Life — November 8, 1923 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“{’M GOIN’ TO TELL YOU A FUNNY THING, TOM; I'VE GOT N 0’ THEM AN’ I’M A BACHELOR YET—AT HEART, I MEA’ A Colossus of Roads ESTERDAY I was crossing a street crowded with motor traffic. We pedestrians had the right of way, and we were doing the best we could. Before we were quite across, the stream of cars was turned on by signal. None of us had wings. We hadn't the leaping power of the sand flea to jump three times our height and cover one-third of the strect at a leap, so we scuttled. At the curb I turned around, instinctively, to see how another man beside me had got out of it. He was a tired-faced man of thirty-five or forty. He looked as if he worked faithfully at some common occupa- tion. Ordinarily he would have been undistinguished in any crowd, but now he was standing with a clenched fist, half-raised, turning a look of burning hate after the car that had just missed him. The chauffeur smiled back at this commonplace figure, noticeable only because of that look in the eye and that clenched fist. He turned on his heels as on a pivot, watching that car as it went down the street. You could almost see the feeling of hatred swelling within him, and the dreams of power and vengeance rising like vapor in his mind. Down the street a bit, I involuntarily turned and looked back, and then it seemed to me I saw a most amazing sight. It was as if that man’s resentment had, through a sudden magic power, changed him, and before I knew it, he was standing towering above the stream of traffic, like a Brobdingnagian, a giant, tall as a twelve-story building, a sort of Colossus. There he stood in the same habit, with the same hands; only his face with that look in the eyes now took on a fearful aspect. Instantly he began to reach down, and he took up the cars as you might pick up a toy locomotive in the nursery. One after another he took them up, turned them upside down, shook out the people into the park on one side, then threw the cars over into an excavation on the other side where they were starting a building—one after another. There was an uproar; the amazed police- men stopped the traffic, and soon the block was clear. But the whole street seemed petrified and aghast at the moun- tainous man. And then, as if at the snap of your finger, he was gone. I saw his diminutive figure slip through the crowd on the other side of the street. We came out of our trance of powerlessness. The waves of noise gradually returned; the streams of traffic started up. The moment of omnipo- tent hate was over. John S. Phillips. BETH: Does your husband confide his business troubles to you? Rut: Yes, indeed. Every time I buy anything. comicbooks.com