Judge, 1918-07-20 · page 6 of 32
Judge — July 20, 1918 — page 6: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes the bootjack—a device for removing boots—as an absurdly complicated solution to a mundane problem. The text describes the evolution from crude methods (wrestling boots off, hopping on one foot) to increasingly elaborate contraptions, culminating in the "Congress gaiter" with elastic gussets. The humor targets American mechanical ingenuity and patent culture: taking a simple task and "inventing" needlessly complex devices to solve it. The illustrations show the bootjack's ridiculous V-shaped design and the awkward contortions required to use it. The closing suggests bootjacks as instruments of "humor" that "extract mankindind from his boots"—mocking both the device's impracticality and Americans' obsession with patenting trivial improvements. The bottom illustration shows ordinary life, contrasting the absurd mechanical focus of the article above.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
pants tucked into them on week days. For Sundays and funerals we slicked up our boots the night before with hot tallow, and next day we drug our pants legs down over ‘em and went +clomping off to church, or wherever the orgy was at, to learn, doubtless, that we were but worms of the dust, doomed to misery here and everlasting blister hereafter, and served us right, too, for not doing what we didn’t know how to do. Before the invention of the bootjack feet were ex- tracted from boots with great difficulty and anguish. The patient first seated himself, then turned up one foot sideways and wrested with the boot until he wrenched his hip out of the socket, or, as occasionally happened, actually pulled off the boot. Or he went hopping about on one foot while fighting the boot on the other, until he tumbled over backwards and upset the stand table and the fam- ily equilibrium. Relatives would sometimes volunteer to assist. The patient seat- ed himself or clung to a bed WBuaeao Nowen tw Oice post and his kinsmen pulled I at the boot, twisting and wrenching it in the hope of catching it unawares and conquering it. Usually they didn’t, but upon occasions the boot bided its time and then in a moment when they wotted not, fetched loose and dumped the helpful kinsmen into the woodbox Putting boots on the next morning was almost as difficult a task. During the night they had petrified with their wrinkles sunk in and their toes turned up- ward, or else they had frozen stiff. In either event they were only to be donned by much pulling and hauling, to an accompaniment of agonized ejaculations, and in extremely aggravated instances the low popping of bursting blood vessels. Sometimes they could only be reduced to ductility by smashing them with a sledge hammer The first bootjack was a crude affair, consisting of an oblong piece of board, with a V-shaped notch in one end and a block on the under side to act as a fulcrum. The user stood on the tail of the instrument withone foot, inserted the heel of the other foot into the forked Tue First Bootsack Was a Cruve Area Witn a end, and gave an upward pull. The boot slipped out and the heavy heel cracked him on the shin of his first leg. Deep thought usually Ied him soon to put the toe under the rung of a chair in which some person sat, and if the sitter was weighty enough and the operator struggled sufficiently long, the boot-jack worked to perfection. Eventually there arose a genius who elaborated the implement by making it long enough so that in the top was an obloid orifice into which the boot was thrust. The front end of the jack went over the toe. This worked so well that pulling off boots became a popular indoor sport for the limited period thereafter during which boots contin- ued in vogue. But about this time the Congress gaiter, with elastic gussets in the sides, appeared. It mattered little that the elastic soon stretched out and puckered like the thorax of an accordion; the gaiters could be donned and doffed without a_ surgical operation, and that was enough to give them least temporary popularit In due course, came shoes of various sorts, and boots went out, and with them the bootjack But It not only Turowinc Bootjacks at Cats Was the Greatest Ksxown Button Buster on Eartn while it lasted its beneficence was twofold. extracted mankind from his boots, but was the mainstay of the humorists of that day. No other subject was so provocative of mirth and laughter. Throwing bootjacks at cats was the greatest button buster on earth. The bootjack finally disappeared, except for isolated specimens poked away under the eaves up in the garret, and became almost as much of a curiosity as the great Auk or a gentleman of the old school. With its disap- pearance genuine humor languished. But now, owing to the wearing of tight fitting boots by army officers, the bootjack is coming back into pop- ularity. And we welcome it with grateful hearts and high hopes that with the return of this beneficent instrument will come a recrudescence of real American humor. Sunpay Mornine in Tue Otp Home Town comicbooks.com