"Greg and Jim"

The Work of Gregory Clark and Jimmie Frise

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The True Christmas Spirit

by

On December 27, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

The two of them squared off, their feet wide apart, and began sparring…

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 27, 1941.

“It’s a queer Christmas,” sighed Jimmie Frise. “War on earth, ill-will amongst men.”

“Let’s go home,” I suggested. “At least we can preserve a little of the Christmas spirit in our homes.”

“I suppose,” surmised Jimmie, starting to rid up his drawing table, “I suppose Christians have always had to face this problem. There have always been wars. I guess there have been some pretty sad Christmases across the centuries.”

“None sadder than this,” I claimed, “because it is the most enlightened age in human history and is the occasion of the most savage war in human history. God could doubtless forgive war 500 or 1,000 years ago amongst benighted and ignorant men who blindly followed their masters. All men were foreign to one another a few centuries back. They had no communication with each other. There were no roads, few ships, hardly any books. But today, with every possible means at our disposal to know and understand one another, with radio and movies and marvellous communications by land, sea and air to help us mix with one another, we are locked in the most titanic and universal hate in history.”

“It isn’t just a couple of armies,” agreed Jim, “of professional soldiers bashing at each other. It is every man, woman and child, horse, cow, dog and cat.”

“When this war is over,” I declared, “mankind as a whole will have to enter into a long penance for its sins.”

“Thank heaven,” said Jim, “we didn’t start it.”

“Even so, what did we do to try to stop it?” I pointed out. “We were all pretty fat and comfortable and indifferent during the years all this was shaping up. We’ve got a penance to do, too.”

“Human nature learns,” said Jimmie, “by doing wrong. A child has to learn that fire burns. It is no use merely to tell him. Sooner or later, he has to find out. And it seems as if each new generation of men were like a child in that respect. Each has to learn for itself.”

“That is a grim and terrible prospect,” I declared. “It offers little hope for humanity.”

“Well,” explained Jim, “that is where Christianity comes in. It was Jesus who first taught the brotherhood of man through the fatherhood of God. Until we realize that God is our Father, we can never comprehend that we are brothers. Christianity has been patiently trying to get that into our heads for 2,000 years. One of these times, when our folly really gets too monstrous for any further refusal, we are likely to become Christians at last. The brotherhood of man is our only hope.”

The common men of all races,” I submitted, “are willing to be brothers. But somebody is always rising amongst us who believes that not only is he no relation to us but comes of a far finer family than the human. This is true not only of Germany now, amongst the nations; it is true of every city, town and village. There is always somebody in every community to whom the idea of being a brother or even a distant cousin to the rest of us is horrible. And he’s the one who generally holds all the mortgages on us.”

Precious Things to Guard

“It costs something to be a brother,” admitted Jim. “I think that is what scares us off this brotherhood of man idea. We are afraid bur brothers would expect too much of us. So the minute we start to collect some of this world’s goods, we begin to cut down on the number of our friends and relations. By the time a man has a million dollars he has hardly any kinfolk at all – much less brothers.”

“Well, Jim,” I said, “put your coat on and let’s get home. They can steal Christmas away from the world. But they can’t take it away from the home. It’s in the homes that Christmas is being preserved in times like these.”

“In fact,” said Jim, “now that you come to mention it, I don’t ever remember a more tender Christmas in my home than this one has been. It is as if we knew we had a precious thing to guard.”

“Will you bring your family around to my place,” I demanded, “for an old-fashioned Christmas visit? There will be Christmas cake and a cup of tea…”

“I will,” said Jimmie kindly, “and will you come and visit my house in turn? Let’s be old-fashioned. Let us make this Christmas the occasion of visiting around among our friends and relations instead of treating it as a day of selfish domestic celebration.”

We locked up the office and walked along the hall. One of the office caretakers laboring past us under a huge jute bag of waste paper and office junk. Jim took him by the arm, signed for him to deposit the bag on the floor. And when he had done so, Jim took his hand and shook it warmly.

“A merry Christmas,” cried Jim. “To you and yours.”

When the elevator came, there was barely room for the two of us, but Jim stood back and said to all the strangers packed like fingers in a fist, “a merry Christmas, everybody.”

And while one or two mumbled a reply, the rest of them just shoved back to make room for us.

At the main floor, we let everybody out ahead of us which sort of slowed things up, since Jim and I were nearest the elevator door. But beaming with Christmas kindness, Jim drew in his chest and smiled them all out. Then he seized the operator’s hand.

“A merry, merry Christmas, brother,” said Jim.

And the elevator man returned the shake most heartily until he had to withdraw his hand from Jim’s in response to the angry buzzing of the signal calling him back aloft.

Full of Charity

In the lobby, Jim lingered, smiling and nodding to friend and stranger alike, and went over to the little newsboy and bought both our paper and its evening contemporary, so full of charity was he; and walked away without waiting for his change from 10 cents.

The street was filled with that intense purpose and hustle characteristic of Christmas, and we strolled along exchanging shy and friendly glances with all and sundry. At Christmas there is just a faint suspicion in our minds that all our fellow men are not rogues. And that suspicion struggles in our faces.

At the corner, a Salvation Army lass jingled her bell beside a kettle on a tripod and both Jim and I dropped a coin in the kettle. An old lady paused at the corner crossing in hesitation before the whirling Christmas traffic, and Jim very gallantly offered his arm to help her across.

At the far corner, he got into conversation with an elderly newsboy of his acquaintance and I saw him shaking hands heartily and buying another newspaper.

Coming back, he took the hand of a little girl whose mother was laden with parcels and escorted her safely over.

“Ha,” said Jim, rejoining me. “When you really let yourself go, it’s astonishing how warm you can feel towards all the world.”

“Don’t catch cold,” I warned him, “from using up all your heat.”

“You’re a terrible old Scrooge,” cried Jim, slapping me on the back. “Come on, loosen up, let your heartstrings slack.”

Up the street towards the parking lot we walked, with Jim fairly bulging with goodwill and I trying to see how many people I could smile at in one block. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that most of the ones I smiled at turned around after they had passed, with a puzzled air.

I smiled at one man before I realized he had had a drop too much and he charged through the traffic to seize me by the coat front and address me as a long lost friend, though I am sure we had never laid eyes on each other before. He would not let go. He wanted me to come with him to a place he knew where there was a grand old party going on. When Jim drew near, he included Jim in both the invitation and the clutch on the coat front and the more we argued that we had to get home, the more loud and vociferous did our friend become.

“Aw, home,” he scoffed, “who wants to go home on Christmas? What’s the matter with the world? What are men coming to? Where’s the good old-fashioned Christmas…”

“Come on,” said Jim peremptorily, taking my sleeve.

“No, you don’t,” maudled the stranger, seizing both Jim’s sleeve and my coat front in a dying grasp.

Jim lifted his foot and brought it down smartly on the gentleman’s toe.

“Ow,” he wailed, releasing us.

And we were quickly lost to him in the crowd.

“That was a shame,” said Jimmie, his face recovering the Christmas expression, “but it’s the only way to handle those drunks.”

Only Play-Acting

When we reached the parking lot, Jim went over to the little shanty where the watchman sits and while I got the car started, I could see Jim dispensing the hearty Christmas spirit by shaking the crusty old watchman’s hand. In fact, so surprised was that bad-tempered old man that he even came out of the shanty and stood to wave us good-by when Jim got in the car.

“Ah, well,” said Jim happily, “most men are pretty good guys when you cut through the crust. Now, that old skinflint…”

“Jim,” I said sadly, “I’m afraid this spirit of Christmas is only play-acting with you. It’s like dressing up at Hallowe’en. Only, instead of putting on a false face, you put on a false front.”

“If we only half tried,” retorted Jim, “we could keep up the Christmas spirit right through the year.”

“And would we ever be sick of one another,” I exclaimed.

Along the lake shore, a chauffeur-driven car passed us at a lively speed and just as it did so oncoming traffic forced it to brake suddenly and cut in ahead of me. Not often do professional chauffeurs get themselves in jams. But when they do, they are more helpless than ordinary drivers. This bird simply swerved ahead of me. I tooted my horn furiously, in warning. But he had to cut in or get smacked from in front by oncoming cars. So cut in he did. And sure enough, I bumped him.

It was a good sharp bump. But nothing broke. Nothing was damaged except all our feelings.

The chauffeur steered slowly off to the side of the road, I after him. He got out and walked with great dignity back to look at his back bumper. He was a huge fellow, stately wide skirted greatcoat. And it has always been my custom, on account of my own small size, to be very fearless with extra large men.

“You great big chump,” I declared in a loud, angry voice.

He halted, straightened up, took two strides and glared in the window at me.

“You big ape,” I repeated furiously. “Don’t you know better than to cut in like that? At your age. And professional chauffeur.”

“Who is an ape?” he inquired in a dainty little way, twisting his lips up into a curious imitation of a smile, but his eyes were like ice.

“You’re an ape,” I said, “you’re a fathead, you’re a chump, whizzing along and suddenly cutting fair in front…”

“Did I hear you call me an ape?” repeated the chauffeur, again twisting up his lips in that queer grimace.

“Yes,” suddenly bellowed Jim beside me, “you big baboon, go on about your business or your mistress will be wearing out her fat finger ringing for you. Beat it.”

The chauffeur ducked down to look in at Jimmie and then all of a sudden started around the end of the car.

Jimmie saw him coming and quickly opened the car door and got out to meet him. No words were spoken. The two of them squared off, their feet wide apart, and began sparring.

Whack! Right in the eye. And Jim went flat on his back.

Ex-Champ Opposition

The chauffeur continued to circle and spar but Jim just sat up.

I hurriedly got out and tried to help Jim to his feet but he preferred to sit for a moment.

“Why, you… you…” I said, “at Christmas, a fine thing, hitting a man in the eye on Christmas, giving him a black eye…”

“Nobody’s going to call me an ape,” said big fellow, reaching down and helping me lift Jim up.

“A fine thing,” I continued, “hitting a man on Christmas…”

“Besides,” said the chauffeur, “I’m an ex-champion boxer, and an ex-policeman, and nobody is going to call me an ape.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I repeated firmly, but not standing up very tall for, fear he would remember who it was that called him an ape.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, dusting Jimmie off in a hazy sort of way, but still looking very hot in the cheekbones, “but if anybody calls me an ape, I just don’t like it. And I did it before I knew what I was doing. And anyway…”

Then he stopped and looked at us for a minute and wheeled and slammed into his car and drove off with that professional chauffeur style.

“Oh, oh,” said Jim, holding one hand over his eye.

“A black eye for Christmas,” I sympathized, as I eased him up into the car seat.

“What did you call him an ape for?” demanded Jimmie angrily. “If you had devoted your efforts to stopping your car instead of blowing your horn at him, you never would have bumped him.”

“Nobody is going to cut in like that on me,” I declared, resuming my seat behind the wheel.

“It was you who called him an ape,” accused Jim. “You called him a fathead and a chump.”

“Okay, then,” I inquired, “what did you have to horn in with calling him a baboon?”

“I wasn’t going to see him hit any friend of mine,” cried Jim. “Besides, how could I see how big he was? He was on your side.”

So we nagged until we reached Jim’s house, all lighted up for Santa Claus.

“Aw, Jim, “I said, as he backed out of the car, “look, old-timer, a merry Christmas.”

“The same to you,” said Jim; holding out one hand to me and covering his darkening eye with the other.

S.O.S.!

by

On December 9, 2025

In Birdseye Center, Comic

December 6, 1941

This was a real campaign during World War 2, I posted about it in Smokes Screen Battles Gloom.

It Always Pays to be Handy

by

On November 15, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

Whittling is absorbing work. You can shave away and talk at the same time…

Women have their knitting. But what can men do to keep their minds and hands busy?

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 15, 1941.

“The shortage of labor,” declared Jimmie Frise, “is making a laborer out of me.”

“The same here,” I agreed. “I had to put up my storm windows last week myself, for the first time in 15 years. The man who usually does it is working in a munitions factory.”

“Making shells?” inquired Jim.

“No, putting up the munitions factory’s storm windows,” I replied indignantly. “And doing odd jobs around the plant.”

“Still,” said Jim, “that’s part of the war effort. Somebody has got to keep the munitions plants tidy and shipshape.”

“Okay, but how about me as a taxpayer?” I demanded. “Am I not part of the war effort? Doesn’t the money I pay in taxes pay the workers who make the munitions? Who’s going to pony up the wages of the men who make the shells if I am so busy putting up storm windows that I can’t earn any money to pay the government?”

“Pshaw,” said Jim, “it didn’t take you half an hour.”

“It took me two hours,” I responded hotly. “And when you figure up how much work we have all got to do ourselves that we used to pay other men to do…”

“Wait a minute,” laughed Jimmie. “The money you save by doing the work yourself makes available that much more cash for the government.”

“I see,” I muttered. “They want us coming and going.”

“They sure do,” said Jim. “They want all the taxes off you they can scrape without skinning you alive. They want all the money you can save to lend them. They want you to work harder than you have ever worked so you will make more money for them to tax and for you to lend them.”

“I’m on a salary,” I pointed out.

“All right, they want you to work harder than you have ever worked for your salary,” explained Jim, “in order that your employer will make more money for the government to tax and for your employer to invest in war bonds.”

“Money, money, money,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” scoffed Jim. “It isn’t money the government wants. It’s shells. And bombs. And bombers. And ships. And soldiers ready for the battlefield. You can’t make a shell. You can’t make an airplane. You couldn’t even paint a ship. You’re too old to be a soldier. So you give what you’ve got. Work.”

“Aaaah,” I said.

“That’s all they want from you,” declared Jim. “Work. Work. Work. Work at anything you can do so long as it makes money that can be converted into shells, bombs, planes, ships. See?”

“Money is easily converted,” I confessed.

“Money is the only thing in the world,” explained Jim, “that can be converted into anything. It is the universal converter. For example: There is a tree standing in the woods. It is useless. But along comes a man who says I will give somebody 50 cents1 to cut that tree down. And down comes the tree. Money has converted the tree into a log. Then the man says I will pay somebody 50 cents to haul that log down to the skids. And from the skids it goes to the pulp mill.”

The Meaning of Giving Up

“What is this?” I inquired. “A lecture?”

“At the pulp mill, another guy,” said Jim, “says he will pay $20 for somebody to work a week in the pulp mill and turn the log into pulp. And then into paper.”

“It see it coming,” I confessed.

“Then another guy says,” went on Jim, “I’ll pay somebody $50 to write an article to print on this piece of paper. And you write the article, see?”

“I’m converted,” I agreed.

“Then about 550,000 people,” continued Jimmie, “say, I’ll give you a dime for that piece of paper with that article in it. So the tree standing in the distant bush has been converted, by money, money, money, into this thing in the hands of two million people, supposing four people read each paper.”

“And that’s the end?” I asked.

“Not on your life,” cried Jim. “Then the government says, we’ve got to have submarine chasers and we need planks, hardwood planks for making little ships. So they say to you, give us 15 bucks of that 50.”

“I’m told,” I said grimly, “that they get more than half of it, one way and another. The get 25 bucks.”

“Okay, says the government,” concluded Jim, “give me 25 of that 50. And it sends a man up into the bush to find a useless hardwood tree standing there. And that guy says I’ll give somebody 50 cents to cut down that tree. And away she goes again.”

“The part I had,” I submitted, “was very small in that transaction. That one measly article.”

“Yes, but you notice you got more for the article,” explained Jim, “than anybody else got for their share.”

“And I gave up more,” I reminded him, “than anybody else when they wanted that hardwood plank for a boat. I gave up 25 bucks, which is more than the man got for working a week in the pulp mill.”

“Oh, no you didn’t,” smiled Jim. “Because all you gave up was a couple of hours work, writing the article, and $25. Whereas the man who worked in the pulp mill gave up a whole hard week of his life, laboring like the devil.”

“I mean…” I protested.

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” laughed Jimmie. “You don’t mean the same thing by ‘giving up’ as I mean. Well, sir, there is a war on. So terrible a war that it’s end will decide whether men shall be free or slaves. And the side that is going to win, without any question, is the side that understands the meaning of giving up.”

“Jim,” I said gratefully, “that was a good lecture. I begin to see what it’s all about. It isn’t what we get, what we keep, what we own that matters. It’s what we convert into shells, planes, ships… all of us, everywhere, doing anything.”

“The other night,” related Jim, “I couldn’t get to sleep and I tried counting sheep. But the sheep would not come. Soldiers came instead. Endless ranks of them, marching. I closed my eyes tight and tried to picture sheep. But brighter and sharper came the endless ranks of soldiers, marching abreast. And I couldn’t go to sleep at all. For I began thinking that here in little, farflung Canada, with only eleven million people, there were 300,000 homes from which a soldier has gone to war. That is a lot of homes.”

“They’re not all at war,” I submitted.

“A hundred thousand are overseas,” enlightened Jim, “and 20,000 are in the navy and 60,000 are in the air force. It does not matter yet where they are. They are all gone to war; 300,000 homes are short a man.”

“And we’ve got to pay those men,” I offered.

“Huh, pay them?” laughed Jim bitterly. “They get $1.30 a day each. But they have to assign half their pay, or $20 a month to their dependants at home if they want the folks to get any allowances from the government. In other words, a married soldier gets about 60 cents a day, brother.”

“Phew,” said I.

“And so the government,” went on Jim, “gives the soldier’s wife $35 a month, and $12 for each child up to two children. Maximum, with the absent soldier’s $20, of $79 a month!”

“That’s not $3 a day,” I protested, “for rent, food, clothing…”

“But look,” interrupted Jim, “suppose the wife has no children? How much has she got? Or suppose she has four children?”

“I guess a soldier’s wife,” I humbled, “doesn’t even get 60 cents a day, come to think of it.”

To Revive Whittling

“Well, the reason I mentioned soldiers,” said Jimmie, “is that when we think of our taxes, and our war savings, we always think of shells, bombs, planes, ships. Big roaring factories; toiling, well-paid workers. What we forget are those 300,000 soldiers at a few cents a day. And those 300,000 homes, with a woman in each one, and children. Lonely, anxious and haunted. And less than $3 a day to live on, entire.”

“Maybe,” said, “we prefer to think of our taxes and war savings going on mighty bombers and ships and shells…”

“It makes us feel more romantic,” explained Jim, “about ourselves.”

So we sat for a little while not thinking very romantically about ourselves.

“Even our leisure,” said Jimmie, after awhile, “should be used. I envy women their knitting.”

“We could do odd jobs,” I suggested. “Like…”

“Like putting up storm windows?” inquired Jim sweetly.

“Okay,” I surrendered. “Like putting up storm windows. Or raking leaves. Or painting the back steps.”

“Or even whittling,” said Jim. “There are a dozen things a man could whittle. Such as…er…”

“See, Jim?” I cut in. “You can’t think of anything a man could whittle nowadays that would be any good. When I was a boy, there was a whittling man in every block. Out in front of the flour and feed store, there was always a man whittling. But now there aren’t even any more flour and feed stores.”

“He could whittle latches for the door,” said Jimmie, “and sticks to hold the window up. And pegs to wind string on. And knobs for drawers.”

“But now,” I countered, “there are no more latches, and windows stay up themselves. And if anything needs a new knob, you turn it in on the instalment plan for a fresh suite of furniture.”

“Say,” said Jim, rising, “that reminds me. I have a piece of hickory down cellar that I got about five years ago for an axe handle. I was down at the old farm, looking around, and I found this piece of hickory.”

“You can buy an axe handle, Jim,” I submitted, “for 35 cents.”

But Jim was heading for the cellar stairs and I followed him. He hunted around the cellar, looking on beams, under boxes and baskets, behind old dining-room buffets and things, and at last, in the fruit cellar, on top of the cupboards, located the very billet of hickory he had brought home years ago from a visit to his boyhood home.

It was hard and dry and weathered. And from the cupboard top he threw down several other odds and ends of wood, including a one-inch plank of cedar about six feet long.

“There you are,” he said. “A cedar plank for you.”

“And what can I make with that?” I demanded.

“What else,” retorted Jim, “but a paddle? That’s what I picked it up for, about seven winters back.”

“You must have been thinking of whittling sooner or later,” I supposed.

Creative Satisfaction

But Jimmie was gone back into the furnace cellar where he rooted around in a big box and found an old-fashioned axe head and an ancient whetstone. And on the stone, Jimmie proceeded to sharpen his pocket-knife. And when he had it honed to a glittering sharpness, he took my knife and worked it up to a beautiful edge that you could feel with your thumb like a razor.

And finding pleasant spots in which to sit and lean, we set to work, Jimmie at his axe handle, with small, keen curly shavings off the hickory and I, at the paddle, with long, stiff strokes of the cedar.

Whittling is absorbing work. You can shave away, and talk at the same time. And there is a queer feeling of accomplishment, of creative satisfaction, that invades you little by little as the thing you are working at begins to take form.

Jimmie got the head end of his axe handle the wrong way round, and I had to saw off about a foot of my plank due to having taken too deep a bite with my knife, causing a large chunk of the cedar to shear loose. But we whittled and viewed and chatted and whittled away dull care until an hour or more had gone, and Jimmie was starting to fit the head on the axe handle.

“You have to get the size of the eye just right,” he said, “or else the wedge will never really grip it.”

And in a few minutes, he fitted the head perfectly, though the handle itself was rather rough.

“There you are, my boy,” he said, handing me the axe. “Just feel the heft of that. No store axe handle has got the feel. You could really swing that axe. Feel how the curve of the handle slides through your hand, giving power.”

And from the kindling bin, he got a chunk of wood and set it up on the cellar floor.

“Now, watch,” he said.

He aimed the axe and then raised it. Back over his shoulder he swung it. Forward and down he struck.

And the axe head slipped off and hurtled through the doorway into the fruit cellar where it crashed on to the second shelf of preserves which included green tomato pickle, chow chow2, mustard pickles, summer catsup, mustard catsup; and these falling, took with them half the shelf of cherries, damson plums and 16 pints of wild raspberries which are Jim’s own favorite.

It was awful. Not only the sound, which continued for several seconds. But the way the juice ran, all red and yellow and ghastly over the concrete floor.

We used the shavings we had made to help staunch the flow. Jimmie used my paddle for a shovel to push the shavings on to the mess and to scrape up the broken glass and pickles and fruit.

Then he crept up the cellar stairs and finding nobody around he got the biggest ash can from the side entrance and we filled its huge space with the wreckage of shavings, glass, fruit and blood.

Then we carried the ash can out and placed it in the side drive of the house next door, where the people are away until Christmas.

And after we had swept and wiped and cleaned all as best we could and rearranged all the fruit and pickles from the upper shelves on to the lower shelves, until you could hardly notice how much damage had been done, I said:

“I am glad my whittling was of some use. It made a good shovel.”

“Finish it, why don’t you?” said Jim wearily.

“You finish your axe handle,” I suggested.

He looked around for it, but there was no sign.

“It must be swept up with the rest of the junk in the ash can,” said Jim.

So we went back upstairs in time to hear the late afternoon war news.

Editor’s Notes:

  1. The are a lot of prices mentioned in this article. For comparable numbers, $1 in 1941 would be like $19 in 2025. ↩︎
  2. Chow chow is a pickled relish made of chopped green tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and seasonal peppers (though carrots, cauliflower, beans, and peas are sometimes included). There are a variety of other pickled vegetables mentioned as well. ↩︎

Give the Boys a Lift

by

On September 23, 2025

In Birdseye Center, Comic

September 20, 1941

It was considered patriotic to give servicemen a lift who were hitchhiking.

Blow Your Own Horn – Softly

by

On August 23, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

“Toot, toot, toot,” went my horn again. Jim was gesticulating amiably to explain that it was a little horn trouble.

While driving home, Greg and Jimmie work out a new world order, only to have a little horn blast their pet theories

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 23, 1941.

“Machinery,” explained Jimmie Frise, is the curse of humanity.”

“Oh, oh, Jim,” I protested, “if it weren’t for machinery, like radio and electric machinery and steam engines, we wouldn’t know there was a war on yet.”

“We’d have had a couple of extra happy years,” stated Jimmie. “Do you know what really put the curse on mankind? It wasn’t Adam eating an apple. It was Adam stepping on a round stone and finding he skidded. That was what planted the seeds of evil in him. The next time he had a heavy load to lift, he remembered his foot sliding on the round pebble, so he went and got a big, round stone. On this he placed his heavy load and rolled it. It was no trick at all to get two round stones and rig up an axle. And so machinery was born.”

“You figure the wheel was the first machine?” I asked.

“Perhaps not,” agreed Jim. “Probably a stick was the first machine. A stick with which our ancient ancestors hit their first rabbit, or the stick with which they first dug a root out of the ground to eat. Or the stick with which the first weak man felled a strong man and so created the vision of human justice.”

“So weapons were our first machines?” I demanded.

“Yes, and today, our deadliest weapons are machines,” declared Jimmie, triumphantly. We invented machines and now they have got out of our control. Machines will be the end of us.”

“Why, Jim” I protested, “our lives would be miserable without machines. Everything we live by today is a machine. The bricks of our houses are made by machines; the clothes we wear, most of the food we eat, all our employment is provided by machines.”

“By serving machines, you mean,” said Jim darkly. “I draw a cartoon. You and I and two or three other guys can see it. We can put it in the window of The Star Office and some hundreds of passers-by can see it. But we give that cartoon into a machine that traces it on to zinc. And we put that zinc tracing into another machine called a press. About half a million people can see it.”

“Is that serving a machine?” I scoffed.

“It certainly is,” Jim informed me, “because it cost $2,000,000 to create those machines for multiplying my cartoon by half a million. Naturally, those machines have got to pay for themselves, so they demand a cartoon from me every week. Now, a cartoonist hasn’t always got a cartoon a week in him. Cartoonists are a sort of by-product of creation. With some bits left over, the Creator said, ‘I’ll make a cartoonist. I’ll make a dopey, whimsical, slightly daft individual who will have a yearning to draw pictures to make his fellow men smile.’ But those terrible machines, costing millions of dollars, and required to be paid for, dollar for dollar, demand a cartoon every week. I am a slave of that machine.”

A Sorry Spectacle

“Would you rather draw a cartoon to put in a window, for the passers-by to look at?” I snorted.

“The best cartoons I ever drew,” sighed Jimmie, “were drawn in the dust on the window panes of the post-office in Birdseye Center.”

“When you were a kid?” I smiled.

“Ah,” sighed Jimmie.

“Well, sir,” I said, “I would like to share your sentimental skunner1 against machines. All over the world today, it is machines that are destroying us, it’s true. But I can’t agree with you. There once was a rather superior monkey who discovered he could pick up sticks and stones with his fingers. That was the dawn of man. It is our use of implements and later of machines that makes us men, not monkeys.”

“If you want my opinion,” declared Jimmie, “the monkeys all over the world are laughing at us today.”

“We are a sorry spectacle,” I confessed. “How all the microbes and germs must be laughing at us. How typhus and cholera and smallpox and tuberculosis and all those bugs we have conquered must be chuckling amongst themselves. For we are doing what they failed to do. Having mastered all our enemies save man, we are now devoted to destroying each other.”

“With machines,” insisted Jim.

“Okay,” I declared, “let’s suppose this war continues to its logical conclusion. All cities are wiped out. All factories are bombed to ashes. All the universities are razed and the libraries burned. All the plans and specifications lost and all the men who might remember the sciences and arts, either killed in action or butchered in concentration camps. And, in the end, just a few people survive who go and hide in the hills and the caves. Thus will we be back in the caveman age once more? How would you like it?”

“We could start fresh,” submitted Jim. “And we could hang anybody that tried to invent anything.”

“No wheels,” I warned him, “no wagons.”

“We could use stone boats,” proposed Jim.

“Harness is machinery,” I countered. “You couldn’t use harness. All you could use domestic animals for would be meat and milk. No plows, no reapers, no seed drills. No pumps. No shovels.”

“Aw,” said Jim, “you want to carry the thing too far.”

“Now you’ve hit it,” I explained. “The question is – how far should we carry this thing called machinery?”

“Who’s going to say?” asked Jim.

“The government,” I informed him. “The government will own all machines. Every machine in the country will belong not to individuals, but to all the people. And anybody that wants to use a machine will come before a commission of the government – or the people – and state what he wants the machine for. If the use he wishes to make of it is for the general good, not just for his own good – if nobody is to be killed, nobody enslaved, nobody cheated or in any way injured, the commission will grant the use of the machinery.”

When a Horn Goes Wrong

“That’ll put an end to the invention of machinery,” smiled Jim. “Because the only reason machines have been invented is because somebody thought they could beat somebody else by creating a better machine.”

“Part of the commission’s job,” I explained, “would be to listen to people with new ideas for new machines. If a man wants a machine that doesn’t exist, he can ask the commission for it. And if it is good, he’ll get it a darn sight quicker than he could get it now. I bet there are thousands of wonderful inventions that have never seen the light of day because the inventor had nobody to help him finance it. But with the people themselves back of him, an inventor could go places. I bet we would step a thousand years forward in a hundred years, if we would only trust all the people, instead of just a few of them, the way we do now.”

“Isn’t that socialistic stuff you’re talking?” demanded Jimmie sternly.

“Anybody who ever talked about humanity has been called a Socialist or a Communist,” I explained, “or whatever the nasty epithet of the time happened to be. I’m just a believer in humanity, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s a dangerous thing to be, these days,” warned Jimmie. “How about going home?”

It was my turn to drive. Jim and I take turn about, week by week, to run our cars. We pick up whoever we can at the foot of Bay street to complete our load and make the gas do the maximum job per quart. So we got our hats and wended our way to the parking lot back of the office.

The parking lot man hailed us as we drove out.

“Something the matter with your wiring,” he said. “I heard a buzzing sound under your hood and I wiggled the wires around and it stopped. But you’d better have it looked at, eh?”

I thanked him in that snooty way you thank people for telling you you’ve got a flat tire or something, and we drove out. As we dropped down over the kerbstone of the parking lot, my horn emitted a brief toot.

“H’m,” I said. “Sooner or later, an old car gets something wrong with its horn.”

As we drove along Adelaide street, in the thick 5 o’clock traffic, every little joggle we did on the car tracks caused the horn to toot briefly.

“Sorry,” I called out to the tired and indignant looking gentleman ahead of me, who leaned out his car window to glare at me. “Something wrong with my horn.”

He drew his head back in doubtfully, and as the traffic snailed along, my horn gave sundry small toots which caused other cars to act impatiently and pedestrians to glare at me.

“I’ll have to get that fixed,” I said.

We turned down Bay for the waterfront, and all the way down that busy, home-going street, my horn continued to issue its senseless little hoots and toots at every joggle or bump, however tiny, in the pavement. One small toot can disturb traffic more than a traffic policeman, even. Cars swerved and leaped away and pedestrians halted and started and halted again while Jim and I sat there helpless to stop the silly thing.

“Those Boys Looked Sore”

“Okay, okay,” I called to the motorists, who turned and stared back, and to the pedestrians, who halted and looked questioningly at me to see what I meant by the signal. Jimmie was very amiable. He gestured and signalled to explain that it was a little trouble we were having with the horn rather than any signal we were giving.

“Ah, thank goodness,” I said, as we reached the Lake Shore road and the smooth, free ride homeward along the lake, without a crossing or a red light for miles.

But the horn continued its tooting at every joggle all the way along. And most of the cars that got in front thought I was gently suggesting to them that they put on a little more speed. Each one, after its driver had taken an indignant glance in his mirror, would speed up. Then a stranger would pass me and take his place. Then the ridiculous business would begin all over again as soon as we hit the slightest unevenness in the pavement.

“Pull into a service station,” suggested Jim, “and let the boys unscramble the wiring.”

“No, thanks,” I declared. “I don’t want any gas-jerkers fiddling with my ignition. I take her up to my own repair man after supper.”

So we tooted and joggled along in a steady series of misunderstandings, until, along about half-way home, a car came alongside which was driven by a pretty girl with another girl beside her in the front seat, and in the back, two soldiers slumped down very cosy and comfortable.

“Toot, toot,” went my horn very pertly.

The girls looked smilingly at us, expecting to see somebody they knew. But it was only us – two old barnacles.

“Toot, toot-toot,” went my horn again.

Jim was gesticulating amiably to explain that it was a little horn trouble. But the young ladies, were giving us a decidedly frosty eye and the elevated chin. And, in the back seat, the two young soldiers sat up slowly and purposefully. And though I merely glanced under my eyebrows, I could see trouble brewing.

Toot, toot-toot, toot,” said the horn, with the nastiest leer.

The car with the young ladies fell back. I speeded up.

“Good heavens,” I said, “you don’t suppose they thought we were trying to be fresh?

“Toot,” said the horn.

“Those boys looked sore,” said Jim.

“Why, surely, they could tell a couple of old guys like us…” I protested.

But even as I spoke, I knew that the car drawing up on the outside of me was an enemy raider. It snaked alongside. I heard a voice, low and menacing, say:

“Pull over to the curb, Barrymore!2“

I glanced to the left. The girls had changed places with the soldiers. One of the soldiers was now driving, and the other sat beside him and did the talking. He was a very bronzed, sinewy looking youth. I drew out of the traffic to the right.

“To Heck With Machines”

The other car ran ahead and then slowed down, forcing me to stop beside the curb. The two soldiers got out and walked slowly and thoughtfully back to us. One on each side. The one on my right rested his elbows quite close to me and said:

“So you’re the old sports who pester a soldier’s girl while he’s away at the wars, huh?”

“I have horn trouble,” I declared.

“So we notice,” he said, through his teeth. “But you didn’t happen to see us sitting in the back seat, did you?”

“I didn’t see anything,” I stated indignantly and with elderly calm. “I tell you, my boy, my car horn is out of order and has been tooting all the way along.”

“Is that so?” said the soldier. I don’t hear it.”

“It only toots when we strike a little bump in the pavement,” I explained. “If you care to drive a short distance with us and see…?”

“I don’t think I would,” said the soldier, drawing back a little.

“Step on the gas,” said Jim. “Maybe it’ll do it.”

“Look,” I said, “listen.”

I stepped on the gas. The engine raced. The car started to tremble. I stepped farther. It began to shake. And suddenly, “toot, toot, toot,” said the horn faintly.

“See?” I cried triumphantly.

And as I stepped full down on the accelerator to let the engine really roar in the hope of bringing the toots out clear I held my hands up off the steering wheel to show there was no deception.

And suddenly, whatever was slightly wrong with the horn went really wrong and the horn burst into a full-throated and violent roar. Even the soldiers were startled. And both young ladies turned and stared out the back window of their car.

“Turn off the engine,” yelled Jim.

“Switch off the key,” shouted the soldier on my side.

“Twiddle the horn button,” advised the soldier on Jim’s side.

But the horn kept up its endless bellow with a sharpness and quality of tone I had never been able to get out of it by legitimate means. I jumped out and lifted the hood.

“Wires shorted,” I told the soldiers, who came and stared under the hood with me.

“This is the horn wire, isn’t it?” yelled the first soldier, jerking a wire loose. But it didn’t stop the horn.

“No, I think it’s this one, Bill,” cried the other soldier, yanking another wire loose. So they jerked all the wires we could see until finally the horn stopped abruptly. Then they waved very friendly and went and got back in the rear seat of the car. But our car wouldn’t even start. And we had to walk about half a mile and finally get a gas-jerker to come and re-wire the car.

“To heck with machines,” I said, as we at last got started again about 6.35 p.m.

Editor’s Notes:

  1. Skunner is slang for “a strong dislike”. ↩︎
  2. I’m not sure but perhaps Barrymore is slang for an older ma, since the famous actor brothers John and Lionel were in their early 60s at this time. ↩︎

Hitching Has Its Perils!

by

On August 9, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

“I thumbed it and a nasty little boy stuck his head out of the window and made a loud raspberry.”

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 9, 1941.

“The trouble with us,” declared Jimmie Frise bitterly, “is, we’re not coordinated.”

“How did I know you were going to leave your car up at the cottage last week-end?” I demanded hotly. “Am I a mind reader?”

“Here we are in the city,” said Jim,” without a car, either of us.”

“It was patriotism that inspired me to leave my car at the cottage,” I informed him. “I thought I would not only save gas in the trip down and back this week-end, but by having you pick me up each morning here in the city, I would be contributing to the war effort.”

“Precisely my case,” said Jim morosely. “But since our cottages are only five miles apart, did it not occur to you that the sensible thing to do was to drive over Sunday afternoon and tell me you were leaving your car up there?”

“Why didn’t that occur to you?” I retorted. “One of my neighbors offered me a lift down to the city, and the plan to leave my car came to me all of a sudden. I had no time to notify you.”

“Exactly the same situation in my case,” muttered Jim. “I was actually on the point of leaving when one of my neighbors drove by and hollered out to me that he would be glad of a companion on the trip down.”

“Well, after having a car for 20 years,” I admitted, “it feels pretty helpless not to have one.”

“I can do without a car for a day,” stated Jim, “when it is in the repair shop or the kids have it. But a whole week!”

“It will make us realize how dependent we are on cars,” I offered.

“It is like having all your teeth out,” said Jimmie. “It changes your whole way of life and leaves you with a sense of painful loss.”

“We’ll manage,” I assured him. “And besides, while we didn’t intend to go quite so far in the war effort, we will be comforted all week by the thought of the gas we are saving.”

“Unless our kids up at the cottage are burning up twice the gas we would here,” speculated Jim.

So all week Jimmie and I used the street cars and our legs. It was interesting to ride on the street cars after all these years. I don’t suppose either of us have been on a street car 10 times in as many years, except for little short downtown jumps when it was too much trouble to get the car out of the parking lot. But the long, bright ride to work in the morning was a new and delightful experience. People who own cars lose touch with their city. They travel in a rut. They follow the same route downtown every day of their lives. And that route becomes to them, their city. They see the same streets, buildings, every day, year after year. They see the same people or the same type of people. Motor driving to and from business is a form of isolationism.

But the average street car route cuts across many sections of the city. Whole social sections of the city get on and get off the car, and you rub elbows with your fellow citizens of many types and grades. When you board the street car, you find it already largely filled with a company of strangers – the people from the packing house district north of you. You find yourself little shy amongst a crowd of people who, by their dress and facial expression and such conversation as you can overhear, are people you have been prevented from encountering by your business, your own home neighborhood and the stiff routine of your past life in the clutches of the motor car.

Making a Decision

After passing through your own district, where numbers of your familiar neighbors get on, whom you welcome as if you were meeting in Paris or Moscow or some other strange city, the car passes through a factory district, and large numbers of the strangers get off. Then you cut through a rather run-down region, beyond the factory zone, and a still more foreign element comes and sits down beside you. They carry bundles and look very preoccupied. By the time you reach the downtown office district where you get off, you feel you live in a city, a metropolis. You feel that it is a far larger world than your motor car had ever allowed you to discover. A world full of interesting and strange and often, beautiful and attractive people, whose lives are in all respects different from yours. You thought of your city as consisting of people like you and your neighbors, in the home and in the office. And you discover, on the street car, that your neighborhood is only a little island, and all around you are hundreds of thousands of strangers living differently, mysteriously, curiously, and they are your fellow citizens who drink the same water and are protected by the same policemen and elect the same mayor as you do.

“Jim,” I said as the carless week drew to its close, “I have had a great kick out of mingling with my fellow mortals. I have a good notion to leave my car at the cottage.”

“By the way,” said he, “how are we going to get up to the cottage this week-end?”

“The same way we came down,” I replied. “We can call our friends who brought us down.”

Which we did. But my neighbor was not going this week. And Jim’s neighbor had already gone. We got on the telephone and tried several others we knew who have cottages on the same lake as ours. But without luck.

“We’ll have to take the train,” said Jim. “Maybe that will be as interesting as the street cars.”

“There is no train except at night,” I informed him, “and since we can’t leave Friday night, we’d have to leave Saturday night, get to the cottage Sunday morning and have to leave again Sunday afternoon.”

“We can go by bus,” suggested Jim.

“And the nearest bus line,” I reminded him, “passes 23 miles from our place.”

“We can hitch-hike in from the highway,” said Jim. “On Saturdays there is always plenty of traffic in to the lake. Why, maybe even our own kids will pass by.”

“We could hardly hitch-hike, Jim,” I stated.

“And why not?” inquired Jim. “Isn’t it about time somebody picked us up? Haven’t we picked up hundreds of hitch-hikers to Muskoka in the past 20 years? Do we ever drive up there without giving somebody a lift?”

“We are hardly the type to hitch-hike,” I explained.

“Aha,” cried Jimmie. “A little snobbish in our declining years, hey?”

“I’m no snob,” I said warmly, “but there is a limit to what men of our standing in the community can do. I can hardly see us standing on the side of the road thumbing.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake, why not?” exploded Jimmie. “This country would be a lot better off if men of our standing in the community would leave their cars at home and do a little hitch-hiking for a change. The fact is, Canada is full of snobs like us. Snobs socially, economically, industrially, politically, every way. A snob is somebody who is so set in his ways, he looks down on all other ways.”

“I thought a snob was somebody who pretended to be better than he is,” I countered.

“Well, ain’t we all?” cried Jimmie joyously. “And I tell you what I’ve just decided. I’m not only going to hitch-hike in from the highway. I am going to hitch-hike all the way. I’m going to take no train. No bus. I am going to the take the street car to the end of the car line and then hitch-hike all the way to the cottage. There is patriotism for you, mister.”

“Will you wear old clothes?” I asked.

“Certainly not,” said Jim. “I’ll dress as I always dress going to Muskoka.”

“People won’t pick up well-dressed hitch-hikers,” I pointed out. “They’re afraid of being bored. Well-dressed hitch-hikers are always dreadful bores.”

“I’ll take a chance,” said Jim. “Will you?”

“I’ll go by bus,” I said, “and then watch for friends passing on the last leg of the journey.”

“Timid, eh?” smiled Jimmie. “I thought you enjoyed riding on the street cars with your fellow men this week. Well, why not experience what your fellow men are experiencing and hitch-hike? See what it feels like to be on the other end of a thumb for a change.”

“No thanks,” I said firmly.

Traffic Boils Past

But by the time Saturday morning arrived, the thought of a long hot bus ride or a night train ride in a day coach to see my family for only a few hours proved too much of an argument on Jimmie’s side, and when he made a last minute attack on me, I yielded. And we took a quick lunch and packed our stuff in one bag and caught the street car for the north end of the city for the great adventure.

When we reached the end of the car line, there were already a bevy of people strung up the highway industriously thumbing. There were soldiers and young boys and one pair of girls and an elderly and very chatty-looking lady with two or three small bags half concealed about her person, all signalling the passing throng of northbound vacationists.

“We can’t join that lot,” I told Jim firmly. “We have no right to compete with those soldiers.”

“Okay, then,” said Jim, “let’s walk a few hundred yards on.”

“No,” I conceived, “let’s hire a dollar taxi and ride one dollar’s worth north to some cross roads and pick a nice shady spot to do our thumbing.”

Which was a good idea and we did it, and the end of the dollar found us several miles north, and under some nice trees where there were no hitch-hikers visible in any direction.

We took our stand on the shoulder of the road, Jimmie holding the suitcase and standing to windward, as it were, to thumb the oncoming stream of cars.

“Don’t try to hide behind me,” commanded Jim. “Stand out frank and open. Nobody likes to pick up hitch-hikers that seem to be half in concealment. As if they were afraid of being recognized by the police.”

So I stood forth. And the weary business began. At first, we tried the “as-one-gentleman-to-another” style, just standing with a pleasant smile, with the right hand slightly raised and the thumb erect in a mere, polite indication of the fact that we were in quest of a lift.

But the traffic boiled by with unseeing eyes. After a little while we became slightly dazed by the whizz of traffic. Jimmie began thumbing a little more classically, lifting his hand and jagging his thumb energetically. But this only caused people to veer away from us and some of them blew their horns with a note of irritation.

Half an hour, and not a single car even slackened its speed as if in doubt. Hundreds, thousands of Saturday cars streamed past.

“Well, Mr. Frise,” I said bitterly, “so this is hitch-hiking?”

Two of us may be too much of a load for most of them,” said Jim. “Go in behind that tree and see what I can do.”

“Is that honest?” I demanded. “What would we think of hiding hitch-hikers?”

But I took the suit-case and went and hid in the ditch while Jim, with renewed vigor and sales appeal, stood forth and thumbed.

After half an hour, he came in off the road wiping his brow and told me to take my turn.

“Maybe the public prefers short fat hitch-hikers,” he said, “to tall thin ones.”

And I had hardly taken up my post when a rattle-trap of a car loaded with a family came along on the side of the road much slower than the main traffic. I thumbed it none the less and a nasty small boy stuck his head out the window and made a loud raspberry at me.

Hardly had he committed this impertinence when there was a loud bang and a hiss and the car, with a blowout, teetered to an unsteady and anxious stop only a few yards up the road past Jimmie.

Indignantly, I continued my thumbing. The driver got out and studied the tire. It was a ramshackle car with smooth tires, yet he had the nerve to risk his whole family in such a death trap. The small boy who had raspberried me was in hiding in the car. He had not expected so sudden a retribution as this.

I thumbed, in vain, trying the leaning back stance, the forward bending stance, the tip-toe style of smiling brightly and lifting the head as if recognizing the driver as a long lost friend. I tried the dejected style. As one car would go by, I would slump in an attitude of despair for the benefit of the car following. All, all in vain. Then I heard conversation behind me, and there was Jimmie cheerfully assisting the owner of the rattle-trap to lift out his luggage and get at the tools. And while I thumbed, Jimmie like a sap helped the owner change tires.

“Here’s Your Boy Friends”

“Well, we’ve got a lift,” he said cheerily.

“Not in that crate,” I said sharply. “I wouldn’t risk my life in that thing.”

“Come on,” said Jim. “Any horse in a storm, or whatever it is.”

“Jimmie,” I protested. But Jim had the suitcase and was walking to the dilapidated car. And I had to follow or be left thumbing there.

The little boy made face at me from amongst the luggage where he was hiding half in shame and half in bravado. We had to squeeze in with children and bags and a dog all over us. The lady was one of those cheerful creatures you often find in dilapidated cars, full of trilly laughter and dopey remarks and endless chatter either to her husband or the children or to Jim and me. The man drove a good 28 all the time, paying no attention to the endless roar of horns and the indignant glares that showered on him mile after mile as we labored along in the Saturday traffic.

The engine boiled on every slope and barely made the hills even in terrible, grinding low gear. The children got cranky, the dog got ill, the baggage finally settled down to a solid mass on our feet and knees. The heat of the day grew terrific and no wind came in the windows.

The car developed a fierce clanking sound, and the owner said, very offhand, that it was probably a connecting rod; they were always going.

“I’m afraid our added weight is too much,” I suggested. “We could get out here and try to thumb some other…”

We were 40 miles from our destination. Evening was drawing on.

“I wouldn’t dream of ditching you here,” cried the owner, stepping up his speed to 30.

And so we boiled and clanked and snorted and trilled and gabbled and cried and sweated and yelled and raspberried our way to the road where we turn off the highway in to the lake.

There our kind host let us off, and there, waiting by the hot dog stand were our kids with both our cars.

“We’re expecting some boy friends,” they protested when we approached, “they’re hitch-hiking up for the week-end.”

“Well, here’s your boy friends, “we informed them grimly. And we made them drive us in to the cottage.

You Can’t Beat Dame Nature

by

On July 26, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

“Wasps!” I bellowed, leaping as high as I could, the bushes clinging and rasping.

To fully appreciate the little things of life, you should go out to a berry patch in shorts

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 26, 1941.

“The bears,” said Jimmie Frise, “are going hungry in many parts of the country these days.”

“We hardly need pity the wild animals,” I submitted. “It is only humanity that needs our pity now.”

“The blueberry crop,” continued Jim, “has been a complete failure in enormous areas of the country due to the drought. And blueberries are the staple food of bears during July and August.”

“They can turn to grubs,” I suggested, “and ants in rotten logs. I’ve seen logs torn to tinder by bears searching for grubs.”

“It’s the blueberries,” insisted Jim, “with their big sugar content that give the bears their main supply of fat for hibernating. If they don’t get their blueberries, they go to sleep when the snow comes pretty thin and gaunt. They don’t sleep well.”

“And if you don’t sleep well for four months on end,” I admitted, “you wake up pretty cranky.”

“There’s going to be some cranky bears next spring,” assured Jimmie. “And some hungry ones too. This is a lean year for everybody, man and beast. Berries of every kind have been dried on the bushes; raspberries, wild strawberries; even the wild cherries did not come to anything in huge areas of the north. Think of all the birds that soon will be coming streaming down out of the far north, where they have been raising their broods.”

“They’ll get a big shock,” I said, “when they arrive in these parts and find nothing to eat.”

“It’s worse than that,” declared Jimmie. “Vast numbers of them won’t survive. What food there is will be snapped up by the first passers-by. As each wave of them comes south, they will find less and less food. Immense numbers of them will delay a little, trying to get enough food to carry them the next stage of the journey. But the frost, sleet, gales and snow will get them.”

“You paint a dismal picture,” I said.

“Nature,” stated Jimmie, “is a crap shooter. She just rolls the dice. Sometimes it comes up a seven and sometimes eleven. Nobody, not even nature herself, knows what’s coming up. We are always talking about the laws of nature, as if those laws were kindly and beneficent. We try to pretend that nature’s laws are framed for our special benefit. But it is not so at all. About the only law of nature there really is, is that if it comes up a seven when nature rolls the dice, you live. If it comes up eleven, you die.”

“Nature is cruel?” I offered.

“Nature is indifferent,” replied Jim. “Gloriously, serenely indifferent. She knows that all things come to an end anyway. The mightiest mountains she ever heaved up in the past are being eaten away by the rain drops. Nothing in the world is changeless. All nature does is carry out her laws – such as that water runs down hill and wind blows where it is drawn by low pressure. What the water does as it run down hill, what the wind does as it blows, is of no concern to her whatever.”

A Staggering Thought

“But how about all these animals, these bees and insects,” I demanded, “that nature leaves in the lurch when she pulls one of these droughts?”

“They’ll all been left in the lurch before,” explained Jim. “All these creatures, all these separate atoms of life, these bears, birds, insects to the number of so many billions that it would be easier to count the stars than to count the living creatures on this earth, are the descendants of creatures who have survived a million years of droughts and ice ages and volcanic eruptions and fires and storms of all time. Some people get dizzy trying to imagine all the separate and distinct atoms of life that have been lived and died in the past thousand years only, including men, horses, cattle, birds, fish, insects – stupendous billions upon billions of them, each owning, for a little while, a tiny share of life. Then losing it. And in all that time, nature has not cared a whoop for one or the other of them, but has gone ahead serenely minding her laws, making the water run down hill and the wind to blow in the direction in which low pressure draws it, the carnival of life going heedlessly on, ducking and dodging.”

“Ducking and dodging is right,” I echoed. “Yet these poor creatures like the bears have had nothing to do with the drought that has wiped out the blueberry crop.”

“It isn’t a moral question,” explained Jimmie. “It is for no sin on their part that the countless little birds will starve and die in a blizzard this fall.”

“Unless for the sin of being little birds,” I submitted.

“You can get very complicated in an argument about nature,” said Jimmie. “I think it’s best to adopt some good old-time religion and not go wandering all over the place thinking.”

“But you’ve got me worried about those birds,” I protested. “There must be billions of birds coming south in another few weeks, most of them newborn birds only out of the egg this past June.”

“So what? said Jim coldly.

“Billions of them,” I said excitedly. “Look. If I can go out in September and sit in a country corner and count 500 birds passing me – warblers, song sparrows, robins, thrushes, bluebirds – if I, one man in one fence corner, can count 500 a day and that’s easy, then figure the width of the continent. Figure how far one man can see sitting in a fence corner. And figure, if you can, that endless procession, day and night, day after day, of little birds stumbling along southward…”

“It’s a staggering thought, all right,” agreed Jim.

“Is there nothing that can be done to help them?” I demanded. “Suppose we asked all the farmers to leave one row of grain along their fences? Suppose we formed a sort of bird Red Cross society to act in this emergency of the great drought, and set out food of all kinds in city and town and village and in the fields and woods…”

“We have no time for the birds,” put in Jimmie. “It’s more than we can do to see all humanity fed this year.”

“Well, it seems a great pity,” I said, “that added to our human woes are all these other woes in the world.”

Goin’ Raspberry Pickin’

“Cheer up,” said Jim. “We’ve all survived our woes, both man and beast and bird and bug. We who are here today, every man and every bug and fly, are here because our ancestors were nimble. The ones that did not know how to survive left no descendants.”

“And the lucky ones,” I reminded him.

“Yes, some of us are here by sheer luck, too,” agreed Jim. “The drought has not been universal. There are plenty of areas where the berries have ripened in the ordinary course. And down through those areas, as usual, will pass the myriads of birds. And in those areas, the bears and raccoons will wax fat for winter.”

“I wish I knew where there were some good blueberry patches,” I put in. “I feel a year is not to be completely counted unless I have picked a few pails of blueberries.”

“I’m afraid the blueberries are out,” said Jim. “The French call blueberries ‘rock berries,’ and that’s what has scuttled them in the dry spell. The rocks burned them up.”

“No wild strawberries, either,” I said. “And no wild raspberries.”

“Yes, I know where there is a good patch of wild raspberries,” said Jimmie. “Or nearly wild, anyway.”

“Maybe I could survive,” I admitted, “if I picked a few pails of wild raspberries. There are certain ceremonies in life that I like to observe. And picking berries is one of them.”

“This place,” said Jim, “I have in mind is an old abandoned farm. The farm has gone back to bush. The ruins of the farm house foundation are just humps in the turf. But yellow briars grow there, and lilac bushes 20 feet high. And out at the back, there is a big wild patch of what must have once been a cultivated raspberry patch. It is in amongst high woods now, and the woods shelter them. And there is a spring rises in the woods which flows out in a sort of bog, and this waters the berry patch…”

“Is it far?” I inquired.

“It’s not an hour and a half from town,” replied Jimmie.

Which, with daylight saving time and the boss being away on his holidays, meant it was no trick at all to arrange a little berry picking trip. When Jimmie picked me up at the house, he protested:

“You can’t wear shorts picking raspberries! Go and put on your heaviest pants.”

“Tut, tut,” I said, getting in the car with my five-quart pail.

“Look, I’ve got overalls on over my regular pants,” insisted Jim. “You’ll get torn to pieces.”

“I just pick around the edges,” I explained.

So off we went and it was a lovely drive. There is no time like late July to see the country fairly leaning at you with bounty and beauty. We arrived at the old farm in less than an hour and a half and when we drove in the abandoned lane, we could see no wheel marks and realized that nobody had come and picked the berry patch before us.

Back of the brush-grown farm site, beyond the lilac bushes and the thick tangles of yellow briar which, about June 15, must be a glorious spectacle of solid masses of daffodil yellow roses, we found the berry patch just as Jim had promised. All around it a grassy bog from the spring fed it with water. And 50 feet this side of it, you could smell the indescribable perfume of raspberries, and you could see the soft dusty red glow of them, hanging ripe and in their prime.

“Gosh, Jimmie,” I exclaimed, “in this year of drought, what a glorious sight. It’s a miracle.”

“One of the laws of nature,” explained Jim, “is that there are always miracles.”

“Now, look,” said he, as we approached the dense and thickly tangled canes, “don’t go into that patch in those shorts. You can get an awfully nasty rip from one of those thick canes, you aren’t careful.”

“Just around the edges,” I assured him, already picking some of the nearest berries and letting them fall with that beautiful sound into the pail. The first berries into a pail are always the merriest.

Jim took a little walk around the patch and finally selected his ground and waded in.

“Jim,” I called, “look over here. I never saw such berries. Come in here and pick.”

“I’m okay here,” replied Jim. “I’ve got a good spot.”

“But you never saw such…”

“Look out for the bees and wasps,” called Jim. “We’re not the only creatures of nature who have found this patch.”

There were a lot of bees. Bees, wasps, flies, even hornets. I drew my hand back just in time from one lovely bough-tip of berries as a big bumble bee detached itself and whirled around a few times in anger at me. I backed up. I caught my leg on a berry cane.

“Ouch,” I said. “Jim, come over here. You never saw such berries.”

“They’re over here too,” said Jim patiently. and I could hear the pleasant plunk, plunk of berries hitting the bottom of his pail.

Seeing I was only working the edges, I wandered around the patch, picking a few here and a few there, and finding one after the other such glorious drooping clusters of big dusty red berries that I could not help exclaiming to Jim and begging him to come and pick.

“Look,” said Jim, rising up in the middle of the patch, “will you come in here and take a look yourself? I’ve got berries as big and plentiful as any here. The way you pick berries is to set to and pick ’em, not go wandering around yelling at people to come…”

“Okay, okay,” I reassured him. “Okay.”

“No,” said Jim firmly, “come and look. Pick your steps carefully through that gap there and take one good, long look at what I’m picking here. And then you will shut up.”

“Okay, okay,” I soothed him. “Go ahead. Miss all the loveliest berries you ever saw.”

“Pick ’em yourself,” yelled Jim sharply, and disappeared down in the patch again. And I could hear the industrious clunk, plunk until he had covered the bottom of the pail.

I went around the patch once and I picked several good cupfuls of berries I could reach. But the best berries are never on the outside edges of the patch. And I could see dozens of prize-winning boughs just a little way in. But to risk wading into the patch was not to be thought of.

Finally, I saw such a patch as could not be denied. It fairly staggered with beautiful big berries. Bees buzzed special ecstasy around it. But I knew the bees would go away when anyone comes near. So I got a stick and used it to part the bushes as I worked my way very gingerly in towards this particularly gorgeous display.

“Jimmie,” I called from amidst this bower fairly soggy with the perfume of the berries, “if you want to do me a favor, just come and one look…”

Jimmie rose sharply from amidst the thicket, his face red from stooping, and said:

“Listen, you come here. You come and see as pretty a spread of raspberries as any in this whole patch. There is enough here to keep me busy until my pails full. Now leave me alone.”

The berries hung in such clusters you I could reach out your cupped hand and just half close your fingers on bunch and they would drop into your hand. I ate the first few handfuls. There is nothing like a berry fresh off the bush. Strawberries fresh off the ground are sandy. Even blueberries, eaten right off the bush, are usually a little warm from the sun. They need to be chilled in the ice-box and then served with milk, not cream. But raspberries fresh off the cane are the elixir of flavor, scent and feel, as they melt in your mouth.

I shifted the bushes about with my stick. defending myself with the pail behind, and suddenly unveiled new glories.

“Jim,” I called, “you will excuse me just once more, but here is a patch of berries the like of which I am willing to bet you a dollar you never saw.”

“Aw, dry up,” came Jim’s muffled reply.

“You are simply wasting your time,” I said, reaching forth and selecting the choicest, the most bulbous, the ones that simply dropped in your hand when you touched them, “simply wasting your…”

An electric shock struck me in the leg.

I moved smartly to the right.

Two more red hot shocks smacked my leg and at the same time. I heard a sound like a tiny airplane’s engine coming nearer and nearer. I looked towards the sound. And in the thick of this choicest patch of raspberries the world may ever see, hung a large gray wasp’s nest.

And from it, like soldiers pouring out of the Maginot Line, streamed a bright yellow string of wasps.

“Hoy, whoof!” I yelled, leaping away.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” shouted Jim, who had stood up amongst the bushes.

“Whoof, wasps,” I bellowed, leaping as high as I could, as far with each leap, the bushes clinging and rasping and scratching all unheeded in comparison with the little electric hot shots the wasps were giving me on all fronts.

“You’ll murder yourself,” roared Jim, starting to come to my aid

A hundred yards away, up near the car, he overtook me. His pail was already half full. Mine had been spilled empty. He set his pail down and started gathering mud to plaster on my several stings, while I dabbed gasoline from the car’s carburetor on my countless scratches.

“I wonder,” I said wistfully, “how nature came to invest wasps?”

“That’s another thing you’ve got wrong,” stated Jim. “Nature doesn’t invent anything. She just lets things invent themselves to try and get around her.”

“Well, sir,” I submitted, “raspberries have done pretty well for themselves.”

So I sat in the car and convalesced while Jimmie filled my pail and his both.

Tempering the Shorn Lamb

by

On May 10, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

I heard various thuds back in the inner pen … and just as the ram came through the bars I started to rise from my kneeling position.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, May 10, 1941.

“Uncle Abe has invited me down…” began Jimmie Frise.

“I thought it was understood,” I cut him short, “that as far as your Uncle Abe is concerned, you and I are no longer partners. Every time I’ve visited your genial Uncle Abe it has turned out a lot of hard work.”

“It’s about his will,” explained Jimmie. “He wants to make some changes in his will, and I’ve always sat in with him…”

“Will my neck,” I assured him. “One time he had the lumbago and we ended up plowing. Another time he invited you down to get some maple syrup and we ended up mending his tractor.”

“No, it’s his will, all right,” said Jim. “He changes it about every two years. He’s been kind of poorly this winter and I have been expecting him to send for me. He likes to keep his will up to date.”

“Okay,” I said. “You go down if you like. But I swore I would never go back after that last time when we landed right into the barley threshing and I had the job on top of the straw stack.”

“It’s a swell time of year to visit a farm,” pleaded Jimmie. “There won’t be any work. All the plowing’s done and the seeding. It’s really his will, I feel sure. While I’m sitting in with him re-writing his will, you can wander over the farm looking at bird nests and helping Rusty stalk ground-hogs.”

“No, Jim,” I said finally. “You go yourself. A will is too intimate a document for a lot of strangers to be hanging around. Anyway, what the dickens has your Uncle Abe got to leave in a will?”

“Well, he’s got the equity in the farm,” said Jim, “and all the stock and implements. And his house and furniture.”

“Won’t he leave all that to his wife?” I demanded.

“Yes,” explained Jim, “but he’s scared to death he and Aunt Emma will be killed at the same time in a motor accident or something, and he has a hunch his relatives will get everything.”

“You, for instance?” I inquired.

“No, no,” said Jim. “There are a lot of relatives and he wants his will so fixed that certain of them…”

“Aaaaah,” I smiled. “So you’ve got your eye…”

“No,” protested Jim, “all he’s leaving me is an old walnut highboy, the most beautiful old thing you ever saw; and the farm bell.”

“Bell?” I queried.

“There’s a bell in a little cupola on top of the back shed,” said Jim, “that I have envied all my life. It is a regular farm bell. about the size of a church bell, with the sweetest tone. They used to ring it to call the hands in off the fields for dinner. But there haven’t been any hands to call now for thirty years and the bell is never rung.”

“What would you do with it?” I asked.

“Put it on my summer cottage,” said Jim, “to call the children in for meals.”

When the World is Young

“I wonder if any of the other farms in the neighborhood might have a bell they’d sell,” I said. “That’s not a bad idea to have a bell at the summer cottage to call the kids home.”

“There might be,” said Jim. “In fact, there’s sure to be. You come down with me. and while I’m closeted with Uncle Abe, you can roam around the neighborhood. In fact. Uncle Abe is sure to know if any of the neighbors have bells. You could probably buy one for $51.”

“Besides,” I admitted, “there is a rose- breasted grosbeak nesting in that woodlot on the hill back of Uncle Abe’s farm. The male bird will be singing like an angel at this season of the year.”

“I’m glad you’ll come,” said Jim. “There’s no time of the year so lovely on a farm.”

It is less than 100 miles, to Uncle Abe’s, and you can get there in two hours by main highways. But main highways are no way to travel in May. Highways are for traffic. And by traffic I mean something mean and greedy. The highways are filled with trucks rushing merchandise at the fastest rate possible in order to get to its destination before somebody else’s merchandise gets there. Highways are filled with salesmen racing at breakneck speed to beat all other salesmen to a dollar. Highways are really low-ways. From highways, people without greed in their souls should keep away. There is always a much nicer way of getting any place in the world than by the highways.

Especially in May, when all the world is like a girl of 17 or a boy of 21. So Jimmie and I went the round-about way to Uncle Abe’s, and we did it in three hours instead of the highway’s boasted two; but the extra hour bought us far more than an hour’s worth of pleasure. For we saw miles of countryside filled with farms where people live in quiet happiness though the world goes mad. And we saw villages and a couple of towns with a back-road quiet and content in them that was like a physical balm to the minds and hearts of us war-rasped denizens of cities.

“These people,” I declared to Jim as we drove through the villages and towns and farm lands, “are collecting the dividends of the investment their pioneer fathers made of themselves and their lives in a new world.”

“Canada doesn’t realize how lucky she is,” agreed Jim.

“The people who first cleared these fields,” I persisted, “and first built these little villages did not come away from the Old World because they saw an easy life ahead of them. They saw a hard life. The men and the women who took the awful chance of leaving their families and friends and homes and all the familiar world to venture across menacing oceans to come to a savage and wilderness land must have had a lot of courage.”

“Or a great discontent,” added Jim.

“Well, these people living here,” I submitted, “are the heirs of that courage and that discontent. I wonder if they realize what a great legacy has been handed down to them by their all-but-forgotten forebears.”

“If it hadn’t been for those venturers,” admitted Jim, “all these people would have been back in the Old World right now.”

“Every one of them,” I agreed.

Uncle Abe is “Poorly”

“Do you figure there is much courage or much discontent left in these people?” inquired Jim.

“Well, look at your Uncle Abe,” I cried. “An elderly gentleman troubled with lumbago the minute the plowing or the harvesting comes along…”

“Now you go easy on Uncle Abe,” warned Jimmie. “He’s never had much money. He never went to school past his entrance. He was born and lived his entire life on the farm. When he was young, Ontario farmers were our well-to-do class. There was no better or more profitable life in the province than farming. But Uncle Abe has lived his life through a period of change and revolution in which the whole trend went against the farmer. All the power of modern science and invention went to the benefit of the cities. Every new improvement in the art of living went to the cities. All the comforts and conveniences of civilization went to the industrial communities. The city mechanic, even the common laborer, lived a more comfortable and a more interesting and attractive life than the farmer. The control of prices and the development of marketing by transporting farm produce, meat, vegetables, fruit, milk and everything else from one part of the country to another has gradually pushed the farmer against the wall. Uncle Abe has lived through that great period of decline. Now, to make a living at all, he has to work harder than any laborer in a city. And he has no union to protect him.”

“Why don’t the farmers form a union?” I wondered.

“Some day they will,” assured Jim. “When things really get bad, the farmers will form a plain, ordinary trade union on the lines of industrial unions.”

“Why haven’t they done it already?” I insisted.

“Politics has always scuttled them so far,” explained Jim. “But, like the industrial workers, the farmers will one day realize that their politics are of secondary importance to their rights.”

So when we drove down Uncle Abe’s lane and up to the side of the house and found Uncle Abe in a rocking chair on the side porch, in the sun, I looked upon him with a warmer and friendlier eye than I expected of myself after past collisions with him.

“I’ve been poorly all winter,” he answered our first inquiries. “I don’t think I am long for this world.”

The old boy looked the picture of ruddy health and he was fatter and more genial-looking than ever.

We protested his fears and told him how well he looked. But when Aunt Emma brought chairs and we all sat down on the porch, Uncle Abe went into a detailed account of how poorly he had been all winter, and like a seed catalogue, he went alphabetically over his symptoms. It was obvious from the way he itemized everything that he had had plenty of practice at the job of recounting his poorly condition.

So at last I brought the matter to a head. “I understand you have some private business to talk over with Jim,” I said, rising, “so I’ll just go and prowl around…”

Aunt Emma took me down to the barn to see the new calves and the two colts. We also saw a new litter of pups that Trix, the farm collie, had borne. Then we heard Uncle Abe calling and we met him and Jimmie coming down to the barn.

“Uncle Abe was just going to show me the sheep,” explained Jim. “They’re ready for shearing.”

I walked around to the far side of Jim and gave him a sharp nudge. I pulled his coat. But he ignored me.

“One of the best sheep shearers in this country,” Uncle Abe was saying, “used to do mine. But this war has upset everything. He was a Scotchman. He went to war.”

Aunt Emma left us and said she had to go and get lunch.

“I only have 17 sheep,” said Uncle Abe, who was walking slowly with his back bent at the kidneys, one hand back holding himself there. “That Scotchman would have done the lot in an hour. You never saw the like. He just grabbed them, rolled them over, run the shears into them and laid that blanket off so slick. You couldn’t believe your eyes.”

“I’ve helped shear sheep,” said Jim excitedly. “But I don’t think I ever handled the shears.”

“It’s no trick at all,” said Uncle Abe. “It’s a lot easier than skinning a fish.”

And he gave me a look out of the corner of his eyes.

“I suppose anything is easy if you know how,” I agreed. “How are you going to get them sheared? Probably one of your neighbors…”

“The last offer I had,” said Uncle Abe, stopping and having a twinge in his back which made him roll his eyes in agony, “was 50 cents a sheep. Perfectly absurd. Fifty cents a sheep2. Why, that Scotchman worked by the day. Two dollars a day. And when he had finished the sheep, he plowed the rest of the day.”

“The war has certainly put an end to those good old days,” I confessed.

“And the war,” contributed Jim, “has done a lot of good by bringing out unsuspected qualities in men. I bet I could shear a sheep if I really tried.”

“Oh, Jim,” cried Uncle Abe, “would you? What a good lad you are! Always coming to help your old uncle at the very minute I’m stuck with a problem.”

“It would be a pretty patchy job,” submitted Jim.

“My dear boy, I don’t care how patchy,” said Uncle Abe.

“Could you hold them while I shear?” inquired Jim.

“Oh, I’m afraid my back…” said Uncle Abe helplessly.

And the two of them had the effrontery to stop and look straight at me.

The sheep were the most unpleasant gathering of animals I ever saw. They were shaggy and clotted and matted and filthy. They were full of burrs. They smelled high3. The ram, who was in a pen back of the rest was the most yellow-eyed devil of a rank old ram I ever saw.

“Would I have to hold them?” I inquired. “By the neck?”

“You have to hug them,” explained Jim. “I grab them, then you reach under and grab the off leg and throw them on their back, Then you sit and hold the sheep sort of on top of you while I shear it…”

“Jim,” I interrupted, “if it is anything like skinning a fish, I will do the shearing. You do the hugging.”

So Uncle Abe went and got the shears and then had to leave us to go and sit in his rocker because the ache was coming on.

The fool sheep seemed to know that something was coming. The lambs bleated anxiously and the sheep emitted silly, flat squawls and the ram in the inner enclosure kept taking little short back-ups and sudden short runs with his head down.

Jim climbed into the pen and cautiously, with arms spread, drove the sheep this way and that until one old ewe, with a high-strung face and a turn-down mouth that seemed to be made for bleating, was cornered. Jim jumped and grabbed her by the thick wool of the back.

“Hold her head,” he gasped, “while I throw her.”

At a Disadvantage

I got a half Nelson around her neck. She kept continually going ahead and backing up and it was a struggle to hold her. Jim got down and reached under.

“Now,” he grunted, giving the sheep a roll and landing her on her back, himself sitting down violently and getting under so that he had her forelegs and shoulders in the air and her hind legs waving madly.

The other sheep stood back aghast and a lone lamb came and bleated hideously in my ear.

“Hang one leg across her hind legs,” gasped Jim, struggling, “and then start the shears right there.”

He stuck his finger in the wool up near her neck.

“Then snip along, laying it off in a wad, like a blanket,” he directed.

The first one was a mess. The wool came off in various sized wads. I was afraid of nipping the animal, which trembled and shook as I snipped with the grass cutters. Some places I had the wool off right to the pinkish skin of the beast. Then would come a patch where I left it an inch long. I saw several ticks sticking horribly in the skin, fat blue slugs.

“Ugh,” I said.

“Swell,” said Jimmie, heavily. “Now easy up around the neck here.”

But I left a kind of ruff around that one’s neck. The second one came off easier, and almost in one piece. The third one was hard to catch and two lambs came and bleated in my ear while I labored. The others in the pen kept up the helpless bleating as if we were murdering them, instead of doing them a great favor for the coming of summer.

Jim swears he did not see the ram coming. I heard various thuds and bumps back in the inner pen. But it seems the crying of his wives and children had given the ram new strength. He broke down or vaulted the inner pen. And just as he came through the outer bars, I started to rise from my kneeling position to get at a new cut on the sheep. And he had me at the famous, the historic disadvantage.

On the way home in the car, I rode in the back seat, lying down crossways, with my knees up.

“Was it five times he hit me, Jim?” I asked.

“No, it was only three,” said Jim, kindly.

“Well, for the fifth time,” I stated, “I am through with visiting your Uncle Abe.”

Editor’s Notes: The title comes from a proverb, ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’ (God is especially gentle towards those who are very vulnerable).

Uncle Abe and his farm are regulars in these stories.

  1. $5 in 1941 would be $100 in 2025, ↩︎
  2. 50 cents in 1941 would be $10 in 2025. ↩︎
  3. No, the sheep were not on drugs. Smelling high just meant that it smelled bad. ↩︎

Fifth Columnist

by

On April 22, 2025

In Birdseye Center, Comic

April 26, 1941

A fifth columnist is a person who undermines a nation from within, usually in favor of an enemy nation. At his point in World War 2, Britain and her Commonwealth allies were on their own, so in this case, Wes Clipper and the gang are implying that the “Gloomy Gus” is acting “defeatist” by saying the war was not going well, and he might as well be Hitler himself.

They Are Very Easily Lost

by

On April 12, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

In the midst of the rumpus there appeared a large and startled policeman. “Now what this?” he said very cheerfully.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 12, 1941.

“Isn’t that the same old coat?” inquired Jimmie Frise.

“Yes, it’s the same coat,” I informed him stiffly. “And the same old suit underneath. And the same old shoes. Probably you’ve forgotten there is a war?”

“I suppose you are not doing any spring cleaning at home this year,” surmised Jim, “on account of the war.”

“Being neat and tidy is one thing,” I stated. “But spending money on new clothes is another. The money I might spend on clothes I might lend the government to buy war material.”

“You might, is right,” agreed Jim. “But if you are the average person, you will just buy enough war bonds and certificates to keep your conscience from yelling out loud. And then you’ll weasel along as usual.”

“I haven’t bought any new clothes,” I insisted.

“But have you bought any new war bonds?” inquired Jim.

“No,” I confessed. “But at least I am in a position to buy some; which I wouldn’t be in if I had spent the money on clothes.”.

“In other words,” said Jim, “if they can persuade you, you can be persuaded. I see.”

“I don’t like your tone,” I informed him. “The government would rather have you save your money than spend it. Every dollar you spend these days on personal things, on non-war things, is a dollar’s worth of work done by somebody else on non-war jobs. And a dollar’s worth of material used for non-war purposes.”

“So if we starve a lot of tailors and clothing store clerks,” pursued Jimmie, “we are helping the war. Is that it?”

“Well, they can join the army,” I pointed out.

“I see,” said Jim. “And the $401 you would have spent on a new suit of clothes will buy them uniforms and feed them for three days or so.”

“If,” I explained, “I lend the government the $40.”

“Then they come back from war,” said Jim, “and take off the uniforms. And then you want your $40 back from the government – plus interest. Where does that money come from?”

“The government can issue a new lot of bonds, peace bonds,” I explained, “and pay back the war bonds.”

“Who’ll buy these peace bonds?” inquired Jim. “There will be no war profiteers this time to soak away their loot in bonds.”

“Well,” I explained, “when I get my cash back I’ll go and buy the suit of clothes I’ve been putting off. And tailors and clothing store clerks who have just taken off the uniform will be back on the job to sell them to me. And they’ll start making money again. They can buy the peace bonds.”

“Won’t they want a new suit of clothes, too?” demanded Jim.

“It’s very complicated. Jim,” I showed him. “All I know is, a lot of clever men are working on this problem of war finance. And we’ve got to accept their advice.”

Using War As Excuse

“Who says they’re clever?” asked Jimmie.

“Well, they’re the cream of the financial world,” I assured him. “They proved their cleverness by rising to the top of their profession in the past few years.”

“What does that prove?” demanded Jim. “Maybe they’re the same birds who got the world into this mess.”

“Okay,” I submitted. “Who will we put in their place? You and me? Or some of those wild-eyed agitators? Or just another bunch of the same sort who are in now? Jim, I don’t think it’s the leaders of the world who are fuddled. I think it’s us, the people of the world.”

“We’re sheep,” said Jim. “We’ve got to have a shepherd.”

“Good sheep usually have a good shepherd,” I reminded him.

“In that suit,” declared Jim, “you sure look like an old sheep that had been let run wild. You’ve got stouter since you bought it. It pulls at all the buttons. The pants are shiny. I can faintly see your shirt through the elbow.”

“I’m going to make it do until summer,” I stated. “Then I can put on my old gabardine suit. Next fall I’ll get a new tweed.”

“Come clean,” wheedled Jimmie. “What is it you are buying instead? A new boat? An outboard engine? You’re just like millions of other people. You are using the war as an excuse. You are going around in old clothes, creating an impression of how patriotic you are, and getting away with it; while really you are soaking your money away into something else you’ve really wanted all your life but couldn’t afford because you had to keep up with the Joneses.”

“Jim, being cynical won’t get you anywhere,” I assured him.

“I’m not cynical,” said Jimmie. “I’m just trying to figure things out. And to figure things out, you’ve got to face the facts. And the easiest fact to face is you. And me.”

“And what light do you see in me?” I inquired.

“Look,” said Jim. “We’re at war. We insist that we are not at war with nations, but with certain gangsters in those nations. However, the people of those nations are not like us. They are not giving what they feel like giving. They are giving all. Do you realize that if you want a new overcoat in Germany you have to turn in your old one?”

“It’s a good idea.” I agreed. “We should get an allowance on all our old clothes when we buy new ones.”

“They don’t get any allowance,” said Jim. “How many coats have you got? They’re only allowed one. And when they buy a new one, they turn in their old one without any allowance or without any question. The idea is that they can’t have any more of anything than they actually need. It goes for food, for household furniture and goods of all kinds; for books, lawn mowers, soap, handkerchiefs, everything.”

“They’ll rebel,” I assured him. “Human nature is human nature.”

“All these people who are allowed as little as possible,” went on Jimmie, “are organized by harsh law to produce as much as possible. But since there is no possible demand for clothes, furniture, books, soap, lawn mowers, they produce only what the government wants. And that is bombs, planes, guns, and food for soldiers.”

“Now you see the reason,” I exclaimed, “why I am not buying a new, suit.”

“Suppose,” said Jim craftily “the government suddenly announced that you couldn’t buy a new suit?”

I looked down at myself. It was true my vest buttons all drew my vest in ridges and creases. It was true my trousers bagged. I examined my elbow. I could detect a faint whitish tone through the tweed.

“The government wouldn’t do that,” I declared.

“Certainly it would,” cried Jimmie, “if we, the people, wanted it to.”

“Ah,” I smiled. “If we wanted it to.”

“There are plenty of people shouting at the government to do more than it is doing,” said Jim. “And about the only thing they haven’t done is start to interfere with the private lives of Canadians.”

“They don’t let us go to Florida for a holiday,” I pointed out.

“That doesn’t affect the people of Canada,” scoffed Jim. “That only affects a tiny minority of people who have the money to think of their comfort. Wait until the government starts telling you what you can buy with your money.”

“They’re telling us now,” I retorted. “By taking our surplus in taxes, they’ve cut me off of a lot of things I intended to buy.”

“That isn’t the same as being told you can’t buy a new suit,” warned Jimmie. “Or that you can only have one pound of bacon a week. Or you can only buy ten gallons of gasoline a week.”

“Will it get that tough?” I wondered.

“It’s that tough and a thousand times tougher in Britain now,” said Jim. “And it is Britain we are supposed to be helping.”

“Aren’t we helping?” I demanded.

“Well, there are a lot of people yelling, for the government to go full out in the war,” said Jim. “Remember, in our country, the government represents the people. And if the people suddenly agree that we want to go full out, the government will obey. Then they’ll take all your money, not borrow it. They’ll tell you what you can buy. They’ll tell you what work you’ll do. We can save democracy all right by throwing it over.”

“I can have this suit pressed,” I considered. “If it doesn’t look right then, maybe I will get a new suit.”

“After all, it’s Easter,” said Jim.

“And besides,” I said, “I wouldn’t want to be caught by any high-handed government decree that I can’t buy any clothes I want…”

“That’s the spirit,” cried Jim.

“You won’t know this suit in a couple of days,” I said. “I’ll send it to be pressed tonight.”

“Look,” said Jim, “there’s a while-you-wait pressing place just a block north. At lunch, let’s both go in and get all pressed up. I could do with a little smartening up, seeing it’s Easter.”

“What kind of a place is this pressing establishment?” I inquired.

“It’s just up in the next block or the one next to that,” said Jimmie. “I can’t just place it. But I’ve seen it lots of times. We’ll find it. You sit in little cubicles while they press your suit. It only takes a few minutes…”

“Probably one of those cheap little joints,” I protested, “where they leave a smell of gasoline all over you…”

But we had a quick sandwich and went out looking for the press-while-you-wait shop that Jimmie had often seen. And after walking around four blocks and not finding it, we finally asked a cigar store man if he knew of it. And he said it was two blocks farther west. He knew it well. His cousin ran it. So we went into a rather down-at-heel neighborhood, mostly garages and warehouses, found the press-while-you-wait shop as directed.

It was hardly the kind of place I would have selected myself. There were two or three very odd-looking gentlemen sitting in the front part of the shop, reading the papers. They had long sharp noses and sideburns. They were all smoking cigars which they had tucked halfway into the very corner of their mouths. They looked up at us when we came in as though we were the funny-looking customers, not they.

There were no cubicles, as Jimmie had promised. Only a large screen. The place was barely furnished. There were a couple of second-hand cupboards partly filled with a few shabby garments on hangers. But at the back there was a man working very casually at a hot smelling pressing machine. Not a very modern pressing machine at that.

“Can you press us up while we wait?” asked Jimmie pleasantly, as this gent left his job to come and attend to us. He, too, had a cigar butt jammed away off in his east cheek.

“It’ll take three-quarters of an hour,” he said rather impatiently.

“Let’s leave it, Jim,” I said. Because from the back of the shop two more men came out, looking at us with the same cold, appraising eye. Behind them I could see others. The place was alive with them, all the same kind, lean, oddly dressed, and all with cigars shoved away over in their cheeks. And most of them with sideburns.

But Jim had his coat off and was undoing his braces.

“Let’s get it over with while we’re at it,” he said.

So the proprietor shoved the screen impatiently around to shield us, and the men sitting and standing about resumed reading and muttered to one another, and some of them drifted into the back room.

“Gimme,” said the proprietor, reaching for our pants and coats.

Jim picked up a paper to read. It was a racing paper, like a railway time table full of small print.

I picked up some annual of the pressing and cleaning trade. And the thudding of the pressing machine came to us behind the screen. Jim was intent on his catalogue of horses and I was glancing over the pressing journal when a sudden scuffle caused us to prick up our ears.

The door opened and we heard a loud voice say:

“Nobody budge!”

But everybody budged. There were scuffles and thudding of feet. There were soft, startled yells of warning and loud bellows. Everybody budged but Jimmie and me, sitting there behind the screen, in our underwear, unable to see what was going on, but very much interested, I can assure you.

In the midst of the rumpus, there appeared around the edge of the screen a large and startled policeman.

“Now what’s this?” he said very cheerfully.

“What’s what?” inquired Jim, hiding the paper he was reading behind his back.

“Come on, me buckoes,” said the policeman. “Get your pants on.”

He hailed somebody over the screen and two more policemen came and stood looking at us.

“A new one,” said the oldest.

“Evidence,” said the second, “of the honest character of the establishment.”

“What is this, constable?” I demanded with dignity.

“Come on, get your pants on,” said he. “It’s chilly in the wagon.”

I was the first to smell singeing.

“Whose pants?” I yelled, leaping up and trying to dash past the constable.

They were my pants. The proprietor had my trousers on the machine and in the excitement he had left the pad down, with the power on. It was an old-fashioned machine. And when the policeman lifted the lever, there was very little left of my good tweed pants.

Meanwhile, ignoring us and our tragedy, other policemen were leading men out of the shop half a dozen or more coming from the back room. Upstairs, we could hear tramping and scuffling, and still more came down the back stairs.

“It’s a raid,” said Jimmie. “And if I’m not mistaken it’s on a handbook outfit2.”

“Wrap something around him,” said the head policeman, “and get him in the wagon.”

“Inspector,” I cried, “we can prove we are innocent customers who just dropped in.”

“This one,” said the first cop, “was reading a racing form when I popped around the screen.”

“There was nothing else to read,” retorted Jimmie indignantly.

From our coats, we were able to produce identity cards.

“Identity cards won’t help you,” said the head policeman. “You were found in. You can prove your identity and innocence in court. Our job is simply to raid the joint and collect all those found in.”

 “Are you going to ruin my good name,” I demanded, “when you can see the charred ruins of my pants right there on that pressing machine? What will the judge say to you when I tell him that evidence of my innocence was still smouldering before your very eyes?”

So they took our names and addresses. And in the cupboard they found a pair of pants that would at least carry me as far as the nearest clothing store. In fact they drove Jimmie and me to the store in one of the scout cars.

And that is how I got this very handsome Donegal tweed3 I’m wearing.

Editor’s Notes:

  1. $40 in 1941 would be $785 in 2025. ↩︎
  2. A “handbook outfit” is a criminal organization involved in illegal gambling, like a bookie. ↩︎
  3. Donegal tweed is a woven tweed manufactured in County Donegal, Ireland. ↩︎

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