Life, 1919-06-26 · page 16 of 43
Life — June 26, 1919 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous satirical piece from *Life* magazine (June 23, 1930) imagining a futuristic ship christening gone comically wrong. **The Setup:** The battleship Alaska's christening ceremony uses ice cream instead of traditional champagne—a modernist twist on an old custom. Miss May Snowdon (daughter of Alaska's governor) is tasked with breaking the ice cream against the ship's bow. **The Joke:** The christening disaster escalates absurdly: Snowdon misses, coating naval officials with ice cream instead. A bystander named Charles Strongheart, intoxicated on "homemade blackberry brandy," "saves" the situation by throwing the entire gold ice-cream freezer at the ship, creating further chaos. **The Satire:** This mocks early-20th-century American modernity—the notion that tradition can simply be "updated" with silly substitutions (ice cream for champagne), and that incompetence masked as progress might still somehow work out. The accompanying cartoon above depicts a doctor and patient; its caption suggests medical advice about smoking, though context is unclear.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
News from an Approaching Era HILADELPHIA, June 23, narrowly averted to-day at the Miss May attempted to christen the giant. sea- 1930.—Acatastroy ching of the battle- Maska when Snowdon, daughter of Alas! ship governor of ided down the ways -honored custom, the battles! fortress as In accordance with t was to he christened with a large spoonful of strawberry, vanilla and blueberry ice-cream, typifying the red, white and blue of the national col When the last chocks were knocked away and the mighty uit started to move, Miss Snowdon screamed, “I n thee Alask, a At the vessel's prow. with which the spoon was moving carried it min the fa war 1 swung the spooniul of ice- She missed, however, and the and deposited large quantities of ice-cre: Sceretary of the Navy Drinkwater, Admiral Bonedry and Commander Ginless. Blinded by the ice-cream, they were helpless. At this juncture Charles Strongheart, a spectator, who later confessed to having had a nip of homemade black- berry brandy before coming to the launching, leaped to the cream freezer and threw platform, seized the solid gold ice His aim was sure, it after the slowly-moving battleship. and the freezer struck squarely against the vessel's stem, spilling ice, rock salt. and harlequin ice-cream over it Thus the Alaska was spared the evil fortune of not having been properly christened \ BANDACE ON IT BEFORE COING TO BED. A PAIR THE THING” HIS DEFUNCT MEDICAL ADVISERS WHO PREDICTED THAT SMOKING WOULD SHORTEN HIS Lire comicbooks.com