Judge — March 31, 1928 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

JUDGE THE ART OF LAKE DRAGGING The recent failure of the au- thorities to locate a number of missing persons by dragging the lakes gives the general public just a slight inkling of how this grand industry de- generated, It will probably come as a sur- prise to our so-called Modern Generation, but dragging — the lakes about the country was an art that few could master, and many of our present-day mil- lionaires (although, doubtless, they will not admit it) owe their success to training lake- draggers. How well I recall the time we dragged the Central Park Lake up to Buffalo, only to find that other draggers had beaten us to this choice location with Lake Eric. It was a sore disappoint- ment to us, for Erie was even smaller than the Central Park Lake then, and just look at the darn thing now. ‘There was noth- ing for us to do but drag our lake back again, where it has been utterly unable to grow; stifled by swan boats and park commis- sioners. There were six of us in our crew—all skilled draggers—and some dub dubbed us the Flora- dora Sextette Besides myself. there was Yanesi and Roszika Dolly, Rube Goldberg, Herbert Hoover and) Gerald) Chapman. We all became famous later, ex- cept the sixth man, a chap named Otto n. 1 often won- der what became of him, Dragging a lake is done at night, as we must be careful not to disturb the many brave men who are “asleep in the deep.” (These men have been immortal- ized in song, the name of which me for the moment.) rs. or hookers, as they lly known to the trade, row out on the lake that is to be dragged, with huge Grap- pling Hooks, so-called after the inventor, a fellow named Cohen, With these Grappling Hooks, which can best be described as shaped like any other hook, we get a firm grip or grap on the lake and row like h—Il for wher- ever we want to drag the lake to. The time that young Leon Trotsky ran away from home and his mot hoped he had met with she put in a plaintive t we drag Lake Ronkon- She knew that, in a case pes: koma. like this, the first thing the police do is drag al d she thought Ronkonkoma was good as any The Floradora just returned from ng job of dr: higan to Chie: ns, Where it of annual flood. We were in 10 mood for dragging Lake Ronkonkoma, Few of us could even pronounce it. Yet. Leon's mother touched our hearts that we could not bring ourselves to say UN Accord ingly, we arranged our hooks and started off for Wetherald, Con necticut, where in later years, by a strange coincidence, Ge to be hung. We started rowing to our amazement that the lake simply wouldn't budge. — We couldn't move it. The reputation and prestige of the best draggers in the country were at stake. It was then that I invented “The Varsity Drag.” This consisted of giving the cheers of all our American Universities, thus bringing out the raccoons who in- fest that territory and naturally have relatives going to Yale, Harvard, ete. They loaned us a from New in the Mississippi so ald was and found Wr because if Fido kne “You spelled it w he'd want some, rong!” “T have to spell it wrong or Fido would understand!” —We have a-p-p-wl d-wem-p-e-li-n for d-e-s-s-wrt. comicbooks.com