Life, 1926-11-25 · page 9 of 44
Life — November 25, 1926 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three distinct sections: **"A Football Fan Peers into the Past"** — A humorous timeline mixing actual historical events with absurd football references, satirizing how obsessed sports fans rewrite history through their passion for the game. **The cartoon** shows two men in conversation. One (labeled "Olga") asks if the other was "held up last night" and lost anything. The other ("Fred") responds he just came from a night club—a joke about the Prohibition era, when "night clubs" were speakeasies (illegal bars), implying he narrowly avoided trouble from gangsters or police raids. **"A Child of the Wild"** and **"Rival Attractions"** are brief humorous prose pieces about winter nostalgia and actors competing for publicity, typical of Life's satirical short-form content. The page exemplifies Life's style: topical humor mixing sports mania, Prohibition-era references, and theatrical gossip.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE RABBITS FIND THE CHAP THAT DRAGGED LITTLE WILLIE RABBIT INTO THE BEDTIME STORIES. A Football Fan Peers into the Past 990, B. C.—Cheer-leading al- most becomes an art when Yu founds Hia Dynasty and inebri- ated spectator shouts, “Yu, Yu, Hia.” 1188—Troy in ruins on Sunday morning after Troy Tech. students celebrate victory with a little clean fun, 1000—Homer, unable to foresee “Homeric struggle” used to describe gridiron contests, fails to destroy his poems. 732—Greeks, after 258 years without a winning army, harbor suspicion that Arabs, Bulgarians, Russians, and Turks have been hiring “ringers.” 698—“It was an ideal day with an autumnal tang in the air when Nebuchadnezzar kicked off to the Sidonian thirty-yard: line... .” 685—"The evening shad- ows were lengthening as Nebuchadnezzar plunged through left tackle and car- tied the ball across the Si- donian goal line....” 183—Hannibal, unable to win for twenty-two years, poisons himself but dies in vain, as Harvard men fail to take the hint. A. D. 1590—Unable to de- termine whether twenty-two objects on field are flies or humans, irritable Dutchman named Jansen leaves stadium Seat 5902, section ZZB, and tushes home to invent tele- Scope. 1492 — Cristofo Colombo, who never heard of C. C. Pyle, is astonished when he finds berries. 1777—King George hears Predictions of disaster, but mistakes them for Knute Rockne’s annual statement on football outlook at Notre Dame, and lets American Revolution go on. 1788—The United States ratify the Constitution without noticing that its framers failed to insert an article limiting the cost of sleeping on pool tables during Homecomings. 1825—Drummond invents lime- Olga: so You WERE HELD UP LAST NIGHT? DID you LOSE ANYTHING? Fred: No; LUCKILY, 1 HAD JUST COME FROM A NIGHT CLUB. light to give husky farmer boys something to be in every fall. 1848—Gold discovered in Cali- fornia. 1925—Gold discovered in stadium at Urbana, IIL. 1926—Oswald Mortimer Gyppes, Yakima, '30, almost dies of mortifica- tion when he learns that distin- guished-looking gentleman whom he saluted courteously last night was president, not football coach, Gerald Cosgrove. A Child of the Wild JUST love winter. There is something about the crackling logs and the smoking fireplace which stirs my primordial — in- stincts. The song of the wind as it whistles through my first and second mortgages takes me back to some remote Norse incarnation. The sight of the drifts, high as the window sills, makes my blood tingle with the spell of the trackless subdivision. The bitter cold reminds me that, in spite of the casu- al innuendo of my relatives, I am a man. I just love winter. I leave for San Diego next week. McC. H. Rival Attractions IRST ACTOR: I can’t seem to get a capable publicity agent nowadays. Seconp Actor: I know. All the good advertising men are going to work for the churches, comicbooks.com