’s apple, his face went livid.
The woman picked up an apple and sniffed it. Then she bit it.
“Owek! Pehaff!” she screeched.
Jim seized one. Bit it.
“What’s this?” Jim shouted, glaring terribly.
“What’s what?” I said.
“What did you polish these apples with?” shouted Jim, each word by itself, as if I were deaf.
“I used a little eeny weeny bit, just a teeny flick of wax,” I said. “Floor wax.”
The gent simply got in his car, slammed the door and lurched off. Jim and the lady stood looking at me with their eyes all screwed up.
“City people,” said Jim, finally, “shouldn’t be allowed to help country people. At all.”
So we went back and washed the apples and squash all over again, and then Jim and I each bought two baskets and a squash and left the lady.
But she sat up a lot more business-like behind her stand.
Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on August 26, 1944 as “Apple Polishers!”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 10, 1937.
“What do you think,” asked Jimmie Frise, “about this new psychology angle, about how to make people like you?”
“The weather’s too, hot,” I explained, “to think about things like that. Psychology is a winter sport.”
“An awful lot of people,” said Jim, “are taking up this friend-making business. You can make friends now just the same as you I can make pies. It’s a science. You take so many ingredients, mix them up, subject them to heat, and there you are – a friend.”
“Pie-making is a science nowadays,” I stated, “but it used to be an art. There are pie factories to-day where, in vast white-tiled sanitary kitchens, expert pie-makers, working with chemicals and employing every device of mechanical perfection of measuring, mixing and cooking in automatically controlled ovens, produce thousands of pies per day. But who wants a sanitary pie?”
“I was talking about friends,” Jim protested.
“It’s the same thing.” I declared. “Now in the old days, when pie-making was an art, a friend was a friend. I don’t like synthetic pies and I don’t think I would care for synthetic friends. You ought to have tasted my grandmother’s rhubarb pie.”
“The heat has got you,” said Jim, a little wearily. “You’ve got pies and everything all muddled up.”
“This rhubarb pie,” I continued tenderly, “had no top on it. The rhubarb was mixed with eggs and sugar in some way so that when it was cooked a sort of brown crust had formed, crisp and crystalline, over the tangy rhubarb. Ooooooooh!”
“The trouble with any art,” stated Jim, “is that so much of it is lousy. When pie-making was an art, only those who knew the artists were in luck. Maybe your grandmother could make pies, but think of all the terrible pie you have tasted in bygone, years, before science came to the rescue of mankind as a whole.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “I can recall those awful pies I had away from home. Apple pie especially, with a sort of thick, pallid crust, almost white. Filled with horrible hunks of half-cooked apple, heavily sprinkled with nutmeg to try and conceal the true facts.”
“And punkin pie,” said Jim. “I’ve eaten some punkin pie that might just as well have been boiled newspaper.”
“My grandmother,” I said, “had a way of making blueberry pie that passed away with her. She put vinegar in it, somehow, and the bottom crust, instead of being leathery, like most pies even nowadays, was so crisp it splintered under your fork. Yet the blueberry juice which spurted all over the place when you sank your fork into the pie never sogged down into that paste. As a kid I used to spend most of my summer holidays picking blueberries for my grandmother.”
“It was an art,” agreed Jim. “But I would say that the average pie to-day is a thousand per cent. better than the average pie of your grandmother’s time.”
“Suppose I admit that,” I asked, “where does it land us? Don’t you see that it only makes pies commonplace? Don’t you see that instead of really great pie being something beautiful and strange and treasurable and lovely, that anybody can have really great pie nowadays and something beautiful and treasurable has gone out of life?”
“What nonsense,” said Jim.
Making Everything Good
“It’s not,” I assured him. “We are eliminating all the values from life. By making everything good, there will soon be no good left. By making everything beautiful, where will we turn for beauty?”
“How absurd,” insisted Jim.
“Science,” I decreed, “is the guilty party. What art created science has bent itself to reproduce in mass. Discover something good, and what happens? Science gets busy and makes a million of it for general use.”
“And why not?” cried Jim indignantly.
“Because,” I explained, “a million of it isn’t deserved. This world didn’t get where it is by patient plodding. No, sir. It got here by the fire of inspiration and genius. But now we are making everything available to everybody, beauty, comfort, pleasure joy – all the sweet remote prizes of life – we’re making them commonplace. So what? Well, there’s going to be fewer and fewer fires amongst the human spirit, and I bet you the next hundred years are going to be the dullest and silliest in human history.”
“Utter rot,” asserted Jim. “We’re going to see in the next hundred years the flowering of the human spirit as the result of long ages of patient cultivation. What can the effect of universal cheap transportation be but to show all men the earth? Think radio and its effect, making beautiful music and good ideas available in every home on earth, rich and poor?”
“Until science got busy with means of transportation,” I said, “only those with courage and the high heart went forth to see the world. The rest of mankind stayed home like hogs in their bin. And those who went forth into the world told of its beauty and strangeness in song and story and picture, and made us believe the world was beautiful. Nowadays any fathead who works like a horse at some stupid job and saves his money can go safely to the ends of the earth, and he sends home picture post-cards and secretly feels the poets lied. He doesn’t realize that just by being there he has stolen away the beauty.”
“Oh, what a Tory,” breathed Jim malignantly.
“And as for radio and beauty and good ideas,” I informed him, “what is the greatest program on the air to-day? It is the program of a man with a large red nose in controversy with a ventriloquist’s dummy.”1
“What a miserable attitude you have towards life,” said Jimmie. “You’re one of those who ought to study this new science of making friends. It would give you a sweeter feeling towards your neighbors.'”
“What kind of a science is this friend-making?” I demanded.
“It’s simplicity itself,” said Jim, happy to be rid of me. “All that it requires of us is that we become aware. Aware of others. Alert to life all around us. Psychology teaches us that we use only a little fraction of our powers, mental and physical. We go through our lives like worms burrowing in the dark earth.”
“Worms,” I pointed out, “would darn soon regret it if they came up and started cavorting around in the hot sun”
“Wait a minute,” protested Jim. “The trouble with us is that we are aware only of our own lives. And aware dimly of a few right around us with whom we grudgingly share a little of our interest in life. If we open our minds and hearts, if we deliberately become aware of others, their interests, their cares and labors, their lives, then, without effort at all, they become our friends.”
A Larger Awareness
“What good would we get out of it?” I inquired. “All they would do is keep coming around after supper and wanting to tell us their troubles. I know those friends. A guy has got to be guarded in his sympathy.”
“I’m not talking about sympathy,” said Jim. “What we get out of a larger awareness of others is a fuller feeling of ourselves, a kind of indefinable joy and pleasure, like waking up in the morning after a grand night’s sleep, or sitting on the cottage veranda after a swell swim waiting for lunch. Waking our minds to others makes our spirits tingle. It is like reading eight or ten exciting novels all at the same time.”
“Just a muddle,” I said.
“In no time at all,” went on Jim, “those who deliberately practise awareness are revolutionized in their manners and attitude. They become good natured and agreeable. All the harsh angles are rounded off…”
“Old stuff,” I cried. “This is the old personality idea. How to be a success in any company. How to be the life of the party. They laughed when I sat down at the piano…”
“It’s entirely different,” insisted Jim. “There are no rules or formulas for making friends. It is just an inner change. A sort of rousing. Wakening. And immediately people are attracted to you, as people are attracted in the lonely night to a house with all its windows lighted.”
“Of two houses,” I stated, “one all lit up for a party, full of gabbling people and cars parked outside and eight or ten people besides myself inside trying to hold the limelight, and another house with only one room dimly lighted but in that room a friend…”
“Well,” said Jim, “I’m interested in this stuff and I’m starting to practise it. It doesn’t seem to work with you. Have you noticed any change in me? Don’t I seem sort of easy and open minded this morning?”
“I never saw you more pigheaded,” I assured him. “All you want to do is argue.”
So we continued with our work, Jim scratching away at his cartoon with his head held back, squinting dreamily; and I sneering at my typewriter. And after a while there came a light knock on the office door.
“Come in,” called Jimmie in a musical voice.
“Who the…” I muttered.
The door opened gently and revealed two young men standing respectfully on the sill. They carried leather cases. They were well dressed. But it was their expression that was remarkable. A look of warmth, of restrained joy, of hope no longer deferred, glowed in their eyes; and their smiles were like Robert Taylor’s.2
“Mr. Frise? Mr. Clark?” said the dark one, tensely, as if he could scarcely believe his eyes.
“Yes,” I said sharply.
“Come in, come in,” cried Jim, throwing down his pen.
All speechless with pleasure, the two young men stepped in. With intaken breaths and quick glances around our tousled office as if they were entering some holy place, they set their leather cases down and laid their hats on our desks.
“What is it, what is it?” I said pleasantly enough. “I’m very busy this morning.”
But the sheet of paper in my typewriter was still blank.
“Mr. Clark,” said Jim, rising and offering them a cigarette, “tries to pretend he is a fierce little man.”
“Really,” I said, “I have to get this done. this morning, as you can see…”
“Gentlemen,” said the dark one, “we can come back some other time. Just name an hour. We wouldn’t dream of interrupting your work.”
His voice went deep and quivered.
The fair one reached for his hat and picked up his leather case, giving me a most apologetic little grin, as he half backed to the door.
“To what are we indebted for the honor of this visit?” said Jim.
“Our visit,” said the dark one, quietly “is probably more important to us than it is to you, and therefore I hesitate…”
“Forget it,” said Jim.
“We represent,” said the dark one, in a tense and almost confidential voice, “a worldwide organization that includes universities, royal societies, international organizations, publishing…”
“Ah,” I said, “books.”
“Sir,” said the dark one, turning respectfully to me, “I sincerely beg your pardon. I know we are intruding. Please excuse us, and some other time…”
He, too, reached for his hat. He was flushed and embarrassed and the very embodiment of apology.
“What kind of books have you got?” I relented slightly.
“I’m afraid,” said he, “they are hardly the kind of thing we ought to show you two gentlemen, so widely…”
“Now you’ve got me interested,” I cried. “I never met anybody selling books who didn’t have to be thrown out by the office bouncer. Here, let’s see what you’ve got.”
“It is a collection,” said the dark young man diffidently, “of biographical and historic sketches of successful personalities, and differs from all other biography in that in each instance selected from the world’s great statesmen, authors, soldiers, leaders in all walks of life, attention has been focussed on the personality of each, and studied in its relation to his success.”
“Mff,” I said, the dark one began to unbutton his leather valise.
“In biography,” explained the dark one, “so much attention is paid to such detail as origin, ancestors, early environment and then historical record, that the true secret of their greatness, their personality, is lost sight of. The scholars who prepared this collection, scholars from many countries and all of them famous men themselves, have delved into hitherto neglected records, letters, unpublished lore of all sorts, anecdotal, contemporary gossip, in order to recreate, as it were, the living personality, without boring you with an account of the activities of these whom the world accepts as our greatest men. An astonishing truth emerges from this new approach to the question of greatness…”
Foundations of Personality
“What of that?” I asked.
“That all our great, from Caesar, down to present day and living men accepted as great,” said the dark young man, “had almost identical foundations of personality.”
“You mean Caesar and Einstein?” I demanded.
“Exactly,” said the young man, with a look of admiration on his face. “You’ve hit it square on the head.”
And he turned and gave his partner a swift look as much as to say, “Didn’t I tell you this was a smart man?”
He then just stood and looked at me reverently, never saying a word, but handing me volume after volume out his case. They were pleasant, stiff volumes, with gravure portraits of the subject of each chapter. There were Caesar, Beethoven, Theodore Roosevelt, Marlborough, Lindbergh, Titian, General Pershing, Charlemagne, Rembrandt, Edison, hundreds of them, some disposed of in a few pages, others taking up a quarter of a volume.
“It’s more just to show them to you,” said the dark young man. “To get your reaction. We’ve read your articles for years, ever since we were schoolboys, haven’t we, Eric? And I said, before we start in on our select list, given us by a federation of university advisory boards, I will just get the reaction of a practical man who makes personality his daily study…”
“It’s a little over my head,” said Jim awkwardly. “I don’t even know who half of these people are written up here. But you certainly made no mistake in coming to Mr. Clark. Now he…”
“How much is it?” I asked doubtfully.
“The normal price, as a matter of fact,” said the young man, “is forty dollars, but we have been given a few sets to be disposed of, confidentially of course, to any who assist us with counsel or advice of a critical nature, at only twenty-five dollars. In return for your kindly interest in this work, I almost wish I could afford, out of my own pocket…”
“Tut, tut,” I said. “I am getting together a library for my sons, and biography is in line…”
And in no time at all, I had signed the little slip of paper and paid my cheque and was assured the complete set would be delivered to my home within a few days.
“Now,” said the fair-haired young man, stepping forward and starting to unbutton his leather case, “Mr. Clark, I’d like to show you this set of four volumes on how to attract friends.”
“Which?” I demanded, hardly having my fountain pen back in my pocket.
“It’s a remarkable work,” said the young fellow. “My partner and I have studied it and it has done us an unbelievable amount of good. It has entirely revolutionized our methods of salesmanship. We are no longer high pressure, but low pressure. And it works twice as good. The secrets, as set forth here, as to awareness, alertness to our fellow man and his temperament personality…”
“Gentlemen,” I said loudly, “good morning.”
And Jim, the silly, accompanied them out to the elevator, joking and laughing.
Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on July 8, 1944 as “Making Friends”.
- This is probably in reference to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. They were only recently on the radio in 1937. As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, the popularity of a ventriloquist on radio, when one could see neither the dummies nor his skill, surprised and puzzled many critics, then and now. ↩︎
- Robert Taylor was a popular actor at the time. I guess he lost some popularity as in the 1944 repeat, his name was replaced with “their smiles were like a tooth-paste model’s”. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 12, 1937.
“Look at that,” cried Jimmie Frise, “for a swell car.”
We were slowed up in Orillia, looking for a parking spot near our favorite eating place.
“Boy,” I said.
“Imagine having that to float around in,” said Jim. “How the miles would waft by.”
“Let’s have a look at it,” I suggested, “when we get out.”
We parked, and in our fishing togs, which attract no attention in a civilized town like Orillia, even if we are a little trampy, we strolled back to have a look at this masterpiece of modernity.
It was a kind of pigeon blood ruby color. Its nose was chromium. Inside, it was upholstered in yellow buff whipcord. Its wheel and other driving appurtenances were casually and widely dispersed, giving the impression of great space within. It was a convertible touring sedan which could be transformed, with the twiddling of a couple of fat, casual looking knobs, into an open car under the divine sun of June.
“Ah, Jimmie,” I sighed, “it is wicked to leave a car like this around for common people to see.”
“Do you realize,” said Jim quietly, “that this is one of the cars you can get for about $40 a month?”
“For how many years?” I scoffed.
“And your old car,” said Jim.
We walked slowly around the magnificence. There was a drop-down arm in the middle of the back seat, a fat, comfortable thing on which you could rest your elbow as you sped through space, dreaming at the lovely Canadian landscape.
“Jim,” I declared, “rich men ought to know better than leave cars like this around where people can look at them. It breeds discontent. This car is a Communist agitator of the worst type.”
“Who do you suppose owns it?” asked Jim. “It looks like an Orillia license plate.”
“Some millionaire,” I said. “Maybe one of those rich ‘county families’ we’re developing in Canada, the way they have them in England.”
“I would be willing to bet,” stated Jim, “that the owner of this car is some plain guy like us. Some fellow making a moderate salary who has enough sense to live while he can.”
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may1,” I sighed, taking another stroll around the gorgeous creation.
“Exactly,” said Jim. “After all, what rule is there that forbids a man to have a princely car, even though he lives in a cheap boarding house?”
“Let’s eat,” I suggested sadly.
We went in and ordered ham and egg sandwiches and coffee and apple pie.
“As I was saying,” said Jim, leaning back, “why should a poor man not have a rich car? What rule requires that he should have a house and good clothes and a bank balance before he can own a three thousand dollar car?”
“I suppose,” I said, “there really is no reason.”
Folly of the Old Order
“When we were boys,” expanded Jim, “the rule was that each man should have a home more or less in keeping with his class. The bankers and big business men lived in one neighborhood. In another, the professional and manager class lived. Next, came the well-to-do store keepers, clerks, superintendents and so forth. Next, the mechanics, and so on. You had to live, outwardly, in your home and your clothes and your general appearances, according to your classification. All that is gone.”
“Not altogether,” I disagreed.
“Well, you can’t tell from anybody’s clothes nowadays who or what they are,” stated Jim. “And from the outside of a house, you can’t guess, with any degree of accuracy, who lives within. Plenty of shopkeepers and superintendents are living up among the bankers and presidents and any number of presidents and chairmen of the board are living in old houses down amongst the stenographers and jazz band violinists.”
“True,” said I.
“In other words,” said Jim, “appearances don’t count any more. A man is free to choose, as he never was in days gone by. If a rich man wants to live modestly and unpretentiously, there is no rule of society to penalize him for not living up to his class. If a poor man wants to buy fine clothes and swank around, after working hours, as a gentleman, nobody cares any more. If he is a gentleman, in his character, I mean, there is nothing to prevent him dressing like one. See?”
“How do you work this argument around to cars?” I asked, eyeing the ruby snout of the royal equipage through the restaurant door.
“A few years ago, when cars became fairly common,” said Jim, “it was a sort of rule of the game, a hang-over from the older order of things, that people should stick to the grade in keeping with their house and neighborhood. If a man in a low-price-class street blossomed out with a $2,000 car, it caused some snootings.”
“I remember my slow rise,” I confessed, “from high-behind black flivvers, up through sixes to eights. I remember perfectly, the dreadful sense of dissipation I had when I got my first blue car.”
“Exactly,” said Jim. “But we have just showed up the folly of that old order of society. We saw thousands and thousands of people who devoted their whole lives to saving and scraping to buy a decent little home, only to lose it in the smash. We saw people who denied themselves every luxury only to be kicked around just the same as the wasters and careless spenders.”
“It won’t be a lesson to them,” I declared. “People will go right on being thrifty. Mark my words.”
“I see no reason,” said Jim, “why a man should not own a swell three-thousand-dollar car and take what enjoyment he can out of life, instead of slaving all his life to buy a home, only to lose it.”
“I agree,” I said nervously. For that winey creation outside seemed fairly to bloom at me through the window.
The ham and egg sandwiches arrived and Jim and I fell to. It was still a hundred miles to the fishing ground we had in mind, and we wanted to arrive in time to have a fling at the evening rise.
A Friendly Stranger
As we ate sandwiches, a man walked in the restaurant and, after glancing around, came straight to us.
“Are you the gentlemen who were admiring my car?” he asked.
“Your car?” I exclaimed. “Is that your car?”
He was a middle-aged man; he was dressed in khaki trousers and a shabby old tweed coat, and there was a little stubble on his chin.
“Yes,” he chuckled. “How do you like it?”
“It’s gorgeous,” I cried. “But how extraordinary, we were just talking….”
“Pardon me, gentlemen,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the cubicle seat confidentially, “but here are the facts. I am subject to arthritis. This arm is suddenly gone crippled on me. I’ve just been into a doctor’s here, but he can’t do much, I’m sorry to say. Now, I noticed you looking at the car and the thought just occurred to me, maybe one of you would be kind enough, if you’re going north, to drive it for me. How far are you going?”
“Sundridge,” said Jim eagerly.
“Why,” cried the stranger, “how odd. That’s exactly where I’m going. And when are you coming back?”
“To-morrow night,” I said.
“Splendid,” said the stranger, rising hurriedly. “What do you say? You come in my car and leave yours here. It will be quite all right, just where it is. And I’ll drop you here to-morrow evening.”
Jim and I were both hurrying with the last of the sandwiches.
“I’m sorry to rush you,” said the stranger. “But as I have lost more than an hour with this arm…”
“It’s quite all right, sir,” we assured him excitedly.
As we paid our check, I muttered to Jim:
“What a chance. We’ll take turn about.”
“All my life,” chuckled Jim, “I’ve wanted to sit behind the wheel of a boat like that.”
When we came outside, the stranger, who introduced himself as Mr. Anderson, halted us:
“I have a better idea,” he suggested. “A mile north of here is a tourist camp. One of you drive your car out there and the other drive me. We can shift your baggage there and then there can be no complaints about parking here all night.”
“O.K. Jim,” I cried, “I’ll drive ours. I know the place he means.”
I trotted up to our car and tooled it out into traffic and away. In my rear view, I presently beheld the long, low pigeon blood coming behind. It slid past me like a greyhound past a scottie, and I put on all speed I had to keep in sight. Jim and Mr. Ander- son smiled lazily at me as they passed.
By the time we reached the tourist camp, they were waiting, and the three of us threw our stuff into the back of the big car.
“Good-by, Lizzie2,” we cried and with a smooth leap like a modern elevator starting. we swung out into the highway and with scarcely a sound, bore into the northerly and sunlit breeze.
“Watch for speed cops,” laughed Mr. Anderson. “I’ll pay the fines, but….”
“Don’t fear,” sang Jimmie, slouching under the big wheel, “I’ve got an eye for them.”
And for a little while, we just sat, rejoicing in the feel of it, the ecstasy, the joy of immense, effortless power. Mr. Anderson shifted his position so as to turn a friendly face on me and, as he explained, just to keep a weather eye behind for speed cops.
“I Solved That Question”
“Mr. Anderson,” I said, “excuse me for being so bold, but my friend and I were just talking about this car and the probable owner. May I ask what line of business you’re in?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Mr. Anderson gaily. “My appearance puzzles you, eh? Well, sir, I’m a decorator and paper-hanger.”
“Contractor?” I suggested respectfully.
“No, sir,” said he, laughing. “Not even a contractor. Just a plain journeyman painter and paper-hanger. But I am unmarried. I have saved my money. And I allow myself only one luxury. And that is the finest car money can buy.”
“Jim,” I cried, “did you hear that?”
“I sure did,” called Jim, winding the great car through the twists of Washago already.
“Mr. Anderson,” I said, “it’s the most curious coincidence, but my friend and I were actually talking about that sort of thing when you came into the restaurant. We were saying, why should not a man of modest means devote his life to a lovely car, a thing of joy and beauty, just as much as to a house and lot, or the usual properties a man slaves for?”
“Well, I solved that question years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, emphatically. “This is the third high-price car I’ve owned. I work all fall, winter and spring. I hardly spend anything on living. Why should I? But in summer, I set forth. I put my little baggage in the trunk behind. I travel wherever I like, in utter comfort and style. Last year I was all over the west, Yellowstone Park, the Rockies.”
“Easy, Jim,” I warned, as we plunged through the aisles of the first Muskoka woods.
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Anderson, “I’m the Hobo de Luxe. And you can tie all the millstones of property around your neck you like. I want nothing but this. And you can’t get it in cheaper cars.”
“I should say not, I agreed, lolling back in the deep luxurious seat, stroking the whipcord, dropping my ashes into the silver ash container at my hand. “The turn-in value of these big cars,” said Mr. Anderson. “Ah!”
He looked sharply out the rear window.
“Jim,” I cried, looking back. “Two speed cops. Racing neck and neck.”
“Will I run away from them?” asked Jim. “Or slow down?”
“Give them a run for their money,” laughed Mr. Anderson. The fine will be the same at the speed we’re doing now anyway.”
“O.K.,” laughed Jim, crouching, and I felt the great car fairly lift.
“We’ll soon be in Gravenhurst,” I shouted.
“They’ll get us there anyway. Let’s slow this side of it.”
Jim took his foot off and we began to slacken our glorious, bird-like flight through space. I could see the cops riding neck and neck, gaining. They went by us in a terrific spurt and wavered ahead of us and we all slowed and pulled to the shoulder of the road. They came back, shifting at their belts and lifting their goggles.
“Three of you, eh?” said the larger cop.
“This gentleman,” I explained, “will accept all charges.”
I smiled at Mr. Anderson, but he, as a matter of fact, disappeared. Instead of the easy-mannered, smiling Mr. Anderson, there was cringing in the front seat beside Jimmie a pale frightened little man, eyes wide and startled, his stubbled chin grotesquely fallen. His shoulders were hunched so that his shabby coat collar stuck up around his neck, giving him an air of decrepitude and age.
“Mr. Anderson,” I said sharply.
“What is this?” whined Mr. Anderson.
“Yeah, what is this?” demanded both cops.
“Why,” I shouted, “this gentleman owns this car and he said…”
“Me?” whined Mr. Anderson. “Me own it? Hah, hah, hah. Why, officer, these gentlemen picked me up not ten miles back. I was thumbin’ my way, and they stopped for me. Is there anythin’ wrong?”
“Anything wrong?” scoffed the cops. “Did these birds steal the most conspicuous car in the whole of Ontario! Come on, get out.”
Mr. Anderson wriggled out of the car abjectly.
“Come on, you,” said the cop that got in beside Jim. “Turn her around. Whose junk is this in the back? Yours, eh? Well, I’ll be jiggered.”
“But this man?” I yelled. “Mr. Anderson!”
“Go on, quit your kidding,” said the cop. “I’ve seen him on these roads for the past month. Beat it, bo3, and keep on going.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Anderson. One cop rode with us, having parked his cycle, and the other followed. We drove back to Orillia. We explained it several times to the cop. We stopped in the tourist camp and showed him our car, where we had left it. We got out our identification cards and licenses. We declared ourselves to be respectable citizens who had no reason on earth to steal anybody’s car, least of all a million-dollar-job like this.
We went back to town and met the owner, a stout, furious man who eyed us with horror and dusted off the seats of his car with his handkerchief.
“This is what happened!” he yelled at us all. “I came out of the bank and got in the car. I put the key in the lock and then suddenly recalled that I had not spoken to the manager on a matter of importance, and I slipped back into the bank for a moment. When I came out, the car was gone.”
“It was then,” I insisted, “that this Anderson slipped into the restaurant and made us the offer of a drive in his car.”
“A heck of a tale,” laughed the cops, “he was a bum. Just a bum. Do you mean to say you accepted that story from him?”
“Chase after him and catch him,” I cried.
“We have his story,” said the cop. “You picked him up thumbing on the road.”
“Well, it was this way,” we explained. “We were talking about poor men owning rich cars, see, and….”
Well, it was nearly four p.m. by the time the explanation seemed to sound good enough, even to us; and that being too late for Sundridge, we just went east of Orillia to some trout creeks we know. But we didn’t get anything.
Editor’s Notes:
- “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is a famous line from the poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick. It’s a call to seize the day. ↩︎
- “Tin Lizzie” was slang for an old, often dilapidated, car. It was was often used to describe a Ford Model T which was a cheap, old car in the 1930s. ↩︎
- “Bo” was slang, short for Hobo. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 27, 1937.
“I could eat,” said Jimmie Frise, “an “Eskimo’s boot.”
“I’m a little hungry myself,” I agreed. “Where will we eat?”
“Eating,” said Jim, “is not the casual matter most of us think it is. What a man eats, he is,”
“Let’s have a good sit-down lunch to-day,” I said.
“It isn’t how you eat,” stated Jimmie, sinking deeper into his chair, “but what you eat. A man consumes food. That food, by a chemical process, becomes him. You are not you really. You are what you have eaten.”
“I’m too weak to argue to-day, Jim.” I explained. “Let’s go and eat.”
“Eating,” stated Jim, “should be by rights a spiritual exercise. It is as important as religion. What is the use of a man trying to implant high spiritual truths in his brain if that brain consists of fibres taken from bulls, hogs, oysters, mud-turtles1 and turnips?”
“Oysters,” I said. “That’s it. We’ll have a dozen Blue Points on the half-shell2. They’ll soon be out of season.”
“The human race,” said Jim, “is right on the verge of a great discovery. And that is, that what you put into a man, that is what you get out of him. Food. Food is the secret of it all.”
“All what?” I inquired.
“All our troubles,” said Jim. “We’ve solved everything, yet we are still in a universal confusion. We’ve solved the riddles of science and can make cloth out of wood and wood out of air: we can fly and we can travel under the sea; we’ve measured the stars; we’ve explored the human mind to its uttermost end; we’ve solved all questions of law and justice and society; we’ve solved everything, yet the human race as a whole is closer, in its own heart, to the cave man today than it has been since it started out of the caves.”
“We have gone kind of primitive,” I admitted.
“We’ve mastered everything else,” said Jim. “The whole animal and vegetable kingdom we’ve brought under control. Cattle we’ve taken and altered and changed to our own requirements. Horses, hogs, sheep, poultry, we’ve possessed body and soul and perfected them to our own needs. Wheat, potatoes, vegetables, flowers, trees, we’ve corrected and moulded and shaped and improved to our liking. How? By feeding. The only living creature, other than wild things, that mankind has not bothered to alter or improve is mankind himself.”
“Science.” I protested. “has vastly improved all food products. The very reason we have altered cows and cabbages was to improve their eating quality.”
“Yet,” cried Jim triumphantly, “we let mankind eat what it likes. That’s the point. You don’t catch us letting cattle or vegetables eat what they like. No, siree. They eat what we give them. And see the result of feeding oil cakes to cows or fertilizing celery?”
“Fascism,” I accused. “Jim, I hope you are not advocating that we humans be fed, not as we like, but as the government decrees?”
“Why not?” demanded Jim. “If we’ve brought all the animal and vegetable kingdom so far with science, wild cattle converted into Jerseys and great shorthorn beef; wild plants and roots transformed into those succulent vegetables and salads: why not wake up to the facts and start applying the same successful principles to ourselves?”
For a Government Menu
“Suppose,” I suggested, “that you would have a daily menu published by the government and we’d go to jail if we departed from it?”
“Better than that,” said Jim, who had apparently forgotten it was lunch time. “The first thing would be to appoint a royal commission consisting of scientists, doctors, agricultural experts and so forth to determine what foods are holding us back and what foods would, as the farmers say about steers and hogs, finish us. The whole history of the improvement of other species could be gone over, from Percheron horses to Pekingese dogs. Then the government could adopt the report of this royal commission and establish a new department called the Department of Human Agriculture or something. Each day in the newspapers would appear tomorrow’s menus. Inspectors would rove the streets of cities and towns, like weed inspectors, and pop into homes at meal time, to see that nothing noxious was being served. Restaurants and hotels would have permanent officers of the Department of Human Agriculture working right in them, sort of New Age dietitians.”
“Would they allow potato cakes?” I asked.
“Or Winnipeg gold eyes3? Or Roquefort cheese?”
“At first,” said Jim, “there would be a pretty general lenience, so as to wean the human race gradually away from its wicked and destructive individualism. I have no doubt that our ancestors had quite a time with wild horses, teaching them to eat what was good for them. But let us make it a Five Year Plan. In five years, the whole nation will be eating what is good for them according to the rules we have found so eminent successful in all other animals.”
“Fascism, Jim,” I said. “It sounds like fascism to me.”
“Well,” cried Jim passionately, “what else can you blame, but eating, for the way the world is to-day? We’ve tried everything else. We’ve mastered and conquered and explained in every conceivable direction. Yet man remains as mysterious and unmanageable as ever. I think it’s what he eats. Turn a herd of horses loose in the wild state, and how long does it take them to slide right back into the primitive mustang again? Let a field of turnips run wild and what happens to them?”
“Pork,” I said. “That’s what we’ll have for lunch, some lovely nice white roast pork, with cracklings on it, apple sauce and bright turnips with lots of pepper sprinkled on them.”
“Why,” said Jim, slowly straightening himself up out of his chair, “we can see the results of eating right in our midst. Wallace Beery eats beef4. Bernard Shaw5 eats vegetables. And look at them.”
“Well, it all depends what you want to do with them.” I said: “if it was a fight in a night club. I’d have Beery: but if it was a witty conversation in a parlor, I’d have Shaw.”
“Where,” said Jim, now upright and reaching for his coat and hat, “will we eat?”
“There are all kinds of places,” I said. “I feel like a sit-down meal to-day.”
“It’s lovely out.” said Jim. “We could eat a stand-up sandwich and spend the rest of the time strolling through the streets.”
“We could go down to the hotel grill room and have,” said I high-pressuredly. “let’s see, first: essence of tomato soup, that pale ruby consomme delicately tinged with tomato; followed by a mixed grill, consisting of a tiny plump lamb chop, a sausage, two strips of transparent grilled bacon, a grilled half tomato and a small kidney.”
“Or let’s go to a cafeteria,” suggested Jim, holding the door open for me. “In a cafeteria, you can see what you are getting. You can even pick the one steak you like out of a dozen steaks sizzling in the pan. Or the exact piece of pie you want out of a great and serried parade of pie. When I look at a menu and read the kinds of pies, apple pie, pumpkin pie, caramel cream pie, rhubarb pie and pineapple tart pie, I can’t visualize then. It’s just a great muddle of pie in my mind. But this is the age of realism. A cafeteria is realistic. I can glance over the pies, and just as you can pick the prettiest girl out of a bunch – though no two men will pick the same girl – you can pick the pie of your heart.”
“Well,” I said. “I’m weak from hunger, but nevertheless, let us go and walk around the downtown until the spirit moves us.”
Which we did; and the noon hour was lovely, and the streets jammed with people looking their best, either because they were just going to eat or because they had just eaten. If nothing else bears witness to the spiritual character of eating, this look of noontime beauty on the faces of everyone old and young does. At no other time of the day down town do you see it. That cold and hopeless and hurrying expression of the morning is gone; the tired, veiled look of the homing throngs of evening, gone. Noon is the hour of joy, of smiles, of freshness and of shining eye.
“Jim,” I said, “these girls are like vestal virgins going to the temple, these men – look at that old fellow, there. I bet he is an old buzzard in his office, yet what an air of comfortable and happy expectation is on him now, as he heads for lunch.”
And all the cars at corners slowed politely. and never tooted a toot, it being noon; though in the morning and the evening, these same cars would come angrily to the turns and with indignant horn fling us pedestrians out of their way. And policemen sauntered with far-away gaze. And lads on bicycles whistled tunes. And in the upper windows of office buildings, men sat leisurely on the sills, looking down, embracing their ankles and dreaming.
“Ah, Jim,” I said, “what a lovely thing noon is.”
“How about eating?” suggested Jim.
This Babylon Hour
So we slowed and looked in all the gating places: the drug stores, their windows filled with hardware and shoe trees and globes of the world, with their long counters within where men sat shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow and ate by the wrist movement; the little orangeade places6 where the girls sit, with wide eyes and self-conscious mouths, chewing as if chewing were slightly improper; restaurants, with and without beer parlors, where men, mostly in threes, go in and hang their coats up ceremonially, always having a brief flirt with the pretty coat-check girl; cafeterias, where forever somebody is always standing, tray braced against chest, staring helplessly around; funny little kosher sandwich shoppes, the spicy odor of which, skilfully emitted from an open transom, makes an invisible and potent advertisement all along the street whichever way the wind blows; tea shops upstairs and down cellar; armchair lunches where forsaken youths sadly push mops along the damp floors forever, and aged men, bent and tousled, carry great tin baskets full of dirty dishes; gloriously pretty soda joints where even the ham sandwiches taste of vanilla.
So we wandered in this Babylon hour amid the topless towers and the meaningless racket of a great city’s interlude of leisure, and the longer we looked, the less we felt like going into any one of them, for when I said beefsteak Jim said sandwiches, and when I said a chicken pie Jim said liver and bacon.
“The only thing we can do,” declared Jim, “is chuck and chance it. Let’s agree we’ll go into the fifth eating place north of here.”
“O.K..” said I.
And, the fifth was one of those orangeade places, where there were forty girls and only two men eating, and both the men looked as if they had duodenal ulcers and were eating as if they were adding up a column of figures.
“Hang it,” I said, as we paused irresolute, “I never felt more like a sizzling steak in my life.”
“An agreement’s an agreement,” said Jim, thrusting the door open, “but I must admit I could go for a large plate of curried lamb.”
So we went in and stood with the girls at the counter, and watched the little trays coming out, with their mug of coffee and saucer of dinky sandwiches on lettuce, and we studied the complex series of notices, signs and advertisements on the back wall.
I’ll have,” I said, “a tomato, cheese and bacon sandwich. And coffee.”
“Make mine,” said Jim, “a chicken, bacon and tomato sandwich. And coffee.”
And there we stood, while the food continued to stream out the little pantry wicket and the girls around us went seeking pews; and presently, out came our sandwiches.
Skidding and Skating
They were three-deckers. On white bread. Skewered with toothpicks on which was impaled an olive.
On the little tray there was a knife, fork and spoon. The plate the sandwich was on was a bread and butter plate. But the coffee mug was large and husky and manly.
Jim and I balanced our trays out into the sea of skirts and up by the window found a table just being vacated by five girls. The table was 18 inches square.
We removed our coats, but, except by climbing over several strange young ladies, we could not hang them up. So we sat on the coats.
“I hate these three-deckers,” I said to Jim as we faced our food. “You can’t open your mouth wide enough to get a bite at them, yet, if you unskewer them, they slither all over the table.”
“Curried lamb,” muttered Jim numbly contemplating his sandwich.
The knives were not sharp, and when I tried to cut into my sandwich, the bacon resisted, at which, this the very first attack, the three-decker began to come to pieces. The top slice of bread skidded on the buttered lettuce underneath. The bacon slewed out sideways.
I stabbed it with the fork to hold it firm.
“Easy,” said Jimmie. “I guess we shouldn’t wait so late for lunch. It affects our temper.”
“Whose temper?” I demanded. “I’m not in a temper. I’m just indignant at these silly three-deckers. A sandwich is a sandwich. It is meant to be eaten in the hand.”
I tried another cut at the thing, and the two top slices, resting on cheese and lettuce. skidded in a new and hitherto unsuspected direction. I made a quick stab with the fork and nailed that runaway.
“Pssst,” said Jim, who was sawing cautiously at his.
I laid my knife and fork down and sat back and looked at him.
Jim, with dignity, continued to saw, and presently got a corner loose. This he proceeded to impale on his fork and transfer to his mouth. But tomato is by nature slippery and elusive. The bottom piece of bread, with tomato and lettuce, slipped off half-way to its terminal and fell in Jim’s lap. He made a quick duck with his head and captured off the fork the two upper bits of bread and some wisps of chicken.
“Ha,” said I, resuming knife and fork and advancing to the attack.
I stabbed the largest and firmest part of the sandwich which by now was slithered out, like a pack of cards, all over the little plate. I laid my knife firmly upon it and pressed. I pressed harder. I drew.
The whole business skidded, the little plate tilted, the tray skated, and my sandwich went to the floor.
“Good!” I said. “Now I’ve got you, you…”
And I got down and stabbed it on the floor.
“Pssst,” said Jim, kicking at me. “Keep cool.”
“The… the… the…” I said.
Easy,” said Jim. “Ladies present.”
So, as if by mutual consent, we rose quickly, snatched our coats and hurried out into the street and went down to a drug store and had a double malted egg chocolate, and went back to work much refreshed.
Editor’s Notes:
- Turtle soup was a common food until turtles were over-hunted and the soup lost its popularity by the 1950s. ↩︎
- “Blue Points on the half shell” are a serving of raw Blue Point oysters. Oysters were plentiful and cheap from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, so they were treated as a cheap protein like eggs. ↩︎
- Goldeyes are a type of freshwater fish. ↩︎
- Wallace Beery was an actor who was well known for his tough guy roles. ↩︎
- George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, was a well known vegetarian. ↩︎
- I’m not sure what these are but it seems like “orangeade places” were restaurants were known for serving small meals that would be more popular with women. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 2, 1937.
“At last, cried Jimmie Frise, “I have everything set to take you duck hunting.”
“Not me,” I assured him.
“Listen,” said Jim earnestly, “I’ve built the swellest duck blind you ever saw. I spent the whole week-end building it. It’s on the one point in the whole, bog where, you might say, every duck from Hudson Bay has to pass on its way south.”
“Count me out,” I said.
“Now listen,” said Jim, “it’s the swellest blind I ever saw. It’s built with poles, overlaid with cedar all woven together and cat-tails entirely covering it. It’s so clever a blind even an old grandma duck that has been up and down America eight or ten times wouldn’t suspect it.”
“I’m booked up,” I said, “every week-end from now to Christmas.”
“Aw,” said Jim, “don’t be so pig-headed. You don’t know what you are missing. You call yourself a sportsman? Duck shooting is the basic sport. Until you have shot ducks you’re nobody in the world of outdoor sport.”
“Give me,” I stated, “deer, moose, bear, pheasants, partridge or porcupines. Anything dry. But deliver me from all dampness, chill, sleet, mud and east winds.”
“This duck blind,” stated Jim, “is practically weather proof. I built a regular little bench in it for us to sit on. I built a kind of a shelter underneath so that if we do get cold we can snuggle down under and get warm. It is made of thick cedar boughs woven in around a framework of poles, the whole overlaid with cat-tails. It is without doubt the best duck blind I ever saw anywhere, and I built it to introduce you, at last, to the sport of duck shooting.”
“Some other time,” I concluded.
“I’m afraid,” said Jim, “you are a fair-weather sport. You miss the true essence and spirit of sport. Sport involves all the manlier human attributes, such as taking risks and overcoming danger. The true sportsman fares forth in the face of the elements and by his own devices outwits the elements. That is why duck shooting is the premier sport of all. It calls upon a sportsman’s resources to keep dry and warm. You can’t hunt ducks on a fine warm day. You’ve got to be in the blinds before dawn, and the worse the weather the better will the ducks fly.”
“It sounds as horrible as ever,” I informed him.
“To me,” cried Jim, “it’s the greatest thrill in the world. We get up at 4 a.m. It is still pitch dark and the wind is sighing over the farmhouse. We dress by lamp-light, gradually coming back to consciousness. Minute by minute, our sense of appreciation of life seems to grow sharper. We put on our heavy clothes, our canvas coats and our wind and rainproof covers.”
“I love bed,” I gloated. “Deep, tumbly bed.”
Those Rushing Targets
“We go out into the air.” went on Jim, “and it is dark and strange and tingling and sharp. The blood leaps. Stars shine coldly. We have our guns across our bent arms, and what a queer lovely feeling that is. Our pockets bulge with boxes of shells.”
“I’m still in bed,” I said. “Yah, I stretch my legs down under the quilts.”
“We walk down across the dark fields,” said Jim, “to where the punt is tied on the edge of the bog, and there it is, looming, with its pile of decoys all ready in the middle. Silently, our heavy boots crunching in the frosty rim of the water’s edge, we get in and push off. We pole and paddle amidst pale ghostly aisles of bog, listening every now and then to the sleepy quack of ducks or to the faint whistle of wings of ducks already stirring. We hurry. We reach the point of bog, putting into the dark, windy water, where we quickly toss out our decoys, draw the punt deep into the rushes to hide it, and fumble our way into the waiting blind.”
“I fumble the quilts up higher about my head,” I put in.
“We unload our pockets,” continued Jim. “We lay the shell boxes handy, emptying a few into our pockets, and load our guns. We button up our collars and pull our caps low. We are ready.”
“And I,” I said, “mutter drowsily in my sleep. Something about the chief end of man.1“
“All about us,” sang Jimmie, “something seems stirring. There is a faint paleness. The wind freshens. Afar off we hear the muffled thud, thud of a gun. Something unseen whistles and fades overhead, a flight of ducks. Dimly the outlines of bog and shoreline begin to be visible, and we sit, crouching, gun at the ready, peering into the air. It is the dawn. It is like a symphony. It is a great, primeval thing, in vast simple tones of gray and of darkness, of sound and silence, of stirring and of motionlessness. We can now see, like little bobbing phantoms, our decoys on the water fifteen yards ahead of us. A mile to our left there is a sudden blaze of guns, two, three guns, blasting in quick succession. We tense. We crouch and take a fresh grip of our guns.”
“Go on,” I said.
“There we crouch,” said Jimmie. “And then faintly, faintly to our ears comes hissing, indescribable sound, increasing like the rush of arrows through the air. Through the peep-holes we have left in the cat-tails of our blind we suddenly see, like shadows, far beyond our decoys, a close packed flock of ducks curving through the air. They have seen our decoys. They lift and turn. Our pulses are beating like hammers. Our breath nearly stops. With a rush of sound they come, like arrows slackening in their flight, straight into our decoys. Ten feet above the decoys they bend their wings to brake their speed, and in a kind of innocent jumble prepare to drop down among the wooden deceivers.”
“Go on,” I said.
“We rise,” said Jim. “All in one smooth motion, we rise to our feet and aim our guns. Bang, bang, bang, we pick our birds and drop them. The others, suddenly towering, try to make off, with loud quacks of fright. We swing and follow with our gun barrels, in that eerie light, the flashes showing us we aimed too far ahead or not enough, and a couple more of those rushing targets fall to the water.”
“How many did we get?” I asked.
“Six,” said Jim. “Three each.”
“Oh, boy,” I said, because a roast wild duck, served with wild rice, creamed celery and apple sauce, is just about as nice a thing as ever a man got out of bed for.
“We hurriedly push the punt out of the rushes,” said Jim, “and pick up our kill. Then we hide the punt as quickly again and crouch down in the blind.”
So that was how I was betrayed by Jimmie into going duck shooting. To my outfit for normal sport I added canvas coats and hip rubber boots, which are good for nothing but washing a car. Firemen wear them, but firemen don’t have to walk in them. They ride.
We arrived at the farmhouse about 9 p.m., but the good woman insisted on feeding us, and there was potted meat and pies made out of greenings, so it was eleven o’clock before we finally got into the spare bed, which was hard and cold. And I don’t believe I got my eyes really shut before I found Jim with the lamp lit shaking me roughly and telling me to get up.
It was not only dark and cold, but a wind that I identified as an east wind was sighing and moaning around the side of the farmhouse. Canvas was never intended to be worn. It is for tents and horse covers. We pulled on our clammy underwear and our canvas and our high rubber boots. We gathered up guns and shell boxes with clumsy hands. I ached all over for sleep. That bed fairly held out its arms to me. But shivering and hoarsely whispering, we stood forth and Jim blew out the lamp.
“Rain,” I said, as we opened the door and stepped out.
“A swell morning,” said Jim with hoarse enthusiasm. “A perfect morning. And not a smell of rain.”
“East wind,” I shuddered, “always brings rain. Just a minute.”
I had seen an umbrella hanging on a nail the night before. I slipped back in and fumbled for it. I took it down and rolled it, with my gun, in the rubber sheet I was taking along to sit on in the blind.
Down the yard and out across the pasture we walked, in the complete darkness, no stars glittering however coldly, and heavy clods sticking up to further impede the loose and hollowly clumping rubber boots. We found the punt, and as Jim had foretold there loomed the pile of decoys in the middle of it.
I clamped down in the bow while Jim, with a long oar, poled and paddled us across the windy little bays of the bog. It took us fifteen minutes to get out to the point where Jimmie had made his blind the week before. As we neared it a voice, muffled and low in the dark, called out:
“Hey, on your way. This is occupied.”
Jim stopped poling and let the punt drift nearer.
“Beat it,” came the voice. “Make it snappy.”
“Look here,” said Jim, “I built this blind.”
“Go on,” said the voice – it sounded like a large, rough sort of person, “beat it. We build our blind on this point every year.”
“You’re in my blind,” stated Jim sharply.
“So what?” said the voice, and faintly I could now make out two massive figures looming head and shoulders out of what seemed a mass of wet and cold swamp.
With an angry shove, Jim pushed away and started paddling past. I could see decoys on the dark water.
“The dirty crooks,” said Jim bitterly.
“Let’s go back,” I said, “the farmhouse.”
“There’s lots more good spots,” said Jim. “In fact, one of the best spots of all is only a quarter mile out here.”
I slunk down lower. The east wind was rising. There was a horrible ghastly paleness seeming to grow all about. Jim paddled furiously with the oar, standing up, and the wet little punt wobbled and teetered across the leaden water, the small busy waves making a most unpleasant sound along the sides.
“Take it easy, Jim.” I suggested.
We drew on towards a point of bog jutting out darkly. As we approached a sharp whistle rang across the murk.
“Hey,” a voice called. “Full up here.”
Jim swung the punt and headed furiously in a new direction. It was paling. Far off, I heard a faint double thud of a gun being fired. Jim made the punt wobble dangerously as he drove the oar into the water.
“If we dumped here–” I began.
But Jim just made an extra wild wobble that cut me short. We hove off another point of bog. A dog barked at us. A voice called angrily words that we could not hear.
From the point where Jim had built his blind came the sharp bang of two pump-guns firing furiously.
“It’s begun,” said Jim, swinging the punt out and resting his oar.
Every Man To His Taste
And it had begun. The paleness had increased until now, dimly, we could see the shoreline. The wind had freshened. On the edge of our limit of vision we saw a flock of ducks, flying low and fast, streak along, and a moment later a fusillade of shots broke from another point. Far off and near at hand, the firing swelled.
“We’ll just push in here anywhere,” said Jim excitedly.
He headed for the cat-tail bog and, on nearing it, commanded me sharply to set out the decoys while he held the punt steady. The decoys were cold and icy. They each had a string with a lead weight for an anchor. The strings were tangled and I had to double down and peer and jerk and untangles I laid them in the water and got my hands numb with the cold trying to make them ride right side up. There were twenty of them.
We got them set out somehow and Jim, feeling with his oar, found a soft spot in the bog where he shoved the punt in amidst the tall rushes. I having to get half out of the punt to help shove with my foot. It was cold and terribly wet and smelled of swamp.
We got set. We managed to turn the punt sideways to allow both of us a shot if any ducks did come in to our decoys.
But no duck did come. We sat there, listening to the far-off cannonade and the sudden fury of the guns nearby. Far off, as the day dawned, we beheld harried flights of ducks crossing ever farther out and ever higher.
It became broad gray daylight, the east wind was now a mild gale and there came the first sprinkle of small, drifting rain.
“Well,” I inquired bitterly, “now what do we do?”
The firing had died down. Desultory shots sounded on the wind in the rushes.
“I guess we can go back now,” said Jim dully.
So while Jim held the punt steady in the lashing wind, I picked the decoys up.
“Wind the strings around each one,” said Jim, “so they won’t get all tangled.”
The water was icy. It ran down my wrists. My hands were no longer gifted with any feeling. They were red and raw looking.
As we started to push away from the bog to cross the homeward bay the rain began to thicken. I reached down and unwrapped the umbrella from the rubber sheet. I shook it out and sprung it open.
“What on earth have you got there?” demanded Jimmie, as if he couldn’t see.
“It’s an umbrella,” I explained. “A device invented some hundreds of years ago by the Chinese to add to the comfort of human kind.”
I heard a whisking sound.
“Hye!” roared Jim, and the punt gave a sickening wobble.
A big fat mallard had jumped from the bog behind us and nearly collided with my umbrella.
“We couldn’t have got off a shot in time anyway,” I stated.
“I guess,” said Jim thinly. “I guess it’s best not to try to interest people in duck shooting. Either you’ve got it in you or you haven’t got it in you. You’re born to shoot ducks, I guess.”
“Every man to his taste,” I agreed.
So I kept the umbrella up all the way across to the farm and all the way up to the house, where we had a great breakfast of eggs, ham, apple sauce, potted meat, apple pie made of greenings, thick toast made over a wood fire and boiled tea.
Editor’s Note: This story was repeated on October 7, 1944 as “Just a ‘Blind’ Date”.
- The Westminster Shorter Catechism is a catechism written in 1646 and 1647 by the Westminster Assembly, a synod of English and Scottish theologians and laymen intended to bring the Church of England into greater conformity with the Church of Scotland. The catechism is composed of 107 questions and answers. The most famous of the questions is the first:
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. ↩︎
“Nix,” hissed Jim, “It’s a cop!”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 17, 1937.
“Policemen,” said Jimmie Frise, “always ought to be in motor cars; not on motor cycles.”
“The law,” I disagreed, “is a game. If you can see a cop on a motorcycle, it’s fair. It is conceded in all civilized countries that cops should not be allowed to hide.”
“Modern traffic,” said Jim, who was watching me steer my car amidst the hot and anxious outward bound traffic of Saturday noon, “modern traffic has got past the amusement stage. It’s a game no longer. Now that the Ontario speed limit has been increased from 35 miles an hour on highways to 50 miles, and in cities and towns from 20 up to 30 miles an hour, a strange and grim psychological factor has emerged.”
“What’s that?” I inquired.
“When the law was 35 miles an hour,” said Jim, “hardly anybody obeyed it. But the knowledge that we were exceeding the limit gave us all a margin of caution. We were alert. Being already guilty of one breach of the law, to wit, going faster than 35, we were a little cautious about breaking it any other way. We were wide awake in the first place for speed cops. We had a guilty conscience, even if only a subconscious or semi-conscious guilty conscience. It made us careful, alert.”
“I follow you,” I confessed.
“Now that the law is 50,1” went on Jim, “that guilty conscience has evaporated. The only sense of guilt we have is when we are driving less than 50, and we wonder if other drivers are put out with us for not keeping up with the Joneses”.
“I believe you’re right,” I admitted, stepping slightly on the gas to increase my speed from 34 to 37.
“Now, a sense of guilt,” explained Jim, “is one of the greatest and most humane of civilized forces. It is our general sense of guilt that makes us kindly, tolerant and good natured towards our fellow men.”
A large blue car swerved angrily past us and the lady in the near seat turned and said something bitter to me. I couldn’t hear her words but if I put the right meaning to the shape of her mouth, that lady certainly is no lady.
“See?” cried Jim. “Before the law was changed, her sense of guilt would have prevented her from cursing you. Now she is free to call you names if you aren’t doing at least 50.”
“Psychology is a funny thing,” I mused.
“No, it’s human nature is funny,” agonized Jim. “With no need for caution under 50 miles an hour as far as cops are concerned, old rattletrap cars that should not ever exceed 30 miles an hour are going to be going as near 50 as they can. And every instant they are on the road they are a menace to human life.”
“There goes one now,” I said, as a shabby old top-heavy sedan with narrow tires of the vintage of 1925, slithered past us and did a sort of Charlie Chaplin skid to get straight on the pavement again.
To Miss the Old Fear
“Then,” said Jim, “plenty of drivers of perfect cars, as far as mechanism is concerned, but who intellectually are incapable of driving more than 40 miles an hour – you know, the kind of people who are clumsy and always spilling things and bumping into things are going to miss that old restraining fear of cops sorely. Such people really need that fear. Without it, they are helpless.”
“Listen to that,” I murmured, as a car behind me continued to snort its horn savagely until I got away over to the side of the pavement. And when it passed, four furious faces leaned and glared out the windows at me.
“You take the young fellow driving one of those rattletrap old cars,” said Jim. “He has, for instance, three other young people in the car with him. He is going 35, which is all the machine is capable of without swerving right off the road. When his companions egg him on to greater speed, he had, heretofore, the excuse that there is a speed cop usually on the top of the hill ahead. But now, what excuse can he offer? Will he say his car is too poor and rickety to risk any more speed? No young man could admit any such thing. So what does he do? He tries for 50 and the admiration of his companions. And just as he lurches and slithers over the top of that next hill, who does he collide with or send head over heels into the ditch but a perfectly nice lady with a carload of children, going 40 miles an hour?”
“It’s bad,” I admitted, as a car driven by a white-haired old lady zipped past me, going about 60.
“Motorcycle cops, therefore,” said Jim, “should be abolished and police should be equipped with ordinary cars of various makes and colors. So that the motorists never know but what the car behind them or the car coming towards them is police.”
“Ah,” I agreed. “A new hazard. A new fear.”
“Correct,” said Jim. “And the police should be most active on the highways, touring day and night at a brisk pace, watching for cutter-ins, hill passers, curve passers; they should pursue and give an official warning to all drivers of old ashcans that were driving at any speed that made them wobble and lurch. Fines for recklessness should never be less than $252, so that for all fools there would be a real terror of coming too fast around curves or attempting to pass without reasonable distance being given.”
“We must put some sort of fear into them,” I declared, for now we were outside the city and on to a wider strip of pavement so that the traffic behind, which had been fairly patient, now began to get excited like lions at feeding time at the zoo and start to zip and cut and swerve and duck in their anxiety to get ahead.
“What’s the good of their doing that?” demanded Jim. “Don’t they realize that there is a line-up for miles ahead of them? What good is it going to do them to scare the wits out of you by cutting in ahead of you with two seconds to spare, when they are going to have to keep that up all the way to Muskoka?”
“It’s a nervous sort of thrill. I suppose,” I said. “It’s like gambling. Like roulette. They would go to sleep if they had to drive steadily. Only by hop-scotching around like that do they keep awake.”
“I wish there were double the cops,” said Jim, “and all incognito in plain cars. That would stop those St. Vitus dance3 drivers. We ought to adopt the system of having a big red enamel patch painted on the back of every car that is convicted of reckless driving. With three patches on your car, 30 miles an hour is your absolute limit. You’d feel like a marked man then, and behave.”
“Look Who’s Ahead of Us”
“Boy, did you see that?” I breathed as two cars, chasing each other at 50 miles an hour, both dove back into the line ahead of us to make way for a big passenger bus coming tearing along in the opposite direction at 50, too.
I had to change gears on account of the sudden stoppage the cutting in of the two cars ahead had created. Minute by minute as we got out into the country it grew worse. Those who knew the law was 50 miles an hour wanted to go 50, and were indignant at all those who didn’t. They kept cutting out and in and charging ahead until in a little while the congestion ahead of us was so bad we were not only slowed to 30 miles but gradually formed a solid line, and frequent dead stops were necessary.
“Oh,” I snarled, “where are the cops?”
“The only way to travel nowadays,” said Jim, “is by aeroplane. No self-respecting citizen will stay on the roads much longer.”
It was hot. It was gassey. It was nerve-racking and on-edgey. The farther people were behind us the more anxious they were to get ahead. And every time the down traffic left space, 40 cars behind us leaped out of line and formed a double line, racing past us until down-coming trucks or cars forced them back into our line; and with fury we had to make room for them. It meant a stop almost every time.
“Get out into the swim,” said Jim, at last. “You jump, too. Everybody else is doing it.”
“Not me,” said I.
“It’ll thin out a few miles north,” coaxed Jim. “The sooner we get there, the sooner this strain will be over.”
“I’m safer where I am,” I said. “In line.”
But in a few moments, the car that had been ahead of me for several miles decided it was getting too thick and it made the jump and got into the scramble.
“Not me,” I cried triumphantly. “Look at whose ahead of us now!”
“It’s cops,” said Jim.
And sure enough, in the car now immediately ahead of us, were the round heads and flat caps of two large cops sitting the stiff way cops sit at the wheel of a car.
“They’re only doing 32,” said Jim looking at my speedometer.
“It’ll do me too,” I said, settling comfortably in back of the cops.
“Now,” chuckled Jim, “watch these cutter-inners when they see the cops.”
But it made no apparent difference. The minute down traffic left a hole, out leaped about ten times more cars than the hole would accommodate and the minute the down traffic came level, all these birds had to scrunch back into line and everybody had to grab and brake and swear and change gears.
“I guess they don’t see they’re cops,” said Jim.
“Why don’t the cops do something, instead of just jogging along?” I demanded hotly.
“Pass them,” advised Jim.
“Not me,” I said. “I respect law and order. Those cops are at least setting an example of orderly driving.”
“And nobody even looks at them,” scoffed Jim.
“What good could they do?” he went on. “In a jam like this?”
“One of them could stand on the running board,” I suggested, “and hold out his hand to warn those behind not to try to pass. In ten minutes the congestion ahead would sort itself out and we could all do 40. It’s that crowding ahead that makes us all go slow.”
“Don’t let’s talk about it,” said Jim.
“Very well,” I said.
With a Baleful Look
So we continued, in regular series of mixups, of grinding and braking and starting and slowing and horns blowing and swearing and cussing as the impatient miles went by. Every time there was a jam-up and cars head would try to cut in ahead of me I would blow my horn furiously in the hope of rousing those two cops ahead from their lethargy.
“What’s the matter with them?” I shouted. “Sitting there. Like dummies. With all this murder going on.”
“Hire a hall,” said Jim.
He sank down in his seat and closed his eyes.
We came to a town. Jim woke and sat up. In the business block, traffic stopped dead for a minute, and one of the cops in the car ahead prepared to get out.
Heavily he backed out the car door. He was in a khaki uniform and with him, hugged to his breast, he backed out a large brass horn.
“Pah-ha-ha,” roared Jim. “A bandsman. A tuba player.”
“Well, I’ll be….” I admitted a little ruefully.
“There you go,” laughed Jim, “always taken in by appearances. Abusing the cops and it was just a couple of lads from the town band.”
Traffic began to move again and we tooled through the town and the minute we got outside, the panic began again, cars leaping, swerving, ducking.
“Well,” asked Jim, “are you going to stick behind the piccolo player?”
“Heh, heh, heh,” I said, taking a quick look behind and then swerving out.
I stepped on the gas and leaped past the bandsman’s car.
“Yah,” I roared out past Jim, “yah, you big windbag, what are holding up traffic for?”
“Nix,” hissed Jim. “It is a cop!”
And it was.
“Ow,” I said, ducking back into line. “It was a cop, giving a guy a lift from the band.”
“Ow,” said Jim, craning his neck to look in the mirror. “He’s after you.”
In a minute, I saw a car creep alongside. It’s horn tooted sharply. I looked. The cop, with a baleful north of Ireland look in his green eyes, was signalling me languidly to pull off to the side.
I took to the shoulder carefully, so as to allow the line behind to pass. The cop pulled in ahead of me, got out and walked back, hitching his belt.
“What was that,” said the cop, resting his elbow on my door, “you said to me as you passed?”
“Huh?” I asked. “Said to you? I wasn’t speaking to you.”
“Oh, yes you was,” said the cop. “What was it about me blocking traffic? Big wind-bag or something?”
“Oh, that?” I laughed heartily. “Oh, that? Oh. I was speaking to my friend here, my friends, he’s deaf, see? I have to shout at him. Oh, ha, ha, did you think… Oh, ha ha, Jimmie,” I shouted in Jim’s ear, “the policeman thinks I was shouting at him.”
“Did he?” said Jim.
“Yes,” I roared in Jim’s ear. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Heh, heh, heh,” laughed Jim, fairly heartily.
“Well, anyway,” said the cop. taking a long slow look at me. “I don’t like the way you cut in and out in traffic. You’ll be the death of somebody if you keep that up.”
“Why, officer,” I cried, “everybody is cutting in and out. Just look at them.”
“Yes.” said the constable, “but not right under the nose of a policeman. I’d better see your driver’s license, mister.”
And he took down all my particulars, tested my lights, brakes, horn and wanted to see my spare light bulbs which I promised him I’d buy at the next town. And all the time the traffic fought and snarled past us.
And then he got in his car and drove ahead of us 24 miles at 28 miles an hour.
Editor’s Notes:
- Ontario’s first province-wide speed limit on rural highways was introduced in 1903 at 15 mph (24 km/h). The speed limit was increased to 25 mph (40 km/h) by the early 1920s and increased further to 35 mph (56 km/h) by the late 1920s. The speed limit on most rural highways was increased to 50 mph (80 km/h) in May 1937. During World War II, the speed limits were temporarily lowered to 40 mph (65 km/h) to conserve Canada’s fuel supplies. The next speed limit increase took place in 1959, when the speed limit for passenger cars using the new superhighways such as Highway 400 and Highway 401 was changed to 60 mph (100 km/h). ↩︎
- $25 in 1937 would be $528 in 2014. ↩︎
- St. Vitus’ Dance was diagnosed, in the 17th century as Sydenham chorea. The old term hung around for a while. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 17, 1937.
“Every city,” said Jimmie Frise, “should be forced to have a great tract of farmland, 40,000 acres say, somewhere not far from its boundaries.”
“So what?” I asked.
“Instead of families going on relief,” explained Jim, “they would go to the farm. Instead of packing the city with unhappy and unfortunate people, you would transfer them to dwell and labor amidst the healthy country.”
“Jim,” I admired, “you’ve got something.”
“In proportion to its size,” went on Jimmie, “each city and town would have to purchase and maintain, somewhere not too far from its limits, a tract of farm land, so many acres per thousand of population. This would be a civic farm, organized as a part of the city’s interior economy.”
“With a city commission,” I suggested, “like the parks commission or the waterworks committee, managing it.”
“Precisely,” said Jim. “On the farm would be a central headquarters building with offices. Scattered strategically over the very large acreage would be the barns, implement houses, stables, greenhouses and so forth. And, in proportion to the need, a large number of beautiful little farm cottages of various sizes, each with its little sheds, hen houses and so forth.”
“How beautiful,” I agreed. “With morning glories on the south walls.”
“In addition to the individual farm cottages of various sizes,” pursued Jim, “there will be central large residences for single unemployed men and single unemployed women. With recreation rooms, libraries and so forth.”
“Like the Y.M.C.A.,” I offered.
“And the Y.W.C.A.,” agreed Jim. “Now watch what happens. A family applies for relief in the city. Instead of being given a measly handout once a week, instead of being driven from pillar to post in the brief, sure and certain decline down hill toward the slum, this family is transferred to the big farm. Baggage and all.”
“Go on,” I begged.
“On arrival,” said Jim, “they will be assigned one of the farm cottages. They will report to the headquarters offices for examinations as to their fitness and qualifications for the various jobs. A farm needs many kinds of help beside plowmen or milkmaids. It needs carpenters and roadmenders, horse- shoers and harness makers.”
“Oh, boy,” I confessed. “I see it.”
“The farm being run,” explained Jimmie, “by expert managers from the agricultural college, and the work being done by squads and platoons under farmer foremen, the man of the family will be assigned to the type of work to which he is suited. The wife will mind the house and some chickens and a small garden. The children will attend the farm’s splendid modern schools.”
“Russia couldn’t beat this,” I declared.
To Turn the Tide
“Work would not be excessive,” said Jim, “especially at the start. Each night there would be regular serial lectures going on in the headquarters’ building, lectures for beginners on the rudiments of farming, advanced lectures for those who had been on the farm some time.”
“Pretty educational,” I demurred.
“Oh, no,” said Jim. “There would be a movie theatre, a dance hall, library, churches, clubs… headquarters would be quite a large model village.”
“And they could run down to the city,” I asked, “whenever they liked?”
“Certainly,” said Jim. “They would earn wages for their work. The farm would be a straight business proposition. Its produce would be marketed in the stores the same as any other farm produce.”
“A farm with a sales manager?” I offered.
“Certainly,” said Jim. “Lots of unemployed salesmen will turn up at the farm. But the great thing about this idea is that it will turn the tide. It will start people, who are unsuited to city life, back toward the land. For years and years, people unsuited to farm life have been moving into the cities. This has been made easy for them, because there are all kinds of organizations for training country people for city life. The big stores operate training schools. We have great technical and commercial schools for teaching people, both day and night, how to do city work. But we have no organization at all for teaching city people how to live on the land.”
“This would really be a back to the land movement,” I agreed.
“That’s the whole secret of it,” said Jim. “We talk about going back to the land, but there is no way of going back to the land except by going. And darn near perishing in the attempt. The civic farm is the solution. Those unsuited to city life will be naturally selected, because having failed to make the grade in the city, they apply for relief. That is the selection. They are then sent to a managed farm, with every kind of farm work to be done, from cattle raising and dairying to market gardening and poultry raising; and all the mechanical features of farming. They are initiated into the land. They come at it as pleasantly and cheerfully as farm people come to the city.”
“Still,” I said, “I know some people on relief who wouldn’t leave the city for a million dollars.”
“As there would be no relief,” explained Jim, “they would simply have to go to the farm. Then if they hated the farm so badly, they could do the other thing: they could work up enough energy to get a city job. And keep it. But no relief.”
“But there will always be misfits,” I argued, “who can’t fit either into city or country life.”
“My scheme.” said Jim, “would identify those cases, clearly and unmistakably. Such people could then be enlisted into special battalions. Sort of labor corps. It isn’t their fault they are misfits. But it isn’t our fault either. So why should we have to carry them? If they won’t fit either into city life or country life, then we enlist them, automatically.”
“It isn’t freedom,” I protested.
“It isn’t for them, but it is for us,” said Jim. “That’s the thing we have to face sooner or later.”
“After all,” I confessed, “there really aren’t many misfits. Mostly it is because there isn’t a chance to fit.”
“The civic farm provides the chance,” declared Jim. “I bet thousands of families and single men and women will graduate out of that civic farm on to the land, successfully. As soon as a family has demonstrated its fitness to go on to the land on its own, then government back-to-the-land schemes can be invoked.”
A Complicated Problem
“It’s a swell idea, Jim,” I sighed, “but the farmers will prevent it.”
“Why?” demanded Jim.
“They don’t want the cities spreading trained farmers all over the country in competition,” I explained. “Farmers look on cities as places to send their children to make good. And besides, they find the market for farm produce bad enough as it is without great civic farms pinching the best market in every community.”
“Farmers can’t prevent cities from setting up civic farms,” retorted Jim.
“All right,” I said, “then the real estate interests, the big mortgage and loan companies and property owners will squelch the idea. They don’t want population moved out of cities. Where would rents go, if we started moving even the unemployed out of town?”
“The big property owners,” retorted Jim, “are being taxed out of existence to support the unemployed.”
“All right then,” I finally submitted, “industry itself and organized labor wouldn’t let us move the unemployed out of town, because industry likes to have a nice big batch of unemployed around, to keep wages down. And labor likes to have unemployed around as a horrible example of industry’s original sin.”
“If I ever go into politics with this idea,” cried Jimmie, “it will go through like a house on fire.”
“You were born and raised on a farm, weren’t you, Jimmie?”
“Yes, and when all is said and done,” he said tenderly, “it is the loveliest, freest, happiest life of all.”
“Look here,” I said, “what do you know about soil? I’ve got to do something about my garden. It’s nothing but sand. I’ve put in about ten loads of what they call loam, but it just looks like plain ordinary earth to me. And it seems to sink right down through the sand.”
“Why don’t you get a couple of loads of good heavy clay?” asked Jim.
“Where could I get some clay?” I asked. “I never heard of anybody offering clay for sale.”
“You can get clay anywhere,” said Jim. “Why not borrow a little truck from one of your storekeeper friends and just drive outside the city somewhere and shovel up a load of clay?”
“I’ll order it,” I said hastily, “from the man I get the loam from.”
“What the heck?” snorted Jim. “Order a load of clay? Why, how can you call yourself a gardener if you just telephone for a load of clay…I suppose somebody else will do the spreading of it around and forking it in?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I have a man do that kind of thing. You see, Jim, my part of the garden is appreciating it. That’s my share. If I didn’t appreciate the garden, naturally, there would be no garden; and then there would be no work for my gardener. You see how it works out? The trouble with cities is, people do more than their share. We city people are hoggish. We are bears for work, as they If everybody took it easier, there would be plenty for all.”
“If you would do a little of the spade work in your garden,” said Jim, “you’d understand it more and appreciate it a great deal more.”
“No,” I disagreed, “I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work. What I love about a garden is the wonder of it. In June I love to go and stand in the middle of it and think, ‘How beautiful all this is, and I got it just for the asking.’ No labor or toil, no dirt, no anything. Just tell somebody, who doesn’t care, let there be beauty. And there it is! That’s what gets me.”
“Well,” said Jim, “about this clay, now. I don’t believe I would order clay, even from somebody you know. Because, after all, there is clay and clay. He might go and pick up a load of junk from some building, excavation, full of dear knows what; or maybe a load from some vacant lot, full of weed seeds that would ruin your garden in two weeks. No. If you want a load of clay, select it yourself. From some nice farm land, where you can see what you’re getting.”
“I wouldn’t know clay if I saw it,” I confessed.
“I’ll come with you,” offered Jimmie.
So I borrowed the grocer’s second truck, a little old thing that would hold very nicely all the clay I needed. And after supper, Jim and I, in old fishing clothes, sallied forth to the country’s edge.
We drove quite a way before Jimmie saw clay. He saw sandy loam and clay loam; sand and loam; some was too gravelly and some too dusty.
“As a matter of fact,” said Jim, getting back into the truck after one of his frequent dismountings for inspection, “the kind of clay I have in mind doesn’t seem to be very common around these parts. Why, when I was a kid, every time I came into the house my feet were the size of hot water bottles with thick blue clay.”
“It’s getting dark,” I pointed out.
“It won’t take five minutes,” said Jim, “to shovel on a load when we find it.”
“Shouldn’t we ask the farmer for it?” I asked.
“Puh,” said Jim, “what farmer would begrudge a little load of clay?”
At Jim’s suggestion, we started turning along side roads and lanes and presently, just as the sun was shining its last glorious farewell, we came to a little gulley with a thin creek through it, and with a loud cry, Jim identified, on the banks, the valuable blue clay we had been seeking.
“Back her in this gate,” said Jim. Which I did.
“Toss me the spade,” said Jim. Which I did also.
With a few expert flourishes, Jim flung aside the dry outer integument of soil and began cutting free large wet gobs of pure heavy clay. I got down off the truck and started to roll up my sleeves.
“Hey,” came a voice from the little hill above us. A figure was silhouetted there. “What’s goin’ on there?”
“Oh, hello,” cried Jim. “We’re just taking a few spadefuls of this clay.”
“Clay?” said the man starting down the slope, with his dog. “Where you from?”
“We’re from the city,” said Jimmie. “My friend here wanted a little clay to tighten up his garden soil. He’s got nothing but sand…”
The farmer, a long and bitter man, stared at us coldly.
“Let’s see,” he said. “You come all the way out from the city to here for a load of clay?”
“That’s it,” said Jim, starting to bend for another spadeful.
“I don’t believe it,” said the farmer. “Coming away out here for a load of clay? You’re crazy. Or you’re crooked. Get out of here!”
“But just a minute,” cried Jim. I got back behind the truck wheel. Quickly.
“Come on,” said the farmer roughly, swinging his arms and legs, preparationaly. “Git.”
“But surely,” said Jim, shoving the spade angrily aboard the truck. “Just a load of clay.”
“It don’t make sense,” said the farmer. “There’s all kinds of grafters. What are you really up to? Come on! What is it you’re after?”
“Clay, I tell you,” we both stated angrily.
“Come on,” said the farmer, with great finality. “Git.”
And he spat on his large dark rough right hand.
So we gitted.
“Can you beat that?” cried Jim. “For sheer hard-boiled suspicion? We’ll look for clay somewhere else along here….”
“Nix,” I said. “we’re going home. I’ll order it, as usual.”
“It’s not dark yet,” said Jim, leaning out and watching the roadbanks with an agricultural air.
“People are too suspicious, Jim.” I said.
“He’s just mean,” Jim said.
“Not him,” I disagreed. “He’s just naturally suspicious, and reasonably so. It’s like that back-to-the-land plan of yours, about the civic farm. People are too suspicious.”
“It’s a queer world,” sighed Jim.
“Yes,” I agreed, “and I’m going to let the usual guy haul, my clay and the usual guy fork it under. And, as usual, I’m going to enjoy my garden when it arrives.”
“Without doing any work to earn it?” protested Jim.
“In this life,” I explained, “it’s as near as we’ll ever get to the Garden of Eden.”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 4, 1937.
“Have you noticed,” inquired Jimmie Frise, “a boy around this neighborhood, a kind of a big kid for his age…?”
“You mean the one with the loud voice?” I asked.
“Loud voice,” agreed Jim, “and red hands and insolent manner.”
“The Raspberry Kid, I call him,” I said. “Every time he passes me on the street, he lets go a quiet but none the less disrespectful raspberry.”
“That’s the kid,” cried Jimmie. “And he bullies all the smaller children. And every time you see him, he is doing something he shouldn’t. Yesterday I looked out the back window and saw him cutting a stick out of my beautiful orange blossom bush.”
“I caught him throwing rocks at our dog,” I added.
“Last week,” stated Jim, “I actually caught him in my garage cutting a couple of short lengths of rubber hose off my garden hose. For new handle-bar grips for his bike, if you please!”
“Why didn’t you give him a licking, there and then?” I protested.
“I asked him,” said Jim, “why he didn’t I cut up his own hose at home, and he said his father wouldn’t let him.”
“Ah, his father,” I agreed. “Hmmmm.”
“His father,” stated Jim, “is that biggish, sulky-looking man that drives the green car. They live down at the foot of the street.”
“I know him,” I assured him. “I figured he was the father of the Raspberry Kid by the resemblance.”
“You hardly know what to do with a kid like that who has a father like that,” ruminated Jim. “It’s a kind of a ticklish problem.”
“I don’t think,” I admitted, “that I would care to get into any kind of a muss with that father.”
“He looks,” said Jim, “as if he would just clip you and then mow you down.”
“Yet probably,” I presumed, “he wouldn’t.”
“I’ve seen him for the past year,” said Jim, “and passed him maybe twenty times. And every time, he looks straight at me, never a smile, but just a cold, straight personal look, as if he were sizing me up for a suit.”
“The same here,” I confessed. “I know the feeling exactly. One night, in the cigar store, I said to him, ‘It’s a fine night’, and he took a look out at the weather, and then turned and looked me up and down, from head to foot. That’s all.”
“In a way,” said Jim, “how can you blame a kid for being the way that kid is, if he is born that way. Maybe it runs in the family.”
“If I see him heaving rocks at my dog again,” I said, “I am going to take after him and beat the tar out of him, heredity or no heredity.”
“As a matter of fact, something must be done,” stated Jim firmly. “The reason I brought the subject up was that last night, three of my neighbors called on me to help form a committee to deal with that kid.”
The Raspberry Kid’s Father
“A committee?” I exclaimed. “To deal with a kid?”
“Well, of course, it’s the father they have in mind, the same as us,” explained Jim. “None of them ever met the big guy. They’ve looked him up in the directory, and he is harmless enough. Accountant in an insurance company.”
“Look out for accountants,” I warned. “They lead such a funny life, bent over ledgers all the time, that they are liable to get violent on the slightest provocation.”
“I wish you had been at this committee meeting last night,” said Jim. “We telephoned to all the immediate neighbors of the big guy, and they could give us no information. None of them are on speaking terms with him, though he has lived there three years.”
“Are any of them on your committee?” I asked.
“No,” said Jim, “they said they thought the matter could be better handled by neighbors living a little farther off than them. But they are with us, heart and soul. They say we have no idea what a pest that kid is.”
“Did they say the father was tough?” I inquired.
“They don’t need to say it,” stated Jim. “They can see it, as easy as us.”
“I hate neighborhood rows,” I muttered. “I’d rather keep clear of them. That big bird looks as if he could make it mighty unpleasant for the whole street.”
“What could he do?” demanded Jim.
“Well,” I explained, “if he can make a whole neighborhood self-conscious, without any provocation, what would it be like if we came to an open row with him? If all of us are made to feel intimidated by just passing him on the street or meeting him in a store, how would we feel if war was declared?”
“I wish you would come to my house the next time the neighbors call,” pleaded Jim. “It’s your wits we need. Your foxy way of looking at situations like this.”
“Well, Jim,” I confessed. “I see what you mean, and if you really think I could solve the problem for you, I would be glad to sit in; but strictly on the understanding that I am not involved. Because, after all, he has done nothing to me personally.”
“No?” cried Jim. “Just heaved rocks at your dog. That isn’t personal, of course.”
“I told you what I’d do if I ever catch him again heaving any rocks,” I informed him firmly.
But that very afternoon, as I turned in my own front walk, I was met by a wild scattering of small children who clustered around me for shelter, while out the drive came the Raspberry Kid, armed with a long gad of rose bush, covered with thorns, with which implement of delight he was chasing the entire child populace.
“Ah,” I said, as he skidded to a halt and stood guiltily before me. “Caught red-handed, young man.”
“Thoooop,” he raspberried me.
“Here,” I shouted, “come here!”
But he just turned and started to walk off down the drive, my drive.
“Listen, young fellow,” I roared, “this neighborhood has had enough of your high jinks. We’re going to deal with you.”
“Yah, yah, yah,” the little brat mimicked back, as he vanished around the corner of the house.
“We’re going to call on your father this very night,” I bellowed furiously.
But he was gone.
“Why didn’t you catch him,” demanded the little ones, clinging around me, “and spank him?”
“You can’t spank other people’s children,” I explained gently.
“You spanked me one time,” protested my little friend, Billie.
“Ah,” I elucidated, “but your daddie and I are the best of friends. See?”
But I am afraid they did not see, for they fell away from me rather embarrassed and looking down and away, and at supper I caught my own boys looking at me with a strange surmise. So when Jim telephoned to say another committee was gathering at his house in a few minutes, to decide on immediate action, due to several outrages committed during the day. I agreed to attend.
And such is the power of eloquence, I found myself gradually being jockeyed into a position of direct relationship to the problem. A man with the gift of speech must be very guarded. I think that in cases of this sort the gathering should be divided into two sections. Those who can speak should do the speaking. Those who can’t speak should be the ones to take action as the result of the speaking. Don’t you think so?
There were half a dozen quiet, angry men there, at Jim’s, but it was not they who were elected to act as a committee to wait upon the father of the child. It was Jimmie and me.
“What would be the good,” demanded one of those wordless birds, “of any of us going when we couldn’t speak? All we’d do would be to get into a fight.”
So Jimmie and I went.
We left the committee at Jim’s, waiting, in case there was any trouble, in which case they agreed to come if called, and we would gang up on the big guy.
That time of night all little boys should have been in bed, yet Jim and I, as we walked slowly and firmly down to the end of the street, distinctly saw the stocky figure of the Raspberry Kid lurking out amongst the bushes on the lawn of his home.
“There he is,” I hissed.
“He’s hid,” said Jim.
We paused out on the walk and went over briefly what we were to say. We were going to be quite friendly and polite, no anger or provocation in our manner or words, so as to give the big guy no reason for taking offence.
“Okay.” said Jim. And we marched up the walk.
We went up the steps. cautiously.
“You ring the bell,” said Jim.
I reached out and, with a deep breath, pushed the bell.
There was a moment of pause.
Then, a most dreadful thing – the glass in the door, right before our faces, splintered with an awful crash.
“The kid,” gasped Jim. “The kid. I saw him. He threw a stone through it.”
We were really starting off the veranda to chase the kid, where he had been hiding ready to put us in this horrible embarrassment, and when the big man opened the door he might reasonably have supposed we were merely trying to make a get-away.
In fact, now that I come to think of it, we probably did look exactly like two men who had come up and smashed the window and were trying to flee.
But the door opened violently and there stood the big guy in his shirtsleeves.
And behind him, breathless, was the Raspberry Kid, screaming past his father:
“I saw them, daddy. I saw them heave a rock through our door!”
Which so astounded Jimmie and me that we halted in our tracks and just stared.
“Gentlemen,” said the big guy in a deep voice, “this is unthinkable. Unthinkable.”
He had switched on the veranda light and was staring down at the shattered glass while the kid continued to babble: “I saw them; I saw them.”
“How can you explain it?” said the big fellow, whose voice had that deep, kindly quality that is in the voice of the radio singer, Singin’ Sam1. “How on earth can you explain an outrage of this kind?”
Jim and I were too astounded to speak. We just came forward and assembled, as it were, at the foot of the steps.
“I have lived in this neighborhood,” said the big fellow, sadly, “for three years. In all that time not a soul has come to visit me, not a neighbor has spoken to me. I have been greeted with nothing but frosty and bitter looks as I pass you on the streets, and now, now you come and smash my windows.”
He stood there, gazing mournfully down on us like some great human St. Bernard. And the Raspberry Kid, I observed, suddenly and very quietly, sneaked back into the house.
“May we come in?” I asked.
“Most certainly,” said the big fellow, with a great awkward eagerness.
He threw his shattered door wide.
And we went in and explained, to the astonishment of the big fellow, the facts of the broken window to him and recounted, item by item, the depredations and scalawaggery of the Raspberry Kid.
“My, my, my,” said the big man, eyes popping in dismay. “I knew Elmer was an energetic child, and I gathered from his conversation that he was not on the best of terms with the other children of the neighborhood. But I sympathized with them there, gentlemen, because I felt that were some sort of unexplainable antipathy to us on this street.”
“Antipathy?” Jimmie and I cried, reproachfully.
“As I say, everyone seems to regard me with hostility,” said the big fellow.
“Nonsense, my dear sir, nonsense,” Jimmie and I insisted heartily. “It is just one of those false impressions we all get amongst strangers. We can prove it. Put on your coat and come on up and meet some of the neighbors who are at the house. A little party. Come along.”
The big fellow got up with alacrity.
“I’d be only too delighted,” he said in that deep voice. “But first I have a small job to attend to with Elmer.”
He went upstairs and Jim and I sat listening.
But no sounds came.
“He’s a very kindly man,” whispered Jim.
“Maybe,” I said, “he’s got the brat across his knee, holding his mouth with one hand and whaling him with the other. Maybe he’s got the kid’s head muffled in a pillow while he…”
“What a blood-thirsty beggar you are,” said Jim, getting up to listen out the living-room door.
But the big fellow came downstairs, not the least ruffled, and said, as he threw his coat and hat on:
“I think you will have no more trouble with Elmer.”
And after briefly telephoning the hardware store about the broken window he joined us and we went up the street to Jim’s and we had a grand neighborly evening, all about politics and business and things, and Elmer’s name wasn’t even mentioned by anybody.
Editor’s Note:
- Singin’ Sam was a popular early radio star, actually named Harry Frankel. ↩︎
