Life, 1912-01-25 · page 35 of 44
Life — January 25, 1912 — page 35: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page is primarily **advertising**, not satire or political commentary. The dominant content is an advertisement for the Matheson automobile, a luxury car marketed as having "a tried and proven chassis of remarkable workmanship" with bodies by premium manufacturers Brewster and Quinby. The left column contains historical text about Benjamin Franklin's journalism career—his work on the *New England Courant*, his imprisonment for press freedom, and his later success with the *Pennsylvania Gazette*. This appears to be **contextual editorial content**, possibly establishing Franklin as an American journalistic icon to lend prestige to the publication itself. The smaller advertisements for Milo cigarettes and an Underground Garbage Receiver are typical period magazine filler. There are **no cartoons or caricatures** visible on this page. The "Silent Six" in the Matheson ad likely refers to the car's engine type, a common marketing phrase of the era.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
His paper was called the New Eng- land Courant. It was edited jointly by James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt want. Benjamin edited it a part of the time and James a part of the time. The idea of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving volume to the edito- rial page, but it was necessary for one to run the paper while the other was in jail, In those days you could not sass the king, and then, when the king came into the office the next day and stopped his paper and took out his ad, put it off on “our informant” and go right along with the paper. You bad to go to jail, while your subscribers wondered why their paper did not come, and the paste soured in the tin dippers in the sanc- tum and the circus passed by on the other side. How many of us to-day, fellow jour- nalists, would be willing to stay in jail while the lawn festival and the kanga- roo came and went? Who of all our company would go to a prison cell for the cause of freedom while a double- column ad of sixteen aggregated cir- cuses and eleven congresses of ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native lairs, went by us? At the age of seventeen Ben got dis- gusted with his brother and went to Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to “sub” for a few weeks and then got a regular “ sit.” Franklin was a good printer and final- ly got to be a foreman. He made an CURE See 3 ———— | Matheson ‘Silent Six.” Egyptian Cigarette of Quality AROMATIC DELICACY MILDNESS PURITY ~ At your club or dealer's THE SURBRUG CO., Makers, New York UNDERGROUND ” GARBAGE RECEIVER REEZIN NO LITTER. pens with the foot: closea itactt, Clean and Sold direct trem factory. Gu: Cire juarant ©. H. STEPHENSON, Mir. 46 Farrar Street, Lyn, Sasa, excellent foreman, sitting by the hour in the composing room and spitting on the stove, while he cussed the make~ and presswork of the other papers. Then he would go into the editorial rooms and scare the editors to death with a wild shriek for more copy. He knew just how to conduct himself as a foreman so that strangers would think ke owned the paper. In 1730, at the age of twenty-four, Franklin married, and established the Pennsylvania Gazette. He was then re- m7 garded as a great man and almost every one took his paper. Franklin grew to be a great journalist and spelled words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper work and everybody respected him. Along about 1746 he began to study the habits and construction of light- ning and inserted a local in his paper in which he said that he would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new or odd specimens of