Judge — April 1937 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

provide at least halfway decent food. The way to begin this reform is to por to those who appreciate good food that there is such.a thing as home- made bread. Not the milk-rising or salt- rising bread of our grandmothers, who had to make their own yeast from pota- toes or what-not, but modern up-to-date homemade bread, made from the best flour, stirred in a bread-mixer, with crisp crusts of golden brown baked in the home oven by a woman who loves to make her husband and children happy. The next step in progress towards better food for American human beings is, of course, the church supper. The church expresses the ideal, doesn’t it? The women who provide the church suppers are mostly good housewives, aren't they? Then why should religion get such a black eye as it does when store ie and pale and lifeless coffee, follow- ing boiled ham, cabbage salad and limp Parker House rolls, are offered to Amer- icans in the name of God? HIS month we feel most affectionate toward a certain Southerner. In. terrupted by his son, while completing his income tax return, he shot the son, shot his other child and his wife, kicked a pet spaniel through a window and slashed himself to death with a razor. No that summer is coming you'll probably be hearing the call of the open road and want to be out on the highway in back of the wheel of your iron monster. You should, therefore, be interested in the Aetna Highway Safety Demonstration tests. According to Mr. Withe, of the Aetna Casualty and Surety Company, who sponsor these tests, they have our large sets and seven smaller sets which they're sending around the country on sort of a vaude.-- ville circuit. The sets are made so that they're very easy to knock down, crate, ship, uncrate and set up. They're work- ing their way westward over the circuit right now, playing in succession Jersey City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis and so on to the Coast, then east again over the Southern route. They try to hit as many cities as possible during National Safety Week or a municipal safe driving campaign so they'll have a good publicity tie-up. If you live in a hamlet, middlesex, village or town of any size whatsoever, ‘you're bound to have an opportunity to take the Aetna Highway Safety Demonstra- tion test. So that you'll know what to expect, we went up to the New York Museum of Science and Industry and entered, all set to be awed. After browsing about in “Herman, if you're not doin anything you might fix that hole in the door.” an imposing array of ship’s models, horseless carriages and turbines, we stepped over to the demonstration. Let us state here and now that the safety demonstration does not take place in a mock automobile, with a wheel, brakes, gas and stuff like that. Nothing so easy, but rather a whole series of very scientific motor-response tests. The damsel in charge pounced on us like a cat on a herring. The first gadget this handmaiden of highway safety pushed us into was the steering test. In this contraption, you sit in a driver's seat with the steering wheel in your hands. In front of your eyes, on a lighted screen, is a broad high. way with a line down the middle; just above the line is a tiny colored ball, controlled by the steering wheel. The highway soon starts to jiggle like a whirling dervish with the hives, and the general idea is to keep the ball on the road while overhead a meter clicks off the percentage of time you're off your course. After what scemed cons, our sweaty paws relaxed their grip on the wheel, and we turned hopefully toward our hostess, who said briefly, “Your car was within the proper limits for 67% of the time. The average is 65%." We felt like asking what was supposed to happen the other 35% of the time, but thought better of it. The next little dingus was the Ishe- gawa color test. This is the one where you are shown a series of circles formed by colored dots, inside of which are numbers found by different colored dots. The idea, of course, is to read the num. bers correctly. We did fine until we came to the last two circles which were perfect blanks to us. “Good Lord,” we gasped, “we're color blind!’ At this point the young lady came to our aid. “It’s all right,” she cooed soothingly, “you weren't supposed to see anything in the last two circles.” She made a note on her card. “You seem to be normal,” she said, “your eyesight, that is.” This brought us to the glare test. This here dingus was a large cabinet, not un- like the ones in a penny arcade where you see “A Night in the Harem.” The only difference is that instead of seeing the ladies of the harem in décolleté, you see, through a glare, the figures of a man, a woman, a boy and a girl. They're rather peripatic specimens, however, and they keep changing like the very dickens, while the glare keeps increasing. While all these things are going on, you keep trying to identify the figures to your examiner. The result is something like this: boy —man—woman—girl—boy—I mean man—man—I mean woman—hell! I can't see a thing! We were pleased indeed to find that we needed only 4 units of light to overcome headlight glare, whereas the average person needs 5.5. Hooray! Our next turn at bat took us to the speed estimation test. This looks some- Judge comicbooks.com