Life, 1921-09-08 · page 33 of 36
Life — September 8, 1921 — page 33: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Left Column - "John H. Gimmish" Story:** This satirizes the early 20th-century craze of newspaper and magazine contests. "Gimmish" is a fictional character who obsessively enters competitions for prizes—furniture, trips, jewelry—winning so frequently he's become a professional contestant. The satire mocks both the contest-addiction culture and the absurdity of contest design itself. The limerick puzzle shown exemplifies this: contestants must fill in missing punctuation. This reflects actual popular word puzzles and riddles that magazines used to boost circulation and reader engagement. **Right Column:** A full-page advertisement for Fisk tires, featuring a cherub-like figure hoisting a large tire. The wordplay "Time to Re-tire?" puns on both tire replacement and retirement. The ad emphasizes Fisk's cost-efficiency—a selling point during an era when automobiles were becoming mainstream consumer goods. **Overall Context:** This page captures early 1900s American consumer culture: the proliferation of contests as marketing tools and the growing importance of automobile ownership and maintenance.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
John H. Gimmish, New American Champion (Continued from page 5) always proved a great incentive to me in my work. If you will look around the house you will notice I have won prac- | tically everything in the way of furni- | | ture, household helps, jewelry, et cetera, that a man can want. I have won seven Bermuda and one to Washington. young contest answerer must not that he will always get what he is One of the greatest disappoint- in my life was due to my winning irst instead of the second prize of- fered by an Oregon newspaper in a ‘What Is She Saying to Him in This Picture’ contest. The first prize was a trip t» New York, but as I was living here at the time, my heart had really been sect on the second prize, a trip to Seattl I was obliged to pay my way out to Oregon and enjoy my victory on the trip home. “I have been giving most of my atten- tion these days to limerick contests, as they require delicate handling and no mean skill at juggling words. There’s a new variant on the idea in the papers to-day which I think I'll take up next.” That evening I had the pleasure of s the champion at work. I had been chatting with Miss Lily Gimmish, the great answerer’s daughter, who is carv- ing out her own niche in the sport world by her frequent entries among the pretty girl contests in the movie magazines. Glancing at her father, I noticed he was poring over some new problem. It was the limerick contest he had | mentioned. With his every thought grappling with the details of the problem before him he was quite unaware of my | presence. I read the requirements of the new challenge to his mental powers. There was the following limerick: “There was a young girl named O’Day Whe went out in the park every day. When asked why she did, She said, ‘Listen, Kid, How do you get that way’ problem was to fill in the missing ion mark at the end of the last | Gimmish phoned me the next day to say that he had solved it a few minutes after I had gone! Stern Lady: al must take things more seriously. You seem to think lawn tennis is a game! —Passing Show (London). Let your next tire be Trade Merk Reg U.S Pat Of Time to Re-tire? (Buy Fisk) ISK gives the lowest cost mileage in history, lowest cost per year, and a satisfactory performance always. Sold only by dealers —_ comicbooks.com