Judge, 1926-07-03 · page 9 of 36
Judge — July 3, 1926 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis: "Going North This Summer" This is a humorous domestic narrative, not political satire. The piece parodies polar exploration literature (particularly fashionable in the early 1900s) by treating a mundane search for a misplaced Palm Beach suit as an epic expedition. The narrator, Alexis Phlap, describes climbing to the attic as a perilous polar journey, complete with "base camps" and supplies running low. Comic details include: a rickety 1907-built ladder, suffocating attic heat, encountering "skeletons of rusted dress forms," and fear of detection by "the housewife." The joke is the mock-heroic contrast between grandiose exploration rhetoric and the trivial reality—the suit has simply been hanging in a closet the whole time. The postcard and "Arctic" scene with Polish children dancing are supporting gags emphasizing the expedition theme. This satirizes the era's popular adventure narratives while gently mocking the fussiness of summer clothing concerns.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Going North This Summer? {lexis Phlap’ ; - TRat. me Gaming. inst the Alexis Phlap’s own personal narrative 4 D Ch of. Usk, rng in time of his exploratory trip to the clothes closet in the attic in his heroic search for his last summer's Palm Beach Suit. (By exclusive radio via Manila, Long Island, Cape Town, The S Sea, and Paris. Copyrighted in just lots of places everywhere.) “Arter climbing to the third floor, I cut my pack to a rigid minimum, leaving even my coat and vest behind me at a base which I established in) Aunt Lucy’s room. Then, it being two seventeen in the afternoon, I started the perilous ascent up that rickety ladder built in September of 1907 by Max Gumphus, who made the bathroom door open the wrong way, and scon Pretty soon. my nostrils were filled with the super- soon after this that I pulled off my collar and shirt... and then all went blank, and I don’t remember anything more until I heard the voice of the rescue party saying. “ ‘Never mind, Alec, it’s hanging in the closet in your room.’ Creighton Peet “Calm yourself, calm yourself. According to observations we're right on top of the Pole now.” heated atmosphere so characteristic of the attic highlands. Stumbling over the skeletons of rusted dress forms and decayed laundry horses, pitiful mementoes of the dear, dead days beyond recall, I penetrated the fastnesses of the clothes closet. “There was little time to lose, for my supply of patience was running low. When [ sounded the tanks at 1, M. on the y of the fourteenth, I discovered that two more unseen objects over which to stumble would prove fatal by revealing my presence to the housewhi ff, a usually tractable, but occasionally dangerous attic biped. I, therefore, resorted to desperate measures and threw every- thing in the closet onto the attic ee —s : floor-lands. Needless to say I suf- QUAINT SCENE FROM THE ARCTIC fered agonies with the heat. It was Pole dance by little North Polish children. comicbooks.com