Life, 1912-04-04 · page 65 of 80
Life — April 4, 1912 — page 65: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page presents a serialized narrative (continued from page 710) about a fictional character named Kelly and his wife's rise to commercial prominence through aggressive advertising. The main text describes how Kelly—apparently an inventor or businessman—built wealth through patent sales and reinvestment, then married a woman of "good stage presence" from high society. The story satirizes early 1900s advertising excess: Kelly's name becomes ubiquitous through relentless promotion of products bearing his name (hats, cigars, shoes). The narrative mocks both Kelly's escalating ambition ("Haven't I gone far enough?") and the narrator's cynical philosophy that "fame is volatile" and requires constant advertising. The surrounding advertisements (Penflex tubing, English tours, Matheson automobiles) are period-appropriate commercial content, not satire. The satire targets the emerging advertising industry's power to manufacture celebrity and commercialize identity itself—a genuinely novel concern in the early 1900s.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
town and Ogdensburg with- roduce-money from the sav- nd sent it to Kelly—ffty it, The rest of the stock o Kelly for his patent, and t was needed for actual pro- ed it over to me for ad- ny this time he had married I with good stage presence, ove in the best society for ths before they discovered ha s deaf and dumb. It never would h © leaked out anyway if her social s« y hadn't carelessly allowed het to: {0 & tea Where there was no music, made a good director, and she had orn the first directoire skirt in hich was the chief reason sh thousand was voted —a nice who cou ing King. From the very sent copy to the leading d ers and New Rochelle the dollars | san to flow into his office. The price of Kelly's Kar Kompanion was dollars, but medical articles at Philadelphia weeklies had so inflacd the people with lust for lation that we never needed a sales needed receiving tellers phers. fly as the money swiftly it went out We were using columns es now; Kelly's wife had sh and game hat in New York, and every style of headgear was prompt- ly termed a Kelly, It was magni team-we “Tur haven't I gone far cnough? protestingly. “I'm making of money already. I can’t pick ta host of wor- n"No rubber to rot, and crack open. “*PENFLEX’? IS A FLEXIBLE BRASS TUBE Light, strong: highl. FXIRLE METALLIC TUBINY CO. Dept. jadelp! E NGLISH TOURS 9.1908 By York le Cars—Go Where You Please! rl iutraed Booklet mailed tree from 3 Pembroke Place, Liverpool, Eng. Live up a newspaper without seeing my name in it, The railroads have sixtcen suits against. me for malicious persecution, and you've had me arrested eleven times for speeding.” “ Advertise every minute,” I told bi “Fame is volatile, and only advert makes it permanent. Why, even ex- Presidents are forgotten when they. “Enough,” said Kelly. “I shall send you my check for another Kundred thou- sand to-night.” We extended our operations to ovt- door advertising along the line of every road from Maine to Califo cigars and mixed drinks and shoc nomed after Kelly, and the free reading- notices he received drove a score of ad- vertising agents to despair, It was re- ported that the president of the New York, 125th Street and Rye R. R. would resign; and when Kelly—at my sugges- tion—began to make generous donations to correspondence schools and colleges, oreavel jerpool”) or Teva apd Coumey ry Bureaus 380 Fifth Ave., New York City comicbooks.com