Life, 1927-06-23 · page 24 of 38
Life — June 23, 1927 — page 24: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page promotes Life magazine's charitable summer camps for poor urban children from New York slums. The article uses sports celebrities as a metaphor: just as Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, and opera singer Pavlova "warm up" before performing, Life's camps prepare disadvantaged children for life through rest, nutrition, and recreation in the Connecticut countryside. The accompanying photograph shows children gathered around a campfire—the visual proof of this charitable work. The small cartoon at bottom depicts a poor girl asking a bird if she can learn to sing by staying at camp, expressing the transformative hope the camps offered. This reflects early 20th-century Progressive Era attitudes: wealthy magazines mobilizing readers' generosity to rescue impoverished children through "transplanting" them from urban poverty to rural health and moral improvement—a then-popular social reform strategy.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Life's Gampa fox Veedy Shildzen SWEET, LAUGHING ASKS OF THE WORLD JUST Now BRANCHVILLE, CONNECTICUT. “(Pauming Lbp TYEFORE Babe Ruth swings ES into work for the Yanks— Before Bill Tilden starts a big tennis match— Before Pavlova stage— Before John McCormack break your heart about Machre: They warm up! A few slashes through the air, a pirouette, a note or two. You have to get into some sort of form for a star act. So it is down at the Camps for Needy Children which are main- tained and operated through the gen- crosity of Lire’s wonderful readers. Such warming up! Such airing, and painting, and scrubbing and sweeping! Such testing of swim- ming holes and swimming pools; such making ready of sleeping tents; such ordering of good food with which to build up those “skinny” flashes upon a arts to “Mother little bodies that come to us every year, Really, you couldn't imagine two busier places than Lire’s Camp for , at Pottersville, New Jersey, 1re’s Camp for Girls, at Branchville, Connecticut. We're getting ready, warming up, for our star act in those beautiful spots, you And that act! You know what it is, of course—or don’t you? Well, it’s this: Every summer for the past forty years Lire has been rescuing little wistful, hot, tired, pitiful sons and daughters of poverty and_trans- planting them from their dreadful surroundings in the slums of New York to the sweet, cool country and giving them a happy, healthy holi- day. We don’t have to tell you what such a chance, such a transplanting, (Continued on page 32) IS EIGHTEEN DAYS IN THE couNtry—AT Life’s camp, Little Girl (to bird): sy Gracious! DO YOU SUPPOSE I CAN EARN TO SING LIKE THAT IF I STAY HERE LONG ENOUGH? comicbooks.com me. Pe ma Bel ple Ma off