Life, 1904-11-03 · page 28 of 40
Life — November 3, 1904 — page 28: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes three aspects of early 20th-century American society: **Top cartoon ("Sports"):** A Yale professor discovers college students are gambling heavily on sports events—losing hundreds of dollars per season. The satire targets the professionalization and exclusivity of college athletics. Only "trained bruisers" (professional athletes) can play; ordinary students can only participate through betting, which becomes their primary engagement with sports. **Middle cartoon ("Ready-Made"):** A joke about a journalist's son. The father says he originally planned to send his boy to journalism school, but discovered "he was a natural-born liar"—so newspaper work is his natural fit. This satirizes journalism's reputation for dishonesty. **Bottom cartoon ("From a Mother's Diary"):** A mother celebrates her daughter's engagement to an epileptic man, consoling herself that epilepsy indicates "old family" status (requiring four generations to develop). The satire mocks aristocratic pretension—using a serious neurological condition as a status symbol. The final illustration shows children reluctant to attend school, referencing Shakespeare's *As You Like It*.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
PROFESSOR at Yale, look- ing into the matter of students’ ex- penses, is aston- ished to find boys who own up to having lost as much as eight hundred dollars in a single season in bets laid on the event of college sports. And yet, why not? College sports are not what they used to be. Nobody is permitted to play in them except a select band of trained bruisers. The only way the average student may get into the game at allis by making a bet. In that way he gets to enjoy a penumbrous exhilaration which is better than nothing. If a student be very poor, he is altogether out of it. In that sad case, he may only yell, or be- THE UrEsO I OTOANE, take himself to some obscure little college, where sports have not as yet taken on the character of From a Mother’s Diary. exclusiveness. na ? OW true it is that every cloud has a silver lining! Yes- Ready-Made. terday I was distressed beyond measure to find my ODD: I hear your boy has gone on a newspaper. I poor, darling girl infatuated with an epileptic and thought you were first going to put him through the determined to marry him. But to-day I learn that epilepsy College of Journalism, is the mark of an old family, I have it on authority that Topp: Iwas. But I found he was a natural-born it takes at least four generations to make an epileptic. liar. Dear Nanny! She was wiser than her mamma, after all. I am very happy; more happy, I fear, than I de- serve to be. ‘i THE Dy | (ADDS) | (Aug WAR || {scro0t oF} ea || NAY memaneg ““CREEPING LIKE SNAIL UNWILLINGLY TO SCHOOL.” micbooks.com