Adventure Magazine, April 10, 1924 — page 177: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HAN Wy A Tes SOS NSCNS SSS i of SS \ . A} ‘ewe ee y ees \ Ss es WSs . Ye 3 + <> YEaee very few are the women writers admitted to our writer’s brigade. Magda Leigh was admitted along with her first story but rises for the usual introduc- tion to Camp-Fire on the occasion of her second, in this issue: Santa Monica, California. I have always had a sincere admiration for the members of Adventure’s Camp-Fire, and _ the invita- tion to take my place among them has been quite an event to me. "THERE'S not much to say about me. I’m just one of those freaks. I should have been a man, and wasn’t. I love the sea and ships far better than anything else in the world, with the exception of my daughter. I like to write of the sea, because it is clean and big. Now that I have the little red-headed mooring-line that keeps me to the shore, I have to do all my seafaring on paper, at my desk. I manage to hike down sixteen blocks, every so often, to see if the Pacific is still there, but my actual voyaging must be vicarious, nowadays, through story char- acters. I have to my credit considerably over a hundred thousand miles of sea travel, however. I’ve been a bloomin’ tourist down the Atlantic (If used to have an annual nervous breakdown, for the sake of the trip to Florida); I’ve sailed the Pacific from San Francisco to Honolulu, and from Panama through Magellan Strait; I know Cape Pillar and have been aground off Cape Hatteras. The Caribbean and I are old pals, and I’ve been swimming in the Gulf of Paria... I’ve ventured up the Suriname, the De- merara and Guayas Rivers; and there’s scarcely a corner of the West Indies into which I haven’t poked my unhandsome but ‘“‘intellectual”’ nose. HAVE been doing editorial work, free-lancing, criticizing, etc., for years. My short newspaper experience included space work in New York and army and navy stuff in Honolulu. I was editor of The Seafarer for the Seaman’s Institute, in San Francisco, and also edited 7. K. K. Topics, for the Toyo Kisen Kaisha, in that same city. Fora year or so, I was a silent member of the staff of Our Navy magazine. Whatever else may be my faults, I am at least consistent in my love for whatever relates to the sea. Not that I haven’t hit the high spots ashore— even as high as 14,000 feet above sea level, in 4¢ fae ec ea e ADVENTURERS 3 Bas de me wet Ay Na: i: staat ee ‘ % sh Ss eH The strange part of it all is that I’ve never been ship-wrecked. I’ve been through a South American revolution (I adored it!), and any number of earth- quakes, and even plague, but the sea has treated me kindly. The finest thing that has happened to me, liter- arily speaking, has been breaking into Adventure. It took me six years to do it, and I stil have a letter from one of the editors, dated 1917, rejecting a story I then offered, in which he said “You have the spirit to win.” I am glad I have been able to prove him not mistaken.—Macpa LEIcuH. AN EDITORIAL in Army Ordnance against the anti-weapon campaign to disarm decent citizens while crooks and Bolshevics keep supplied with weapons con- tains, among other strong arguments, the following: Thus another clumsy attempt is being made to remedy the abuse of a right by prohibiting its use. Assuming such a law upon the statute books, its mantle of protection would fall chiefly upon the criminally minded. The respectable law-abiding citizens would obey it and go unarmed; the burglar and the bandit would ply their trades with added security and, of course, with no more respect for the anti-pistol law than for the others they are flaunting. A really effective remedy against the use of the pistol for illegitimate purposes would be to punish this use. Certainly a bandit who carries a pistol has it in his possession for other purposes than self- defense. Let the possession of a pistol by a person who commits or attempts to commit a felony be presumptive evidence of an intent to use the pistol in support of his crime. A mandatory sentence of say five years for this intent in addition to the normal penalty for the crime would go far toward making “pistol toting’ by criminals unwise and would leave the respectable citizen free to defend himself in accordance with his constitutional guarantee. The oft worked “police power” could doubtless be made to cover this case. HORTUNATELY, the proposed bill has an obstacle to overcome that may be insurmount- able. The Constitution of the United States provides “‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It is hoped that there are evidences of at least a slight return to the old- Bolivia. (What I never suffered in sea-sickness, I fashioned respect in which our ancestors held the made up in mountain-sickness, too!) Constitution. The pertinent examples of the 175 = NOOKS a S = a (C@