Judge — October 11, 1924 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

Goop Me Too, Saint Gelett by Don Herold Get Burcess will probably be a Saint some day—Saint Gelett —because he has done so much to help millions of parents raise children rightly. His Goops are just as in- genious as hell fire, as an aid to righteousness. Indeed, they partake of some of the fascination of hell fire. Every parent knows the answer to the question as to the advisability of reading about bad examples such as the Goops to children, as opposed to the other possible method of reading to them about good examples. This other possible method is impossible. Children want to hear about children sinners. Instead of accepting passively some perfectly acceptable example, they want to enjoy passions of con- tempt and disgust in attaining their moral growth. (In this, they are not so different from their elders.) They want to be good because Goops are so utterly despicable. The method may be all wrong, but it works, at least superficially. The latest Bur- gess book, “Why Be a Goop?” (Stokes) is worth ten times its cost for what it has done to our little girl Doris, the past four days. I have heard her giving herself many an argument that I would have had to give her, otherwise. Her moral tone has been wonderful and I have heard her say, “Why Be a Goop?” to herself dozens of times. Now a man who can come into your house and do that to your kid for four days is worthy of sainthood, or SKK i . YO OX oo RK a _ 2 SOS SK ROW oy Uli wy) > = URE LL Ma Sunday school for grown up Goops nobody is. I don’t think the Lord, Himself, has equaled that record as yet in our house. Burgess could positively cinch his sainthood by writing a book about Grown Up Goops. Along about fifty we all need a new dose of, well, not exactly moral instruction, but of help with our manne (And after all, manner sins are every bit as bad as moral sins, and one good thing about the Goop books is that they recognize this.) Somehow our parental manners go to pot about the time the children begin to come home from college. Parents ought to take some kind of training course to prepare them for their children’s college education. In a Goop book, or somehow, they The average wife’s conception of the average chorus girl should be drawn aside and told, either jokingly or cruelly, what terrible, terrible pains they are going to give the children they love unless they are mighty careful. Mother has stood father’s five or six favorite stories for twenty years and so far the children have not been hurt by them, but the children are going to be more acute now than they have ever been. They are going to scious of all slouching, either in story telling or soup eating, either in hair dressing or newspaper reading, and in parental thinking. Some way, the Goop idea should be applied to poke up old folks. T honestly believe that not one old folk in ten thousand realizes that it is possible for him to give his children or his grandchildren almost the most cutting pain that a human being has to endure. The more love the chil- dren have, the greater their pain is going to be. Oh, how I hope that as I grow older I can be a true sports- man in the eyes of my daughter and show no slouching submission to the powers that bend and I long to crack all at once, or at least put up that appearance, like an oak under a stroke of lightning. I want to drink my coffee noise- lessly to the very end. int Gelett, if there is any possible way you can Goop me into this, I throw myself at your feet. Can’t you open up a parents’ room in your Goopy Sunday school? comicbooks.com