Judge — August 13, 1921 — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Saint Nickel-us Lorimer By GEORGE MITCHELL EORGE HORACE LORIMER, G the man who put the dol- lar’s worth in the Nickel and the literary descendant of Poor Rich- ard Benjamin Franklin, must surely be reckoned by masculine America and cherished in the heart of Ameri- can Womanhood as one of the great- est benefactors of our country, for does he not, in continental altruism, gather the lame and the halt, the maimed and the blind (mentally—of course), shove a fistful of literature into their eager grasps and make home a haven of rest not merely to the women and children (God bless ’em!) but to the poor old tired busi- ness man (God forgive him)! The Saturday Evening Post, which impetuously comes up for air every Thursday afternoon, has been mothered under the maternal wing of Mr. Lorimer since 1899 and has become as _nece: a bath to the mind of America as is the Saturday Evening soap and hot-water ablution to its body ... the hot water and soap, however, running a bad second and a wretched last, respectively. The editing of a weekly as strong as the Old Men’s Home Journal may be considered a man-sized job. We venture to assert that if it were handed on progressively from man to man so that everyone of us might weekly have a shot at it, there would be more insane asylums dotted over our fair map than would fit the map without buying Mexico and Canada. To handle a group of Illustrators (if it has been your discomfort to know the species) alone must merit the Congressional Medal for Valor, the Victoria Cross and a thousand United Cigar Store certificates. To grapple with the entire output of short story (short of story, rather) writers of America surely deserves an itch in the Hall of Fame without scratching for it. And yet, Mr. Lorimer has found time between whiles to rip off such trifling scraps of literature as “Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to his Son,” “Old Gorgon Graham,” “The False Gods,” and so on... . Comparatively, the man who vaude- villainously spins a dozen or more plates simultaneously looks to us like an old lady idly twiddling her thumbs. We are not crediting Mr. Lorimer with saving mankind just for the spiritual exercise he might get out of it. He gets a fair-sized salary for what he does and, if he didn’t we are inclined to believe that he would scut- tle a ship, if there were a dollar in it, with no less alacrity than any of the rest of us, but we do say that he (eda (ait : u Se ee Drawn by GorDON GRANT. “Goop-By ROSE AND DELLA, Goop-By JANE NN, Goop-By GRA Goop-By DoLLy, Goop-By MoLLy, Goop-By Goop-By Mary, JULIE AND SUE. 0 AND May. I’M OFF TO SEE MY OWN TRUE LOVE, TEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY!” does a great deal of good with a job that rates a drink at the end of the day. He’s one of the few men to our knowledge and belief that has knocked the tar out of Abraham Lin- coln’s bon mot: “You can fool some of the people all of the time” . . . etc., in that he fools all of ’em all of the time by giving ’em more than they expect to get half of the time. If you are not surprised with a nickel’s worth of Lorimer’s Light Literature, you ought to be made to hand over your nickel to somebody who remem- bers the nickel in the heyday of its youth. Home was never like what it is, thanks to Lorimer. Such men can do more to dry up a wet parade than a wet parade-day and a million- a-weekly Volsteads, for, we maintain that if an interesting bit of reading- matter were insidiously shoved into the hand that reaches for the grape, the grape would shrivel and soon az lose it’s raisin d'etre. In conse- quence, Lorimer’s halo ought to weigh enough to need carrying about on the chassis of a ten-ton truck. So here’s to you, George Horace Lorimer and may you never be called upon to suffer anything worse than being buried beneath the million of fickle nickels that trickle weekly from a fictitious public. red Always Prepz Pickett—What makes the Rev. Mr. Whoopler so successful? Pierce—His adaptability. For ex- ample, last Sunday he preached a rattling good sermon on the wicked- ness of profiteering; and, on the fol- lowing Thursday, he gave a most touching funeral talk on the beauti- ful points in the character of the late Bill Yonkinson, the most nefari- ous profiteer to which our city has ever given room. ~ comicbooks.com