HERE’S THE SECOND OF THE STAR WEEKLY’S COMIC MASKS
Boys and Girls:
Did you like the mask of Popeye the Sailor Man in last week’s Star Weekly? In the last issue The Star Weekly began this series of comic characters that you can cut out and make into a false face. There are many more to come: Maggie, Jiggs, Wimpy Olive Oyl – and, as a special treat, Gregory Clark and Jimmie Frise. They’ll appear in every issue right up till Hallowe’en.
Save these masks for your Hallowe’en Party
Think of all the fun you can have if you save all the masks from now till Hallowe’en! By then you’ll have eight different masks and you’ll be able to go to eight different parties and be a new character each time. Or even if you don’t go Halloween parties there’s a barrel of fun to be had in wearing these masks wherever you go, whether it’s your friends’ homes or just over to the corner grocery store.
Bring out your paste pot and scissors and you’ll soon look as much like Old Archie as old Archie does himself.
Cut out this illustration of OLD ARCHIE in a square, leaving about an inch border all the way around. Get a sheet of paper about 15 inches square. Any good heavy wrapping paper or light weight cardboard will do. Paste the OLD ARCHIE illustration on the paper. When dry, cut the outer edges of the mark but be sure to follow the line around the square flaps indicated at each of OLD ARCHIE’S cars. Use a razor blade or a sharply pointed knife to cut around OLD ARCHIE’S none on the heady black line, and to cut the slits in his eyes. Next, fold down the Flaps along OLD ARCHIE’S ears. Get two medium sized rubber bands. Place one side of the rubber band inside the fold of the flap and paste down firmly. Do not attempt to use the mask until the flap in dry and firm. Now, put the mask on, placing the rubber bands around your ears, and there you are, OLD ARCHIE, in the flesh.
Editor’s Note:Last year I published the Halloween masks of Jim and Greg, but missed this one of Old Archie. Modern readers would likely know Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Wimpy from Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar (who died on October 13, 1938, around when these were published). Jiggs and Maggie were from Bringing Up Father by George McManus. And of course Old Archie was Jimmie Frise’s own from Birdseye Center.
Then a tire somewhere amongst us went bang and whined. “Oh, ho,” I said, “some poor beggar has got a blowout.” “It’s us,” said Jim, hollowly.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 13, 1938.
“What time,” demanded Jimmie Frise, do you want to leave for home?”
“Let’s leave good and early,” I submitted, “before we get caught in that awful Sunday night jam.”
“How about five o’clock?” suggested Jim.
“Too late,” I protested. “We’ll just get within about 50 miles of the city by the time the jam in at its height. We’ll be two hours going that last 50 miles. In one awful stew.”
“Listen,” said Jim, “why don’t you accept the 20th century for what it’s worth. Accept it. Adapt yourself to it. Traffic jams on Sunday night are part of the normal age we live in. Get in tune with it. Don’t fight it. Nothing you can do will alter the fact that every Sunday night in summer you have to boil your way home.”
“Unless I leave in time to get home ahead of the jam,” I pointed out.
“Look,” said Jim. “We arrive here at the cottage at 6 p.m. Saturday. And you want to clear out at noon Sunday. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’d rather,” I explained, “curtail my weekend than wreck my nerves fighting my way home through a midnight traffic war. If anybody would keep in line and let us all get home at 35 miles an hour, it wouldn’t be too bad, But there are always those cutter-inners. Those anti-social bounders that leap ahead every time they get a chance, only have to duck back into traffic again and throw the whole line out of gear for miles back. Those are the bounders. Those are the people that fray my nerves.”
“Be one of them, for a change,” laughed Jim. “It’s fun. It’s a sort of game. Be a traffic inner and outer on our way home tonight. Give it a try.”
“Not, me,” I assured him. “You don’t gain one mile in 50, and you risk your life and you strain your car and you infuriate all the other people in the line. It isn’t so much the stopping and starting that gets me down, in that traffic jam as we near the city. It’s those traffic bounders that keep whizzing madly by you, on the wrong side of the road, and every time they have to nose back into traffic when they meet an up-comer, everybody else has to tramp on brakes, slack off and make way for them. One of these days, I’m just not going to make way for one of those babies, and we’ll see what happens.”
“You’re old-fashioned,” stated Jim. “All these views you hold about traffic only prove that you don’t belong to these times. The true son of the nineteen-thirties has no nerves at all with regard to traffic. If you are in tune with your time, you just don’t notice things like traffic bounders. You just sit easy and hop along with the jam as best you can. That’s the spirit of the times.”
“We’ll clear out of here,” I informed him, “at 2 p.m., right after lunch.”
“I decline,” said Jim. “I say we leave right after supper. It is only 115 miles. Even allow three hours for that little distance, we’ll be home shortly after dark.”
“Two p.m.,” I reiterated.
Coming Back Is Different
“Look,” said Jim, “let’s compromise. We’ll leave right after an early supper. We can have a swim at four and supper at five and be out of here before six. And then, instead of going home the main highway, we’ll take that back road that comes out through the west end.”
“It’s a gravel road,” I demurred. “Dusty.”
“It’s a swell big highway,” retorted Jim. “I know dozens of people around here who never go home any other road. A big wide gravel highway.”
“In an open car,” I pointed out, “we’d have grit in our teeth all the way.”
“They tell me,” said Jim, “that hardly anybody ever uses the road. It’s the best way to get home. Let’s do that. Let’s take the fullest advantage of our week-end by staying till evening and then take the back road home. Let the bounders have the smooth highway, we’ll take the happy road home.”
“I don’t care for experimenting,” I muttered, “but we’ll try it this once.”
So we had a pleasant snooze after lunch and then a swim at three, and the children couldn’t be found at 5.30 for supper, so we ate a few minutes past six. But it was still the fine shank of the evening when we loaded up our gear in the car and, waving fond farewells, wheeled out the Muskoka road and headed for the highway.
“What did I tell you?” I demanded, as we came in sight of the highway. Cars, like hurrying beetles, were zipping in unsteady streams southward. The evening was full of the weary roar of traffic.
“We only have about 20 miles of this,” said Jim, “and then we turn off on to the back road. Relax and take it easy.”
So I got to the right of the road and let the bounders bound. I held a comfortable 40 and let the fifties and sixties, with horns blasting and tires ripping and slithering on the far shoulder, race headlong past us.
“I bet those birds,” said Jim, “won’t be home half an hour ahead of us. They’re heading straight into the maelstrom. We’re going the lazy back way, and we’ll jog into town pleasantly aired, while they have completely lost all the good their week-end in Muskoka has done them. Nerve-wrecked, exhausted, jittery.”
It is funny the difference in tone and tune between going up to Muskoka and coming home from Muskoka. Going up, all is jolly and lively. When a man races past you, you smile to think how eagerly he goes to see his family. But coming home, there is no sense of the merry. It is just a lot of bad-tempered people selfishly struggling home.
“What a spirit,” I mused, “in which to end the Sabbath Day. It isn’t Sunday baseball games or Sunday tennis that the churches ought to be worrying about. It is this Sunday night traffic. Here are hundreds of thousands of people, all ugly, at war, angry and in no Christian spirit whatsoever, profaning the Sabbath more by their state of mind than all the baseball games imaginable.”
“The churches,” said Jim, “are practical. They can’t stop people motoring. But they can stop baseball games.”
And as we coasted along, a man stuck his head out of a passing car and shouted at me: “Put a nickel in it.”
And a little while later, another youth shouted as he passed:
“Which end does the concrete come out?”
“There you are, Jimmie,” I said bitterly. “There’s a Christian spirit for you.”
“Never mind,” consoled Jim, “in a few minutes we’ll be turning off on to the gravel.”
The Easy Road Home
A few miles south, we came to the town where the gravel highway goes one way and the concrete the other. Already the inpouring side-roads had filled the highway so that, even in this modest country town, there was a solid stream of cars necessitating frequent halts, slow grinds forward in low gear and more halts.
“Take the next turn to the right,” said Jim. “Then we’re away.”
But as we approached the fork, we saw that about half the cars were taking the gravel and half sticking to the pavement. Down the gravel road for miles hung a great dust cloud.
“Look,” I protested. “It’s jammed too.”
“Take it, take it,” commanded Jimmie before I could come to any decision. So I took it. With a slither and a bump, we were on the gravel and headed the back way home to Toronto. Ahead, cars fled away in yellow clouds, fencing around each other anxiously for front position. Hardly had we gone 50 yards before two cars with horns roaring slithered past us, sweeping up vast clouds of dust and flinging pebbles against our windshield.
“So,” I said, “we take the easy road home.”
“We just happened to get into a bunch,” explained Jim. “Wait a few minutes until this crowd get ahead.”
So I slackened speed and let the dust-flingers move farther out. But, one by one, fresh cars came rushing from behind, as if each driver hoped to get ahead of all the others and so escape the dust.
“This is going to be a dandy drive home,” I assured Jim. “We should have left at two p.m., as I advised.”
“It’s just a coincidence,” said Jimmie. “We have run into a bunch. People don’t like a dusty road like this. In a few minutes, there won’t be a car in sight, ahead or behind. You wait.”
So I slacked still more, and jogged along. But, whizzing and rattling, car after car came rushing from behind and, as far as I could see in the reverse mirror, cars were following.
“There aren’t any back roads any more in this world, Jim,” I informed him, “All roads are main roads.”
“Do you want to turn back and get on the pavement again, then?” demanded Jim.
“One’s as bad as the other at this time of night,” I informed him sadly. There was grit in our teeth already and the windshield had begun to go gray.
“Everybody told me this was a swell way to go home,” said Jim. “Maybe they meant earlier in the season before everybody got fed up with the jam on the main highway.”
I said nothing. I just took to the side of the road and held it at a nice 40, while with regular monotony cars from behind overtook us, blew their horns indignantly at my dust cloud and speeded furiously through, leaving a specially dirty dust cloud for me to hang in for two or three minutes.
“Nice, friendly people,” I remarked.
But now even Jim was silent, huddled down with lips set grimly against the dust and his eyes squinted.
“We’re overtaking somebody,” I informed him suddenly.
Ahead, through the dust, I could see a car, then several cars.
“Don’t tell me,” I protested, “that there is a jam on this road too.”
We came up in rear of a line of a dozen cars, all crowding and jostling close to each other.
“It’s a detour,” said Jim, who had stood up to look.
And it was a detour. Across the gravel highway barricades were set, fending us off to right and left, down traffic taking a narrow dirt road around a concession to the right, and up traffic apparently using a concession to the left.
“Well, sir,” I said happily, “if there is anything else to recommend this road, I wish you’d mention it right now.”
“How did I know it would be like this?” retorted Jim angrily.
“You didn’t know anything about it – that’s the trouble,” I informed him.
And slowly taking our turn, while behind us fresh cars came furiously and dustily to a surprised stop, we turned off on to the side road which was baked hard and full of ruts and bumps and hummocks of dead grass.
“What are they doing?” I shouted to the man minding the barricade.
“They’re improving it,” he called back politely.
“Oh, goodie,” I told him.
And as we lolloped and swayed and bumped along the narrow road with a slow and laboring string of cars ahead of us, I developed the theme.
“They’re improving this road,” I explained, “to relieve the main highway. They will pave it. So that instead of only one big traffic jam every Sunday night, you can choose between two big traffic jams.”
“In that case,” said Jim, “you’ll have to adapt yourself to the 20th century. You’ll have to modernize yourself.”
“I think I’ll give up motoring,” I announced. “Motoring is getting too vulgar. The high-class thing to do presently will be never to motor.”
“If you weren’t so silly about traffic,” said Jim, “we would have been spared all this bouncing around in the dust. We’d be somewhere outside the city limits right now, a couple of traffic bounders taking a little fun out of zig-zagging through the jam.”
“I much prefer this,” I said, even though we at the moment nearly crashed a spring in a hole in the dirt road, “to being in that main highway tangle. This may be a little rough and dusty, but it’s safe.”
And then a tire somewhere amongst us went bang and whined.
“Oh, ho,” I said, brightly, “some poor beggar has got a blow out.”
“It’s us,” advised Jim, hollowly.
And it was so.
“Pull as far off the road as you can,” said Jim. “We have to let traffic past somehow.”
So we came a few yards farther on, to a farm lane where we pulled out of the traffic and set the jack up on a wobbly turf and got all dusty taking off the spare and all greasy taking off the old one and all grass-stained putting on the new one and all wet with perspiration trying to release the jack so that it would come down.
And when we tried to get back out of the farmer’s lane into the road, it was getting dusk and everybody was grim and angry and tired so that we had to wait until about 30 cars passed before there was a slight gap in the traffic. And when we did pop out into the road, the man we popped ahead of was so indignant that he blasted his horn for 10 seconds at us and came up right against our back bumper and we could hear him yelling things at us, but we could not hear the words.
And the whole thing was in a lovely holiday mood and very unlike the Sabbath altogether.
Editor’s Notes: This was a time when people’s weekend did not start until afternoon on Saturday. Families with cottages would have the wife and children spend all summer at them, and the men would only come up for the very short weekends, and would be “summer bachelors” in the city during the week.
“Welcome, strangers,” cried Uncle Jake. “You’re just in time. Only one cabin left. And it’s a dandy one at that.”
“No more fooling,” said Jimmie Frise; “you’ve got to come down with me this week-end to visit Uncle Jake and Aunt Minnie on the farm.”
“What crop are they gathering this week?” I inquired bitterly.
“I picked this week specially,” said Jim, “because there are no crops. The hay is in. The farm is at rest for a little while now. You will see the farm at its best. The cattle fat and clean. The fields bright and heavy.”
“Three times,” I stated firmly. “I have visited the farm with you. Once there was threshing. Once there was haying. And the third time Uncle Jake had the lumbago.”
“That was in my mind,” said Jim apologetically. “My idea in going down this week is that there is nothing whatever doing on the farm. I haven’t heard from Uncle Jake since Christmas. That means he is in good health. The only time he writes is when he is in pain. It relieves him to write a letter when he has something wrong with him.”
“I’ve never visited a farm in summer,” I confessed. “In summer we’re always summer resorting. We visit farms in autumn, when they are forlorn.”
“Exactly,” said Jim. “More than three-quarters of the people of the world live on farms. The whole basis of human civilization is the farm, not the shop or the factory or the town. I think we owe it to ourselves, as seekers after the truth, however silly it turns out to be in the end, to know something about farms other than what we can see jazzing along highways at fifty miles an hour.”
“You’re quite right,” I agreed.
“Sometimes,” said Jim a little wistfully, “I sort of half regret having left the farm to become a cartoonist. There is a false glamor to town and city life. It doesn’t pay, in the end. You run away from the farm to escape manual labor, driving horses, handling forks, steering plows. You imagine it is a far better thing to be a mechanic in a factory, standing beside a machine. Or sitting on a stool in an office. You see a city’s street cars, its pavements, its lights and conveniences, its gaiety, its endless activity. And what do you give away in exchange?”
“I don’t like getting up at 5 am,” I pointed out.
“Pah,” said Jim bitterly. “It isn’t that. It is the peace and freedom you lose. It is the quiet and the gentleness. The patience and the kindly waiting. You plow, you plant and you tend and watch. All things come home. The wheat ripens in due season. The calves are born to the very day. Morning comes and night drops down. It is a life of order and beauty, and it is ordered not by the will of man but by the serene and eternal laws of nature. We are a long step nearer to Heaven on the farm; and in cities it’s a long, long step the other way.”
Chicken and Rhubarb Pie
“When a city man comes into my office to see me,” I confided, “he sits down on the edge of the chair and is half risen to go all in the same movement. But when a friend from the farm comes in, he enters slowly, waiting to see the impression of pleasure and delight on my face, reflecting his own. He looks about to see where to hang his hat. He selects a chair and draws it forward to a pleasant and comfortable position. He relaxes. He is there for an hour. And I, who love him, must sit, all strangely and uneasily relaxed, wondering how I can tell him I must hurry, that work is pressing, that I am a squirrel in a cage and must run, run, run round and round. I dare not relax. In cities it is fatal, it is terrible, it is painful, physically painful, to relax.”
“How,” demanded Jim, “can we ever solve the troubles of the world while the human race is so divided into two races? Two species as distinct as hawks and chickens? Three-quarters of the human race look upon life from the sweet reality of the farm. The other quarter, the deadly, scheming, clever, achieving quarter, look upon life from the dread artificiality of the city?”
“The way it is going now,” I suggested, “we are slowly starving a pretty big percentage of people out of the cities. Unemployed. If we keep up the present tendencies the number of people in cities is going to grow less and less until presently the control, the direction of human affairs, will pass out of the hands of lawyers and promoters and get back into the hands of the majority, the people on the farms.”
“Uncle Jake,” said Jim, “will be glad to see us. Aunt Minnie will give us a rousing welcome and fly to the kitchen to get some of those famous rhubarb pies of hers into the oven and a chicken on.”
“Fried chicken?” I offered.
“Roast chicken,” cried Jim, “boiled chicken, fried chicken, young chicken fried American style, chicken fricassee, chicken hash. The times I’ve been at Uncle Jake’s and Aunt Minnie’s I eat chicken till I bust, yet I never tire of it. Nobody knows how many ways there are of doing chicken until he has visited a farm in July.”
“Cold roast chicken,” I gloated.
“Chicken jellied,” said Jim, “with thick green lettuce, not the pale kind, but the rich dark green kind with a tang.”
“Will we leave Friday night or Saturday morning?” I asked.
And in due time we were headed out the highways for Uncle Jake’s, amidst the city-fleeing throng of week-enders.
“Just look at them,” cried Jimmie, as the cars filed away ahead of us and honked their horns wildly to pass us from the long stream behind, “rushing away from the city for just a few hours’ taste of what they might have forever on the farm.”
“Don’t they look silly,” I agreed.
“I picked up an Englishman,” related Jimmie, “on the Lake Shore road the other morning. Do you know how he spends his week-ends? There are some of these dinky tourist camps right on the outskirts of Toronto. They are meant to accommodate tourists coming to or passing through Toronto, in lieu of hotels. This Englishman, on Saturday afternoons, goes out to one of these suburban tourist camps, hires a cabin for Saturday and Sunday nights, $1 a night, and gets into his bathing suit.”
“I can see him,” I admitted, “tall and knobby.”
The Gipsy in Human Nature
“And there he is, ten minutes outside of the city,” continued Jim, “in the green country, with a beach nearby, with people in holiday mood all around him. He bathes in the sun and the lake. He has the camp owner bring him tea and toast Sunday morning, while he lies in bed in the little cubby. He has a swell time for about $2.50, counting car tickets. And he wants to know why people have to rush off a hundred miles for a week-end?”
“Not a tourist camp, Jim,” I begged. “Don’t suggest that we forego a lovely week-end visit to the Muskoka Lakes in favor of a visit to a tourist camp.”
“They say they’re not half bad,” submitted Jim.
“My dear man.” I protested, “ridiculous as all these cars look, streaming in all directions madly from the city at this hour, they look far less ridiculous than people going 10 miles from a comfortable bed to cramp themselves into a tourist cubby.”
“Think it over,” advised Jim. “This tourist cabin business is on the increase. This whole trailer cabin idea is growing by leaps and bounds. We are just seeing the beginning of it now. In winter, all over the southern part of the states, there are whole cities of trailers and tourist cabins. Mark my words, in the summer, we are going to see whole cities of them up here.”
“It isn’t human nature,” I informed him, “to live in a shack. Human nature craves property, space, room.”
“Wrong,” cried Jimmie. “Like so many other ideas about human nature, that one is utterly wrong. Human nature is tired of property, tired of possessions that anchor them down. Men are discovering that to be anchored to a house is like being anchored to a mountain.”
“Jim, that’s heresy,” I stated, “What would real estate men and trust companies say to that?”
“You can’t change human nature,” insisted Jim. “You can twist it out of shape for a century or two, maybe, but it works itself back to normal in time. And I tell you the natural man likes a shanty, a shack, a cubby, a cave, one room, just enough to keep him warm and dry and space to store his hunting tools. That is the natural man, not this queer jackdaw, this collector of trinkets and baubles that is supposed to be the normal man today.”
“You’re subversive, Jim,” I warned him.
“We must try one of those tourist camps some time,” said Jim.
“Not me,” I assured him. “Not me. With people jammed in all around you, people you don’t know, never saw before and never will see again, yet your most intimate neighbors for a night. And kids yelling and snores from both sides shaking the flimsy walls. No, sirree! And early birds on their way at daybreak and people coming in late stumbling and banging against your cabin at three a.m. No, sirree!”
“I’d like to have a try at it,” repeated Jimmie, and we both craned our necks to look at a handsome array of brand new tourist cabins at a road corner as we sailed along. There were merry groups of people amidst the aisles of the cabins, and cars half unloaded and children romping and women doing washing and hanging clothes on tiny lines.
“It’s the gipsy in human nature coming out,” said Jim.
“Ah,” I cried, pointing to a farm all lush and green, the white farm house bowered with bending trees, aloof, serene. “But look at that. There’s the real thing.”
“Plus chicken,” admitted Jim. “Plus chicken hash on toast.”
“Cold roast chicken,” I corrected, “broken apart by hand. Not sliced. Just broken into gobbets.”
“Mmmmmm,” we harmonized. I pushed down a little on the gas and joined with the endless streams of those escaping from Nineveh and Tyre, nor ever looking back.
And in a couple of hours of this stewing and grinding, we left the beaten path and took the second-class road that led to Uncle Jake’s. It was still a beaten path, however, for few and far between are the roads nowadays that are not beaten.
“Hurray,” we yelled when we topped the last hill and saw ahead the cluster of elms and maples that are the symbol of the peace and plenty amidst which Uncle Jake resides.
“There’s somebody there,” exclaimed Jim. “See the cars in the lane.”
“Maybe he’s holding a sale of stock,” I offered.
“There’s nobody to be married,” muttered Jim. “I hope it isn’t a funeral.”
Startling Changes
And with every yard we grew nearer to Uncle Jake’s lane, the more anxious we felt. Because there was certainly something going on at Uncle Jake’s. We could see cars parked not only in the lane but around the house.
“Good heavens,” shouted Jim, so suddenly that I took my foot off the gas and coasted. “Tourist camp.”
And now we could see the back of the house behind which was a bright array. A vivid and bright avenue of little tourist shacks, amidst which a quiet population moved in the supper time light.
“Are you sure it’s Uncle Jake’s place?” I enquired.
“Did I never spend my happy boyhood here?” said Jim brokenly.
As we turned in the lane, we could see Uncle Jake politely and ceremoniously waving us onward, a true greeter.
“Oh, ho, ho,” cried Jim, tragically.
I drove slowly in. Children romped and leaped, a man with a banjo played whanging tunes, folks were at supper and Aunt Minnie greeted us in a great swither of excitement and joy.
“Chicken dinner, 50 cents,” said a sign on the gate as we rolled funereally through.
“Welcome, strangers,” cried Uncle Jake, stepping on the running board. “You’re just in the nick of time. Only one cabin left. And a dandy at that. Turn left.”
We turned left and drove along the turf.
“Here you are,” said Uncle Jake swinging athletically off and waving a hand at just another of the gaudy little shanties.
“Uncle Jake,” said Jim, “my friend here is troubled with hay fever and asthma. He isn’t allowed to sleep in cabins. How about that room I used to be in, when I was a kid? The one with the sloping ceiling and the big red flowers on the wallpaper?”
“Aw, Jimmie,” said Uncle Jake, “that’s let. We’ve got some semi-permanent guests up in that room.”
“There’s nothing but these?” asked Jim earnestly, as a nephew to an uncle.
“Why, what’s the matter with these?” cried Uncle Jake. “A dollar a night? Paid in advance? A dry, well-built, cosy little kumfy kabin like this?”
“How about it?” asked Jim turning to me.
“Where else would we go?” I retorted grimly.
We got out and Uncle Jake helped us with our stuff.
“I hate to charge you boys,” said he, confidentially when we got inside. It was hot and smelt of new wood. “I hate to charge my own kinfolks, but you see how it is. I’m in business. I got to get my income from the investment. Now, if you had come during the week, I might have let you off. But the week-end is my busy time…”
“It’s all right,” said Jim, “what’s a dollar between relatives?”
“Well, it’s quite exciting,” said Uncle Jake, patting the walls and door admiringly. “Farming is no good any more. This is the line of business everybody ought to be in on the farm. I figure I won’t be doing any plowing or sowing next spring at all, at the rate it’s coming in now.”
‘We’re Living At Last”
“Well, one thing.” said Jim, sitting down on the narrow stretcher on the side of the cabin, “we’ll have a chicken dinner. And has Aunt Minnie got any rhubarb pies.”
“Oh, shoot,” said Uncle Jake, snapping his fingers, “we’re just out of chickens. This crowd ate up the whole supply we had ready and I haven’t another on the place that ain’t laying.”
“No chicken?” I said. “No cold bits left over?”
“Not a scrap of chicken,” said Uncle Jake. “I only got a few layers left. I got to buy my chickens in town now, the whole neighborhood is fresh out of chickens due to this kind of business.”
“How about rhubarb pie?” asked Jim. “One of Aunt Min’s famous brown-top rhubarb pies?”
“Jimmie,” said Uncle Jake, part way out the door and all ready to fly in answer to a car horn tooting in the distance, “Minnie is that busy looking after the place we’ve had to get a girl in specially to do the cooking. She’ll put you up a nice feed, though. When you’re set, come to the kitchen and see her. Fifty cents only, for supper.”
He vanished, his boots crunching hurriedly.
Jim leaned his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. He sat a long time so, while I arranged my belongings around the camp stretcher on my side of the cubby.
After awhile, he sat up and we went to the kitchen where a large strange girl laid us out a nice meal of potted meat and mashed potatoes, pickles and buns. But it seemed as if neither thought nor imagination had been given to the meal. The girl just took the stuff off the pantry shelves as her hand found them. They were not viands aimed at us, as individuals. They were food for anybody.
Aunt Minnie swept furiously through the kitchen several times, all flushed and full of vim. She embraced Jim heartily.
“Oh, Jim,” she said, “we’re having the grandest time!”
“The old place is all changed,” said Jim.
“And wasn’t it time?” cried Aunt Minnie. “Why, we’re living at last.”
After supper, Uncle Jake told us to walk around and look the old place over. In the barn were three cows and a horse. A couple of pigs had the look of being fed on chocolate bars and sandwiches. Jim showed me where there used to be 15 cows that he had helped milk. He walked me over fields where he had hunted wary groundhogs as a boy: and now the groundhogs whistled at us scornfully.
We came back at dusk and found two trailer cabins had joined the community, just for company. We sat on the step of our cubby and watched the strange phenomenon of neighbors for a night, this weird society based on hours instead of years. There was music and singing and children yelling to bed and banging and engines and a game of horse shoes. There was advancing night and a gathering quiet. There were snores and mutters and the going out of lights.
“When it is all quiet,” whispered Jim, under the stars that were over the brooding elms, “we’ll get the heck out of here.”
Which we did.
Uncle Jake politely and ceremoniously waved us onward, a true greeter. (Colour image from July 15, 1944)Microfilm image from July 15, 1944.
Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on July 15, 1944, as well as appearing in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Outdoors, 1979.
Nineveh and Tyre are both described in the Bible as capitals of mighty empires. Both were reportedly wicked places and had their destruction foretold by prophets.
Jim batted of the bee with his hand while I ducked and twisted and tried to keep the car on the road.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 2, 1938.
“Step on her,” said Jimmie Frise.
“This is the speed I like,” I explained. “This is my cruising speed.”
“We’ll never get there, at this rate,” muttered Jim.
“You speed merchants amuse me,” I stated. “Many’s the time I have been in your car and we go whang along at 60 miles an hour, passing everything on the road.”
“Why not?” said Jim.
“Just a minute,” I suggested. “After sitting in a sort of daze of speed and jitters, with our hearts in our mouths every hilltop we come to and a sinking sensation in the pit of the stomach every time we pass a car, you finally pull up at a gas station for gas. And, while we sit there three or four minutes, what happens?”
“I’ve heard this before,” said Jim.
“Along come all the old jitneys, rattle-traps and slow coaches we have been passing 20 miles back. Three or four minutes, and the whole parade we have so magnificently left behind, catches up to us. I think that ought to dispel the illusion you speed merchants are under. You submit yourselves to all kinds of risk and nerve-strain under the impression that you are getting somewhere ahead of everybody else. You beat them, no matter how fast you go, by about 15 minutes or something.”
“I’ve beaten you,” stated Jimmie, “by three hours, going from Toronto to North Bay.”
“Yes,” I replied, and what did you see, on that trip, as you raced like a madman across the province? All you saw was a gray blur of road, while you sat tense and cramped at the steering wheel.”
“Okay,” said Jim, “and what did you see, as you doped heavily up the highway, all sagged back under your wheel with an expression like a purring cat in your eyes. You know: half open and half shut?”
“I saw,” I informed him loudly, “glorious country, hill and dale. I saw vistas and far-flung panoramas. I saw sheep and cattle, horses and birds, like hawks and bright warblers along the woodsy margin of the road.”
“My, my, my,” said Jimmie.
“I saw farmers, my brothers in life.” I continued emotionally, “plowing their fields or raking hay. I saw the faces of country children as they walked along the roadside. What did you see? Just a zipp and something had been passed. Just a phhtt!”
“Phttt,” echoed Jimmie. “That’s the way I like to travel.”
A Bee in the Car
“Look around you now,” I commanded. “Behold the beauty of summer. Relax and rest your eyes on these lovely scenes through which we are passing. Could we look at these fields if you were driving? No, sir. Both of us would be sitting like in a dentist’s chair, keyed up, nerves taut.”
“Okay,” said Jim. “I’m looking around. I don’t see anything special. There’s a field of wheat. That’s a pasture. Three cows lying down under a tree. And here we’re coming to a rather commonplace looking farmhouse, sort of decayed and run down and seedy…”
“Beauty,” I advised, “is in the eye of the beholder.”
“There’s a patch of woods,” pointed out Jim, “that would have been all right if the cattle hadn’t been in it, and eaten off all the lower foliage.”
“Look at the picture as a whole,” I cried, “not at the detail, as if you were some kind of land valuator. Take in the panorama.”
“It’s a pretty dull panorama, if you ask me.” said Jim, taking it in all around, “dusty looking hills, just a lot of crops sizzling in the sun, homely-looking farm houses and rickety barns, exhausted horses drooping against fences…”
“Very well, forget it,” I said heatedly.
“How can I forget it, at the speed we’re going?” retorted Jim. “If you’d only step on the gas and hustle us through this desolate looking country, I wouldn’t have to sit here staring at all these evidences of man’s futile struggle with life.”
“We’re hitting 38,” I stated. “Thirty-eight miles an hour is fast enough for anybody to go.”
“Could I appeal to you,” inquired Jimmie, “on the grounds of heat? How would you like to go just fast enough to create a breeze? I’m slowly stifling.”
“Open the windows behind you.” I advised. “There’s a grand breeze.”
“Make it 45,” pleaded Jim. “Just forty-five. Give us just enough wind to blow the engine heat out of the car.”
“I’ll make it 40,” I consented, cautiously pressing a little harder on the pedal, “but no more.”
“There,” accused Jim, “you’ve let a bee in the car.”
“Shoo it out,” I ordered sharply. “Shoo it out.”
“It went behind somewhere,” said Jim, turning to look in the back of the car. “Now that’s what comes of driving slow. I never get a bee in my car because I’m travelling too fast. And if one …”
“Come on, come on,” I commanded anxiously, “find that bee. Get busy. Find it.”
“Find it yourself,” retorted Jim. “You let it in. All right. You get it out. I tell you, if any bees get in my car, they’re so stunned, they’re helpless.”
“Jim,” I said, “don’t talk. Just look for that bee.”
“It probably flew out the window,” said Jim. “At this speed, all the bees in Ontario can come and visit in on us.”
“Bees,” I informed him, slowing the car and steering for the shoulder of the road, “give me the willies. I’m going to stop and get that bee out. The thought of a bee crawling up my pant leg actually gives me sort of nervous breakdown sort of feeling.”
I pulled up on the roadside and got out and shifted the baggage around, examining all the nooks and crannies for the bee, while Jim sat with an expression of disgust on his face. I couldn’t find any bee. I found a couple of dry grasshoppers and some bobbie pins, marbles and a small toy automobile that my daughter lost some months ago; but there was no bee.
“Hm,” said Jimmie, as I got back in behind the wheel, “one of these days you’re going to have a mud turtle pop into your car.”
“A bee,” I stated, “is a serious menace. Hundreds of fatal accidents are caused every year by bees.”
“Bees never bother people who drive at normal speeds,” said Jim. “You go 60 miles an hour and you won’t see any bees except dead ones on your windshield.”
“Of the two evils,” I replied, “I choose the bee, because if I am stung at 40 miles an hour, I imagine I could control the car long enough to bring it to a safe stop. But at 60 miles an hour, nobody can control a car in any sudden emergency, like a bee sting or a sudden attack of hay fever.”
“Don’t talk,” said Jim. “Just drive. Every time you talk, you case your foot off the accelerator and we drop back to about 30 miles an hour. Concentrate on your driving.”
I stepped it back up to 38. Just to show I am not bigoted, I stepped it up to 40. In fact, the needle hovered for a few minutes up almost to 45. And Jim sat back and breathed a big sigh.
“If she doesn’t drop to pieces,” he said, “you’re doing all right.”
And then, out of the corner of my eye. I saw another bee, a big, black and yellow one, zoom in the side window and go behind me.
“Quick, Jim,” I cried, “another bee.”
Jim turned around and watched in behind.
“I don’t see it,” he said, preparing to sit back.
“Watch for it,” I insisted. “I saw it come right in past my ear. One of those big yellow bumble bees. See if it’s crawling up the back of the seat”
“Don’t be so jittery,” said Jim. “It probably went out the other window. Keep this speed up and it will blow the bees out.”
“I’m doing 45,” I gasped. “Better than 45. Look at the needle.”
“Good,” said Jim. “Hold her at 45 or better and we won’t see any bees.”
“I believe,” I said, grasping the wheel grimly and holding my breath,” I believe there is something in what you say about bees. I just smacked into one there a minute ago. Look at it on the windshield. As if an egg had burst.”
“Keep it up,” said Jim, enthusiastically.
Then, with a deep zoom, the bee came from behind and batted on the windshield right before our eyes. It zigzagged and hit the roof and dropped out of sight down by our feet.
“Hey,” shouted Jim, “watch your driving!”
“Get that bee,” I said, already feeling as if ten bees were crawling up my pant leg.
“Look out,” shouted Jim.
I was, as a matter of fact, wabbling a bit. I tried to keep one eye on the road and bend the other one down towards the floor boards, but you can’t do that.
“I got it,” cried Jim, stamping with his foot. But the angry bee now spiralled up and zoomed and hummed around our heads, while Jim batted at it with his hand and I ducked and twisted and tried to keep the car on the road. Needless to say, I had my foot off the accelerator and, in the two or three seconds that all this was happening, the car was coming to a stop. I got it stopped with one wheel just on the edge of the ditch.
And almost simultaneously with us, a speed cop rolled gently from behind us and parked his cycle square across our bows.
“W-hell, w-hell, w-hell,” said the cop, walking up and resting his elbow on my window sill. “What kind of fancy driving do you call that?”
“There was a bee in our car,” I stated. “It’s still in here somewhere.”
The policeman put his head in the window and leaned his face up close to me and sniffed long and judicially.
“What are you insinuating?” I demanded sternly.
“I was just seeing,” said the policeman,” I could smell any honey or anything.”
He backed out the window and opened the door. I scrambled out, shaking my pant legs in case of any bees. Jim got out the other side and came around. The policeman stood very close to us and kept sniffing suspiciously.
“Look here,” I said, “I tell you there was a bee in our car, a big bee. And that was what made me wobble a little.”
“A little?” said the policeman. “I saw you wobble 10 miles back. That’s what attracted my attention to you.”
“That was another bee,” I explained.
Only When You Go Slow
“So you go into a sort of stagger every time a bee gets in your car?” asked the constable.
“It’s all very well,” I said, “for you, with your leather leggings. But you just imagine a bee crawling up your pant leg and see how you feel.”
“I can charge you with reckless driving,” said the cop. “Steering all over the road like that.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “Go ahead and charge me if you like. But when a bee gets in my car, I can’t help getting excited.”
“You can’t go swerving all over the road like that,” insisted the constable.
“Well, I’ll do my best,” I sighed. “But bees are bees.”
“Just keep your head,” advised the cop walking over to his cycle. “And remember, don’t wobble.”
He tramped authoritatively on his engine and rode on, slowly. Jim and I got into our car and followed. The cop jogged along at about 25 miles an hour, and we kept behind him for a mile or so.
Suddenly the constable’s cycle wobbled violently to one side and only by sticking his leg out did he keep the machine from falling, He pulled up at the side of the road and as we drew near he held up his hand for us to stop.
“Now,” he shouted, “you’ve got me bee conscious.”
“I’m sorry,” I assured him.
“Sorry!” he shouted. “I’ve a darn good mind to charge you with reckless driving after all.”
“It’s only when you go slow,” cut in Jim, very kindly, “that bees bother you. If you’re going fast, they just bump against you.”
“Is that so?” said the policeman grimly.
I nudged Jim to stop talking. The best thing to do with a speed cop is just look at him humbly.
“Maybe,” said the policeman, thoughtfully, “maybe I’ll get bees on my nerves, like you.”
He sat on the cycle, staring around at the grass and weeds. Then he took his gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on. Next, he took a handkerchief from his hip and tied it carefully around his neck. He pulled his cap down well over his ears and slid his goggles on. Hunching his shoulders, and crouching down on his saddle, he started his engine and, with a terrific roar of his exhaust, he leaped down the highway at 60 miles an hour.
“There you go,” said Jimmie. “Putting notions into the poor fellow’s head.”
“He’ll be more sympathetic now,” I pointed out. “Him coming smelling our breath like that.”
“Ouch!” exclaimed Jim. “Pshh! Shoo!”
Jim was flicking his hand frantically as our old friend, the big yellow bee, came groggily crawling up the outside of Jim’s pantleg, heard it scrunch as Jim stepped on it on the floor boards.
“There,” said Jim. “Now you’ve got me going.”
“It’s a mercy,” I said, “that it came up the outside of your pant leg.”
“Let’s drive on,” said Jim.
And he helped me wind up all the car windows, leaving only about an inch open at the top of each.
Editor’s Note: “Wabbling” is the same as “wobbling”.
The whole reel like a great tangled skein, lay all over the floor. “You didn’t hook it in properly!” cried Jim loudly…
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 26, 1938.
“One thing,” said Jimmie Frise bitterly, “leads to another.”
“You said it,” I assured him. “Learn that fact, and you’ve got all philosophy by the tail.”
“I wish,” said Jim, “I hadn’t been born so good-natured.”
“What have you let yourself in for now?” I asked.
“Oh, one of those things,” gusted Jimmie, unhappily. “Two months ago, some ladies called at the house in connection with the church. They said they were organizing a series of entertainments to help defray the cost of redecorating the Sunday school.”
“So?” I laughed.
“I said I’d be only too pleased to help,” said Jim. “Engagements two months away are so easy to keep.”
“I make it a rule,” I informed him, “never to make any engagement farther off than to-morrow night.”
“Good,” said Jim. “It’s to-morrow night this is.”
“Ah,” I countered. “Sorry, Jim, I’m all tied up for to-morrow night.”
“Look,” said Jim, “you’ve got to lend me a hand. I told these ladies I would arrange one whole evening for them.”
“It’s no trick for you,” I said, “to stand up there and scratch off cartoons of Old Archie and Pigskin and the rest.”
“For two hours?” cried Jim. “There has to be movies. I had the movies all arranged, and just a few minutes ago the fellow that owns the movie machine, called me to say he was laid up with a severe attack of bronchitis and couldn’t possibly come.”
“Anybody can run one of those things,” I pointed out.
“That’s what I say,” agreed Jim. “You could do it swell.”
“Not me,” I informed him decisively. “Anybody in the world but me, Jim. There is some convolution in my brain missing, or something, that has to do with practical things. I was no good at arithmetic or algebra at school. I simply don’t understand. Why, I have never even lifted the hood of a motor car in my life, I simply wouldn’t dare. And when daylight saving time comes, I never enter into the family discussion as to whether you put the hands of the clock forward an hour or back an hour. No, sir, Jim, there are some things I wouldn’t touch for a million dollars.”
“Pshaw,” said Jim, “any kid can run one of those little amateur movie things.”
“O.K.” I agreed. “Get some kid to do it then.”
“Look,” pleaded Jim, “he said I could have his projector, and three reels of travel pictures of China he’s got, and a couple of children’s pictures like Felix the Cat.”
“Nnn, nnn,” I shook my head. “Why don’t you run it yourself?”
“I have my hands full,” said Jim, “getting my big drawing board over and the paper and everything set up. I’ve got to have somebody look after the projector and screen and everything.”
“Anybody but me, Jim,” I assured him. “I have a holy horror of any kind of gadget that works. And what I’ve seen of those baby projectors, they hum and click and fizzle and do everything that makes me stiff with fright.”
“Listen,” said Jim impatiently. “they’re automatic. Just as simple as turning on the electric light. It’s all done with buttons.”
“Jim,” I advised him, “I was born about a century late. I don’t belong in this age at all. I belong about the time of the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne. My belief is, that the human brain grows with each generation, so as to accommodate all the new things invented. But my brain happens to have slipped a couple of generations, probably owing to rickets when I was an infant, or maybe because I started to creep too young.”
“You’ve got a good brain,” encouraged Jim.
“Maybe, Jim,” I replied uneasily, “but you ought to feel the funny feeling that comes over me every time I get into a horse-drawn cab like in Montreal, or whenever I see a lovely old-fashioned bookcase or chest of drawers. I get a queer flood of feeling, as if I had suddenly met a long lost friend. Or like being lost in the bush and suddenly meeting a human being. Jim, machines are as foreign to me as to an Eskimo. I hate machines. I won’t come. No, sir, excuse me.”
“Very well,” said Jim, coldly, “I’ve helped you out of many a jam.”
“Mention one,” I suggested.
“The least you could do,” said Jim, “is help me. I’ll run the machine, if you’ll just come along to help carry the thing and set up the screen and that sort of thing. I’ll operate it.”
“Jim,” I said, “much as my experience of you warns me to keep as far as possible from you in cases like this, I’ll come along, as you suggest, merely as your helper; as your caddie.”
“That’s swell,” cried Jim, with vast relief. “I’ve got lots of other friends I could ask, but you’re the only one that sort of suits a church basement.”
“You call for it, then,” I arranged, “and bring the machine and the films to your place. Get some lessons on how to run it from the guy.”
“I planned to do that,” agreed Jim. “You come to my house about half past seven, and we’ll take the stuff over to the church and get it set up.”
“But let this be a lesson to you.” I warned him. “Never make any more long distance engagements. They always catch up with you.”
“It’s so easy to be a good fellow at two months’ notice,” said Jim.
“It’s so easy to do anything,” I corrected, “at 60 days or six months. It is like debts. You promise to pay one year from now. It seems to be so far away as to be almost never. But the fact of the matter is, if you can’t pay now, the chances are you will find it just as hard one year from now.”
“All the debts in the world,” said Jim, “are testimonials to the eternal optimism of the human race.”
“The way I do,” I explained, “is this: when somebody asks me to do something six weeks from now, I say to myself, do I feel like doing it now? Almost without exception, I don’t feel like doing it now, especially going out to a meeting or attending a gathering or something like that. So I say to myself, if I don’t feel like doing it now, I certainly won’t feel like doing it when I am six weeks older and wiser than I am now. So I just don’t make the date.”
“Don’t you ever feel,” inquired Jimmie, “that you sort of owe a little service to churches or society or anything? Especially when it’s weeks and weeks away?”
“Jim,” I declared, “I play fair. I don’t like listening to other people reciting or making speeches. So I don’t expect other people to listen to me. Do unto others as you expect others to do by you.”
“That’s a swell rule for mean people,” pointed out Jim.
“The world is full of people,” I retorted, “that not only love listening to others speaking, reciting and singing, but they love doing it themselves. It is a straight case of give and take. But if you don’t do any taking, why should you expect to do any giving?”
“I wish I had it worked out like you,” sighed Jim.
“If I had it worked out as good as I think I have,” I informed him, “I wouldn’t be making any date with you for to-morrow night.”
For This Worthy Object
Jim telephoned after supper to say he had just been over to his friend’s house and got the projector and three reels of film on travels in China, one reel of a motor trip down the Gaspe coast, one reel of a motor trip through the Niagara peninsula during blossom time and two rather aged reels of Felix the Cat, those animated cartoons that so delight the children.
“Come on down,” said Jimmie excitedly, “I’m going to run them through just to see what they are, and get a little practice at operating the machine.”
“No, thanks,” I assured him, “I see through you. You want to give me a lesson and then to-morrow night, just hand the job over to me.”
“Aw, come on, just a private family show,” cried Jim enthusiastically.
“No, thanks,” I said so unemotionally that Jim knew I meant no.
In the morning, Jim told me how delightfully simple the whole thing was.
“It’s a kind of an old-fashioned projector,” explained Jim. “Not one of these little compact babies they sell nowadays. It’s all open and shut. You just hitch the film in one wheel and turn the switch and away she goes. It’s as easy as running a wheelbarrow.”
“How are the films?” I asked.
“Swell,” cried Jim. “I wish you had come down. We had a lovely private show. The Chinese pictures are marvellous, showing what China was like before the war. They’re kind of old and speckled sort of, but mighty interesting. And the animated cartoons are cute. The kids will love them.”
“What time will I call to-night?” I asked.
“Make it 7.30,” said Jim, “so we can get everything set up in good time in the church basement.”
So at 7.30, I was at Jim’s and we loaded into the car his big drawing board, on which were tacked a dozen jumbo sheets of paper for him to do his charcoal cartoon act on, and the projector, a clumsy kind of contraption in a big scuffed case, a sheet and half a dozen tins containing the reels of pictures. We drove to the church but the caretaker was nowhere to be found and we had to sit in the car until 8 o’clock, by which time quite a gathering had assembled, waiting to get in.
We carried the stuff in, and while Jim set up his easel on the platform, I hung the sheet up, under his direction. I also helped open and set up the projector, so that several little boys took me for the specialist in charge of the movies. And I explained to them how it worked, though to tell the truth, the black, gadgetty thing gave me the creeps.
About 8.25 the ladies of the committee finally got their minds made up and one of them went to the platform and called the meeting to order. She spoke of the work of decorating the Sunday school, and how there was now $27.71 in the treasury for this worthy object, and how grateful everybody was that Mr. Frise had come to draw cartoons and Mr. Clark to show some of his delightful moving pictures taken on his trips to China.
So Jim went forward and drew big cartoons of Old Archie at the pump and Pigskin Peters with a snapping turtle hanging to his arm and seven or eight more dandies which delighted everybody very much. And then came the movies.
I tried to seize an opportunity to explain to the meeting that these were not my movies, that I had never been to China and had not only never taken any movies but didn’t know the first thing about them, but the crowd was so eagerly turning and craning to watch, and Jim was so busy plugging long electric cords into sockets and getting things set that before a chance offered, Jim sang out, “Lights out, please,” and we were in darkness.
I stood beside Jim, in case I was needed. I could hear him fumbling and scrabbling around the projector. I heard switches go snick several times, and Jim grunting, but nothing happened.
“I wonder,” said Jim, in that church basement voice, “I wonder could we just have the lights on a moment, please?”
And after a lot of stumbling and loud talking and heavy breathing, the lights came on again.
Jim turned the switch, and the contraption began to buzz merrily.
“Ah,” cried Jim. “I guess when you turn the lights off, it turns the power off for the projector, too.”
So a gentleman in the audience who was an electrician came and volunteered to help. He found a socket that was separate, and he also rigged up a pull string to the switches that Jim could reach, so that we could control the lights.
“Very well. All ready,” sang out Jimmie sweetly, and pulled out the lights. He turned the switch. The stab of light cut through the darkness towards the sheet on the platform. Jim seized the front nozzle and twisted it, to bring the hazy muddle on the sheet into focus.
But it was still a muddle. Before our astonished eyes, we saw a queer conglomeration of flickering Chinese figures, but they were all upside down and moving backwards A loud ripple of laughter rose in the audience.
“Just a moment, please,” sang Jimmie, switching on the light.
And rapidly, we both bent and took the reel off and shifted it this way and that, trying to get it the opposite of what it had been.
We switched the light off and turned on the machine.
But now the figures were merely upside down but backwards the opposite direction.
“Did you rewind these,” I hissed, after you showed them at your house last night?”
“Certainly I did,” said Jim, indignantly, as he switched on the lights again. “But we’ll try the Niagara in Blossom Time one, because I didn’t show it last night.”
I dove and got out the Niagara in Blossom Time reel, while Jim removed China No. 1. By now, most of the audience was standing up, looking back good-naturedly at us.
We rigged Blossom Time on, turned off the lights and set the machine going. Aha, right side up and front end foremost. But unhappily, the picture was mostly a family picture, and it spent most of its brief hundred feet showing close-ups of rather ordinary little kids and a lady in a 1929 hat, smiling and nodding speechlessly at us, while in the dim distance, faint outlines of peach trees in blossom showed, and a steady rain seemed to stream across the picture.
“Phew, Jim,” I whispered.
And this soundless, speechless record of a family excursion to Niagara came to a happily early ending, amidst a mild splatter of astonished applause from the audience.
By now I was perspiring and Jimmie was too.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I began, “the chairlady made a slight mistake when she said I had taken these pictures in China….”
But everybody interrupted by laughing, so I let it go, especially as Jim was kicking me for one of the Felix the Cat reels, which I handed him.
“Now,” said Jim heartily, “for a Felix the Cat cartoon.”
“Hurray,” said everybody, not only the children. The lights were doused, the machine flashed on, and there was Felix, upside down and backwards, busily leaping out of a great splash of water down through the air to a springboard.
“Let it go, let it go,” yelled several people amidst the explosion.
So Jim just let it go. I leaned over and congratulated him on the swell job of rewinding he had done at his home last night, and he just took it in dumb silence. I heard a kind of a sizzling, sleek, trickling sound, as I stood watching Felix absurdly jerking and backing through an incomprehensible adventure. I felt something softly touching my pant leg. But when Jim turned on the light at the unhappy end of the reel, neither he nor I was prepared for the sight of the whole reel like a great tangled skein, all over the floor.
“You didn’t hook it in properly,” accused Jim loudly.
“Who didn’t?” I cried. “I don’t know the first thing…”
Embarrassed, I picked up the film and began feeding it back through the machine, and now to everybody’s delight, Felix came right side up and front end foremost, as slowly the celluloid was picked up off the floor by the reel. I squatted down in the darkness to feed it carefully up to the machine.
“We have discovered our trouble,” explained Jim, heartily to the audience. “It will just take a few moments longer…”
And he ripped all the reel off China No. 1 on to the floor and then fed it right side up into the projector, which picked it slowly off the floor and projected it quite as pleasantly as if it had been on the reel.
And they were very nice scenes too, although the silence of them was somehow paralyzing.
And we got a very pleasant vote of thanks.
Editor’s Notes: The title of this is a play on the slang “flimflammed”, which means to swindle or trick someone.
Anyone old enough to remember operating projectors will understand the need to rewind and to thread the film properly.
Cartoonists in the early to mid-20th century would engage in public demonstrations much like Jimmie did. They were referred to sometimes as “chalk talks”, as a blackboard could be used just as easily as large pieces of paper. The artist would be on stage discussing what he was doing, or stories about his or her work, while drawing characters from their strips.
Felix the Cat was a cartoon character created in 1919 during the silent film era, and was the first popular cartoon character. By the late 1920s and the advent of sound movies, production stopped until a revival in the 1950s.
We had to smash a channel from decoy to decoy… Jim’s teeth were chattering and I was cold beyond all shivering.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 5, 1938.
“I’m open,” said Jimmie Frise, “this week-end for a final go at the ducks.”
“Take some of your thicker-skinned friends,” I replied.
“I can’t get over your indifference to duck shooting,” said Jim. “It is, in the opinion of the greatest sportsmen in the world, the cream of all outdoor sports.”
“Duck shooting,” I informed him, “is sheer bravado. Only men who get a kick out of showing how tough they are go duck shooting.”
“Isn’t it funny,” mused Jim, “how a man can outfit himself with opinions in defence of his own ignorance?”
“Duck shooting,” I went on, “is the last survival of the hair shirt instinct in humanity. In past ages men wore hair shirts to show what they thought was their piety. It was only the desire to show how tough they were. Duck shooting is the same. You love to suffer, in order to demonstrate the vigor of your character.”
“Can’t you grasp,” pleaded Jim, “the delight there is in doing something entirely different from your normal life? Can’t you imagine any joy in entering a world as strange and different from the everyday world as it is possible to enter?”
“I don’t like being cold,” I stated. “I don’t like being wet or sleety. I don’t like to have to sit like a frozen dummy for hours on end in an icy bog, with a wind whistling amongst rushes.”
“The first delight of duck shooting,” interrupted Jimmie, “is the getting up at 4.30 a.m. You think of it with horror. As a matter of fact, it is the strangest and most delightful sensation imaginable. Your whole being is astonished. Your body, your mind, your secret spirit, tingles with a queer, a fascinating, joy, just to be up in this mysterious and unearthly hour.”
“Maybe my nervous system,” I suggested, “is too close to the surface of me.”
“Then,” went on Jim, “the going out, after good hot breakfast, into the stormy night, the chill, the stars, the wind. The walking and the rowing out to the duck blinds. The setting out of the decoys, in the darkness and the little waves, seems to wake in your deep heart some age old cunning, and it gives you the same lovely tingle as hearing, softly, the tune your mother used to sing to you when you were in her arms, a child.”
“What a queer comparison to make,” I protested.
“It’s true enough,” declared Jim. “Most of the deepest feelings in us are queer. And rightly so, because all our deepest feelings are the ones that have survived from time immemorial in us, handed down to us from our fathers, generation after generation across uncounted ages. Yet in the past few hundred years we have been trying to squelch these ancient things in us in order to be, as they say, civilized. So what we say and do and think, as civilized beings, seems plain and open. But whenever the deep, ancient things in us stir we find them strange.”
“We’ll be a better race,” I stated, “when we have succeeded in squelching those ancient things entirely. The day will come when nobody will go duck shooting, partly because it is idle to kill wild ducks when it is so easy to kill tame ducks. And partly because it is silly to go out and expose yourself to cold and discomfort and possible danger of pneumonia.”
Two Philosophies of Life
“I see,” retorted Jim. “So you’re one of the new pacifists. It is not because war Is evil that you would put an end to war. But because it is silly and expensive and uncomfortable.”
“Precisely,” I cried.
“Then in time to come,” suggested Jim, “there will be no more fishing, eh? Or golf or any amusements except the indoor amusements?”
“Even the indoor amusements,” I informed him, “will have to be pretty intelligent to get by. Playing bridge will prove to be silly, sitting up stiff in an uncomfortable chair, having to keep your mind alert…it won’t go. Mankind is moving definitely towards the understanding, of life that they arrived at centuries ago in India and China. And that is, that life, at its perfection, is simply sitting perfectly still, doing nothing, feeling nothing.”
“How about the Germans?” demanded Jim. “They don’t believe in any such perfection. All the trouble the Germans have been to the rest of the world in the last 50 years is because they believe so utterly in action, in discipline, in suffering, in exposing themselves to hardship, in living and dying dangerously.”
“Sparta,” I replied, “believed that, too. But what is Sparta? Just a word. A printed word. Nothing else of it remains. No statuary or vases, no literature, no philosophy or laws. Sparta terrified the whole Greek world in its time. But it was the rest of Greece, the terrified part, that handed down to us anything that we value of Greek civilization.”
“Puh,” said Jim, “this is all recent stuff, this Greek and Roman business. Just the other day. What I am talking about is the stuff that is in human nature for the past fifty million years. Because the Greeks or the Romans had certain experiences are we to be guided by them? Because they succeeded or failed. just within the past couple of thousand years, are we going to base our whole system of life on their experience?”
“What other experience is recorded?” I demanded indignantly.
“Recorded?” cried Jim. “You mean on paper? My dear boy, that counts out all the most valuable experience of all, because writing is only a recent invention. How about the records of human experience written in our very souls? In our minds and hearts and instincts. That’s where you want to look for records.”
“You,” I exclaimed, “are striking at the roots of civilization. Our entire world depends upon the written experience of humanity.”
“Therefore,” triumphed Jim, “if, in the past couple of thousand years, everything mankind has done has been in error, your whole world is founded on error.”
“But error couldn’t survive for two thousand years,” I protested.
“Oh, couldn’t it?” inquired Jim, sweetly. “Then how long do you say error can survive? Take a look around you at the world, before you answer.”
“Look,” I said, irritated, “what has this got to do with duck shooting?”
“Everything,” said Jim. “Because you can choose between two philosophies of life. You can either sit at home this week-end, doing nothing, feeling nothing, sagged in a chair like Buddha himself, believing in your numbed and all but lifeless mind that you are at that moment achieving the perfection of life. Or else you can come duck shooting with me, and feel cold and wind, and be aware of your skin and your eyes and your ears; filled with mystery of time and space, of stars and shadows and, as dawn begins to break, of swift flying little squads of wild ducks, swishing past, while you sit, controlling even your cold shudders, motionless as a stump, and the squad of ducks, seeing your decoys dim in the reeds, bank and turn and wheel and come, wings set and rigid, coasting down into range of your gun.”
Swell Day for Ducks
“You make a very unfair comparison,” I declared. “If I stay home, there are a hundred little things I can do. I can paste all this past summer’s fishing snapshots in my album. I can rearrange my book shelves, and index the latest acquisitions to my collection of early Canadian and American angling literature.”
“Very worthy, very worthy,” agreed Jim. “Pottering about with a paste pot, sighing over yesterday, thumbing through old withered pages of books written by men who were men of action, who, a hundred years ago, fished all our noblest waters when they were wild, and shot ducks and passenger pigeons and wild turkeys…. You think you are civilized. You are only debilitated, like our lakes and woods.”
“I like comfort,” I stated. “And so did cave men. I’m the natural man, not you.”
“You’re just getting a little feeble,” retorted Jim.
“Do you mean to insinuate,” I demanded, that I couldn’t sit out in a bog as easy as you? Do you suggest that you are more fit to stand a little wind and weather…”
Well, you know how it goes? Somebody is always trapping us by the old personality method. At any rate, with a gun borrowed from my brother, and in hip rubber boots borrowed from the garage man, and in woollen shirts and leather vests and canvas hunting coats and great clumsy slicker borrowed from my son, I waited in the cold rain for Jim to hack into my side drive to pick up my dunnage bags and valises full of spare woollens, and shell boxes and all the equipment a normal man can think of taking with him at this time of year on a most unnatural undertaking. Including a hot water bottle.
“A swell day for ducks,” gloated Jim, shoving open the car door heartily.
“And for the flu,” I agreed. “It smells as if it were going to snow.”
Thus, for a period of three hours, along deserted highways amid a forsaken world, we drove, the rain flooding and volleying eternally, and the short afternoon waning to an unpleasant and mischievous darkness, out of which raced glaring lights of unhappy vehicles, and the dim, unfriendly lights of towns and villages wrapped in November gloom.
Jim professed to love it all, the feeling of strong and virile isolation from a timid and withdrawn world. He talked about the arts of wing shooting, of leading a duck so many feet per yard of distance per angle of flight. He raved about the flavor of wild duck, believing that a split teal, broiled in a wire broiler over charcoal, cooked merely to a perfection that still permitted the juices to run, and served with boiled wild rice, boiled celery served only with butter, and hot dry toast, to be the supremest wild flavor the human palate could appreciate.
We came at length, at what seemed midnight but was merely 8 p.m., to a village at which we turned east and took a rain-sodden country road. This we followed with caution for six miles to a farmhouse where everybody had gone to bed but a jovial elderly man, our host, who fed us rather sketchily on some overdone cold meat of some description, a lot of big loose bread, butter so salty it stung and hard stewed crab-apples in pink sweet water.
Jim and Jake talked loudly of the morrow, and the wind increased and the rain quit, and when we stepped out before going up to bed, the air had got so cold it pinched our cheeks.
“Will they ever be flying in the morning?” cried Jim mightily.
“Will they ever,” agreed Jake, heartily.
And he led us up a creaky stairs to a gloomy slope-ceilinged room with two unmatched beds between barren walls. So damply, strangely, uneasily into bed and the lamp blown.
But almost immediately, the lamp was relit, and there, shadowed monstrously on the walls, was Jake, whispering us that he had the kettle on, and we dressed. In damp wool, in scrapy, frigid canvas, we dressed, and, rubber boots clumping and flapping, we went down to a breakfast of coffee-colored tea, thick, dry-fried bacon, two eggs fried stiff and turned over, thoroughly saturated with bacon grease. Then, wiping mouths hastily, off into the night, at 18 minutes to 5.
Jake showed us the boat and shoved us off from shore, with a husky but hearty good-by, good luck. We had to tramp away a thin shell of ice that held the boat to the frozen mud shore.
“She’s freezing,” I shivered.
“The wind will get up before daylight,” shuddered Jim.
With frequent peerings and bendings low, Jim steered a zig-zag course across the sullen water, and we came at last to a sort of promontory of swamp and bulrushes jutting out.
“Drop out the decoys,” muttered Jim.
I fumbled amidst the potato sacks full of damp decoys, unwound the stiff cord, and dropped them overboard at Jim’s direction. Twenty. “Bluebills, all,” said Jim. “But whistlers will come into them.”
Then with a powerful drive of oars, Jim thrust the punt into the point of bulrushes, ice crunching sharply and startlingly under the bow.
Waiting for the Sunrise
“Lovely,” I murmured. “Do we sit on the ice?”
“We sit in the boat,” said Jim, and with the oar, he cracked the thin ice ahead and handed the punt inward with grips of the tall bulrushes. When we had battled our way six feet in, Jim began cutting bulrushes and sticking them upright along the gunwales of the punt.
“Now,” said Jim, “for daylight. We’re at exactly the right time.”
Dawn is praised by poets. But poets are seldom out in November. Through the spaces in the rushes, we gazed out at blackness. The wind had fallen completely. But it was bitter cold.
“Don’t stamp your feet,” hissed Jim. “Squeeze them with your hand.”
And a little later:
“Don’t cough.”
And, just as a faint and sickly pallor became visible on the sky, he said: “Now you have to sit really still.”
I could barely see the decoys, immobile in the glassy water, a few yards out from the rushes. Far off, a gun barked, again and again. Quite close, two guns banged the sun and frigid air. We strained our eyes out into the sky above our decoys. But nothing passed.
It seemed hours for the dawn to break through. The sky was leaden. The air was icy. Not a breath moved the driest rush tip.
“She sure is cold,” whispered Jim.
“Ssssshhh,” I warned fiercely, massaging my feet through the rubber boots.
Seven o’clock came and went. Daylight, ghostly and wan, came. Our decoys lay inert and motionless on the queerly still water, but now we had to keep low, for fear of being seen.
“On a day like this,” whispered Jim, “they may fly a little late….”
“Whisht,” I warned, both hands inside my innermost garment.
Eight o’clock, like an invalid in a chair, rolled slowly in. Passed, and at 8.30, Jim stirred noisily.
“Well,” he said in a profane voice amid the silence, “I guess there’s no use sitting here any longer. We’ll pray for wind tonight, for the evening shoot.”
We stood up in the punt, and she did not wobble.
“Ho, ho,” said Jim, rocking the boat. But she did not rock.
“Frozen in,” I suggested,
So with the oars, we cracked the thin shell of ice around the punt, and, with Jim in the bow like George Washington, we broke a narrow passage out of the rushes. For 20 feet out, a lovely thin sheet of ice had frozen in the three hours of dawn.
Our decoys were fast in it. We had to smash a channel from decoy to decoy, Jim making the passage. I picking up the wooden beasts and winding the stiffening cord around them, after chipping off the fringe of ice.
Jim’s teeth were chattering and I had reached the stage of cold that is beyond all shivering.
“I think,” I said, carefully, “that my circulation has stopped.”
“We’ll be back in by the fire in 15 minutes,” clicked Jimmie.
So like two Buddhas, we sat by the fire until 4 p.m., and then, no wind having risen and the sheet ice being 40 feet out from the muddy shore, we packed up roughly, and in the dark, drove home slowly, on a slippery pavement.
Here’s a mask of Gregory Clark waiting for you to cut out and wear as a false face
It’s a Cinch to Make This Mask
ARE you going to a Hallowe’en party? The Star Weekly comic masks are made to order to liven up that spooky night’s fun. If you start right now and cut out Gregory Clark, you’ll have five different masks to wear, for next week you’ll have Wimpy, then Maggie, then Jimmie Frise, then Jiggs. That’ll bring you right up to Hallowe’en when you’ll be looking around for a funny disguise to wear. And if you want more, you can get back issues of The Star Weekly for masks of Popeye, Old Archie and Olive Oyl. Just wear them and you’ll find they’ll bring you more fun than a bushel of monkeys whether you’re going to a Halloween party or not.
Cut out this illustration of GREG CLARK in a square, leaving about an inch border all the way around. Get a sheet of paper about 15 inches square. Any good heavy wrapping paper or light-weight cardboard will do. Paste the illustration, on the paper. When dry, cut the outer edges of the mask but be sure to follow the line around the square flaps indicated at each of GREG CLARK’S ears. Use a razor blade or a sharply pointed knife to cut around his nose, eyes and chin on the dotted black line. Next, fold down the flap along his ears. Get two medium sized rubber bands. Place one side of the rubber band inside the fold of the flap and paste down firmly. Do not attempt to use the mask until the flap is dry and firm. Now, placing the rubber bands around your ears, march over to a mirror and there you are, GREGORY CLARK himself.
October 22, 1938
HEY, KIDS Look who’s here!
It’s JIMMIE FRISE
your seventh STAR WEEKLY FALSE FACE
Be ready for Hallowe’en with this mask of Jimmie
YOU’LL FIND THE STAR WEEKLY COMIC MASKS MORE FUN THAN A BARREL OF MONKEYS FOR A “SHELL-OUT” OR HOUSE PARTY THIS HALLOWEEN. SO BRING OUT YOUR PASTE POT AND SCISSORS RIGHT AWAY AND JOIN IN THE FUN.
Cut out this illustration of JIMMIE FRISE in a square, leaving about an inch border all the way around. Get a sheet of light weight cardboard about 15 inches square. Paste the illustration on the cardboard. When dry, cut the outer edges of the mask but be sure to follow the line around the square flaps indicated at each of JIMMIE’S ears. Use a razor blade or a sharply pointed knife to cut through the inner pink circle of his eyes. Smaller children can use the mask if they cut out the portion of the white circle nearest JIMMIE’S nose. Next, fold down the flaps along his ears. Get two medium sized rubber bands. Place one side of the rubber band inside the fold of the flap and paste down firmly. Do not attempt to use the mark until the flap is dry and firm. Now, placing the rubber bands around your ears, march over to a mirror and there you are, JIMMIE FRISE himself.
Editor’s Notes: In October 1938, the Toronto Star Weekly printed Halloween masks based on comic strip characters that kids could cut out and use. Note that “trick or treating” was not as common at the time, (referred to as “shell out” above), so it was suggested they could be worn to a party. I like that Greg characteristically has his hat at a jaunty angle, and Jimmie is portrayed with his ever present cigarette in his mouth.
Modern readers would likely know Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Wimpy from Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar (who died on October 13, 1938, around when these were published). Jiggs and Maggie were from Bringing Up Father by George McManus. And of course Old Archie was Jimmie Frise’s own from Birdseye Center.
Jimmie tried to hurry it up but the top jammed and we had to start all over again… And the rain come down in larger drops.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 30, 1938.
“Well, sir,” said Jimmie Frise, “will wonders never cease?”
“What has happened?” I Inquired.
“I was just reading,” said Jim, “about a new machine some German has invented. All you have to do is put meat and vegetables and flour and butter and stuff in one end. Turn a button. And one hour later, open the back door of your machine and there’s dinner, all ready on the plates.”
“Cooked?” I asked.
“The vegetables,” cried Jim, “peeled, washed and salted. The meat basted and turned. The flour and butter and stuff all mixed and rolled, and baked into a pie.”
“Get away!” I scoffed.
“So help me,” said Jim. “It’s an electric stove, with a lot of tubes and compartments around it that you feed the unpeeled vegetables and rough meat and fruit for your pie. It’s all automatic. It does each thing in the right time to have all cooked and come out the back on a little conveyor belt at the same moment. It even serves the food on plates that you stick in a slot.”
“It’s criminal, Jim,” I declared.
“That’s what Hitler, thinks, too,” admitted Jimmie. “He won’t let the inventor, market it in Germany. It would ruin the old-fashioned housewife.”
“It would ruin more than that,” I protested. “Nobody would need to get married any more if they had machines like that. Does it wash the dishes, too?”
“There’s a dish washing attachment,” agreed Jim. “Feed the dishes in one end and they come out all dried, and the garbage pops out a trap door in the bottom, all parcelled up.”
“Well,” I stated, “all I can say is the inventors are going too far. Somebody had better call a halt to all this inventing.”
“Wait a minute,” laughed Jim. “Who can it harm? The only people who can afford to buy one of those machines are the people so rich that they never have to cook a meal or wash the dishes anyway.”
“It will put a lot of cooks and maids out of jobs,” I informed him. “Just like all the other labor-saving devices. They don’t save labor. They starve, labor.”
“The more the hard and dirty jobs in this world,” said Jim, “are handed over to machines, the happier the human race is going to be in the end.”
“And the more people are going to be on relief,” I pointed out.
“We call it relief now,” said Jim. “But in ten years we’ll call it leisure. We are just in the early stages of realizing that a large proportion of the human race don’t have to work any more. Machines have taken the work over. At first, when people lost their work on account of machines, we never thought about them at all. Then we thought they should get other work. Now we realize that there is no other work, so we support them on what we call relief. Relief, hell. It’s freedom. It’s leisure. They don’t have to work any more.”
It Sounds Wonderful
“Who is going to support them?” I demanded, outraged.
“The machines,” said Jim. “Who else? At first, when we started inventing labor-saving machinery, we imagined the inventors and the big industrialists and smart business men were going to benefit. We were all wrong. As usual, we were thinking with our feet instead of our heads. The first people to benefit from labor-saving machinery are the people whose labor the machinery saved. They are being benefitted now. True, relief isn’t very generous. But it will become rapidly more generous in the next 10 years, as everybody begins to catch up with the idea.”
“Preposterous.” I muttered.
“Not at all,” explained Jimmie. “The first great steps in labor-saving machinery were in excavation machinery and other machines that did away with pick and shovel. They are the first, now, to be unemployed. Next came the machines for doing fairly simple mechanical work. You will observe that in exact proportion, the unemployed are mostly the laboring and unskilled mechanical classes. So it will go. As more and more expert machines are invented, more and more skilled mechanics will become unemployed. Why not? Their work is being done for them.”
“But good heavens,” I protested, do you mean to say we’ve got to go on paying more and more taxes, ever higher and steeper, to maintain in idleness ever-growing classes of unemployed?”
“Ah, no,” explained Jim. “Taxes will only go a little bit higher before all of us suddenly understand the situation. Then we will demand that machines pay the support of all these millions that have been disemployed.”
“Ah, disemployed?” I offered.
“Yes,” elucidated Jimmie, “these people are not unemployed, they are disemployed. Their work is finished. They have had a machine invented to do their work for them. They’re lucky. The machines will now pension them off.”
“It sounds wonderful,” I breathed.
“It is wonderful,” said Jim, “as soon as we wake up to the facts. The joke, however, is on us. On us who can’t be relieved by machines. No machine can draw cartoons or write articles. No machine can manage a plant or an office. All us smarties that thought we were so clever will be the only ones who will have to work on, unrelieved, unpensioned. We can never be disemployed.”
“Then,” I cried, “I ought to alter my sons’ plans and educate them to be mechanics or shoemakers, in the hope that soon a machine will be invented to pension them off into the leisure class for life.”
“Certainly,” agreed Jim. “If you go ahead with your idea of making your sons business men and lawyers and doctors, they’ll have to work all their lives. The leisure class of the next generation will be the workers whose work is done. Done by machines.”
“Jim, I see it,” I cried, “I see it.”
“Good,” said Jim. “The sooner everybody sees it, the sooner this silly business of taxes will end and machines take over the burden they have created. Why should my taxes increase? My cartoons haven’t put anybody out of a job.”
“We’ve been letting machinery get away with murder,” I agreed.
We’ll All Work for Fun
“Murder is the word,” said Jim. “Slow murder. But any day now, when the ever-increasing disemployed become too much for our ordinary tax system to carry, we’ll face the simple facts and hand the job over to the machines. All the profit of the machines goes to the owner of the machines. How silly! How do the machines save them any work? All it saves them is money. O.K. Where the money is, that’s where we get it. Isn’t it?”
“Correct,” I agreed, “But Jim, now I come to think of it, I wonder how happy we’ll all be when machinery reaches its logical conclusion and does everything for us? Will the human race be any happier doing nothing than it was when it was busy all day long?”
“There will be plenty to do,” said Jim. “Fishing, hunting, travelling, motoring.”
“Do you mean to say the disemployed will have motor cars?” I gasped.
“Certainly,” said Jim. “Where else will the market for motor cars be when the majority of mankind are disemployed?”
“They’ll have to be awfully cheap,” I argued.
“They might as well be cheap,” explained Jim, “because, one way or the other, the money will be taken off the machines that make the cars.”
“Then who’ll go into the car manufacturing business,” I triumphed, if there is no money in it?”
“There will always be people,” said Jim, “who will be wanting to be making things, whether there is money in it or not. Some people wouldn’t take leisure as a gift. I think there are enough of that kind of people to keep the rest of us in cars and farm produce and other essentials when the great day comes.”
“Jim, it’s a dream,” I scoffed.
“The one comical discovery the human race has yet to make,” declared Jim, “is that the hardest thing in the world to bear is leisure. When we all can have it, nobody will want it. Then comes the millennium. We’ll all work for the fun of it.”
“Then,” I exclaimed, “come on, you inventors!”
“They’re doing pretty well,” protested Jim. “Do you realize that just 15 years ago there was no radio and now look at it, a vast industry, a giant art, a major profession.”
“And think,” I agreed, “that when we were young men, the first high-behind motor cars were chugging and spluttering through the astonished streets.”
“We were born and raised,” said Jimmie, “in the buggy age. The fastest thing in town was the butcher’s high two-wheeled delivery gig.”
“And the streets,” I reminded him, “were lit with gas lamps on tall green iron posts, about one every hundred yards. A silent, bitter little man used to come huddled along the winter streets, about dusk, carrying a sort of stick with a light on the end of it, lighting all the gas lamps.”
“But on the corners,” said Jim, “there was a tall pole with a round globe dangling from the top, lit with electric carbon lights that hissed and sparked redly all night long, fading and bright by turns. Swinging in the night wind.”
“We had telephones, then, too,” I recollected. “Wall telephones, and the receiver had two bright red bands around it.”
“Only doctors and rich people had telephones,” remembered Jim.
“Yes, all the neighbors came in,” I recalled, “when ours was installed. My old man had got a raise to $25 a week, which put him in the leisure class.”
“Then, cried Jim, “just there, at the turn of the century, something happened. The whole world, the human race, the universe, nature itself, seemed to squirm with a sort of ecstasy of creation. The motor car came. Giant electrical plants were founded. Streets were suddenly ablaze with lights every few paces.”
“The block pavements,” I said, “began to be torn up, contemptuously, and macadam and asphalt laid down, with engines snorting and arrogant Irishmen slamming it down, whole city blocks at a time.”
“What a century’s beginning was that,” cried Jim warmly. “Hardly had it got going, ablaze, moving, gallant, until men were flying in airplanes and a Frenchman flew the English channel.”
“And an Italian buzzed messages through space across the Atlantic,” said I. “Then with a great whoop and rush, we went into the war.”
“And then invention went mad entirely,” said Jim. “We talk of mass production. Mass production was invented in the war. Factory production was developed to unbelievable heights. Research was carried into every conceivable field, to find substitutes, to find cheaper and faster ways of making everything from food to steel.”
“The aeroplane,” I said, “that would have taken twenty years to develop as a novelty, was developed in a few months for war purposes to almost its present perfection.”
“And gas engines,” said Jim. “More was learned about engines in connection with aeroplanes than the automobile industry would have found out in fifty years.”
“Oh,” I summed up, “there was never an era of exploration and development of the material world to equal the four war years and there may never be another.”
“Funny,” said Jim, “that in the four years that humanity lost more than it will ever know, in the spiritual realm, it gained more than it will ever know, in the material realm.”
“By selling our souls to the devil of war,” I suggested, “we bought, like Faust, sundry things that do not matter.”
“How do we get our souls back?” asked Jim. “How did Faust get his soul back?”
“He never lost it,” I explained. “Because he knew that signing a compact with the devil would never damn him; only the self-satisfaction out of the things he would buy would damn him. He found no satisfaction in the things the devil gave him, just as we find no satisfaction in the countless wonders science is giving us. So we’re not damned. Yet.”
“It was a wild, energetic, extravagant beginning of a century,” admitted Jimmie. “Something to be proud of, something we should be glad we shared. But invention has steadied down. The whole genius of men now seems to be bent on thinking of humanity. The motor car and the radio are the two greatest and most characteristic inventions of the new age. Both have set free the human spirit. The one sets free the human body. The other sets free the human mind.”
“I guess the motor car is the greatest development of all time,” I concluded. “It has made one community of whole continents. It is making neighbors of whole nations. Every year it breaks down new barriers and new boundaries.”
“Because of motor cars,” said Jim, “highways are being built to the ends of the earth, across deserts that man would forever have abandoned, through jungles and forests, leaving the trail of village and hamlet and town and city wherever they go.”
“Sure, I’ll Watch You”
“The motor car has set free the farmer from his hermitage,” I recounted, “and discovered a thousand beauty spots for the human heart to feast upon. It rescued mankind from an age of slavery to machines in cities and for that alone we should be consciously grateful every day.”
“God bless the motor car,” confessed Jim, “and all inventors working to set man free.”
“How,” I suggested, “about going for spin? I don’t feel like any more work today.”
“It looks like a thunder storm,” said Jim, flinging his drawing pen aside and walking to the office window to look out over the city.
“Nothing so refreshing,” I said, “as a thunder storm in the country.”
“Will we go in my car or yours?” asked Jim, hopefully.
“Why ride in an oven,” I inquired, “When you can sit in a swell little open job like mine, floating through space? It’s like riding in a launch, over water.”
“O.K.” said Jim, shutting up his desk.
So we went down the back way, on account of editors, and wove my little speed boat out of the parking lot and in no time at all were out the Lake Shore Road headed for pastures old. Great white clouds loomed monstrously on all horizons. A heavy sense of thunder was in the air, but with the little open car washing the breeze over us, like a bath, the contrast with all the world around us, made us all the happier.
“When she starts,” said Jim, looking at the moving mountains of white based upon vast heavens of fateful black, “we ought to run into a gas station to stick the top up.”
“Why?” I inquired sharply.
“The guys can help us,” said Jim.
“Guys nothing,” I informed him. “This is a one-man top. I can stick it up in half a minute by myself.”
Jim just continued to lean back and let the humid air bathe him. We scooted north on the Centre Road. Traffic seemed to have all gone to sleep with the heat and the impending storm. Growls of thunder battered and shook. A livid blast of lightning flashed across the black sky and suddenly the white mountains vanished. A couple of big drops slashed against the windshield.
“How about the top?” asked Jim.
“We’re just on the edge of Brampton,” I advised, letting her out. “We can pull into the curb there.”
Which we did, while everybody stood under awnings and doorways and the great thunder shower fell. First, there was the top envelope to get off, and mostly it comes off like a mitt but sometimes it comes off like a wedding glove. And this time it came off that way, with Jimmie pulling too hard on his side. Then there were the little straps to undo. And when we got them undone, there were the little nuts to loosen, and while usually they are all too loose, this time, they stuck.
Then there was the lifting of the top, which has to be done evenly or else it jams. And carefully, or else it catches your fingers in the numerous hinges and swivels and bolts and bands. But with the rain now pouring straight down in heavy vertical rivers, not in drops, but in continuous spurts half an inch thick and two miles long, up, Jimmie tried to hurry and it jammed and we had to lay it back and start all over again.
“Watch me,” I commanded.
“Sure, I’ll watch you,” said Jim, skipping across under the awning of a store. “It’s a one-man top, eh?”
So I did it myself, the slow way but the right way. And I just thought to myself, as I struggled it through, that in one feature of motor car, inventors have been just a little lackadaisical.
Editor’s Notes: Jim’s description of a machine that could cook your dinner sounds ridiculous and like science fiction, but perhaps there was a sliver of truth to it, since 1938 was the year the first home Pressure Cooker was invented.
Greg mentions sidewalks being made of macadam and asphalt. Macadam is just another name for a type of asphalt.
Car roofs on old convertible cars were notoriously hard to raise. You can watch someone try and raise one on an old Model T by himself here (skip to the 6:30 mark for raising it). Note he says a few times that it is really a two person job. By the 1930s, some manufacturers were touting “one-man” roofs, or automatic roofs.
“You look bad,” said George. “What’s the matter?” “We’re O.K.,” said Jim emphatically.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 12, 1938
“What’s the matter?” cried Jimmie Frise sharply.
“How, who?” I replied, startled.
“You,” said Jim. “You look as if you had been pulled through a knothole.”
“I feel all right,” I stated.
“You look bad,” said Jim. “You look terrible. My dear chap.”
He stood staring at me, his face full of anxiety and concern.
“Wh-hy,” I laughed nervously. “I feel all right. I feel the same as ever.”
“Were you reading late?” inquired Jim, earnestly, “Or anything?”
“I was in bed before 11,” I said stoutly, “and I slept like a log and woke, now you mention it, feeling like a million dollars. Why. my family was all kidding me, not an hour ago, about my singing while I was shaving.”
“Hmmm,” said Jim, scrutinizing me narrowly, as I took off and hung up my hat and overcoat.
I sat down at my desk, rubbing my hands together. I smiled around the familiar office, at its pictures, mottoes and framed cartoons. I felt fine. I felt perfect. Not a pain or an ache.
“Maybe,” I suggested, “I just need a haircut.”
But I felt Jimmie watching me covertly. In fact, each time I looked up from opening my mail, I caught Jimmie just glancing away from me, with a secret look about him.
“Look here,” I said, “what’s the idea? What’s the big idea of peeping at me like that?”
Jim sat back in his chair and looked long and earnestly at me.
“How long is it,” he asked tenderly, “since you saw a doctor?”
“Say,” I cried, “what the dickens is the matter?”
“I’m asking you,” said Jim. “How long is it since you saw a doctor?”
“I had a life insurance examination,” I informed him, “less than two years back.”
“A lot of things,” said Jim, hollowly. “can develop in two years. In two weeks, even.”
And after a long, lingering stare, he returned to his work.
I finished opening the mail and noticed, incidentally, that my hands looked a little different from the last time I had looked at them. They seemed knucklier. The skin on them seemed drier and more crinkled than I had noticed ever before. I held up the left one. I was astonished to see that it was shaking slightly. Very slightly. When I tried to hold it perfectly steady, it trembled most decidedly. A very slight, but certainly a decided, tremble. I felt Jimmie watching me slyly, and looked up in time to catch him at it. He glanced away with an expression of shame.
“Hrrrmmph,” I said.
“When Did You See a Doctor?”
I leaned back in my chair and looked out the window. I then slowly went all over myself, with my mind, as it were, feeling all my joints, parts and insides. Slipping my thumb casually in the armhole of my vest, I felt my heart, first of all.
“Ga-bump, ga-bump, tiddle, ga-bump,” went my heart.
I had never noticed that “tiddle” before. In fact, that “ga” in front of the “bump” was not altogether familiar.
I listened, as it were, to my lungs, liver, kidneys and stomach. Quite suddenly, and without warning, I noted my eyes seemed queerly dull. The gray March light outside seemed grayer than March used to be. I tasted a little different taste in my mouth than I had ever observed before. And finally. I seemed to feel a slight limpness or numbness in my wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees and ankles.
As I turned from this contemplation of myself, this stock-taking, I caught Jim just turning his head from having been watching me intently.
“Jim,” I said, rising, “what is it you notice about me? Do I look pale?”
Jim got up and came to meet me.
“Look,” he said, “you just look kind of queer, that’s all. Not pale, but sort of drawn and peaked. There is a funny look to your eyes. You seem to have shrunk, somehow.”
“Jim,” I said, “what do you suppose it is?”
“How would I know?” demanded Jim. “But as your old friend. I think I have the right to tell you you look bad, when you do.”
I looked intently at Jim, to read his thoughts, to know the truth. And then I noticed Jim had a funny look about him. His eyes, which, the last time I had bothered to observe, were bright with light and twinkle, now seemed, as it were, faded. His skin seemed polished across the cheek bones. There were pouches under his eyes and the bridge of his nose looked bony.
“Jim,” I suggested sympathetically, “you don’t look so good yourself.”
“Eh?” said Jim.
“You don’t look very well yourself,” I said gently. “How have you been feeling lately?”
“Never better,” said Jim heartily. “I feel in the pink, that’s what made me conscious of you, I guess.”
“Jim,” I corrected, “you may feel in the pink, but you don’t look it. Now that my attention is drawn to it, your eyes have a dull sort of look, there are heavy pouches under your eyes, and look the way you are standing!”
Jim straightened sharply.
“Ah,” I pointed out, “you have been walking around awfully stoop-shouldered this last while. We get so used to seeing each other, we don’t notice these things until something forces our attention to it. Jim, you’re a kind of yellow color, do you know that? How is your liver? When did you see a doctor last?”
Jim walked over and looked out the window. He pulled up his belt and straightened his shoulders. He coughed and shrugged and I could see he, too, in his turn, was giving himself a mental going over, outside and in.
“Why,” he said, “I had a doctor look me over just last spring, when I had that tooth trouble. Or was that two springs ago?”
“Hmmmm,” said I. “a lot can happen…”
Sudden Anxiety
Jim turned from the window anxiously.
“How do you mean I look kind of yellow?” he asked, earnestly.
“Bilious, or jaundicey,” I said, turning him to the light so I could give him a good honest report. “Why, Jim, isn’t it funny how we change so suddenly? The last time I remember looking at you, and I see you every day of my life, practically, you were a lithe, springy, ruddy fellow, life in your eyes and skin and every movement.”
“And what’s the matter with me now?” questioned Jim crisply.
“Well,” I said sympathetically, “to put it very simply, Jim, you seem to have suddenly aged, your skin is sort of parchment like, your eyes have a dull look. I don’t know, you just seem to be aged, somehow.”
Jim stiffened and walked back to his desk. He sat down and picked up his drawing pen and started to scratch with it. He glanced up and caught me watching him.
“Let’s forget it,” he suggested, “Let’s just forget it.”
“Very well,” I agreed. “There is nothing we can do right now, but I’m going to see the doctor to-night.”
“The same here,” said Jim, humping down over his drawing board. And I addressed myself to the typewriter with intensity.
So through the morning Jim scratched, with little to say, and I banged and thundered on the machine, though I noticed long pauses in Jim’s scratching, and the pauses of my own machine grew ponderous and frightening, as I slowed between thoughts. I hated to feel a pause. I wrote many pages that I tore up because there was really nothing on them, only words that I wrote to fill the office with a busy sound.
We were both very happy when it came 12 o’clock and lunch. We put on our coats with an obvious sense of relief. We smiled and joked extra loudly in the corridors, as we met our colleagues of many departments going to lunch. We cracked the usual ones with the elevator man. It was a snappy day, and Jim and I, instead of dawdling along, stepped out with conscious vigor, and wove in and out through the lazy noon hour crowd. We arrived at the lunch counter we favor on those days we feel like walking three blocks and got stools side by side.
George, the boss of the lunch counter, who stepped up to ask us our order and dish us a glass of water, froze when he saw us.
“Hello,” he said, “what’s the trouble?”
“Eh?” said Jim and I heartily.
“You look bad; what’s the matter?” said George, solicitous and low leaning over the counter.
“We’re o.k.,” said Jim, emphatically. “I’ll take a hot beef sandwich with peas and coffee.”
“Have you had any bad news or anything?” queried George.
“Make mine,” I stated firmly. “hot pork with plenty of gravy, french fried and peas on the side. Brown bread.”
Friends are Solicitous
George looked at me closely.
“I wouldn’t recommend pork,” he said, surreptitiously. “Pork’s heavy.”
Saying which, he slid Jim’s plate on the counter, the big sandwich drowned in rich gravy. the peas vivid green, scoop of soft pallid mashed potatoes balanced on the edge.
George waited on somebody else while I thought what I wanted other than pork. Jim stared intently at the beef sandwich and picked up his knife and fork slowly and deliberately.
“I think,” said Jim, “I think I’ll change my mind. Make mine a… ah… a chopped egg sandwich and a glass of cold milk, eh, George?”
“Good,” said George.
“Mine the same,” I stated.
“Good,” said George, very kindly. “You’ll feel better than eating a big meal, the way you feel now.”
He slid away, but we could feel, as we nibbled the sandwiches, that George’s friendly eye was on us, sideways. I stole a glance at Jim. He was gaunt and hunched, and he was eating his sandwich as if it contained poison. I felt Jim looking at me, and I tried to take a big bite of my sandwich but I choked slightly.
“Here,” muttered Jim, flinging down the half of his sandwich. “Let’s get out and go for a walk. What we need is fresh air.”
As we paid our checks, we encountered three of the boys from the composing room.
“Well, well, well,” said they, standing us back to look at us, “what kind of flowers do you guys like? Will we make it a wreath or just a spray? Those sprays of spring flowers are …”
But Jim and I pushed out the door and got into the throng.
The lazy throng. The noon throng with gaze turned inward, digesting their food or perhaps pondering problems left unfinished at their offices. How comfortable and at ease they all looked, especially the girls, the business girls, with that superb look of indifference which distinguishes them from non-business girls.
Listlessly we drifted with them, they thrusting and pushing by with vigor and energy.
“Ah,” sighed Jimmie, as a particularly fat, healthy girl bounced past as if she was made of rubber all over, “little do they guess.”
“I never saw people so disgustingly healthy,” I stated. “They seem to flaunt it.”
“Yet any day,” said Jim, “any one of all these may glance in the mirror in the morning, and see the signs.”
“They look lovely now,” I submitted.
“One of the evils of being well,” said Jim, is that you never think of your health. It’s only when you lose it you think of it. We ought to have big posters all over the streets, saying in great big type, ‘Do you feel well? All right, then gloat.’ Or something of that kind.”
“I think,” I said, thinly. “I’ll lay off for the afternoon I’ll just go home and lie down for two or three hours.”
“I’ve got a good notion,” said Jim, “to slip up and see the doctor. His hours are from one to two.”
“That’s a better idea,” I admitted. “We’ll both go, and that will save time and money. We’ve both got the same trouble anyway.”
So we got Jim’s car and drove out home to see Jim’s doctor. We drove slowly. In fact, we drove too slowly.
“Just put a little steam into it, Jim,” I suggested. This slow pace sort of, sort of …”
So Jim put on the gas; even so, we did not travel along the Lake Shore at quite our usual pace. The doctor was in but there were three people ahead of us, an old lady whose head trembled all the time and who had a look of despair; a man with a bandage over his face, concealing something mysterious; and a young woman as pale as a ghost who never raised her eyes from the ragged old magazine she was only pretending to read. One by one, these three were called ahead of us, and we could hear far off, dim sad sounds in the utter silence of the waiting room.
When our turn came, we were so limp we could hardly get to our feet.
“Well, for heaven’s sakes,” said the doctor, with that relief doctors always feel when they come to their last patient, “and what are you two old hickories doing here?”
“How do we look, doc?” demanded Jim, posing.
“You look all right to me,” said the doctor. “What is it? Life insurance? Or are you trying to get me on some committee. Sit down and rest your feet.”
“Honest, doc,” said Jim, “how do we look?”
Feeling Terrible
The doctor sat back and looked with that secret professional eye at both of us sitting very stiff and pretty.
“Well,” he said, “off hand, I should say you look like a couple of steers all combed up for the Royal Winter Fair. Why, what’s up? Am I supposed to see a rash on you or something?”
So we told him. We said we were feeling fine, but we both had noticed how the other had failed lately, and then, when we went to lunch, everybody looked at us and said we looked bad.
“And did you feel bad?” asked the doctor.
“Not until Jim noticed how badly I looked,” I admitted.
“You do feel bad?” asked the doctor.
“Doctor,” I declared, “I feel terrible. To tell the truth. I feel kind of gone. My eyes feel dull and I can’t eat. I choke on my food, my mouth has a funny taste, and in all my joints, I’ve got a weak feeling, see?”
“How about inside?” asked the doctor.
“I have no pain,” I confessed, “but I have a sort of woozy feeling, as if something was wrong, something seriously wrong, perhaps.”
“Exactly the same here,” said Jim. “only I didn’t like to say so. I feel as if any minute I would get a sharp shooting pain in my insides.”
“Well,” said the doctor, very earnestly, “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the spring.”
“The spring?” said we.
“The spring,” said the doctor. This time of year is like 4 o’clock in the morning. If you wake up at 4 in the morning, your faculties, your glands and humors are all at their darkest ebb. You feel only half alive. It is the same now, in March and part of April, until the first iris reaches up until the first buds get sticky, until the first robin nests in your tree.”
I looked at Jimmie. He was transformed. Before my very eyes, he seemed suddenly flooded with life and health.
“Maybe,” said the doctor, “you need a little sulphur and molasses, but probably you don’t. Probably all you need is to keep from thinking about how you feel. Don’t think at all. Don’t feel. Just wait for these weeks to pass…”
“Why, look at him,” cried Jim, pointing at me. “Look at the little beggar, fairly busting with health. What’s he been trying to put over, drooping around the office this morning as if he were in a galloping decline!”
I stood up. Jim stood up. The doctor stood up.
“Listen,” said the doctor, “never tell anybody they look bad, especially at this time of year.”
“That’s an idea,” admitted Jim.
“And here’s a trick,” laughed the doctor. “If anybody ever says you look bad, tell them right back that they look terrible.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Jimmie and I heartily, shaking the doctor’s hand muscularly and leaping into the car and driving back along the Lake Shore hell for leather.
Editor’s Notes: Sulphur and molasses made up a home remedy, also known as a “spring tonic” because of the laxative influence of sulfur.
