Life, 1927-06-30 · page 23 of 35
Life — June 30, 1927 — page 23: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three distinct pieces of satire: **Top cartoon** ("The Arrival of the Book-of-the-Month"): Shows a frontier settlement welcoming what appears to be a book delivery, satirizing the newly-popular Book-of-the-Month Club subscription service as a significant cultural event deserving frontier-style celebration. **"Mrs. Peps' Diary"**: A society gossip column mocking upper-class dinner etiquette anxieties and preoccupations (concerns about serving beets, buttermilk, etc.). **Bottom cartoon** ("Lewis and Clark"): Depicts the historical explorers with a modern Girl Scouts leader claiming credit for "discovering Oregon." The joke satirizes both the rewriting of history and contemporary Girl Scouts' prominence. The punchline about demoting a girl "seven grades" for unknown misconduct mocks administrative overreach. **"Patriotic Memories"**: Lists nostalgic Fourth of July traditions (cannon crackers, baseball games, Roman candles). The page overall satirizes American pretension, historical revisionism, and institutional bureaucracy through mock-earnest tone and juxtaposition of trivial with grandiose.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH. Awake betimes, and through on the telephone to Agnes Hyde to invite her and Fillmore to dinner, asking if she would like anything special to eat, whereto she responded to the slight and negative extent that she trusted we should not have beets, so T assured her heartily that she need have no fear on that point. And were I myself to make such a sug- gestion to a prospective hostess, I should plead against calves’ liver, cocoanut, buttermilk and cottage cheese, albeit I hear there is now a way of stirring chives and pimento into the latter until it is fairly palat- able. All the morning gone in watching the construction of the gar- den restaurant which is going for- ward below our windows, and how my servants will ever get any work done after it is finished I do not see, so great is the distraction, nor could I easily restrain myself from descending and imploring one of the workmen to let me aid him in paint- ing the red flower boxes, neither. Effic Goings and I have promised my Katie that we will take a meal there- in when the place is finished and choose a table wherefrom we can wave to her, which causes my hus- band, poor wretch, to make divers speculations as to what he could ac- complish (Please turn to page 30) Our History. Chap. IX Patriotic Memories HE all-day supply of cannon crackers that was exhausted be- fore breakfast. Holding the bass drum in the Sil- ver Cornet Band by the Courthouse. The titanic baseball struggle be- tween Brownsville and the Union- town Sluggers that ended in a riot. Trying to tell Mother it was dark enough to start the Roman candles. The strawberry ice cream at the First Presbyterian lawn féte. That feeling of being up after ten o'clock at night. The resolution to start saving to- morrow for the next Fourth. McC. H. SYCHOANALYSIS: What you don’t no, won't hurt you. YES INDEED, MR. CLARK, AND t SHALL SEE TO IT THAT U\SitE 1S DEMOTED SEVEN GRADES IN THE GIRL ScouTS ORGANIZATION! LEWIS AND CLARK, INC., DISCOVER OREGON AND INAUGURATE NATIONAL APPLE WEEK. comicbooks.com