Life, 1926-06-17 · page 20 of 44
Life — June 17, 1926 — page 20: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page features a satirical cartoon and diary entry mocking the "Gay Nineties" (1890s). The cartoon shows a man and woman looking at a storefront display, searching for "father's legs"—a humorous reference to children's mischievous errands during that era. The accompanying diary entry by "Mrs. Pep" is written in exaggerated, pretentious language, satirizing upper-class complaints about noisy tenement children and ridiculous commercial practices. She describes wanting to throw vegetable juice at neighborhood kids, suggests threatening handbills delivered by aeroplane (clearly absurd for the 1890s), and complains about real-estate companies disguising advertisements as wedding announcements. The satire targets both the insufferable wealthy and the absurdity of period conventions, using overwrought prose to mock pretension and social anxiety about class boundaries in the era.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Broaaway J, 3 {@ Number ite AEST SHH FY og ts a THE GAY NINETIES LOOKING FOR FATHER'S LEGS—A REGULAR ERRAND OF CHILDHOOD IN THE DAMPISH NINETIES, May The urchins from the tenements at the rear of our dwelling 25th making even more noise in the early hours of this day than they have done hitherto, I was at some pains to restrain Samuel, who, in spite of what poets have to say about happy little children at play in the springtime, was referring to them by a term which is used in books of history and by the Elizabethan dramatists to designate the less fortunate progeny of royalty, from hurling down upon the young marauders my cauldron of vegetable juices which had been simmering all night. And when he did entreat me, rhetorically, as to how he was ever to be rid of such a nuisance, I did counsel him to have some threatening handbills printed with which to circularize the offenders’ par- ents from an aeroplane, but he gave me small heed. Then to my letters, marvelling that a real-estate firm will spend hundreds of dollars on costly stationery and engraving plates to dis- guise an invitation to inspect a new apartment house as a wedding announce- ment and then permit the same to be addressed by a commercial penman who not only inscribes the name of our city on the outer envelope but abbreviates it as well. Looking hopefully, too, at the tabloid paper which we take in, to learn whether or not it has accepted for the sum of one dollar the account of my life’s most embarrassing moment, which was to find myself on a week- end in the hunting district with nought but chiffon raiment into which Elsie Ferguson could have stepped for any given third act, but did find that inad- vertent dislocations of false teeth and untimely remarks of youthful relatives are still taking precedence with the (Continued on page 36) comicbooks.com