Tag Archives: short-story

Keep the Reform Fires Burning

Ring Lardner

The Morning Union/January 30, 1921

Several people has wrote to me lately complaining that they hasn’t been no new reforms suggested in the land of the free in the last couple of Wks, and it begins to look like the boys that takes care of our morals was loafing on the job and why didn’t I step in and give them some new idears to work on. 

Well, I can name a whole lot of things that could stand a trip to the cleaners only you can’t expect to reform everything at once, and you half to pick out one to start in on so why not begin with the advertising business which some of my best friends is mixed up in it, but when the public welfare is conserned a man shouldn’t let personal feelings interfere. They’s plenty of room for a moral uplift amongst the boys and gals that writes our ads and a man don’t realize how much till you make a study of it like I done. 

The way I come to get Interested in it was last fall when I was talking to a friend of mine that writes ads and I was telling him how hard it is to make both ends meet the other and he asked me why didn’t I try and write ads too which he says they was good money in it. 

So I told him I couldn’t never be a ad writer because I haven’t got no imagination, so he says that is the last thing a man needs to write ads because when you write them now days for a first class consern they won’t let you tell nothing but the truth about their goods and further and more if you don’t tell the truth the high class magazines won’t print the ads. 

So I says do you mean to say that all the ads you read in the magazines is nothing but facts, and he says you bet they are and I will give you a dollar for every miss statement you find in them so I asked him what he considered was the high class magazines and he named a few of them and I bought them and when I didn’t have nothing else to do I looked through them at the ads. Well friends, if I had of tooken this bird up on his offer he could of paid his sir tax with the change from a ruble. 

One of the first ads I run acrost was a ad of a cold cream and the people that makes it is A. No. 1 and O. K. but here is how the ad started out.

Most of us can remember when our mothers or grand mothers on retiring used to take with them to their rooms a saucer of fresh cream.

Well personly I didn’t remember no such a thing but I wanted to make it a fair test so I chose 10 people at random and says to. them one at a time: 

“Can you remember when your mother or grand mother on retiring used to take with them to their room a saucer of fresh cream?”

Six out of the 10 replied with the short and ugly word “no!” Three of them give me a dirty look and the other says: 

“I have heard that, one!” 

Investigating Further.

I come to a ad of a winter top for cars that for all as I know it may be a good winter top, but the ad says: “Bad weather is the time you need your car most.”

So I asked 4 guys when they needed their car most and 3 of them says in summer when its the golf season and the other one says whenever it’s laid up in the garage. And wile we are talking about automobile accessorys, they was another ad that said:

“Every owner wants his gold initials on side door of his automobile.” 

I made inquirys about this from 3 birds that owns cars and couldn’t get a civil answer out of none of them. 

Then they was a ad that said: 

“No gift from a father to a son could be more sensible than a razor.” 

I didn’t halt to make no inquirys about that as I have got 4 sons of my own and its just a question in my mind whether it would be more sensible to give them a razor or lock them up in a room with a mad dog.

And speaking about razors they was a shaving cream that they claimed made shaving a pleasure, but I will bet that even when the men that makes it and gets it for nothing, I bet when they are through their work and out for a good time they don’t run home and shave themselfs all the evening or they don’t never think of spending their vacation removeing thir wiskers with this here cream.

Another ad sung the praises of a certain mince meat and it said down at the bottom “Thursday is pie day and as such is observed nationally.”

Well friends how many of you gets every Thursday off or tends church services once a wk. in honor of mince meat and how many of you goes around all day Thursday saying, “Merry Pie Day,” to your friends?

“Cleanliness brings happiness and good cheer” is another bold statement which it looks like it was open to question.

For inst. I got 4 people right here in the house that ain’t happy if they ain’t dirty, and just the idear of getting cleaned up is enough to send then into a tantrums. 

Then I come acrost 2 ads of musical instruments one of which I happen to know about personly myself. It says:

“You can double your income, your pleasure and your popularity with a saxaphone.” Well one of them things was give to me 2 yrs. ago and so far my income ain’t nowheres near double,. and in the second place I can enjoy a good show or a fight just as much or even more so if I leave my saxaphone home, and as far as popularity is conserned I kind of feel like maybe we would have more callers if we traded this elegant instrument for a couple bottles of Scotch.

Ukelele Player Lonesome.

The other ad said: 

“If you can play quaint dreamy Hawaiian music or latest songs on the ukelele you will be wanted everywhere.” 

Well, I know a bird that can do that little thing and I can name 100 places he ain’t wanted, to none where he is wanted, and if the mail man didn’t have nothing to do but deliver this guy’s invitations they would lock him up as vagrant. 

And another one was the washing machine ad.

It says: 

“For a mother, young or old, no gift could be better proof of thoughtful affection.”

I know mothers both young and old that if you handed them any kind of a washing machine they would show their appreciation of your thoughtful affection with a wallop in the jaw. 

Those is only a few samples but they are enough to convince me that the advertising game is far from pure and I don’t see why the lords day alliance or somebody don’t get busy and not only make these guys tell the truth about their goods but make them tell the whole truth. 

For inst., if they are advertising say the Perfect Cord Tire, why let their ad read:

“The Perfect Cord sells for $70 and it’s pretty near as good as a $75 tire. It is a non-skid tire when the car is standing still on a dry road and it don’t hardly ever get a puncture unless you run over a mall or something. The Perfect Tire is guaranteed for 6000 miles which means that if one of them blows out when you haven’t only drove it 1000 miles, why take it to one of our agents and try to get a new one.”

Or if they was advertising a car itself: 

“The price of the Echo Six complete is $1685 F. O. B. Albany, meaning that if you live way off somewheres like Utica the chassis won’t only cost you $1750 and then all as you half to buy is a body and a steering wheel and a couple spare tires. The 7 passenger model has room for 3 grown ups and a weasel. The Echo don’t need no patent safety locking device. Her looks is her protection.”

That is the way to make them advertise, gents, and when you get a system like that working, they won’t be no more pitifull cases like the poor sap I spoke of that went and learned how to play quaint dreamy Hawaiian music on a ukulele and there’s only one place he is ever asked to go. 

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On Whiskers

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/May 2, 1910

The ridiculous report, so industriously circulated by the Boston Evening Transcript and other sensational papers, that Governor Hughes will be compelled by the unwritten law of the judiciary to shave off his copious and unearthly whiskers when he becomes a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States has no foundation whatever in fact.

There is, indeed, no such law, written or unwritten. The learned justices have a perfect right to cultivate their hirsute garden as they list. They may go in for shaven lawns, they may decide for shrubbery before the ear, they may even devote their leisure to broad waterfall effects, straight or bifurcated. It is all one. No court-martial or board of inquiry has any authority to question their taste or to offer suggestions. A barrister who sought to enliven a tedious argument before them and mixing sly jokes about the judicial foliage would be clearly in contempt and might reasonably expect a heavy fine or a term in jail.

Whiskers On The Bench

A considerable diversity is noticeable in the vegetable adornment of the justices. The Chief Justice and Justice Holmes go in for pugnacious mustaches of the Bismarck type, without chin or cheek support. Justice Harlan wears siders, Justice Moody wears a mustache of the ragged sort popular among business men, Justice Lurton sports a toothbrush, and Justice McKenna yields to the insidious fascinations of a full beard, though his upper lip is bare.

In the past many other capillary effects have been visible in that austere sanhedrin. It is firmly established, indeed, as an axiom of jurisprudence that a justice may cut his whiskers as he pleases, just as he may divert himself with plantation toilet or the common plunge of commerce, as he pleases.

There is no purpose here, of course, to lay it down as an indubitable fact that Governor Hughes will make no rearrangement of his facial adornments when he mounts the bench. That he need not do so has been established, but that he will not do so is scarcely a matter of safe prophecy. He may, indeed, yield voluntarily to a wakening sense of the fitness of things—to some spontaneous aesthetic impulse—and so mutilate his whiskers with scissors, or even obliterate them entirely with a razor.

Such changes of mind are by no means impossible theoretically and by no means unrecorded in actuality. Many a man, after staggering on to 50 years with whiskers, more or less grandiloquent, has suddenly chopped them off and gone down to his grave with smooth cheeks. And by the same token many a man, after 50 years of clean shaving, has devoted the leisure of his old age to the cultivation of whiskers more or less elaborate.

The psychology of bewhiskerment, in truth, is exceedingly complex and obscure. Why do men raise whiskers? And why do other men raise mustaches? It is common to ascribe all such disfigurements to a childish vanity, to crude and even childish conceptions of the beautiful. The man with mutton-chops, for example, is dismissed with a sneer as a man of defective aesthetic vision, and it is assumed as a matter of course that his infirmity also inclines him to admire upright pianos, solitaire diamond rings, plaid waistcoats, green hats and other abominations.

Some Eminent Shrubbery

But a brief inspection is sufficient to show the absurdity of all such off-hand theories. Many a man of undoubted intelligence and impeccable taste wears whiskers. Nicholas Acusa, the father of modern philosophy, had a beard reaching to his belt; Herbert Spencer and Thomas Henry Huxley sported Galways; Christopher Columbus went in for throaty effects; Emperor William I of Germany cultivated a pair of burnsides with almost ludicrous assiduity; Napoleon III wore an imperial, and Henrik Ibsen trained his hair and beard into a form suggesting an aureole or an Elizabethan ruff. Even Shakespeare gave obvious attention to his whiskers.

In view of all this—and thousands of other examples must occur to everyone—it becomes plain that the cultivation of whiskers is by no means a sign of ignorance or puerility, nor even of senile degeneration. But why, then, do men raise them? Why do civilized and educated human beings, who would shrink instinctively from any suggestion that they pierce their ears, cut furrows across their scalps or bedaub their foreheads with gaudy pigments—why do such superman still waste time and thought upon the rearing of fantastic and unsightly vegetal flora?

In Paris, a couple of years ago, a curious psychologist sought to find out, albeit he confined his inquiries to men with mustaches and had no dealing with actual whiskers-wearers. To each of 100 chosen men he addressed the simple question. Why do men wear mustaches? and from each of them he got a reply. Those replies afford us an interesting, though perhaps, not quite satisfying, insight into the causation of all hirsute manifestations. 

Thirty-six Gave It Up



Ten of the men admitted frankly that they wore mustaches because their wives insisted that they do so, and all 10 seemed to hint that if they were free to choose they would shave. Sixteen others answered that mustache-wearing was the fashion in their professions, and that they feared shaving would make them seem eccentric. Eight others answered that their fathers wore mustaches before them, and that they deemed it their duty to observe the family custom.

Six others said that they were admirers of eminent men who wore mustaches— such as the Emperor of Germany, for example—and did likewise to show their admiration. Twelve confessed freely that they regarded the mustache as a pleasing ornament, and so cultivated it. Four swore that their upper lips were so tender that they could not bear the agonies of shaving; two said that they desired to hide their false teeth, and six others that they desired to hide scars, warts, moles, hare-lips or other disfigurements.

So far we have accounted for 64 of the 100 men. But what of the 36 remaining: What were their reasons for wearing mustaches? The answer is simple: They had no reasons at all. One and all, they confessed that they could offer no intelligible excuse for their habit. One and all, they passed up the problem as insoluble.

And now the infinite complexity and obscurity of the whiskers question begins to grow apparent. If 36 of 100 men with mustaches confess that their adornments are entirely independent of conscious processes of ratiocination, what sort of answers are we to expect from men with whiskers?

An Impenetrable Mystery

The mustache is a simple thing, and in consequence it should be easily grasped by the mind and placed in an ordered chain of cause and effect. It runs to standard forms, it does not stun the intellect by its prodigality: it is familiar, usual, normal.

But whiskers are not. On the contrary, they are infinitely diverse in quantity and quality, texture and form, density and curvature, length and specific gravity. No two stands are exactly alike. Even among Galways, siders, mutton-chops and other more or less familiar species there are gradations without number.

A fine stand of whiskers, in truth, changes from day to day, even from minute to minute. Meteorological variations conditions and qualify it; tonsorial incompetence cripples and musses it; it is affected by every phenomenon of a restless environment. The human mind must needs be helpless in the presence of a thing so inordinately complex, mobile, fluid and elusive.

Even a man who devotes his whole life to the cultivation of his whiskers, meditating upon them ceaselessly, day and night, and giving them the place of honor in his most secret hopes and aspirations—even so assiduous a birsuticulturist must, in the end, stand flabbergasted before their impenetrable mystery. 

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Pole Sitting and Golf

H.L. Mencken

Press of Atlantic City/August 30, 1929

The best psychologist in these parts is the Hon. William F. F. Broening, LL.B., imperial wizard of the Moose and, so I hear everywhere, the next Governor and Captain-General of the Maryland Free State. Long before anyone else paid any heed to the polesitter, he was out visiting the first champion and making a speech that will probably live as long as Lincoln’s harangue at Gettyburg. His intuitions in such matters are singularly apt and searching. It took him only ten seconds to perceive that pole-sitting would fetch Baltimore, and it took him only a minute or two more to reach the ringside. Has Baltimore got columns of valuable publicity out of the new Olimpiad? Then Dr. Broening has got the same. 

When I speak of this publicity as valuable I simply accept the local standard, formulated officially by the experts in this art and mystery. If it profits us to send out news that a new soap factory is to be opened on Locust Point, or that the Tall Cedars of Lebanon are to hold a parade, then why shouldn’t it profit us to send out the pioneers still bubbles and festers in Baltimore’s infantry? Dr. Broening, in his historic speech, was quite right, it takes more than mere patience to sit on a pole for ten days. It takes, for one thing, moral courage, for the prevailing moves are against it. It takes toughness, especially posteriori. Above all, it takes self-reliance.

When these high qualities appear in the young it is not time for the judicious to cough sadly behind their hands, it is time for them to get out their best jugs and make whoopee. For what the phenomenon has to teach, speaking concretely, is that the young are still sufficiently limber to leap from under the steam-roller. With playgrounds everywhere, manned by hordes of assiduous ma’ms, they yet prefer to make their own games even at the cost of wet skins, stiff knees and parental glares. Let us rejoice that this is so—that some, at least, escape the uplift. For one boy on a pole, contemplating the world with easy independence, is worth a thousand in a squad, laboriously drilling to pedagogical commands.

That the sport looks idiotic to most persons on the ground is a fact of no consequence, for that is how all sports look to those who take no hand in them. I confess that to me, at least, it seems a great deal less idiotic than golf. I can imagine myself, to serve some great public end, sitting on a pole in my back yard, but I can’t imagine myself playing golf even to save the republic from the Japs. Golf happens to be my pet abomination.

It not only seems idiotic to me; it also seems shameful. When I hear of a friend devoting an afternoon to it, with so many pleasant saloons open and willing. I am affected as I’d be if I heard that he had been converted at a Methodist revival. I regard it as an attentat against human dignity. It is a disgrace to the human race.

But this, of course, is only a prejudice, and fundamentally irrational. No doubt it is possible, given the right attitude of mind, to play golf with decency, just as it is possible to spit at a mark with decency. Maybe my low opinion of the game is due to a subconscious blood thirstiness—a secret resentment of the fact that it so seldom kills. All I can say on this point is that I am aware of no regret when I hear that some fat and elderly golfer, making an obscene show of himself in the hot sun, has staggered, turned blue and barged into heaven, to the relief of his heirs and assigns. If there were more such fatalities on the links, the game would better justify its existence. But even if a dead wagon followed every foursome I’d still not play it.

In any case, pole sitting is better, if only because it is not done at country clubs and in grotesque and unsightly costumes. The pole sitter pursues his chosen folly on his private estate, in the manner of a gentleman, and does not rig himself out like a movie actor on a holiday. If candidates for high office choose to come and make speeches to him, he hears them with dignity, but does not commit himself. He does invite them to join him. He does not talk pole sitting. He joins no club. If he is absurd, then it is only in the sense that everyone who follows undeviatingly a difficult course is absurd. If he is laughed at, then so was Columbus laughed at, and St. Simeon Stylites, and Lindbergh and Coolidge. 

Human beings, in fact, spend a great deal of their time laughing at one another. Every man seems absurd to his neighbor, not only in his diversions, but also in his sober labors. My own favorite object of mirth is one of the most austere and venerable figures in our society, to wit, the judge. If I frequent courtrooms very little, it is only because I have a high theoretical respect for his office, and so do not want to be tempted to laugh at him. That temptation, in his actual presence, is almost irresistible. There he sits for hour after hour, listening to brawling shysters, murkily dozing his way through obvious perjury, contemplating a roomful of smelly loafers, and sadly scratching himself as he wonders what his wife is going to have for dinner, all the while longing horribly for a drink. If he is not a comic figure, then there is none in this world.

Years ago, when I had literary ambitions, I blocked out a one-act play about a judge. Now that I am too old to write it I may as well give it away. The scene is a courtroom, and the learned judge is on the bench, gaping wearily at his customers. They are of the usual sort—witnesses trying to remember what the lawyers told them to say, policemen sweating in their padded uniforms, newspaper readers and tobacco chewers, and long ranks of dirty and idiotic old men, come in to get warm. In front of the judge a witness is being examined by a lawyer. To one side 12 jurymen snooze quietly. The place smells like an all-night trolley car on a winter night. 

The judge, unable to concentrate his attention upon the case at bar, groans wheezily. It is a dreadful life, and he knows it. Of a sudden the opposition lawyer objects to a question put to the witness, and the judge has to pull himself together. The point raised is new to him. In fact, it goes far beyond his law. He decides in loud, peremptory tones, notes the exception, and resumes his bitter meditations. What a life! What a finish for a man who was once a gay dog, with the thirst of an archbishop and an arm for every neck! What a reward for long years of toil and privation! A tear rolls down the judge’s nose. 

As he shakes it off his eyes sweep the courtroom, and a strange thrill runs through him. There, on the last seat, sandwiched between a police sergeant and a professional bondsman, is the loveliest cutie ever seen! There, in the midst of the muck, is romance ineffable! The judge shoots his cuffs out of his gown, twirls his moustache, permits a soapy, encouraging smirk to cover his judicial glower, and gives a genial cough. How thrilled the cutie will be when she sees that he notices her! What a day in a poor girl’s life! What an episode to remember—the handsome and amiable judge, the soft exchanges of glances, “Maude Muller” all over again. He coughs a bit louder. 

The cutie, glancing up, sees him looking at her. Paralyzed with fright, she leaps out of her seat, climbs over the police sergeant, and flees the courtroom. 

Maybe this play won’t seem as sad to you as it does to me. If so, forget it. But don’t forget that all of us are poor fish, and that the distance between the judge and a polesitter is not, after all, very great. All of us, in this world, play the parts of melancholy clowns, and appear ridiculous to the other clowns. If your taste in humor is bitter, try to picture to yourself an elderly and somewhat rheumy man, weighting nearly 200 pounds and full of all sorts of rare and valuable learning—picture such a man sitting in his underclothes on a hot, sticky night, writing such stuff as the foregoing. Yet the kingdom of Heaven is full of such fellows, and others swarm in Hell. 

The pole-sitters are no better and no worse. They are less dignified than judges, but more rational. They don’t know much, but what they know is true—that there are fewer flies in the air than on the ground, that hard boards grow softer when one is used to them, that people are easily entertained and easily gulled, that a statesman making a speech is a gruesome spectacle, that sitting on a pole is a great deal better than going to school. A judge knows more, but very little of it is true; his mind, if he sticks to his trade, becomes a junkheap of lugubrious nonsense. He, too, sits on a pole, but it teaches him nothing.

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Ring Exchanges Snappy Chatter With the President

Ring Lardner

Muskegon Chronicle/April 2, 1927

To the Editor:

Since the news leeked out that I had been to Washington the mails has been flooded with a couple of letters wanting to know did I meet the President. Yes friends, we both had that honor and the meeting took place in the executive offices on one of the days when he received whatever newspapermen is able to be up by 4 p.m.

The doors is throwed open at given signal and all the correspondents rushes in and stands around his desk and he stands up and reads off a few replies to queries that has been wrote in to him and wile he is reading any correspondent has got the privilege of interrupting him to ask extra questions provide it they don’t care if they get a answer. The day I was there he might just as well of said mah jongg as soon as we had him surrounded. When meeting was over Mr. Watkins of the Indianapolis Star says for me to lag behind like usual and he made the introductions and we shook hands and the President says I have heard your name a good many times and I wanted to say horse a piece but I just give him one of my smiles and says I had heard of him too. He laughed till you could of heard a pin drop. So when I left before he had a chance to ask me to supper, as I all ready was dated up.

Starved to Death in Safety Zone.

The date was with a stage actress who I had kind of bragged around that I knowed her and promised some of the Washington folks that I would introduce her to them and the arrangements was that they would wait for me down to Harvey’s restaurant and I would bring her there. Will state at this point that the lady in question was Miss Dale Winter who is starring in a music show. Well anyways I could not find Miss Winter and the folks who was waiting for us got kind of hysterical and one of them name Jack O’Brien made the remark that if Winter comes will Ring be far behind. This is said to of created a furor in Harvey’s and spoiled several people’s supper.

One thing I noticed about Washington is that the taxi drivers is pretty near all boys that failed to get overseas during the war but is about ½ seas over now and still trying to do their bit and if they don’t knock off at least one pedestrian per trip they don’t charge for the ride. The boys was telling me about a congressman from Humperdinck county, Wisconsin, who they had all been trying to get but couldn’t seem to do no more than graze him till finely they hired a policeman to tell him about the safety zones in the middle of the street and he stepped into one of them one night and they kept him there till he starved to death. Personally I was too smart to walk anywhere and all I got was strained ligaments from trying to work the foot brake from the back seat.

Senators Nearly Get Trapped in Senate

Another chance a pedestrian takes is on acct. of the bootleggers being jealous of each other and every time one of them sees another other, which you can’t hardly help, why they’s a mutual shooting affray. But the boys has generally always been trying their own stuff and being ½ blind are just as libel to hit you or I. A few years ago it seems they happened to hit a senator but lucky for him the bullet struck his head and he got off with a abrasion and anyways he was from Vermont which somebody has nicknamed the granite state.

I kind of expected that everybody in town would be speaking in code but was able to understand practically everything that was said up to 2 or 3 a.m. I figured that the newspaper men being right there, on the grounds, why they would have a better inside in the situation but they was very few names I didn’t hear favorably mentioned for the president’s chair, speaking of which they will half to make it a couch or you can count me out. One correspondent even said he heard that Cox was going to run again. He didn’t explain the use of the adverb.

Spent one pleasant p.m. out to the Central High School where the athletic director is Doc White that used to pitch and sing baritone for the White Sox. Doc’s high school baseball team was having their work out and will state that it is good thing for Philadelphia that they ain’t in the National League.

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One Way Talker Big Bother

Ring Lardner

Fort Worth Star Telegram/October 6, 1927

Ring is Handicapped in Opener

Hot Dogs Called “Wieners”

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 6—I wish to state at the outset that I watched the first game under a severe handicap. Possibly my more senile readers will recall that amongst those attending the World’s Series of 1921 was a Mrs. Vera Thoke, nicknamed Ducky because her husband was a quack doctor in Enid, Okla. The town of Enid had conducted a popularity contest and the winner was to be sent to the series, which Enid hoped would last a long time. Mrs. Thoke won the contest and was given a ticket to New York, but no ticket to the series. She stood in line in front of a ticket window at Madison Square Garden for three days before she found out that the games were being played at the Polo Grounds. In some way or another she got a hold of my telephone number and from then on she draped herself around me. There was no vacant seat in the press box, so she sat in my lap and I had to read about the game in the papers next day.

Well, when I took my seat this afternoon, a terrible looking woman on my left started a one-way conversation and who should she turn out to be but Mrs. Thokes’ daughter. She said her name was Helma and she had been christened that because it was what she replied every time her mother spoke to her. She did not win any popularity contest, but came to the series as the result of a wager. Last spring she bet with a girl friend that Cleveland would beat out Pittsburgh, thinking they were in the same league. The loser was to ride here on a surf board, rolling a peanut in front of her. Miss Thoke started from Enid in July, when it became evident that Cleveland could never do it, and arrived Wednesday just too late to wash her face and hands before the game began. She had an anonymous letter of introduction to me and was pretty much of a pest all afternoon. If it had not of been for she and the fact that Donie Bush got beat, I would have had a pretty good day.

DIRECTLY behind me was Graham McNamee and his microphone and I could hear every word he said. So it was just like eating your cake and having it. I mean here I was watching a World’s Series ball game and listening to the broadcast of it at one and the same time. You might almost say I attended a double-header, the game Mac was describing and the game I was watching.

I suppose my millions of radio fans will want to know what Mr. MacNamee looks like and I only wished I could tell you. But I can’t. It ain’t because he is indescribable. But I couldn’t turn around on account of a stiff neck which I caught from Wilbert Robinson of the Brooklyn club coming over on the train Monday night. Robbie contracted the ailment during the regular season from looking straight up in the air at his ball club’s line drives The Hotel Schenley was kind of crowded at the noon hour, so I decided to make a lunch of hot dogs at the ball park. I found out that they don’t call them hot dogs here in Pittsburgh. They call them wieners in honor of Lloyd and Paul.

I ran into Dan Howley, manager of the St. Louis Browns. He said he was disappointed in only getting Catcher Manion in the draft. He wanted to get Ed Winn, too, which of rounded out his ball club.

“I had a tough break a while ago,” said Dan. “My team were all at the ball yard when the tornado hit St. Louis and it didn’t kill a one of them.”

Early in the morning a dense fog hung over Pittsburgh and in the afternoon some of the ball players acted like they was still in it. A good many of we experts thought the two clubs wasn’t Pittsburgh and New York at all, but the Phillies and Browns disguised as Lon Chaney.

WAITE HOYT and Ray Kremer seemed to be betting on each other. Both these gents are a whole lot better than they look in this battle. If they ain’t, I am going to take up pitching. I could still continue my art. In fact, pretty near every ball player in this series is experting on the side and at one juncture in the game they asked a 10 minutes recess so as they could refill their fountain pens. Earl Smith complained that it was hard work to typewrite while wearing a mask, protector and shinguards, and Judge Landis has stated that hereafter a stenographer will be permitted to set on the home plate and take the catcher’s dictation.

To add to the confusion, in the excitement of the third inning, Miss  Thoke jumped up on a press table and did a cartwheel. The swish of her skirts blew away the first 6000 wards of Charley Herzog’s story and Charley’s only hope is that it blew them toward Baltimore.

I guess I forgot to mention that Miss Thoke is betting on the Yankees. She has got them mixed up some way with the Notre Dame football team and at frequent intervals all afternoon she would holler “Hurrah for Rockne” and “touchdown, touchdown.”

A remarkable feature of the pastime was the fact that in four different innings it was the Pittsburgh pitcher’s turn to bat first. In the last half of the ninth, some of the fans wanted Donie to send in Cuyler, who has remained on the bench, where he has spent the last two months, because, so rumor bath it, he did not choose to run or slide in 1927.

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Saintly, Generous Ward Green Had Handy Pair of Fists, Too

Westbrook Pegler

Columbus Ledger/January 26, 1956

The death of Ward Greene, the editor and general manager of King Features Syndicate, is a personal disaster to all of who worked with him and of course many others in and out of the newspaper business which he honored and adorned. I have met few persons whom I could sincerely describe as saintly, but this is my opinion of Jimmie Greene and I sure none of our writers, artists, editors, and our girls on the switchboard, will dissent. He was saintly, although he once remarked in his quiet voice, faintly musical with the accent of the South, that he hated church-people in Georgia who used to rush up to him beaming smugly and cry, “Brother, are you a Christian?”

I doubt that he really hated them because hating simply was out of his line. Sweetly generous, indiscriminate kindness was his chief trait. J.D. Gortatowsky, another member of our uptown brass, put it that unwavering loyalty was his strongest spiritual trait. I agree, but I think it is a phase of the whole soul of a man whose like I never have met. He was so generous and fair that not long ago he went after a writer, offering him a contract even though this young man had taken some terrible belts at our concern and some of our executives.

“He has been pretty rough on us,” Jimmie said, “but the kid is a good writer, and he seems to me to have integrity. I am afraid I like him.”

Jimmie — this nickname just happened and was with him from childhood—was spotted as a great novelist in 1929 when his first book, “Cora Potts,” was published and Henry Mencken went into conniptions about a new genius. Cora Potts was a madam. The theme was bold enough by itself but Jimmie’s Cora Potts was an absolute challenge to morals because she was successful and still on the rise, without the slightest indication of retribution, on the last page.

I thought “Death in the Deep South” was Jimmie’s best. It was a fierce, magnificent rebuke to the typical city-side gang of reporters on a “hot” murder story. It was a paraphrase of the tragedy of Leo Frank, a young Atlanta factory executive from the North who was convicted of murdering a young woman, sentenced to hang, commuted to life and, finally, lynched. The description of the heartlessness of reporters, including women, in pursuit of trifles for new leads for new editions and the anguish of the afflicted wife of the man accused took courage because the portrayals were photographic and these were people with whom he had to work day after day.

A few years ago Jimmie did a little sentimental book about a couple of dogs, called “Lady and the Tramp.” It sold well but authors seldom get rich on books, so when Disney made a movie of it I phoned Jimmie from Arizona to congratulate him. He thanked me but said with a dry chuckle, “Only trouble is I sold it outright for very little.”

Later, though, he and Disney got up a comic strip the same theme and Jimmie recently told me this would bring him $20,000 a year as long as he wanted to do it.

As I write this, Gorty phones from Santa Barbara to warn me not to give an impression that Jimmie was sweetly tiresome.

“I never knew any non-professional who had so many fights,” he said. “He never ducked a fight or won one. When Villa raided Columbus, N M., he secretly wired the War Department for credentials as a war correspondent and the message leaked to some of us. So, we sent him a wire to drop everything and hurry to Washington. Jimmie resigned, was about to hop a day coach when we sent him another saying the War Department was advised that he was a drunken bum and therefore withdrew the credentials. Jimmie wound up in a police station, pretty well scuffed up. He hit a cop his first week in New York and Sime Silverman, of Variety, got him out of that one.

“One night in Los Angeles, he took pity on a horrible, low-down bum sleeping in that park across from the Biltmore and, at four in the morning, tried to take his character up to share his room. The house detective stopped them and Jimmie said ‘Why, this is my friend.’ The house dick said, ‘Okay, what is his name?’ Jimmie turned to the bum and said, ‘Friend, what is your name?’ So Jimmie belted the dick and they had to call the night desk at the Examiner to keep him out of jail. He never weighted more than 130 pounds.”

In the office, Jimmie often let the whole staff go at noon on very hot days. If the weather was bad in winter he would close up shop in time for the suburban people to make it home. This earned him the name of Simon Legree.

Four years ago, Jimmie was took real bad but in the last year he gained a little and was enjoying life again with Edith, his wife who had once been his secretary. Her anxiety seemed to be over until he had a heart attack on board the President Polk approaching Havana.

Jimmie was an affectionate friend of Margaret Mitchell, another reporter of his class in Atlanta. After she wrote “Gone With the Wind” he boasted proudly of their friendship. And when I first met Miss Mitchell she spent a good deal of the interview telling me what a great writer he was and of her joy in his success.

A year ago Jimmie was forbidden to drive a car. So he got a de luxe affair and a uniformed chauffeur and he recently remarked to his old friend Gortatowsky: “Gory, I now ride to my office in a limousine with a driver in livery and read my New York Times and take my heart pills. I am a success at last.”

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How He Came to Pinch the Most Beautiful Legs in the World

Westbrook Pegler

Columbus Ledger/January 24, 1956

Strictly in the line of my duty I recently pinched the most beautiful legs in the world, surmounted by a beautiful blonde actress. This was in Rome where American movie actors of high and lesser degree infest the Via Veneto, which runs from the Excelsior up to the lovely Hotel Flora where the experiment took place. Vincent Barbi, a naturalized American who boxed with the Italian Olympic Team in Los Angeles in 1932, is the town crier, so to speak, of this concourse, meanwhile pursuing his career in a thriving market as body-guard for bloated counterfeit emperors against authentic Roman backgrounds. He is, unfortunately, typed by a slightly cauliflowered nose which imparts a resemblance to Jack Dempsey before he had his snoot rehabilitated with bees-wax, chicle and cartilage from a mewling lamb. However, there Is a brisk demand for his ominous mien and he lives monkishly from day to day suppressing a severely professional ambition to clutch lovely ladies and snort and pant quite insincere phrases about love. Mr Barbi is married.

The lady on the legs also is married and, as sometimes happens in the world of make-believe, is devoted to a husband. Her name is Maria Gambarelli. The way I happened to find myself running my hands up and down her legs was slightly complicated but innocent of the slightest twinge of impurity. I have witnesses so to swear.

Vince Barbi stopped me on the Via Veneto and said: “How would you like to meet Maria Gambarelli? I could invite you to tea on the terrace and we could watch the Communists ride by in their beautiful German Mercedeses and English Daimlers. We could hold a meeting of the underground because she is very opposed to Communists, too, and this street along here is Red as a bloody nose, just like Hollywood and Vine.”

But it came on rain that afternoon so Miss Gambarelli came to my apartment instead and I do not wish to disparage Grace Kelly or that lovely Lollobrigida girl, but into each life some rain must fall and they are strictly nine-spots by comparison.

So we had tea and Maria’s duenna drowsed off according to charming siesta custom and I abruptly asked Maria: “How can you keep your legs in condition year after year when great fighters and ball-players check out after a few seasons because their legs go? Tris Speaker, Cobb and Hubbell would be going yet if their legs had lasted.”

“Well,” Miss Gambarelli said, “since your interest is strictly professional feel them— ” And she got up and came over and extended her right leg “Feel that calf. Now the knee. Now—.”

I felt that calf and thought of the Statue of Liberty.

‘‘They don’t exercise,’’ Maria said. “I have been dancing ever since I was four years old. Down in Greenwich Village—”

I said: “You mean Greenwich, Conn., no doubt. Very refined and you no doubt went to Miss Bidgett’s select classes for young ladies on 91st Street. But surely not Greenwich Village, downtown, in the slums.”

She said: “Yes, I said Greenwich Village, downtown, tenements. Italians both alto and basso, Irish and Jews. Walk up, five or six stories. Some buildings only one bathroom to four or five families to a floor. Very nice people, too. One boy across the hall is a great surgeon. Some are priests. The beautiful dancer Yolanda, of Verloz and Yolanda was one of our girls. Some of us went to Public School No 3 and Our Lady of Pompeii.

“I was born here in Italy. My father had some money but he lost it after we went to New York. Then we had bad times. My poor sister had to work in a bottling place, but one day she cut her finger and my mother was determined never to let me work in a factory. She had her whole heart set on it. And if a dancer has even a slightly deformed finger it spoils the picture, the perfection, no matter how graceful she may be.

I was not feeling Maria’s calves all this time, of course. After a while I put my hands under me and sat on them and she went over by a door and grasped the knob and started doing splits and popping up onto her toes.

“I got into the Metropolitan dancing class at the age of seven. Pavlova took me to Italy and I danced before the king and queen. I was only 14 when I was premiere danseuse at the Metropolitan and my legs are still as strong as they ever were because I have not missed three days in a row from my exercises in all these years. Ball-players and fighters lay off for months and wonder why their legs go.”

And that was how I came to pinch the most beautiful legs in the world as Maria’s duenna took siesta that afternoon at the Flora in Rome.

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Don’t Get Wrong Idea About That Fur Coat

Ring Lardner

The Times/October 5, 1922

Well, friends, you imagine my surprise and horror when I found out tonight that the impression had got around some way another that as soon as this serious was over I was planning to buy a expensive fur coat for my Mrs, and put a lot of money into same and buy a coat that would probably run up into hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Well I did not mean to give no such kind of a impression and I certainly hope that my little article was not read that way by everybody a specially around my little home because in the first place I am not a sucker enough to invest hundreds and hundreds of dollars in a garment which the chance are that the Mrs. will not wear it more than a couple times all winter as the way it looks now we are libel to have the most openest winter in history and if women folks should walk along the street in expensive fur coats in the kind of weather which it looks like we are going to have why they would only be laughed at and any way I believe a couple can have a whole lot better time in winter staying home and reading a good book or maybe have few friends in to play bridge.

Man Would Be Sucker

Further and more I met a man at supper last night that has been in the fur business all his life and ain’t did nothing you might say only deal in furs and this man says that they are great many furs in this world which is reasonable priced that has got as much warmth in them as high price furs and looks a great deal better. For inst, he says that a man is a sucker to invest thousands and thousands of dollar in expensive furs like ermine, muleskin, squirrel skin and kerensky when for a hundred dollars or not even that much, why a man can buy a owl skin or horse skin or weasel skin garment that looks like big dough and practically prostrates people with the heat when they wear them. 

So I hope my readers will put a quietus on the silly rumor that I am planning to plunge in the fur market. I will see that my Mrs. is dressed in as warm a style as she has been accustomed to, but neither her or l is the Kind that likes to make a big show and go up and down 5th Ave, sweltering in a $700 hog skin garment in order so as people will turn around and gape at us. Live and let live is my slocum.

Fur Forgot, Furious Flight

So much for the fur coat episode and let us hear no more about it and will now go on with my article which I must apologize for it not being very good and the reason is on account of being very nervous after our little ride from the Polo Grounds to Park Row. It was my intentions to make this trip in the subway, but while walking across the field after the game I run into Izzy Kaplan, the photographer, and he says would I like to ride down in a car which him and his friends had hired so I and Grantland Rice got in and we hadn’t no sooner than started when one of our fellow passengers says that we ought to been with them coming up, “We made the trip from Park Row in 24 minutes,” he says, “and our driver said he was going to beat that record on the return trip.” 

So we asked what had held them back comeing up and one of them said that the driver had kept peeling and eating bananas all the way and that he did not drive so good when both his hands was off the wheal. Besides that, they had ran into a guy and had to wait till the ambulance come and picked him up. 

Well, ‘friends. I will not try and describe our flight only to say that we did not beat the record, but tied it and the lack of bananas didn’t prevent our hero from driving with his hands off the wheel as he used the last named to shake his fists at pedestrians and other riff raff that don’t know enough to keep off the public highways during the rush hour.

Most of the things I was to mention in this article was scared out of me during our little jaunts. One of them however was the man from Toronto that stood in line with his wife from 8 p. m. Tuesday night till the gates opened Wednesday morning so as to be sure of good seats. According to officials of the club, they could of got the same seats if they had not showed up till a couple hours before the game, but if they had of done that, why the lady would not of had no chance to brag when she got back home. The way it is, why she can say to her friends: “Charley may not be much for looks, but he certainly showed me the night life of New York.” 

Dividing interest with this couple was a couple of heel and toe pedestrians that done their base circling stunt just before the start of the game. One of them was the same guy that done it before the first game last fall, but this time he was accompanied by a lady hoofer and it is not too much to say that the lady was dressed practally as though for her bath. Casey Stengel expressed the general sentiment in the following words: “If that is just her walking costume, I would hate to see her made up for tennis.”

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