Tag: 1941 Page 3 of 4

There’s One in Every Cellar

by admin

On April 2, 2022

In Greg-Jim Story

***She shoved back the hood and lifted the table cover. And looked with horror on the face of the clock.***

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 5, 1941.

“Are you busy?” inquired Jimmie Frise over the telephone.

“I’m just studying the seed catalogues,” I replied.

“I wonder would you drive down for a minute,” said Jim, “and take me over to the watch repair man’s?”

“Jim, my car’s in the repair shop,” I informed him rather comfortably, because it was a rotten day out. April showers. Cold sleet, in other words. In this country it is May showers bring June flowers.

“The kids have my car out,” grumbled Jim, “and they won’t be home till late.”

“Sorry, Jim,” I said. “I left my car in this morning for that spring overhaul. You know. The one they describe in the circular they send around. Your car needs spring cleaning.'”

“You’re falling for everything,” laughed Jim. “Circulars about your car. Seed catalogues.”

“It’s in the air, Jim,” I assured him. “Everybody’s restless at this time of year. What are you falling for? What do you want to drive to the watch repair man’s for? Why can’t you walk?”

“It’s our clock,” explained Jim. “I’m sick and tired of sitting here looking at a clock that not only isn’t running; it hasn’t run for six years. And I just suddenly decided to have it fixed.”

“Aha,” I crowed. “So you’ve got the spring bug, too.”

“That fool clock,” said Jim, “has been sitting on the mantel now ever since 1935 and it hasn’t uttered a tick. There in its place of honor, on the mantel, presiding over my household, it sits at two minutes to two. I’ve looked at it thousands of times. My family has done the same. It is always two to two.”

“I hate to see your high purpose come to nothing, Jim,” I urged. “Couldn’t you carry it over to the watch repair man? It’s only three or four blocks.”

“It’s too measly a day,” said Jim. “It’s raining. And while it’s not a heavy clock, it would be an awkward package to carry on a day like this.”

“Jim,” I egged him on, “maybe this impulse to have that clock fixed may never come again for another six years. I know this feeling. It passes very quickly.”

“I’ve had it dozens of times before,” confessed Jim. “But it never was strong enough to make me take the blame clock over. And now, when I haven’t a car and your car is in the repair shop, I’ve got the urge stronger than it’s ever been.”

“But not strong enough to make you carry it over,” I submitted.

“Maybe if you came with me I’d carry it,” wheedled Jimmie.

“It’s pouring rain,” I retorted. “And I’m just at the zinnias.”

“April showers,” pleaded Jim.

“Ice water,” I corrected.

Restlessness of Spring

And we hung up. But it only takes a little while to come to the end of a seed catalogue. Even if you take your pencil and mark with an X the ones you are going to get plants of and a V for the ones you are going to get seeds for, in about 15 minutes you come to the vegetables at the back. Then you get up and go to the back dining-room window and look out at the winter-killed garden, all full of mud and patches of ice in the lee and broken hockey sticks and half-buried rusty snow shovels. And what is more natural than that you should realize that it is a long time yet to the 24th of May and the planting of the garden?

Besides, the rain looks as if it were slackening.

So I put my coat on and an old hat and walked down to Jimmie’s.

“I’ve been sitting here expecting you,” he grinned.

“The heck you have,” I retorted. “I hadn’t the faintest intention of coming.”

“But you’re here,” cried Jim. “It’s the spring.”

“I don’t like people to be able to read my mind,” I informed him. “Or my character either.”

“I knew you’d come,” stated Jim, “because you are restless and impulsive like everybody and everything else at this time of year. Nature makes us all impulsive and restless in April. How else would all the June marriages take place if everybody didn’t go suddenly impulsive about the first of April?”

“I’d hate to understand everything the way you do,” I assured him. “Is this the clock?”

“And a lot heavier than I suspected,” said Jim.

I lifted the clock off the mantel. It weighed about 12 or 15 pounds.

“What a brute,” I exclaimed. “You couldn’t carry that.”

“We could carry it between us,” submitted Jim, “but it would be awkward walking half-sideways for four blocks with that thing between us. But I’ve thought up an idea while I was waiting for you. There’s an old baby carriage down cellar.”

“Then you don’t need me,” I said hastily. “You can wheel it over yourself.”

“You’ll help me carry the baby carriage up from the cellar?” inquired Jim.

“Certainly,” I agreed. “But you don’t catch me perambulating through the streets with a clock in a baby carriage. Not at my age. I mean, after all, there is a little dignity …”

“Now, look here,” protested Jimmie. “What’s wrong with pushing a baby carriage through the streets with a clock in it? What’s the difference what you’ve got in the baby carriage?”

“Jim,” I declared firmly, “a baby carriage is a baby carriage. It is dedicated to a high and sacred purpose. I gave up pushing baby carriages many years ago. I don’t expect to start again until my grandchildren begin to arrive. And then I’ll not only do it gladly; I’ll do it proudly. But in the meantime I don’t propose to go through the streets of my own neighborhood like a peddler shoving a barrow.”

“Just walk beside me,” insisted Jimmie.

“No, Jim, no,” I said emphatically. It wouldn’t look dignified, the two of us using a baby carriage for a wheelbarrow. No, sir.”

“You’re a snob,” accused Jim.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m a snob.”

“Thousands of people use baby carriages for carrying parcels,” pleaded Jim. “Every Saturday afternoon you’ll see hundreds of young couples out shopping with their baby and the carriage filled with parcels.”

“Ah, that’s different,” I said. “I don’t know why it is different. But the very idea of us using a baby carriage as a parcel carrier seems to me infra dig.”

“Well,” said Jim with finality, “I fail to see it. There is an old baby carriage in almost every cellar in the world. Put down there to keep in case some other member of the family might want it. But when it is wanted, no new parent would even look at a second-hand pram. There always has to be a new one. So all over the world are these little and highly useful vehicles lying in cobwebs and coal dust.”

“It can’t be helped,” I insisted.

“Well, there’s a war on,” stated Jim. “And we’re going to see a lot of funny things before it’s over. We are going to see people casting silly pride aside. We’re going to see old clothes worn with pride and baby carriages used for wheelbarrows. For I’m going to take my clock over to the watch repair shop in the pram. And there is no reason on earth, intelligent or otherwise, why I shouldn’t use a baby carriage to carry bundles. It has wheels. Okay. I wheel it.”

So I took off my coat and went down cellar with Jim and found the old baby carriage in behind stacks of stored garden furniture and curtain stretchers and retired iron beds and things. And we worked it out and dusted it off and carried it upstairs.

Jim lifted the clock and set it in the pram.

“Look,” said Jim. “What better vehicle could be imagined than this pram for carrying so delicate an instrument as a clock? See this little mattress? See those big soft springs? Why, it’s ideal for transporting clocks. Even a $2,000 car would jolt the stuffing out of a clock, as compared with the soft ride it’ll get in here.”

“Quite so,” I said drily, putting on my coat.

Jim went and got a couple of small tablecloths and a bridge table cover and tucked them over the clock.

“Ha,” I scoffed. “Weakening, eh? Trying to pretend it is a baby?”

“Certainly not,” said Jim. “I am just protecting the clock from the rain.”

I looked out. It had begun its weary April drizzle again.

“Turn that hood up well over it,” I suggested. “You don’t want a good clock all stained and wet.”

So while Jim was getting his coat on, I undid the little screws that hold the hood and turned it up so as to protect thoroughly the contents of the carriage. I altered the covers a little, tucking them down around the foot of the carriage and creating a lifelike illusion of a baby stowed within.

“There,” I said. “That’s realistic enough.”

“Help me down the steps with it,” said Jim.

So I took the front end and helped him lower the carriage down the front steps.

Then, since I was going his way as far as my house, I could not do other than walk with him as he pushed the pram along. After all, there was no way of telling, from appearances, that there was a clock in the carriage. The only thing that occurred to me was that if any of the neighbors saw Jimmie pushing a pram it might inspire some lively curiosity. I caught Jimmie casting a few slantwise glances at the windows of his immediate neighbors.

But half way up the block we encountered an elderly couple, a man and wife, walking under the one umbrella. And the way they stood aside for us, and the warm, friendly smiles they bestowed on us, trying to get a glimpse of the little one within as we went by, was quite gratifying. There is, after all nothing so flattering to people of 50 as to have people of 70 mistake them for youngsters.

Protests and Explanations

“I’ll stick with you, Jim,” I assured him as we went on.

“You don’t have to,” replied Jim. “I can get along very nicely.”

“You’d do as much for me,” I insisted.

As a matter of fact, despite the drizzle of rain, we got quite a kick pushing that pram. At the street crossings I got hold of it myself, and when Jim lighted a cigarette I had it all to myself and shoved it at least three or four doors along. It was years and years since I had felt a pram jouncing and smoothly rolling before me. Nice feeling.

When we turned on to the shopping street it began to rain a little heavier.

“Only a block more,” said Jim.

But an elderly lady barred our way.

“Tssk, tssk,” she said, smiling benignly. “You’ll soak the child. Don’t you men know how to tuck …”

She had shoved back the hood and lifted the table cover. And was looking with horror into the face of the clock.

Then she stared, with incredible suspicion on her face for so elderly and kindly a lady, at us.

Like a traffic cop, she signalled the doorman of the movie theatre to come to her aid: had sent a boy on a bicycle down the street for a policeman; and had 40 people in a tight ring around us so that we could neither escape nor make our protests and explanations heard above the loud murmur.

“Imagine,” said the elderly lady. “Making off with a clock! I’ve heard of them making off with a pound of butter. Or a can of peas. But a clock!”

“Slickest scheme I ever saw,” said the movie doorman. And others gave similar summaries, while Jimmie and I tried vainly to locate one neighborly face to whom we could explain that we were on the way to the watch repair shop.

At first the policeman was inclined to look upon us as guilty until proven innocent. But we produced our registration cards, drivers permits, letters, bills, receipts; and then the girl in the movie ticket window, who couldn’t resist the excitement any longer, came out and identified us as a couple of regular customers for years past, though she didn’t know our names. Finally a grocery messenger boy wheeled in and positively identified us. The policeman accompanied us down to the watch repair shop. And the man there knew us well.

So all was well except for one thing.

“You can push it home alone, Jim,” I assured him. “After all, snobbery is just another name for the respect for a certain type of law or convention. A baby carriage is for babies.”

However, the movie got out just then and in the crowd we saw two little neighbor girls from only a couple of doors away from Jimmie’s. And we hailed them and asked them if they would like to wheel the baby carriage back home for us.

Which they were vastly delighted to do.

With the little girls walking ahead, in the most ladylike, the most motherly air you ever saw, we followed slowly.

And so back home and down again into the cellar, behind the iron bed and the curtain stretchers and the garden furniture, went the baby carriage once more.

Editor’s Notes: “In the lee” means next to something. “Infra dig” means demeaning.

Next!

by admin

On March 22, 2022

In Birdseye Center, Comic

I don’t quite get the joke, but I gather that Wes was hoping that he would make a lot more charging the hermit for a haircut rather than selling him just a plug of chewing tobacco.

Clothes Make the Man

by admin

On January 29, 2022

In Greg-Jim Story

***“Can you do my windows starting tomorrow at 8 a.m.?” she inquired crisply.***

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 25, 1941.

“The funniest thing,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the effect the uniform has on men.”

“I’d be as proud as a rooster,” I informed him, “if they’d let me back into it.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Jimmie. “What I mean is, some of the finest looking men, the minute they put on uniform, look like tramps. And some of the dowdiest looking men of my acquaintance, as soon as they don uniform, turn out to be Adonises.”

“It’s perfectly simple,” I explained. “The uniform is standardized. Thus, the guy who could cover up his physical imperfections as to shoulders or legs by choosing artfully tailored clothes is shown up in his true light when he puts on uniform. And many a man who is physically perfection has never had the taste or the money to buy the clothes that would show him off.”

“Besides, in uniform,” said Jim, “you can’t slouch around. I think good appearance is mostly a matter of tidiness anyway. It isn’t the quality of the clothes. It’s the way you keep them.”

“The reason I wear such loud clothes,” I confided, “is because I am really so shy. I want people to look at my clothes, rather than at me, see?”

“Who ever would have thought of that?” cried Jim. “I bet you were a funny looking soldier.”

“Before I got to France.” I admitted, “my size kind of caused a snicker. I was only five foot two and seven-eighths. And I only weighed 106 pounds and 11 ounces.”

“You have the fractions,” said Jim.

“A man my size always has to use the fractions,” I pointed out. “But once I got to France there were no more snickers. I am told that plenty of big 200-pound comrades of mine used to say their prayers at night in the trenches and ask God to make them little like me.”

“I guess small men are handiest in war,” agreed Jim. “But suppose you had been a private soldier. How would you have got a uniform to fit you?”

“I was a private soldier,” I informed him. “For six weeks. By that time they couldn’t find a uniform small enough, so they made me a lieutenant and told me to go and buy my own uniform.”

“So that’s why so many famous generals are small men,” exclaimed Jimmie.

“Listen,” I said, “do you realize why I have worked so hard all my life? Do you know what boiled me full of ambition to make money? Just the fact that in Toronto street cars my feet do not touch the floor when I am sitting on the seats. So I just had to have a motor car. You have no idea what a spur it is to be a runt.”

“You don’t wear high heels,” remarked Jim, studying my boots.

“No, sir,” I assured him. “When you are a shorty, the trick is to pretend you don’t care. The smartest thing to do is to wear clothes that accentuate your shortness.”

We’re All Self-Conscious

“What the heck,” scoffed Jimmie. “Who cares how big you are? Anyway, who looks at you?”

“Oh, we’re all self-conscious about something,” I declared. “Big men are often more self-conscious than little men. I once had a big man six feet four and 300 pounds of muscle tell me almost in tears about how self-conscious he was. He said every time there was a dog-fight or whenever a drunk made a scene on a street car, everybody looked at him in expectation. He is scared of dogs and hates drunks. He is just a big, shy man. Yet whenever there is any trouble, the whole world looks to him to make a hero of himself.”

“By George, I never thought of that,” said Jim.

“He said he got so he was scared to go out, scared to walk the street, scared to go anywhere,” I described, “for fear of some trouble arising that everybody would expect him to deal with because of his size. That’s being self-conscious.”

“Nobody would ever expect you to jump in and stop a fight,” agreed Jim.

“And that’s why, if I do jump in, I’m a heck of a hero,” I explained. “You don’t know what an awful temptation it is to a little man to jump in and be a hero. That’s what makes us self-conscious. Self-consciousness, after all, is just fear. What we are scared of makes us self-conscious. If I am scared of being poor, I try to look rich. And if I am scared people will find out I am rich, I try to look poor. Life is very complicated.”

“It sure is,” admitted Jimmie. “But the good old uniform makes life a lot simpler for a great many of us. Personally, I wasn’t a bad looking soldier.”

“You’re one of those men, Jim,” I confessed, “who looks the same whether he is in a business suit, a pair of overalls or a nightshirt.”

“I wore overalls,” said Jimmie, “the first 16 years of my life, around the farm. And I’m proud of it.”

“So you should be,” I stated. “In fact, one of my Christmas presents this year was a suit of overalls. $2.95. I bought them myself and sent them up to the house anonymously.”

“What the dickens do you want overalls for?” demanded Jim.

“They are the greatest things in the world,” I informed him, “for fishing, rabbit shooting, gardening and pattering around the car. They are warm. They keep rain off you. They keep you clean. But, most of all, they have a curious psychic effect on people like me. My ancestors all wore overalls. And the minute I put mine on, I suddenly feel capable. All my city-bred helplessness vanishes. This past month I have learned more about the engine in my car than I ever learned before. Why? Because I had overalls on. And my mind seemed to work.”

“Such stuff,” said Jim.

“It’s a fact, Jim,” I assured him. “Clothes make the man. Dress up in a tuxedo with a white stiff shirt and light evening pumps on and you suddenly are infused with a feeling of elegance. You walk with conscious pride. You are witty. Your tongue grows nimble. Your whole being has a swing and a lilt to it.”

“It’s a fact,” admitted Jimmie.

“Put on your oldest clothes,” I continued, “a little ragged, a little skimpy and bulged at the knees, and you feel lazy and dopey and listless. When I put on my overalls I suddenly feel mechanical. I go all artizany. I seem to feel strong muscles in my forearms and my hands get rough.”

“Hold on, hold on,” begged Jimmie.

“I am filled with a sense of capability,” I insisted, “of knowledge of hammers and saws. I can pick up a hammer in my ordinary business clothes and I go all kind of helpless. With overalls on, I can pick up a hammer and feel as if I had been born with a hammer in my hand.”

“You’re a Jekyll and Hyde,” said Jim.

“We can all be Jekyll and Hydes,” I declared, “with a few changes of clothes.”

A Man in Overalls

“How would you like to give me a demonstration of this miracle in your overalls?” demanded Jim.

“Any time,” I assured him.

“Well, it’s like this,” said Jim. “Last November I put the storm windows on without washing them. The family was at me every day and I kept putting it off on account of the deer hunting and one thing and another.”

“One of the things I don’t feel like,” I interrupted, “is putting on storm windows in my overalls. It only applies to the mechanical arts, like engines, carpentering and so on.”

“Wait till I explain,” said Jim. “So one Saturday, when the folks were all out, I got the urge and put the storm windows all on. But it seems I should have had them washed first. The family, which wanted me to put them up so badly, hadn’t washed the windows. They were going to do that whenever I got in the mood to put them up. So there was an awful row.”

“If it’s done, it’s done,” I assured him.

“No,” said Jim; “they were pretty bad when I put them up, but they’re worse now. They’ve got to come down.”

“If you put them up without help,” I inquired, “why do you need a man in overalls to help you take them down?”

“Okay,” said Jim, “okay, if you don’t want to lend a hand to a friend. And this is wartime, too.”

“Storm windows are silly, Jim,” I said. “You should have your house insulated.”

“Okay,” said Jim, “okay. Never mind.”

“It would only be to put my overalls on,” I said, “if I did lend you a hand.”

“Like a fool,” said Jim, “I broadcast all over the house that I would take the windows down and wash them myself. If it was just to take them down I wouldn’t ask any help. But when they came home and found I had put them up right out of the cellar, all dusty and grimey, I announced that I would take them down and wash them.”

“Aw, they won’t hold you to that,” I protested.

“Oh, yes, they will,” replied Jim. “You can’t brag around my house.”

“Well,” I said.

So we quit at 3 in the afternoon and I went home and put my overalls on. I keep them in the attic closet, where I can go and try them on now and then when none of my children are around. I have also worn them quite a bit working on the car, shovelling the snow, putting up some new bird feeding houses in the yard, and anything I can think of. They are my most exciting Christmas present, even if I did send them up anonymously.

They give you a nice, broadlegged feeling when you get them on.

“You look better than I’ve ever seen you look,” declared Jim when I walked down his sidedrive in them. “You look kind of … natural.”

“Thanks, Jim,” I said. “I knew you wouldn’t kid me.”

Jim got a pail of hot water, a chamois, some rags and a scrub brush. We carried out the stepladder and started on the front living-room windows. Jim would climb up and unbutton the window and pry it out of the frame. Then I would draw the bottom out and take hold and lower it down. In overalls, you grab hold of things with your arms and chest, in a most businesslike fashion, because the more dirt you get on your overalls, the better they are.

On that same principle, I took the lead in the washing of them, because a little soapy water splashed on my overalls would only increase their beauty.

“Well,” said Jim, “you’re right. I never saw such a change in anybody in my life.”

“Here y’are,” I said, with a rowdy, window cleaner air. And I handed him up the beautifully polished window and he slipped it into the frame and I banged it home with a good strong, rough hand.

The Magic Garment

We had got pretty well along with the front windows when the elderly lady who lives right opposite Jim came across the road and up the walk.

“I suppose,” she said, “you’ll be all day at this job?”

“We won’t be done before dark, ma’am, “I assured her.

Jimmie came down off the stepladder and joined us. He didn’t have overalls. All he had on was his old fishing clothes.

“Can you do mine starting tomorrow at 8 a.m.?” she inquired crisply.

She was so sharp and businesslike, I thought Jimmie had certainly got on the most amiable relations with his neighbors.

“And how much,” she inquired shrewdly, “do you charge? Is it by the window or by the hour?”

I looked at Jim to let him in on the joke.

But he was just standing staring at the lady with a puzzled frown.

“Well, usually, madam,” I said, “we charge by the window. We measure the window in square inches, and…”

“Nonsense,” said the lady, very choppy; “I have it done each year, the whole house, for $6. I’ll give you $6 and no more.”

“What do you say, Jim?” I hedged, feeling he should be in the neighborly fun.

“Well, aw, ugh,” said Jim, changing position and standing more squarely in front of the lady so she could get a look at him.

She glanced at him briefly, but looked at once back to me as though I were the one to deal with.

“I’ve been watching you,” she said, and you certainly do a good job. My windows don’t really require a second washing at this season of the year. But I have decided that you do so thorough a job I will have you do mine. Come. When will it be? Tomorrow? That will suit me best. And I will pay $7, seeing it is winter.”

“Aw, er, wuh,” said Jimmie, smiling broadly and opening his coat to show his business collar and shirt underneath.

“Well, ma’am,” I said, “we are busy tomorrow, but we’ll give you a ring the first day we’re free. How will that do?”

She looked at me impatiently.

“Very well,” she said. “Make it a good clear day. But I suppose you know your business.”

So I wrote down her name and telephone and she walked back across the road, stamped the snow off and went indoors.

“Well,” said Jim, “I’ve lived across the street from the lady for 10 years. I know her as well as I know you. She knows me as well as you do.”

“She thought you were my helper,” I said. “She practically brushed you off.”

“She certainly didn’t recognize me,” said Jim.

“People never look at faces,” I stated. “They just look at clothes.”

“Then any little embarrassment I have felt,” said Jim, “over washing windows here on my front lawn has been wasted.”

“Precisely, Jim,” I agreed. “If any neighbor happened to notice us working around your house they’ve just said to themselves, the Frises are having something done, and forgotten about it.”

“It was your overalls,” cried Jim.

“The magic garment,” I exulted.

So we have arranged that when the lady across the road calls Jim’s house to get the names of the window cleaners who did such a thorough job the family will give her the telephone number of the first window cleaning outfit we found in the book.

And we hope they wear overalls when they arrive.

All Aboard!

by admin

On June 8, 2021

In Birdseye Center, Comic

No Crowing Before 7 A.M.

by admin

On April 17, 2021

In Greg-Jim Story

***I went to the nests; and in the third one found an egg!***

Any person with sense enough to come in out of the rain could run a chicken farm. That’s what they thought

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 19, 1941

“You and I lead a risky existence,” declared Jimmie Frise.

“Our dangerous days are over, Jim,” I said comfortably.

“I don’t mean risky in the sense of bullets and bombs and stuff,” said Jim. “But suppose this war goes on until nobody wants to look at cartoons any more.”

“You could always eke out an existence drawing war maps,” I submitted. “There is always room for artists there. War maps change every few days.”

“What about you?” inquired Jim. “Suppose this war goes on and on until you haven’t the heart to write any more nonsense.”

“I could peddle articles about how terrible the next war is going to be,” I stated. “Lots of men made a living predicting this war. Don’t you remember? They wrote sensational articles all about how the skies would be filled with bombers and whole cities blown to atoms. And how armies would fight only in tanks. And ships would be sunk from the air.”

“Now that I remember,” cried Jim, “they did a pretty good job of forecasting just what this war would be like.”

“Yep,” I said, “and they made enough to live on and see their predictions come true. It must be queer to be a London or a Berlin journalist and sit in your deep dugout, thumbing over your scrap book and studying all the big feature articles you wrote in 1930, with terrific illustrations of bombers blasting cities and tanks roaring over prostrate civilians…”

“We got so sick of those predictions,” interrupted Jim. “that we went into reverse. Instead of preparing us for the disaster, those articles just drove us to bury our heads in the sand. Maybe the government won’t let you peddle articles like that after this war. Maybe that will be defined as a form of indirect treason.”

“I’ll find something to write,” I assured him.

“Sometimes,” sighed Jimmie, “I get so weary of trying to find anything amusing in this sad world.”

“Laugh, clown, laugh,” I asserted. “It’s the old, old story. Jim. We who were framed by providence to be fools and clowns have to keep on, come hell or high water. The show must go on.”

Going Chicken Ranching

“I wish we had some side line,” muttered Jim.

“Such as?” I demanded.

“We have reached the age,” proposed Jim, “when we should look ahead to retiring. Naturally, we have been much too foolish to save any money. You can’t be a professional fool and a private wise guy at the same time.”

“Chicken ranching,” I submitted.

“That’s not so foolish,” ejaculated Jimmie, sitting up sharply. “I’ve often thought of it. But it is so common a way of escaping from the world, so many people have retired to chicken farming, that I was afraid you’d laugh at me if I suggested it.”

“If others have found an escape from the woes of this world by going chicken ranching,” I offered, “it probably indicates there is merits in the idea.”

“I know people,” said Jim. “who have decided to retire; who quit work and sold their homes in the city and went out and bought little places in the market garden belt; and who inside of two years were back in the city, cleaned to the bone and living on their relations.”

“They probably didn’t understand chickens,” I informed him. “But I should think anybody with enough sense to come in out of the rain could make a go of chickens. Why, out in the towns and villages, nearly everybody has a hen house at the foot of their back yard.”

“Chicken ranching is different,” said Jim. “Keeping a few chickens is one thing. Making a business of them is another.”

“Listen,” I said. “You were born and raised on the farm. You were 18 before you decided to come to the city and be a cartoonist. Surely there is enough of the farmer left in you to make a go of a chicken ranch.”

“I suppose if we went into chicken raising,” said Jim, “you’d leave all the hard work to me on those grounds?”

“I’d be the salesman, Jim,” I explained. “You be the production manager. I’ve got some swell ideas already. For instance: You know those white signs they have along the highways – ‘Cattle Crossing, 300 feet ahead’.”

“Yes,” said Jim, alertly.

“Well, sir, three hundred feet on either side of our little chicken ranch,” I said triumphantly, “I would have signs exactly the same only reading – ‘Chicken Crossing, 300 feet ahead.”

“Oh, boy,” said Jim.

“Can’t you just see them?” I cried. “And can you imagine the effect on the traffic going by? Why, hundreds of cars would stop, just for a laugh. And they’d come into our little place and buy our eggs and poultry. I could set up a little sort of glass shop in the front yard, with refrigerators and things, modern and white…”

Secret of Success

“I believe you’ve got something there,” exclaimed Jim. “Chicken Crossing, 300 feet ahead. Boy, that would stop them. The secret of success in any business is a new idea.”

“You said it, Jim.” I said enthusiastically. “Why maybe we’ve been wasting our lives in this newspaper business. I bet if we’d started in some business like chicken ranching 30 years ago, we’d be rich old geezers right now.”

Jim sat thinking in eager silence, his eyes dancing with the mental pictures he was seeing.

“Listen,” he said excitedly. “You know that little kennel run you have at the foot of your garden?”

“Yes,” I said, doubtfully.

“You don’t use it for anything but storing the lawnmower and the garden furniture,” said Jim. “It was built by some former tenant who kept pets of some kind…”

“Rabbits or pheasants,” I admitted.

“Why can’t we do a little preliminary experimenting,” demanded Jim. “I’d go in with you to get a few chickens. There is no use putting this idea off, the way we do all our other inspirations. Let’s start chicken raising right now. In a small way…”

“Not in the city, Jim,” I protested. “It’s against the law, for one thing.”

“Is it?” questioned Jim shrewdly. “Let’s find out.”

And while I sat filled with misgivings, Jimmie telephoned the city hall, and got the sanitation section in the department of public health and had a long chat with the gentleman there.

“See?” cried Jim, hanging up. “It is not illegal. There are no restrictions whatever against keeping chickens in the city.”

“It doesn’t sound possible, Jim,” I protested. “They’ve by-lawed everything else in the world.”

“The man said, definitely.” declared Jimmie, “that there were no restrictions. It was wholly a question of the neighbors. If the neighbors objected, then we could be summoned through the department of health.”

“It doesn’t sound natural, Jim,” I cautioned. “It doesn’t sound like Toronto.”

A Perfect Example

“The man said,” assured Jim, “that the grounds on which neighbors usually complained was that the chickens were unsanitary, or they were kept too near other people’s premises, or they created a nuisance by escaping into other people’s gardens. Or the rooster crowed too early in the morning … any of these reasons could be advanced by the neighbors and you could be forced to quit keeping chickens.”

“What is too early for a rooster to crow?” I inquired narrowly.

“The gentleman said,” advised Jim, “that in the court, it was usually the opinion of the bench that a rooster should not be permitted to crow before seven a.m. After that, it is all right.”

“What a perfect example,” I pronounced, “of pure democracy. There is no law regarding chickens. But if the neighbors object, you’re out. I didn’t think there was such a case of pure democracy left anywhere on earth. And we find it right here in Toronto.”

“It shows you the value,” declared Jim, “of keeping in with your neighbors. If you are the type that is eternally quarreling with you next door neighbors, objecting to their children, to their dogs, to their shaking mops out windows and so forth, then it is hopeless to try to keep chickens. But if you love your neighbors and they love you, then you have earned not the right but the privilege of keeping chickens. One sour neighbor, and you’re out!”

“Jim” I confessed, “not as an experiment in chickens, but as an experiment in citizenship, I am almost persuaded to agree to your proposition. How many chickens would we buy?”

“Six,” said Jim, after a moment’s calculation. “Five hens and a rooster. I’ll buy three, you buy three.”

“I’ll buy the rooster,” I said.

“And we’ll divide the cost of buying chicken feed,” said Jim, “and we’ll divide the eggs. Oh, boy, oh, boy, do I ever love a pure fresh egg, still warm from the nest, poached and sitting on top of a slice of lovely golden toast…”

“Shirred eggs for me,” I cut in. “Take a little dish and butter it. Break two lovely fresh eggs and put in a hot oven. Bake them until they are just set. Don’t let them bake too long…”

So we went down to the Market that very afternoon, and amidst a glorious music of roosters crowing and hens cackling and squawking that resounded in the big empty market like a symphony rehearsal in an empty auditorium, we walked up and down aisles of cages full of poultry and sought the advice of the white coated lads in charge.

But in the company of the chickens, Jimmie’s latent memories of the farm began to waken, and he began to show an increasing knowledge of the chicken world. The big fluffy Plymouth Rocks intrigued me: but Jim said eggs were our chief interest and he plumped for the White Leghorn. The young fellow who had us in tow praised the Rhode Island Red. He said he had a strain of them that were simply prodigious at eggs. They couldn’t be pried off the nest. He suspected most of them of laying two eggs a day.

Buying White Leghorns

So we ended up by buying a White Leghorn rooster and a combination of White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds. The idea being that we could experiment with them and so decide what to raise when the great day came for us to go ranching. The young fellow put them in sacks and we took them home in Jim’s car.

In no time at all, we had the pet house at the foot of my garden in shape for the chickens. All we had to do was move out the swing and the lawnmower and some canvas chairs, patch a couple of holes in the wire netting where some previous tenant had kept some sort of pets; and there we were. A large gathering of children of the neighborhood and both our families were present at the launching of the chickens from the sacks.

They took at once to their new quarters. Each ran about four steps out of the sack before starting to peck. And the big rooster got up on the door edge and let go such a trumpet that windows for half a block in both directions were opened and heads came popping out.

“We’ll have to keep that rooster locked up until seven a.m.,” said Jimmie.

“By the way,” I inquired, “how will we arrange about whose turn it will be to come and let them out each morning? You take one week and I’ll take the next?”

We went up to the Junction and found the last flour and feed store in the district. We bought a 20-pound bag of feed and a water trough and half a dozen china eggs to put in the nests. And before dark, we had the whole enterprise ship shape. Jim built three box nests and I nailed up two perches inside the little house. From a new house we saw under construction on our way to the flour and feed, we got a big carton full of sawdust and shavings. We went to bed that night in the knowledge of something well done and a new era dawning in our lives.

I was waked by sounds in my garden. And there was Jimmie in his old clothes at the chicken house, throwing feed. I dressed hastily and joined him. He lives only five doors south but he had promised to set his alarm clock for seven. It was only ten to seven.

However, I didn’t raise any quarrel. I examined the nests. There were only the china eggs. I renewed the water in the can.

“Mmmff,” said Jim, warmly. “It already smells chickeny.”

We watched them for about an hour and then had to go and get ready for the office. We left the office early and spent the evening around the birds, making friends with them and indicating in our dumb way that they were welcome in all respects and that we would not be distressed if they laid an egg.

Up At Six-Thirty

The next morning, I set my clock for 6.30 a.m. and caught Jimmie just as he came down the side drive. We entered together. I opened the door. Jim grabbed the feed bag and started throwing the feed. I went to the nests; and in the third one found an egg!

It was still warm. And Jimmie and I, after the excitement had died down and the rooster had been chased into silence from his perch on the door, handed it to each other several times while we praised its beauty of form, its transparency, its delicate shell … Then we tossed and Jim won it for breakfast. However, I claimed the right to borrow it long enough to take it inside and wake each member of my family and show it to them.

We latched the door and left repeated instructions to our family as to anybody disturbing the fowls during our absence, and we got back home around 5 p.m.

There were no more eggs. This distressed me, because I was figuring on a shirred egg for supper. But we broomed out the house and renewed the water and Jim made some changes in the sawdust and shavings in the nests. And it was about seven p.m., after a hasty supper, that Jimmie and I were sitting inside the chicken run watching the birds slowly going to bed when the party of neighbors came in the drive. They were a deputation. There were seven gentlemen and one lady. Some of them came from as far as ten doors north.

“Aha,” I said, when I saw their formal expressions, “democracy, huh?”

The spokesman was a man I have often lent my lawnmower to. I have even loaned him a lawn mower that I had borrowed. His children play with mine without ever a rift.

He explained that a wholly spontaneous delegation had been formed, by telephone. There were in the neighborhood several sick people. There was one new-born baby, whose parents got little sleep anyway. That the rooster crowed all day long. But even without the rooster, the hens made a slow, drawling, complaining sound that was most irritating.

“The weather has been very still,” I pleaded. “On ordinary days, you would not notice …”

But he said he had requested to be permitted to be the spokesman as he was an old friend of mine and he wanted to keep the delegation on the pleasantest footing possible.

“We’ve only had one egg,” I pleaded.

However, as the other members of the delegation began to swell up and get red, especially the one lady, we agreed to do something about the matter. The spokesman herded the delegation out before it burst.

So we sat down and watched the last of the fowls retire into the house. It was the rooster. With soft, masculine chuckles and mutters, he reassured his five ladies that all was well and he was coming in from his sentry duty.

I felt something tiny crawling on the back of my neck. I pursued it. It eluded me. I felt something on my wrist. I felt two things on the back of my neck, in the short hair.

“Jim,” I said, bending over, “can you see anything on the back of my neck there?”

“You should keep out of the chicken house,” said Jim. “We’ll have to get some fine sand so they can dust themselves.”

“Is it …?” I inquired.

“Yep,” said Jim.

And the following morning, there being still no more eggs in the nests, I held the bag and Jimmie cornered the birds and we took them down to the market and sold them back to the man for $1 less than we paid.

Which is cheap experience.

Editor’s Notes: Keeping chickens in Toronto was banned in 1983. However, starting in 2018, a pilot project is under ways to allow chickens in select wards.

Fake eggs are placed in nests to encourage chickens to lay in a particular spot. This is were the term “nest egg” comes from, as it was felt that it would encourage more eggs, and therefore bigger profits.

Greg was probably referring to mites or lice being on him, which can come from chicken farming.

A Mere Matter of Clothes

by admin

On May 23, 2020

In Greg-Jim Story

By Greg Clark, May 23, 1941

In which Greg and Jimmie confirm the old adage that one good turn deserves another good turn

“Guess who’s in the army?” cried Jimmie Frise.

“Goodness knows,” I guessed.

“Wesley,” shouted Jim.

“Not old Wes?” I protested. “Why, he’s older than we are.”

“He’s in,” declared Jimmie excitedly. And he’s coming over to the house tonight. In his uniform. And I said you’d be there for sure.”

“I’ll be there. I stated. “If only to find out how he did it.”

“Well, he did it by persistence, of course, said Jim. “He hasn’t drawn a happy breath since this war started. Now he’s in heaven.”

“But he’s away over 50,” I protested. “Wes is just about the Methuselah of the army, I’d say.”

“You’re jealous,” smiled Jimmie. “Just jealous.”

“Not me,” I assured him. “I’ve seen a lot more of this war than old Wes will ever see. I’ve seen more of it than most of our army has seen yet.”

“Yeah, but a war correspondent isn’t a soldier,” submitted Jim, “even if you have a uniform.”

“This country has come to a pretty pass,” I insisted, “if they have to take men as old as Wes.”

“I think they took him,” said Jim, “to get rid of him. He has been public nuisance Number One at all the military headquarters in the country, including Ottawa. He has a file nearly a half a foot thick from Ottawa alone.”

“What’s he going to do?” I inquired. “What branch is he with?”

“Oh, some supply department,” said Jim. “He’s too old to fight.”

“Why, he was in the old First Division, a quarter of a century ago,” I scoffed. “He enlisted on August 5, 1914. I remember thinking he was rather oldish for a lieutenant in that old war.”

“He was a great fighter,” declared Jim. “He won two decorations.”

“Maybe it is just to show off his ribbons that he’s been so crazy to get back in,” I suggested.

“Now, that’s a lousy thing to say,” declared Jim. “Even if your jealousy does hurt you, you shouldn’t say a thing like that. Wes deserves great credit and honor. If there had been more men like Wes in this country we’d have been better off.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “You’re quite right. Wes is a real patriot, even if he hasn’t done so good these past 20 years.”

“He’s just had bad luck,” said Jim.

“Bad luck?” I laughed. “The last war ruined Wes. He came back from the old war a hero. And there was no more call for heroes. So instead of forgetting about the old war and settling down to business like the rest of us, he tried to travel through life on his reputation as a soldier. There were plenty like him.”

Solver of All Problems

“I didn’t know you felt like this about Wes,” said Jimmie. “I thought you liked him a lot.”

“I do like him,” I explained. “But I think it is silly for an old guy like him…”

“Heh, heh, heh,” laughed Jimmie. “I’d like to see the standing broad jump you’d take if you got the same chance Wes got.”

“I know my age,” I declared, “and my capacity.”

“Ah, the army,” sighed Jim dreamily. “No more worry. No more fretting. You get up to a bugle and you go to bed by a bugle. You eat to a bugle call and you go to work to a bugle call. Your pay goes on, whether you work or not. The more dependants you have, the larger your allowance. No cares in the world.”

“It sure must be heaven to old Wes,” I agreed. “He hasn’t had a steady job for 22 years until now. He first tried selling insurance to all his old army friends. Then he went into the stock brokerage business. Then he got a job as sales manager of a novelty furniture company. He came in to see me one day with some crazy kind of collapsible shell he tried to sell me. His life, ever since the last war, has been one long worry. No wonder he was frantic to get back into the good old, safe old, cosy old army.”

“Well, the way things are going,” said Jim, “with taxes and everything, it seems to me the boys in the army are the wise guys.”

“Maybe that’s why I feel a little envious,” I confessed. “The army sure was wonderful wasn’t it? When I first enlisted, I thought with a kind of horror about the surrender of my personal liberty to an institution like the army. But suddenly I found all my personal cares had been lifted from me. All the little, petty carping worries and anxieties of my daily life vanished. I had nothing any more to decide. Everything was decided for me. Always somebody to tell me what to do. I did not even have to decide how to dress for the day. It was all laid down in orders. I did not have to make any decisions as to how I would spend the day or even my spare time in the evenings. There it all was, laid down in the syllabus.”

“It’s freedom, that’s what it is,” declared Jim. “Army life is not the surrender of freedom. It is the sudden liberation from a thousand little, unrealized cares that like a swarm of bees follow a man in civilian life wherever he goes.”

“We never understand how enmeshed like fish we are in little bonds and shackles,” I agreed, “until we go into the army and discover the nearest approach to freedom there is in the world.”

“A monk in holy orders,” said Jim, “escapes from the cares of the world.”

“And a soldier can do what he likes in the evening,” I added.

“The army is the solver of all problems,” declared Jim.

“It is the only way I know,” I concluded, “in which you can chuck your troubles and tribulations on the nation’s back and get credit for it.”

“Maybe Wes can give us some tips on how to get back in,” suggested Jim.

Back in Uniform

“What rank has he got?” I inquired.

“Lieutenant,” said Jim.

“Well, I couldn’t get along on lieutenant’s pay,” I pointed out. “I was a major in the last war. If I could get a colonel’s job…”

“You’re a lot wiser than you were in the old war,” agreed Jim.

“And there are a lot of jobs on organization and so forth,” I submitted, “where I could fit in without losing my wind at all the hills.”

So after supper I went down to Jim’s and we sat on the steps until Wes arrived. We saw him coming halfway up the block. He was magnificent. The old Wes I had seen many a time bowed and shrunken with his worries and disappointments of the past 10 years had left not a vestige of its mark upon the fine upstanding soldier coming down the street, his back as straight as ever it was, his head up, his chin out, and carrying his little swagger-stick as carelessly as though he had held a swagger-stick all his life. His stride was long and lithe. He was like a parade all in himself.

“Let’s give him a cheer,” I said.

“Don’t embarrass him,” cautioned Jim.

So we rose to our feet and stood forth to meet him in honor.

“Wes,” I said, wringing his hand, “this is a great treat for us all.”

“It’s nothing, boys,” he said happily. “It’s where I should have been 18 months ago …”

Even his manner was altered. Wes, of recent years, had got a tired sort of voice, with a little tinge of complaint in it. Not now. His voice was vigorous and it rang. And there was just the trace of an English accent in it, such as many of us affected in the old war.

So we went inside and got settled in the living-room and all gloated.

“When did you put it on, Wes?” we asked.

“I didn’t get the uniform until 5 o’clock,” laughed Wes. “I haven’t had it on three hours.”

“And yet you look as if you had never had it off,” said Jim heartily. “Sit down, Wes.”

But Wes would not sit down. He preferred to stand. He stood against the mantel. He stood over by the windows, his hands behind his back. He walked back and forth in the living room. In a new uniform, you hate to sit down.

His ribbons glowed on his chest. Men of 50 are pretty crafty at noting the age of their peers. A man of 50 who can carry his years is an ever-pressing reproach to all his fellows.

“My first parade,” said Wes, “tomorrow morning.”

“Are you going to have to drill again?” I exclaimed

“Ah, no,” said Wes. “This is just an office parade. I mean that I must present myself to my new C.O. at 8.30 am. He’s quite a stickler. I want to make a good impression.”

A Bit of Spit and Polish

You could see the old Wes feebly trying to assert himself amidst the force and splendor of the new Wes.

“May I suggest,” I ventured kindly, “that you could put a bit of the old spit and polish on those buttons?”

“They’re lacquered,” said Wes. “I haven’t got a batman yet. I may not have one for some time, they told me. So I thought I would leave that lacquer as long as I could to protect the shine.”

“Aw, Wes,” I protested. “An old soldier like you? With dull buttons?”

“They’re not dull,” said Jim.

“I agree they’re not what they should be,” said Wes, looking down appreciatively at his handsome frontal expanse. “But I have no button stick, yet, and no polish. It takes a little time to get things organized again, after all the years…”

And he gazed at space with a strange, joyous, exalted expression on his face.

“After all the years,” he said quietly.

“What chance,” began Jimmie, “do you think we might have, Wes, of getting back into the game?”

“I’m shocked, Wes,” I cut in, “to think that an old soldier like you would be stumped by the want of a button stick. Haven’t you made hundreds of them, in your younger days, out of cardboard?”

“Where’s some cardboard?” laughed Wes, promptly. “Jimmie, find us a bit of stiff cardboard. And have you any metal polish in the house?”

“Down cellar there’s sure to be polish,” said Jim, rising.

So we followed him. And down cellar on the shelves we found three kinds of metal polish. And Jim got a piece of heavy card board, from which we fashioned a button stick. In the army, it is usually of brass. It is a small panel of brass with a slot cut in it which you slide under your buttons to polish them and keep the cleaning fluid off your tunic. We made one, as most soldiers do, out of the cardboard.

“Have you got a good polish,” asked Wes. “that will cut the lacquer?”

From the three assorted polishes, we chose the one that seemed likely to have the most bite.

“Wes,” I said, “take off your tunic and let me have the honor of being your first batman in the great world war.”

And Jim gave me a friendly look, as much as to say that I was making decent amends for some of the things I had said behind Wes’ back. But I am a great believer in acts of humility. I sometimes think they are about the only ones that God happens to notice.

Wes took off his tunic and handed it to me. I slid on the button stick under the buttons and proceeded to wet them up. The lacquer was very hard. I had only rags, but Jim dug up an old brush and with that I scrubbed the buttons. And under Wes’ anxious eye, I began to get results. The lacquer certainly began to dissolve.

“Now,” said Wes, “lay on the flannelette.”

And you should have seen those buttons gleam.

“To think,” said Wes, ashamed, “I came through the streets with those dull buttons.”

A Great and Broken Cry

Long and tenderly we buffed and fluffed the brass buttons until they shone like liquid jewels.

“You know,” I submitted, “a batman’s life isn’t so bad.”

But when we removed the cardboard button stick to attack the smaller buttons on the pockets of the tunic, Wes let out a great and broken cry.

For around each button was a nasty yellowish stain from the brass polish seeping through the cardboard.

“Quick, quick,” shouted Wes in an agonized voice. “Get something.”

“Water, Jim,” I shouted.

“No, no,” bellowed Wes, “some kind of cleaning fluid.”

“Cleaning fluid,” said Jim, promptly diving into the cupboard. “I saw it here.”

And he came out with a large glass jug labelled “Cleaning fluid.”

“Douse it on,” I commanded.

“Easy now, easy,” begged Wes, his voice cracking with anguish.

Jim got a fresh rag and we dipped it in the cleaning fluid and wiped it over the stains around the buttons. Instantly the nasty yellowish stains turned white, as if the very dye out of the khaki cloth had been removed.

“Oh, oh, oh,” roared Wes, snatching the tunic from us.

Jimmie found out later, from the family, that this cleaning fluid was for cleaning floors and sinks and things like that.

“Wes,” I said, as he stood staring in rage at the beautiful new tunic with the horrid ghastly stains all down the front, as neatly spaced as the buttons themselves, “I hope you don’t think I did this on purpose.”

“On purpose?” cried Wes, too confused and amazed to try to understand.

“I’m an artist,” said Jim, resolutely, “I think I can mix up some color in some kind of medium that will touch out those spots temporarily.”

“My first parade,” said Wes, “tomorrow at 8.30.”

“The tunic is ruined,” I said bitterly.

“Come upstairs,” commanded Jim firmly. “I’ll see what can be done.”

So while Wes sat, all hunched up and broken in heart in the living-room, Jim worked in his study, where he keeps his amateur artist stuff – he is in artist by profession, but is a pretty fair amateur artist on the side tinkers at landscapes and things – and taking a tiny patch of cloth from the inside of one of the tunic pockets he worked with colors in ink and alcohol until he got a reasonable match for khaki.

But when he picked up the tunic to start applying the color, he found, with a great yell, that the nasty spots had almost disappeared from the cloth. Only a vague circle of paler color surrounded the buttons.

So we took a damp cloth and sponged around some more until we had abstracted still more of the offending polish and cleaner. And by the time the cloth dried, you could barely see the stains, even in bright 100-watt light.

Wes donned the tunic and stood a little way off.

“Why,” cried Jimmie, “all it looks like that the shine of the buttons has lit up the surrounding cloth.”

So Wes ceased muttering and went off home and we have no doubt his first parade was a complete success.

Editor’s Notes: As indicated in the story, Greg was already a war correspondent at this point in World War Two, and was in Europe during the fall of France.

A swagger-stick was a short stick like a riding crop that officers would carry as a symbol of authority.

A batman was a servant to an officer. This was much more common in the First World War, when class hierarchies were much more prominent in the British Army, and to a lesser extent, in Canada.

As described in the story, a button stick was used as an aid to polishing buttons.

Smokes Screen Battles Gloom

by admin

On May 14, 2020

In Advertisement, Miscellaneous, Other Story

By Greg Clark, May 10, 1941

In a fighting man’s life, there are never enough cigarettes.

There may not be enough ammunition, or enough bombs or even enough food. But if there are enough smokes, everything is jake.

In fact, every old soldier will agree with this: that though there be boxes of ammunition enough to build a barricade and bombs and shells and food enough to stand a siege, if there are no smokes, the battle looks gloomy indeed.

Every soldier’s family knows this. If you listen to the troop broadcasts from Britain, you will hear about every fifth man laughingly but not too laughingly exclaim…”and don’t forget the cigarettes.”

But there are thousands of our men in the army, the air force. the merchant marine who either have no family contacts to keep them supplied with smokes or whose families are living so strictly within the narrow confines of a soldier’s pay and allowances that a dollar for cigarettes is not a little gay gift but a sacrifice, even a heavy sacrifice.

And since there are so many millions of us in Canada with no warmer wish in our hearts than to do some little gracious act towards some unknown man in army, navy, air force or merchant marine, here is the way.

Send a donation of a dollar up – or a dollar down if you like – to the Overseas League (Canada) Tobacco and Hamper Fund, 225 Bay St., Toronto.

For every dollar you send, 400 cigarettes go to a Canadian fighting man in Britain, on the sea, in the air in Newfoundland, West Indies, Iceland, and wherever Canadians are these days.

His majesty the King is patron of the Overseas League, also the Earl of Athlone, representing his majesty in Canada. Every lieutenant-governor in Canada is a patron. Hon. Ernest Lapointe, Air Marshal Bishop, and Sir William Mulock are patrons. Chief justices of provinces, presidents of universities and namely men all over Canada are patrons. The Overseas League (Canada) Tobacco and Hamper Fund is a reputable organization if ever there was one.

You personally can send 300 cigarettes to a friend in the army for a dollar. The Overseas League sends 400. Because of their mass purchases. They have so far sent 4,000,000 cigarettes. They have, in past months, on an income that never yet exceeded $2,000 a month, tried to give one package of cigarettes per man per week to 80,000 Canadians. They need $20,000 a month to supply every Canadian soldier, airman, sailor or merchant marine a packet of cigarettes a week. And they think that if The Star Weekly tells all those people who have the warm wish in their hearts about their program, the $20,000 will roll in. And the league will then give at least one packet a week to every one of the 80,000 Canadians, and in each package will be a postcard bearing the giver’s name and address for the soldier or the sailor or the airman to send his thanks.

The league will also personally acknowledge your donation.

Never Enough Smokes

Now that is the simple and direct process by which you can touch with your own hand some Canadian fighting man somewhere in the far, battled world.

Simply mail your money to the Overseas League (Canada) Tobacco and Hamper Fund, 225 Bay St., Toronto.

By return you will get an acknowledgment from the league.

Supplies from home are of tremendous value to the boys. Under the present system, you can go to any reputable tobacco dealer and send 1,000 cigarettes to your soldier overseas for only $2.50. Imagine 1,000 cigarettes arriving in one gob to your lad sitting in some stuffy hut in a coastal village in England!

Besides, in these perilous times, so many plans go agley.

Ships go down, and with them cigarettes and socks and many a treasured gift. So the more we keep flowing across, the more will get there.

Speaking of ships going down. Our main supply of cigarettes in the old war came via the Expeditionary Force Canteen. The supplies were brought over from England and distributed to our battalion canteens via the big wholesale canteen. But a channel boat loaded with a week’s supply of smokes was sunk. And before another boat could be loaded, a tobacco famine had struck.

And were we ever conscious of what a smoke means to a man! What little stores of smokes we had each treasured up, from our parcels from home, were soon exhausted. And there, mile after mile along the front, were some millions of men all going through the business of “giving up smoking” at the same time. And we got a little on each other’s nerves.

In the dugout in which I lived there was a small wooden box which had come up with the rations. It was a familiar little box. It came to each company of our battalion once a month from a ladies’ auxiliary of our unit back here in Toronto. One month it would contain tooth brushes. The next month, washcloths. Another month, dear little icky-dicky tubes of toothpaste or fairies’ own soap. Now, mind you, these little gifts are welcome. They marked the fact that we were remembered back home by somebody else.

But we never opened these boxes up the line. We carried them back out of the mud and filth, and opened them and distributed their contents when we got back to billets.

However, I adopted this box as my chair or stool in the dugout. And there I sat, during the six-day tobacco famine, on that small box. And such was the state of my nerves that while the company commander just drummed his fingers on the table and the other lieutenants acted queerly according to their natures, I took the old three-cornered French bayonet that we used as a poker for our brazier, and with it sat moodily picking at the small box which protruded between my shins.

And I accidentally split off a bit of the wood. I looked within. I saw a sheet of thick, dark brown waxed paper.

H’m, said I; funny packing for bath salts or something. And I stood up and picked up the box and let out a great and mighty yell. For the box contained one gross of plugs of vicious black chewing tobacco.

Chewing tobacco. As black and fat and pungent as tar. But the note inside explained that the ladies’ auxiliary had been too busy to pack the gifts this month and had left it to a committee of three husbands. And the three husbands had secretly agreed together to be rid of this icky-dicky soap and paste stuff, and send us, for once, the he-mannest thing they could think of – eatin’ tobacco!

God bless those three husbands. It was awful stuff. We cut it up into finest dust and rolled cigarettes with it. We used it in pipes. The bravest of us chewed it. But it broke the famine. And cheered us beyond all belief.

I have seen men in the last outposts of despair, cut off from all help, no food, no water, no ammunition – and because they could steal a smoke, they looked one another in the eye and grinned. And came through.

I have seen men deathly wounded, who, when the stretcher bearer stuck a cigarette in their lips, seemed, at any rate, to lose their pain for a time. Seen men dying who, by the grace of a cigarette, could relax and smile.

There be grim-hearted people who will look askance at this panegyric of tobacco. They think it mean of a human being to bear so heavy upon a wisp of paper and twist of a weed. But on the sea, in far seas, on land, in remote worlds far beyond anything our lads ever dreamed to see, are tens of thousands of our boys who give the lie to the grim-hearted who think of mankind as something to be improved upon what it is, by denial.

Send your dollar, your less than a dollar, your five or your collected $50 to the Overseas League (Canada) Tobacco and Hamper Fund. 225 Bay street, Toronto.

Readers who wish to contribute to the fund are requested NOT to send money to The Star Weekly. Donations should be addressed to: The Overseas League (Canada) Tobacco and Hamper Fund, 225 Bay St., Toronto. This is the Canadian headquarters. Your gift will be acknowledged by return mail – and later, some grateful soldier in Britain will doubtless write you a note of thanks.

Editor’s Notes: I’ve labelled this article as an advertisement, for understandable reasons. 225 Bay Street no longer exists in Toronto, it is now just part of a block containing the Commerce Court West Office tower.

The Earl of Athlone was the Governor-General of Canada at the time of the article. Ernest Lapointe was Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s “Quebec Lieutenant” in Cabinet, Billy Bishop was a World War One Flying Ace, and Air Marshal in World War Two, and Sir William Mulock was involved in so many things, you will have to read his Wikipedia article to see why he was referred to as the “Grand Old Man” of Canada. At the time of the article, he was the Chair of the Canadian Committee of the International YMCA, and 98 years old.

Greg so liked the story about the unexpected tobacco received during the First World War, he would repeat it on many other occasions with various embellishments.

Scrap!

by admin

On May 5, 2020

In Birdseye Center, Comic

Sap’s Runnin’!

by admin

On March 21, 2020

In Greg-Jim Story

By Greg Clark, March 22, 1941

“Men from the country,” asserted Jimmie Frise, “make better soldiers than city men.”

“As a city man.” I replied, “it is my duty to deny that. And I think it ought to be self-evident. This is a war of machines. Machine-guns, tanks, airplanes. It is a city man’s war.”

“The average farmer,” declared Jimmie, “knows at least 10 times as much about machines as the average city man. A city man lives amongst machines. But he doesn’t know anything about them. The most he knows about them is to push a button. He pushes a button and an elevator comes and carries him upstairs. He stands at a white post, and a car stops and picks him up. He puts a nickel in a slot and something comes out. A city man is served, hand and foot, by machines. But it is all buttons to push and switches to turn and white posts to stand at.”

“Why, Jim, that’s ridiculous …” I protested.

“If a city man’s car starts to act up,” went on Jim, “he runs it into the first garage. He wouldn’t dream of trying to fix it himself. If his radio goes bad, he yells for a repair man. There is nothing so comic in the world as a city man whose telephone is out of order. He is rendered absolutely helpless.”

“So,” I said bitterly, “after living all these years in the city, you turn and bite the hand that feeds you!”

“A farmer,” continued Jim imperturbably, “knows 10 times as much about machines as a city man. He lives by machines. He can take his tractor or his car apart and put it together again. His daily job has to do with engines, churns, chopping mills. He understands and can fix pumps, harness, tools and implements, all of which come under the heading of machines. His electric light, telephone and all the things which to us city men are mysteries beyond our ken, he can mend because he understands them. This is the machine age. But the city man is its only victim.”

“How do you mean victim?” I demanded hotly.

“Because,” said Jim, “the city man has sold out to the machines. He has left himself no retreat. If our power were shut off for a week, we would be thrown into complete confusion. All our work would stop. We would live in darkness. We couldn’t cook; our oil furnaces would go out; we would huddle like cavemen freezing to death. But the farmer would carry on his life much as usual. Without lights, he’d just go to bed earlier. Without coal, he’d use wood or straw.”

Magic Hour in the Country

“Our gas engines and cars and trucks would save us,” I countered.

“Purely temporary,” said Jim. “Without power, without machines, we would be helpless. Our telephones wouldn’t work, our radio would be shut off, there would be no movies. Why, we poor city folk would find life hardly worth living. But the farmer has not sold out to the machine. His machines are still his servants, not his lords. We may have saved a little money. But the farmer has saved hay. He plants his grain and feeds his stock. His hens go right on laying, his hogs go right on growing.”

“Yah,” I cried, “but he has to have the cities for his market.”

“If he wants a market,” agreed Jim. “But suppose he merely wants to live? He has got all the means wherewith to live right in his own hand. He has his food. His fires he feeds with wood from his own woodlot. He has lamps, and if the oil gives out, he can still remember how to make tallow candles. If all the highways are bombed so that no traffic can move, the farmer lives in perfect comfort and security, while the cities slowly starve and go mad.”

“That’s an awful picture, Jim.” I accused.

“No,” said Jimmie, “I was just pointing out that we should not put too much reliance on machines and we should not permit ourselves to be carried away with our pride in them. A farmer’s land will stand by him long after the machines have let the cities go to hell.”

“You said men from the country make better soldiers than city men,” I accused.

“I’m inclined to think they do,” repeated Jim, “and we mustn’t forget that among city men are tens of thousands of men from the country who have come into the cities. Whereas, among the men from the country are mighty few who have come from the cities.”

“You’ certainly have a one-way mind,” I snorted.

“I was just thinking,” said Jim, “of all the boys from the farm who are in the army now, in Britain and Iceland and Gibraltar and all over the world. And how they are feeling just about now. With March nearly over and April on the rim.”

“I guess city boys are feeling the same,” I asserted.

“No,” corrected Jim, “to city men March and April are just the dead end of the year; a memory of rain and mud and slush and dreariness, with all the clothes shabby before the spring clothes come out, and all the cars dirty and the streets gray and slimy. But to a country boy, this is the magic hour. The calves and the lambs are coming. The stock are being let out into the fields. The hens are starting to lay and the sap’s runnin’.”

“Of course,” I cried. “The sugar bush.”

When Spring Exults

“The last log is being hauled out of the woodlot,” sang Jimmie, “and the last cordwood being drawn. The meadowlarks and the song sparrows are in every field and the crows are making marriage in the bush.”

“And spouts are being hammered into all the maples in the sugar bush,” I reminded.

“All over the world today,” said Jimmie, “the soldiers from the farms are exiles indeed. This is the time of year when the farmer feels his own sap rising; when he looks out to see where he left the hay rake last fall; in what corner of what field did he drop the plow. You will see him plodding over the fields, planning his crops. At this very hour spring exults on the farms.”

“Jim,” I interjected, “maple syrup and maple sugar. Let’s stop and think about them. To me, there is no flavor in the world so inspiring as the flavor of genuine maple syrup boiled in the bush.”

“And you got mighty little of it,” stated Jim. “Mostly you get ordinary cane syrup flavored with an artificial maple essence made from maple bark and sap wood. There are thriving factories in this world devoted entirely to the making of artificial maple flavor. And I’ve even heard of imitating the flavor with potato peelings and brown sugar. There was a farmer’s wife who could make it that way and even her husband couldn’t tell it from the real thing.”

“No,” I said aghast. “There ought to be a law against it. That’s a crime against the state. The maple leaf is Canada’s emblem.”

“All I say is,” said Jim. “if you want maple syrup, go out in the country and buy it from the farmer.”

“Why,” I cried scandalized, “the government ought to forbid the manufacture or import of maple flavoring. It’s unpatriotic. It’s subversive.”

“I agree with you,” said Jim. “But there are plenty of politicians who wouldn’t. If there are dollars in anything artificial, then that thing is here to stay. That’s a sort of general rule we can bear in mind.”

“We ought to start a battle,” I declared

“Listen,” said Jim. “I bet that half the maple syrup you have gloated over was fake. And I also bet that there are tens of thousands of people who have never yet tasted genuine maple syrup, made and sealed in the bush.”

“And it is one of the unforgettable flavors of this world,” I sighed. “Which we owe to the Indian.”

“The Indians,” enunciated Jim, “had no kettles big enough to boil the sap. They used to get their sugar by freezing.”

“How?” I inquired.

“They collected the sap,” explained Jim, “in bark pails. They had to collect it real early in March, at the very start of the run, so as to take advantage of what frost remained. They set the pails of sap out to freeze. Then they skimmed off the ice and threw it away, By alternately freezing, and thawing, they reduced the sap to a kind of sugar. When the white man came, he introduced big kettles.”

Enormous Possibilities

“Does it take much sap to render down to syrup?” I inquired.

“It all depends,” said Jim. “Some sap is richer than others. But as a rule, it takes about 30 to 35 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.”

“Holy Moses,” I said. “And how much sap does one tree give?”

“Well,” said Jim. “that, too, is a problem. If you get a good tree with a big top, and it is situated near a cold spring, and it is a real hard sugar maple, you would get an average of two gallons of sap in 24 hours.”

“So 15 trees would give you a gallon of syrup a day,” I suggested.

“Plus a lot of hard work,” smiled Jim. “driving a sleigh around the sugar bush collecting the sap from the buckets and taking care of it so it doesn’t sour.”

“Isn’t the sap sweet?” I demanded.

“Yes, but if it is neglected, or gets warm, it sours,” said Jim. “You can get sap from any kind of maple, and they all make syrup and sugar. But the best trees are the sugar maple. And they run good for only about three weeks. Sometimes the run starts early in March, sometimes later. Sometimes the run will go great for four weeks and sometimes only for two. It’s tricky, like everything else around a farm. But if you want to go for a drive in the country one of these days, we can pick up a few gallons of the real McKay.”

But I was looking speculatively out the window. For there in Jim’s back yard were three thriving maple trees. And out in front were two more. And in the neighbors’ yards I could see half a dozen other fine maples. And I was calculating just how many there were in and around my own front and back yard.

“Jim,” I said, “did it ever occur to you how many maple trees there are in Canada? How many billions? Did it ever occur to you that if we Canadians went at the problem in a business-like way, we could take possession of the sugar market of the world?”

“Don’t suggest anything business-like in connection with maple syrup,” said Jimmie, “or you lose the wild, smoky tang that distinguishes the real thing.”

“Do you realize,” I demanded that there are 15 maple trees within sight of where we sit? Do you realize that those 15 trees would give us enough sap, at two gallons per tree per day, to make a gallon of maple syrup right in our own kitchen?”

“Hm,” said Jim reflectively.

An Exciting Experiment

So we went out and made a survey of the situation and found five trees on our own premises, seven more on the premises of what might be called friendly neighbors, and another 12 in the immediate vicinity which might be brought into the scheme if we approached the owners in the proper fashion.

It was a matter of less than an hour to round up, in our own cellars, enough empty pails, lard tins and other receptacles suitable to collecting the sap. From the stationery shop we got half a dozen pea shooters of tin which would make, Jim thought, ideal sap spouts to drive into the trees. A chisel for making the notch in the bark and a brace and bit for making the little holes into which to stick the spouts was, with a handful of nails, all that a couple of maple enthusiasts required.

We agreed to tap only Jim’s trees to start with. From them we figured on collecting about 10 gallons of sap which would give us a boiling down of better than a quart of syrup, which, as Jimmie explained, would indicate whether the experiment was worthy of larger development.

“We may,” pointed out Jim, “get the whole city making maple syrup.”

So, with daylight saving to help us, we tapped our five trees, on the front lawn and in the yard, and found no trouble inserting the spouts and suspending the pails on nails. The colorless, water-like sap began to run almost instantly. First a dribble and then a trickle rewarded our gaze as each tree was notched and spouted. And when darkness fell, there was already a nice wetness covering the bottom of each pail.

The next morning being Saturday, we telephoned the office that we had important work to do; which was fortunate, because with all the children of the district home from school, we had to keep a sharp eye on our pails of sweet sap. Overnight, some of the smaller pails had actually filled and overflowed. It is astonishing how maple sap flows. With the day, the sap flow increased. In a big preserving kettle down in Jim’s cellar, on the laundry gas stove, we collected the sap from the pails.

“We should be boiling by 6 o’clock tonight, at this rate,” said Jim, looking at the good six inches of sap already in the kettle.

The children of the neighborhood took a most lively interest in the enterprise, and Jim and I both took time, seeing there was nothing else to do, to instruct these ignorant little city children in the mysteries of maple sugar making.

“To celebrate our first boiling,” suggested Jim. “we might invite all these kids in to watch and let them sit around the kettle and dip sticks in the syrup, the way they do in the country at a sugaring-off. They dip switches in and then cool the syrup in the snow and it turns to candy.”

“It might be nice,” I agreed, “because after all, this is a patriotic enterprise and the kids ought to be in it.”

The First – and Last – Boiling

So we got quite friendly with the children clustered around and I allowed some of them to taste the sap, even though it was precious. I had tasted it. It had a sweetish, queer flavor. Rather nice. I tasted quite a lot of it. I got a spoon and dipped some out for each youngster. They all had two or three helpings of the sap. I had about 10 or 15. And then an old lady passing by spoiled the fun.

“Mercy sakes,” she said, “you are not giving those children that maple sap!”

“It won’t hurt them,” I reassured her.

“Won’t hurt them?” she cried. “It’ll give them the worst gripes they ever had. My goodness, don’t let them have any more.”

“My dear lady,” I said, “I bet I’ve had a pint of it.”

“Well,” she laughed, “if you have, you’ll soon know it. Why, when I was a girl back on the farm the best joke in the world was to invite your town cousins out and give them sap to drink and then…”

But at that instant I felt the first gripes. It was just as the lady said.

I had to leave the experiment to Jimmie. He had drunk only a little of the sap and was more or less able to carry on. I came and went, as the gripes came and went. I was feeling some better along about 6 o’clock, when Jimmie announced the first boiling to be ready.

Unquestionably, as we boiled, there was a delicious maple aroma in that cellar laundry. Unquestionably, the sap slowly boiled to a darker and darker shade. Unquestionably the slowly forming syrup, as the hours went by, did taste like maple syrup. But also unquestionably it seemed to taste of other things, such as a faint suspicion of gasoline, and a faint tinge of lubricating oil and other things which undoubtedly seep down into the soil from which city trees draw their sustenance.

It may have been the sap I had drunk earlier in the day that threw me off my taste, but by the time the syrup had begun to take on the consistency of syrup, I had no taste for it at all; and I was ready to go out into the fresh air and breathe the cold. What we had left at the end of the boiling both Jimmie and I agreed to pour out in a quiet corner of Jimmie’s garden. Altogether, it was a failure as an experiment. And a lot of work and trouble.

But the worst feature of the experiment was that all day all the mothers in the neighborhood telephoned in high, sharp voices to ask what on earth we had been giving their children to drink?

Editor’s Notes: This story gives a good description of making maple syrup. I suspect that at the time of writing, it was more common to encounter artificial syrup in Canada, but this in no longer the case. To anyone in the right climate, making maple syrup by hobbyists is not uncommon, so long as you have enough trees to work with, and preferably do the boiling outside. One shouldn’t let Greg and Jim’s failed experiment discourage you.

Jim uses the phrase “the real McKay“. This is from an advertising slogan of the MacKay whisky distillery: “A drappie o’ the real MacKay”. This would eventually transform to “the real McCoy“, to indicate something was “the real thing” or “the genuine article”.

A Cottage Almost For Sale

by admin

On June 1, 2019

In Greg-Jim Story

By Greg Clark, June 7, 1941

“I’m going to have to rent the cottage,” stated Jimmie Frise dismally.

“Rent the cottage!” I cried.

“With the new war taxes and everything,” said Jim, “I just can’t afford to have a summer cottage. I’m going to rent it.”

“And who’s going to take it?” I demanded hotly. “Doesn’t everybody have to pay taxes?”

“I can get somebody to take it,” said Jim.

“Yes, but what more right will he have to take it than you?” I demanded.” “If you can’t afford to keep a summer cottage, nobody else can. So keep it. Everybody’s in the same boat now.”

“I can find somebody with a little more money than me,” explained Jimmie. “The taxes and stuff have moved me quietly out of the class of people who can afford summer cottages.”

“You don’t follow me,” I protested vehemently. “If these were normal times and you had lost money in the stock market or something normal like that, you would be justified in giving up your cottage. But everybody is being taxed. Everybody is going to have to live on less money. Therefore, how are you going to find anybody to rent your cottage? And if you do find somebody to take it, doesn’t that prove he is a chiseller who hasn’t declared all his taxes?”

“You’re just sore because you won’t have those fishing week-ends up at my place,” smiled Jim.

“I don’t let my personal concerns interfere with my reasoning,” I informed him. “But it doesn’t make sense to say that you can’t afford to keep your cottage so you’re going to rent it to somebody who can’t afford to rent it.”

“Plenty of people,” said Jim, “can get along very nicely on the money I get, without going short. I’m just a poor manager, that’s all.”

“So you’ll rent that dear little cottage,” I said, “to some good manager? My dear boy, if there are any good managers, they’ve got a summer cottage of their own already.”

“I can get $200 for the summer from that cottage,” said Jim. “And boy, I need that $200.”

“There is nothing you can buy for $200,” I informed him, “that will be worth half so much as those two months for your family and you up at the lake. Not for $500 could you buy anything of equal value.”

“I don’t want to buy anything,” explained Jim. “That $200 would go for things I’ve already bought.”

“Jim,” I pleaded, “economize on other things. Economize on your car, put it away in the garage all summer. Economize on your food bills, on your clothes, on your summer wardrobe. But don’t try to economize on the health and happiness of your family.”

“Or,” said Jim, on the good fishing of my friends.”

“It is Your Dream Home”

“Any more cracks like that,” I stated, “and I won’t even visit your cottage.”

“I’m afraid you won’t be visiting it anyway,” said Jim. “Unless maybe you’d like to rent it?”

“I’m not interested, Jim,” I said. “You know my beliefs in the matter of summer cottages. I don’t believe in tying myself down for the whole summer to one place. I like to see various parts of the province during the summer.”

“At your friends’ cottages,” said Jim.

“I pay my way, don’t I?” I said indignantly. “Didn’t I bring a whole ham on that last visit to you last August? And two baskets of tomatoes, and a basket of melons, and two boxes of candy and toys for the kids? Didn’t I?”

“You remember the details, all right,” admitted Jim.

“I certainly do,” I stated. “I make it my business to bring the equivalent in supplies and gifts of a sum of money equal to what I would pay at a good summer hotel. For whatever period I come for. I’m no cheap sport. I pay my way.”

“You’re very good,” agreed Jim. “But it isn’t the same as owning your own cottage. Or even the same as staying at a summer hotel.”

“Do you resent my spending a few weekends with you?” I exclaimed. “I thought we had more fun than…”

“Sure, sure, I love to have you up,” said Jimmie. “In fact, our fishing trips are the highlight of the whole summer to me. But I was just wearing down your objections to me renting my cottage. I’ve made up my mind. I’ve written out an ad to put in the paper. And I’ve painted a sign ‘Cottage for Rent’ to nail up on the cottage this week-end.”

“Well,” I said glumly, “there goes about the nicest cottage in my whole collection.”

“It’s a great little spot,” admitted Jimmie. “It won’t be easy to pass it up. We’ve had a lot of fun there. You can move all over the city in the course of the years, and leave one house after another without a pang. In fact, you’re often glad to be rid of the last one. But a summer cottage is different. No matter how shabby and run-down it may be, a summer cottage becomes your true home in a sense a city house never does. It is your dream home.”

“You said it, Jim,” I insinuated. “You have no idea how you’ll miss it this summer, when you and your family are slowly baking and frying here in town.”

“It’s a straight case of dollars and cents,” said Jim quietly. “I have thought it all out.”

“Have you visualized the haggard eyes of your little children,” I demanded, “looking at you when you come home here on one of those blistering August afternoons?”

“We’re going on plenty of picnics,” explained Jimmie. “We’re going to bring down from the cottage some of the deck chairs and other summer furniture to fix up our garden. We’re going to bring down the outboard engine, too, and I will rent a skiff down on the lake off Sunnyside and take the family on the evenings for sails along towards Oakville and Hamilton.”

“How pleasant,” I sneered.

Jim Makes a Decision

“I’ve set out a regular program,” continued Jimmie, “picnics, sails along the lake, al fresco suppers out in the garden on bright deck chairs and rustic tables. After all what’s the difference between Muskoka and Toronto when it comes to temperature?”

“About 30 degrees,” I stated loudly.

“Don’t be absurd, retorted Jim. “Don’t you remember last summer some of these nights when you could hardly draw your breath it was so hot and stuffy up at the cottage? You were there in the hot spell. We had to practically live in the water.”

“And where will you live during the hot spell here in town?” I inquired. “In the cellar?”

“It isn’t five minutes from my house to Sunnyside,” said Jim. “And we can put our bathing suits on right in our own house here, too.”

“You are making a great mistake, Jim,” I said.

“I am making $200,” replied Jim.

“Which the government will take off you,” I pointed out.

“You have put up a good fight,” said Jim, “but you have lost. I am definitely giving up the cottage this year. The ads go in next Monday. I am going up to the cottage this week-end to bring down some stuff. The deck chairs, my outboard engine, and a new three-burner oil stove we just bought last summer.”

“Are you hiring a truck?” I asked.

“No,” said Jim, “I thought maybe you would be interested in a little trip to the country. And if we took your open ear, we could pack all that stuff in it.”

“Well, I’ll be …”I gasped. “You deprive me of one of my favorite summer cottages, and then you …”

“An open car carries twice as much as a closed car,” said Jim.

“But I’m not making any truck out of my sport phaeton,” I snorted. “Especially three-burner oil stoves. What are you bringing that home for? Isn’t the new tenant going to have a stove?”

“There’s the old oil stove out in the back shed,” explained Jim. “We don’t like to use second-hand stoves. The food always seems to taste of strangers. So we’re bringing the new one home to store and let the tenants use the old one.”

“I think my family has me dated up for this week-end, Jim,” I said.

“Very well,” said Jim shortly.

The Farewell Journey

But the more I thought of it, the more I felt I should accompany Jim on his farewell journey to the cottage. After all, Jim and I have been friends since boyhood. I was a cub reporter when he was a cub artist doing diagrams of where the murder took place, X marking the spot where the body was found. We have been to wars together and killed thousands of fish and not a few ducks together. And, as Jim says, a summer cottage comes to mean more to you than any mansion you might inhabit in a city.

So I intimated to him that the date my family had made for me on the week-end had fallen through and that I would be happy to use my touring car for transporting his lares and penates down from the cottage.

“What are lares and penates?” asked Jim.

“It is Latin for outboard motors and three-burner oil stoves,” I explained.

“And we left Friday night, seeing we are all on the five-day week now which gave us Saturday and Sunday at the cottage, to do a real job of farewell.

The bass season does not open for nearly a month, so there was no use torturing ourselves by going out in the boat. We just loafed about the cottage itself. Sat on the veranda and smoked; walked back over the hills and woods where already the heavy hand of summer was laid. The birds had pretty nearly finished nesting and young birds were everywhere. The wildflowers were all over and done. The season of silent growth was one, the season of leaf and wind that leads straight to autumn and harvest and lying leaves and death again.

Between walks. we went over the cottage rather sadly setting out on the veranda the things Jimmie wanted to take home. The engine, the stove, three deck chairs and a new mattress that was too good to let unknown strangers have.

We also tore down a whole raft of colored pictures from the rotogravure and from the movie magazines which, in past years, had been tacked up on the cottage walls.

We tidied things up and hid away some of the things Jimmie was sure would be lost or mislaid by strangers, such as paddles, a little hatchet Jimmie was very fond of, an old rake and things like that.

“I’ll hide these under the back of the cottage,” said Jim. “which will give me the feeling of coming back some other year. These things will be waiting for me, even though strangers call this place their own for a while.”

“The new people,” I said, “will probably change everything around. They’ll tack up new pictures clipped from the rotogravure. They’ll probably shift the beds around.”

“I can easily shift everything back again,” said Jim.

“They’ll no doubt break things,” I pointed out. “Some of the china, and maybe a window or so. Are you going to allow a family with children to rent the place?”

“I wasn’t figuring on selecting the tenants,” said Jim. “For $200, almost anybody …”

“Some women,” I said, “are dreadful housekeepers when it comes to a summer cottage. They just feel it is a holiday and they let things go hang.”

“My family can soon redd it up,” said Jimmie.

“You’ll have to come up after the season’s over,” I suggested, “and clean her up then.

Some women leave the kitchen like a pig pen, dirt and filth all around the sink, and stuff left in bottles and packages on the shelves. That attracts the mice in, and when you come up next year the place will fairly stink.”

“I’ll be up in the fall, all right,” assured Jim. “The minute those people get out, I’ll be up here with a gang to clean house, you bet.”

“Are you putting on any extra insurance,” I inquired, “in case these people are careless with lamps and things? Or any insurance for damage kids might do?

“I think I’ll try to rent it to a couple of old maids,” said Jim. “How about piling the stuff in your car now?”

“Why,” I protested, “we’re not leaving yet, are we? I thought we’d be leaving after supper.”

“There’s no use hanging around,” said Jim miserably. “The longer I hang around, the worse I feel about the whole business.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pile the stuff in the car.”

So we carried out the mattress and the engine and the chairs and stowed them in the car. We were just carrying out the three-burner oil stove when a strange thing happened.

Right off the little wharf in front of the cottage a huge black bass leaped.
It was not an ordinary leap. Jimmie and I have both seen thousands of bass leaps. This was like a ceremonial leap. The bass came out of the water in a loud, ringing splash which attracted our attention as if it had been gunshot. There, in the lovely light, the bass seemed to hang in space. It curved and dropped, with another resounding splash, back into the water.

Jimmie and I set the stove down in a single movement. We tightened our belts and walked quickly down to the wharf. There, on its white sand nest, lay the bass, a huge one, fanning the water with tail, and fins in motionless stance.

Jim stood and stared with entranced gaze. I dared not open my mouth.
The great bass, fanning immovably, seemed to eye us with his red orbs. Jim waved a hand. The bass darted from the nest and then came darting back.

I tossed a little chip on the water. The bass rose like a torpedo and hit the chip a terrific slash with his tail.

“Oh, boy,” muttered Jim, “oh, boy, ohboy-ohboy.”

He turned and marched back up to the car. He seized hold of the end of the three-burner gas stove. I seized the other. Jim backed into the house. I followed. In five minutes, we had the chairs back, the mattress on the bed, the engine in the cupboard and everything all hunky dory.

Then we went and sat on the cedar chairs and put our heels on the railing and lit our pipes and blew smoke out on to the silent air.

For the first time, Jimmie spoke.

“That settles it,” he said firmly.

Editor’s Notes: For story-telling purposes, Greg implies he does not have a cottage. He did at Go Home Bay on Georgian Bay.

Lares and Penates were Roman deities who protected the home. It came to be a phrase meaning a person’s home and household possessions.

Rotogravure is a printing technique, and was also used as a term to refer to the illustrated sections of magazines.

“Redd it up” means to clear something away, to tidy.