Life, 1920-12-30 · page 4 of 39
Life — December 30, 1920 — page 4: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is **not a satirical cartoon page, but an advertisement**. The page promotes White Trucks for public utility work (telephone, telegraph, electric, gas, rail, and water companies). The image shows a White Truck equipped with a tall hydraulic lift platform—technology designed for utility workers to access overhead lines safely. The accompanying text emphasizes reliability and durability: White Trucks allegedly perform "hard day's work after years of service" and remain "ready" for emergencies where "five-minute delays" prove costly. The "summary" lists statistics showing widespread adoption across utility companies (635 trucks for telephone/telegraph, 482 for electric companies, etc.), a common advertising strategy to demonstrate market dominance and trustworthiness through numbers. This represents straightforward early-20th-century industrial marketing, not satire.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
FIRST im Public Utility Service | no ‘other field of motor hauling do speed and dependability count as in public utility work. A five-minute delay in repairing a line might prove serious. Breakdowns need instant attention. The areas covered are often extensive. Emergency calls keep whole fleets on the go. In the building and extending of telephone and telegraph, water, gas, railway, light and power lines, the hauling is heavy and the roads often bad. In this as in all other exacting fields, White Trucks are predominantly used. They have the stuff in them to stand up; as able to do a hard day's work after years of service as they were at the start. They are always ready and they stay ready. Year after year they continue to do the most work for the least money. A Summary of White Trucks in Public Utility Service 46 Telephone and Telegraph companies own 635 White Trucks. 143 Electric Light and Power companies own 482 White Trucks. 64 Railway companies own 144 White Trucks. 77 Gas companies own 230 White Trucks. THE WHITE COMPANY, Cleveland WHITE TRUCKS comicbooks.com