Life, 1928-06-21 · page 17 of 38
Life — June 21, 1928 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three separate humorous pieces: 1. **"Life's Camps for Needy Children"** (left): An editorial arguing for summer camps as relief for poor children in New York tenements, describing urban heat and overcrowding as serious hardships. 2. **"Ghost Writing"** (center): A brief joke about a prizefighter whose manager writes his newspaper column, with the fighter unaware of what's being published under his name. 3. **"Riding Stables Proprietor"** (bottom): A cartoon depicting a riding instructor and victim discussing a horse incident, with the punchline implying the victim was kicked by a different horse than the one he rode yesterday—satirizing dishonest stable operators or sloppy record-keeping. All three pieces use humor to critique social conditions or human dishonesty common to early 20th-century urban America.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
FY POTTS. ar no of aan & ‘Lires Cam ps for Needy Children The Marvelous Interlude Just about this time each year there is something very thrilling that we must speak to you about. . Lirt’s Camps for Needy Children. We get keener about these Camps every day. They are so necessary, so great- hearted, so marvelously fit for the good work they are planned to carry on. Feeling as we do, it has always been dificult to keep from speaking about them sooner, but there is a proper time to do it and we had to wait. The proper time is that unfailing day when summer really arrives. No use say- ing that the cool weather may linger a little longer. It will not. And especially it will not down in those terrible districts of New York known as the slums, Summer uses brute force down there in the dark, airless piles of tenements. It uses brute force with the children of those tenements. It harasses them—it bullies, it terrifies, it kills. The children know it for their most formidable enemy. And God knows, these poor youngsters know an enemy when they see one. For instance, they know neglect, and ignorance, and pov- ety, and squalor, and general wretched- ness. But summer! There is the epitome of all these. Summer, when we, the more fortunate, can share its beauty and its restfulness and its joy! The tiny citizens of the heartbreak streets are sent into a sort of frenzy when summer clutches them. It means a cruel ume of sleeping on fire-escapes and roofs, of haunting the teeming streets in an effort to find a shady spot in which to play. It means finding that shady spot generally in some dank cellar. It means bedeviling the men of the nearest fire- sation until in despair the sympathetic fire-fighters turn their hose on the little wilting bodies. The children of the Lower East Side stare ahead into the next two Patient (to dentist): Doc, I've lost a front tooth, Dentis : An upper incisor? Patient: Naw, a right hook to the beezer. Ghost Writing Prizericuter (looking up from a news- paper article signed by himself, to man- ager): Say, Jerry, who writes my stuff in the papers? Manacer: Some syndicate guy; why? Prizericuter: I'm readin’ here how he tells how to handle yourself against hold- up guys an’ thugs. D'ya think mebbe that guy that writes them articles for us would mebbe give me some lessons? I'd like to know what to do in case sometime I run into a stick-up or something. months with panic-stricken eyes, and|Rwinc Staste Proprietor: You say the horse I gave you yesterday kicked you and the one you had today tried to bite you? Tue Victim: Yes—that was a horse of a different choler. litle hearts crying out for help. The answer to (Please turn to page 29) comicbooks.com —