Life, 1915-06-03 · page 20 of 52
Life — June 3, 1915 — page 20: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top illustration satirizes the impossibly contradictory desires of the middle-class vacationer. "The Man" seeks a summer resort that is simultaneously: affordable yet not remote, social yet private, elegant yet unpretentious, seaside yet mountainous. The three panels show Time literally sculpting away his options as years pass (20, 30, and 40 years marked on clay blocks), suggesting that by the time he finds a place meeting all criteria, he'll be too old to enjoy it. The page mocks the American consumer's unrealistic expectations and the proliferation of resort advertising. Ellis O. Jones's accompanying text sarcastically confirms: the Man will never succeed, no matter how many brochures he reads. A secondary cartoon about literary adaptation jokes that modern writers merely recycle existing work through different media, ultimately tracing back to college-era poetry.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
See the Summer Resorter S the Man, His brow is knit, and he wears a worried look, See, he is laden with booklets and time-tables and descriptive pamphlets and answers to advertisements. Is the Man adding to his library? No. The Man is trying to find an ideal place to go to for the summer. What kind of place does the Man want? The Man wants a place that is not so far away from the city as to con- sume all his vacation money in trans- portation charges, and one that is not so near as to put the prices of accommo- dation beyond the limits of his pocket- book. He wants a place that is not too gay and not too dead, a place where he can get away from people when the notion strikes him, but where the peo- ple can not get away from him if he feels in a sociable mood. The Man is not at all particular. Either seashore or mountains will be acceptable. He would be perfectly satisfied with a seashore resort if it had all the advantages of the moun- tains, or, if he couldn't get that, he would take a mountain place that had all the advantages of the seashore. He wants a place that is frequented by people who are not so rich as to be snobbish and exclusive, and not so poor as to be vulgar and unrefined. TIME, THE SCULPTOR In short, he wants a place that will just suit him and just suit his wife and just suit his children and just suit his visiting relatives. Will the Man succeed in finding what he wants? Nay, though he look through a pile of booklets as high as the moon, Ellis O. Jones. “WYJHAT are you working on now?” asked the artist. “A novel,” replied the literary me- chanic, “I’m adapting it from one of my moving-picture plays, which I adapted from a drama I wrote in 1910, which I had adapted from an ode I penned while I was at Yale.” “REMEMBER, DEAR, THE GERMANS ARE GREAT BIG MEN” Billy: 1 KNOW; BUT THERE MUST BE GERMAN CHILDREN, AUNTY comicbooks.com