Life, 1926-06-10 · page 28 of 44
Life — June 10, 1926 — page 28: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous satirical piece mocking ambitious but poorly executed expeditions. The main cartoon at top left depicts a society couple (a man in formal dress and an elegant woman) admiring what appears to be a globe or navigational instrument, with the caption joking that they've "killed the goldfish"—suggesting comic incompetence. The bulk of the page is a tongue-in-cheek travel letter from someone claiming to be on Life magazine's "Polar Expedition," which is actually stuck in Scarsdale (a suburban New York town). The satire lies in the contrast: they're supposedly attempting a major polar journey but are delayed by mundane domestic tasks like installing window screens, dealing with a lost nut, and coal dust. The piece mocks upper-class dilettantes and their grandiose plans that collapse into suburban domestic comedy. References to "Lieut.-Commander Connelly" and "Ensign Thermaline" parody military expedition structure applied to trivial home improvement. The "Country Auction" section listing antique prices is separate filler content.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
The Lire Polar Expedition ander Rene ere received last vicinity of Tuckahoe. The ei sit eSSAYE as only ju come through.) IN ROUTE with Lire’s Polar Expedition, June We are still in Scarsdale, and from the looks , it will be fall before we are able to get o} our way. We have even talked of up the Pole plan entirely and. trying the th Pole Vt so many amateurs at the South Pole flying co stantly around in airships We probably would have kept r planned had we not been held up in Scarsdale so 1 ere was the first big di yintment about that nut which got lost (although the more we think of it the more we are convinced that my little boy is telling the truth when he says that he never touched it. A boy as small as he is simply couldn't lie day in and day out, as he at fi seemed to be doing), and then there were the screens to be put on. The screens held us up for almost two days. It occurred to my wife that while we were waiting for the Prana ~] extra nut from © WHITE PLAINS New York we © HARTSDALE might as well put the sere on, and, at the time, the idea appealed tous. We thought of it more as a lark. Lieut-Com- mander Connelly \ said that he knew \ \ how, and could V7) IN \ do it alone i jiffy, but Ensign Thermaline and I Hostess: pox’t you love MY cock S, MAJOR insisted that we The Major: ou—ves, INvEED! BUT I'M RATHER AFRAID would not let him WE'VE KILLED THE GOLDPISIT do it alone. It is this spirit of team-work which = MAP SHOWING LOCATION OF SCARSDALE, Prices the Antiques Fetched at the has made our ex- wiere THE Life EXPEDITION WILL LAY Country Auction pedition the sue- OVER UNTIL FALL cess that it is. ANDWICH-GLASS plate So we got the screens out from the cellar and found that Ship model they were very, very dirty, owing to the soft coal we had to use last winter. As Lieut.-Commander Connelly said, what with our own coal strike in this ya ein Eng Green-glass candlesticks Broken Windsor chair 3 cracked plates of C K land, things have come to a pretty pass. He said this in a Two Currier & Ives prints moment of irritation after hitt of the screens and covering himself with a cloud of coal-dust. He doesn’t usu- ally lose control of himself like that Well, we had a great time finding which screens went with Incomplete spinnin Maple bed 108,00 8-year-old family flivver 7.25 Syke which windows, I don’t think that we have got all of them right even now, for if you walk past the dining-room windows with a jarring step, the screens fall off into the nasturtium LD GENTLEMAN: Here, here, you boys mu bed. That can mean only one thing: the screens are not on play on that lot! the right windows. But all the other screens seem to fit Kin: Aw, gwan, d'you think you're Mussolini? (Continued on page 37) comicbooks.com