Imperial Valley press., 1936-05-17

umn goes into another derviSh whirl
today. Round and round. yo hoo!
Gelett Burgess has turned in a
swell performance with his volume,
Too Good Looking!" Changing his
pace entirely. In Esquire I learn
Cobb desert is tautology. Gobi is
Monaghan for desert It's The
Cobb.
Still lives a human being so con-
scienceleSs as to make extra money
biting off puppy dogs tails. An
unsolicited letter from him has been
sent to the S. P. c. A. in his city
I have been showing a Frenchman
around What interested him most
was the splendor of our five and
ten cent stores.
Somehow this vagrant line from
a poem has been taking me for
rice: The cusped hill yearning
toward the crying sea-" Much of
my life I've been trying to men,
orize those smooth flowing lines of
Goldsmith They begin: when
lovely woman stoopS to folly, and
finds too late that men betray o"
Right there the valve of mem
ory sticks. Some of the most en-
tertaining stuff is Letters to Edi-
tors" departments. Washington Irv-
ing once said every one suffered at
times from a plethora of intellect
and sat down anc; discharged a par
eel of observations to We editor.
Roscoe Peacock writes some dam
dies.
The heartieS laughs I've heard
in the theater were inspired by Nc
Intyre and Heath in The Ham
Tree" that classic founded on the
psychology of human hunger. In
it the pompous Heath described to
his starving fellow track walker
Mcintyre the bountieS of that Won
derful land just around the next
bend. Where the hams grew on
trees, where there were rivers of
brown gravy and biscuit bushes!
Recently l read an old Chicago
Tribune office yarn. Some cubs were
sent into The Loop by the city
editor to comb hotel registers for
imposing names to interview. All
but one came back with bang up
pieces. The lone exception soberly
reported he found nobody worth
interviewing. Neither had the 9th
erS, but they used imagination. 1t
II Fol
became notable figures, mostly in the
theater Worlo, and one was Charles
B. Dillingham;. But to assure read
ers the cub who came back empty
handed did pretty well in life, it
was stated he was none other than
Frank A. Vanderlip. In fact he
topped them all.
In the cartoon world there is a
standing joke about hiding, by one
trick or another, things hard to
draw. This accounts for the re
peated use of the high board
fence-an "out" of even such in
duStriouS limners as Ding and
Webster. The reader imagines what
is behind the fence. The hind legs
of the horse and the dog are amnog
the most difficult to draw, hence
they are obscured where possible.
Hands are stumblerS Also shoes.
Briggs loved to draw cars.
90
And most of us who iugglc high
faluting words chant an eVoe in
returning to the dlSpaSsionatc re
marks of the erudite in the en-
cyclopedias. Men devoted to plain
statements of fact and insist on
chucking emotion, over-statement
and the like. Plan statements, plain
talk! How the old world needs them.
90
One of the original ArmourS-P.
Danforth. as l recall-Was strik-
ingly plain spoken. After he became
millionaire many times over. he
was in court one time and was ask
ed his occupation. I'm a butcher!'
he doomed. He hated false fuSSi
ness. Once he said to one of the
snowy office boys: Roy, I sup
pose of all the people around here
you could run to the post-office
fastest. But Heaven only knows
what you'd do when you got there 1"
90
There's only one time I ever re-
member drinking coffee to stay
awake. I had come home drowsy
and before dropping off got into
one of Booth Tarkington's word pic
lures of the old college town.
Spreading elms. Iron deer. croquet,
The clOp. clOn of hack horses. The