Life, 1928-06-14 · page 9 of 42
Life — June 14, 1928 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three separate satirical pieces: 1. **"Open Letter on Olive Bottle Traffic"**: A humorous complaint about San Francisco's traffic congestion caused by olive bottles stuck in the street. The writer calculates wasted time annually and proposes absurd solutions (stop/go signals for olives, lead weights in bottles). It's satire mocking both traffic problems and the tendency to over-engineer trivial issues. 2. **Top cartoon**: Shows a man arriving home late, with his nurse telling him his wife (a telephone operator) will excuse the delay. The joke satirizes the modern phenomenon of wives working in new industries like telephone operation, creating domestic complications. 3. **Bottom cartoon**: Depicts an Egyptian king inspecting his tomb, finding it in poor condition—satirizing ancient Egypt's grand ambitions versus actual decay.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
re Open Letter to the Erskine) Foundation of Traffic Research, Harvard University GENTLEMEN: We out here in San Francisco are given to understand that you are attempt- ing to relieve the trafic jam problem. But what we want to know is this: are you taking cognizance of the worst trafic jam problem of all? I refer, gentlemen, to the deplorable congestion that occurs invariably in the short but slender neck of an olive bottle whenever one attempts to extract there- from an olive. A careful survey shows me that it takes average of five minutes to straighten out an olive bottle jam. As- that 1,897,874 bottles of olives are opened every year, we waste 9,489,370 golden minutes, 158,156.166666 glorious hours, 6,589.8 beautiful days or approx- imately 18 years every year! . San Francisco always has been consid- crate of its bottles. Times when we have felt like blasting off the neck of an olive bottle we have restrained ourselves, for Hie’ Miaaten A Teueritone Ormiiion the humblest bottle sometimes comes in | Nurse: Your wife says will you excuse it, please? handy. But San Francisco, gentlemen, is near the end of its patience. It appeals to you to answer some questions: tion whereby the olive on the right would | placed at the mouths of olive bottles to Would it be possible to establish a}have the undisputed right of way? avert the jams that always come during trafic control system for olive consump-| Could “stop” and “go” signals be|the moments when everyone is shouting to hurry up the next one? Would your institution be willing to aid in a campaign to hav ce of lead placed in one olive in cach bottle, in place of the seed, so that the olive thus ballasted would roll out first and blaze a clear trail for its compatriots? Or must we, in a day of modern meth- ods, still continue the ancient custom of breaking up olive trafhe jams with the handle of a knife or fork? San Francisco, gentlemen,—as well as the entire nation—eagerly awaits some word that will solve this matter. Vry trl. yrs, Chet Johnson. A LADY SEEKS PRIVACY In Order to Tear Petals Off a Daisy To think a grown-up girl like me Should close her office door to see If this fool daisy will reveal What that gent does or doesn't feel. Tracy. “Tuat fellow Jones is rich, isn’t he? ‘4 . ; f N|T guess he was born with a gold spoon in sta 3 = “ ‘ neff, | his mouth.” Axcient Eoyetian Kino (inspecting his tomb): It’s a rotten, grafting job. Terrible “Well, maybe. But T'll bet it had the architecture! I wouldn’t be found dead in it! name of some restaurant on it.” comicbooks.com