Life, 1922-07-27 · page 20 of 36
Life — July 27, 1922 — page 20: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes summer hotel social dynamics and gossip culture. The cartoons depict various hotel guests during their vacation: **Mrs. Ulch** exemplifies invasive gossip—she admits she's not one to pry while clearly doing exactly that, having peered through a partially open door to report on a neighbor's smoking habits to hotel management. **Mr. Clinch** endures repetitive small talk about the heat, hearing the same observations fourteen times before breakfast. **The Knitters' Quartette** pretends devotion to their needlework while actively surveilling other guests' behavior—the "widow from the South," children on the beach, and "the girl knockout from Brooklyn." **Mrs. Nimick** represents petty entitlement, outraged that a stranger has taken her customary rocking chair after eight summers, demanding the hotel "call out the militia." The overall satire mocks the pettiness, busybodying, and territorial behavior of leisure-class hotel guests—people with little to occupy them except monitoring neighbors and complaining.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Mrs. Ulch takes two friends into her somewhat overcrowded confidence and ives them the inside story of the lady who occupies the room across Mr. Clinch, who has left the business world flat on its face, and joined the r Little Woman for two wholesome Pl weeks at Barnacle House, gets in on the hall. “Of course,” she explains, the local gossip. For the fourteenth | ur] “I am not one of the kind that wants time since breakfast, Mr. Clinch has 1 hel to mix in anyone else’s affairs, but learned that the day is doubtless a g nee the door was open at least six inches, and when I went by, the smoke blew right out into the hall.” The audience agrees that it is Mrs. Ulch’s duty as a wife and mother to make a full re- Port to the management, scorcher in the city, and that the heat er is practically nowhere as compared to the humidity. Thus it goes, back and forth, all day long, and the unaccus- 4 tomed mental strain is beginning to tell on Mr. Clinch. ea The Knitters’ Quartette renders its big favorite—“Each thought a purl, each purl a pray’r.” The members are not s0 intent upon adding eighty stitches for the sleeves and binding off thirty for the neck that they can’t keep a series of watchful eyes on the carryings-on of that widow from the South, the way those Gilley chil- dren are allowed to run wild on the beach, and the heart affairs of the girl knockout from Brooklyn. Miss Crouch gladly wel- comes the vacation days, for then she works in her year’s reading. Miss Crouch has been’ burning up modern literature this | summer, coming triumph- | | Mesdames Curley, Walmsley, and Loof form a jolly line-up at the Saturday night dances. They have as good as settled it that things are not what they were when Grandma was a girl, that they are completely mystified as to what . antly through “Chats on this generation is coming to, and “ GLUYAS Old Silver,” “Rambles in that there never was a prettier nor WILLIAMS, Vermont” and “Fifty At- healthier dance than a good rous- tractive Stitches Filet ing lancers. Crochet.” It is Mrs. Nimick’s private opinion that the whole hotel is in league against her, and she is not the girl | to suffer in silence about it. The latest outrage is the occupation, by an entire stranger to her, of her own special rocker, on the corner of the porch where she has sat for the last eight summers. Mrs. Nimick feels that the least the clerk can do about it is to call out the militia. tenn swin knoy cann a tir Through the Summer Hotel with Gun and Camera comicbooks.com