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Whenever I’m down with a cold, I always remind myself to be grateful when I am breathing easily again and don’t feel so horrible.
I think all of us tend to forget to be grateful for some of the things that reside in the everydayness of our lives. Yesterday, there were 100,000 homes in our area that didn’t have power. We were one of them. It’s a very unsettling feeling to be without it. My father wrote an insightful radio script about it. You can read “Written by Candelight” here.
There are so many things we take for granted when we have power coursing through our homes every day. When you can cook and open the refrigerator, flush the toilet and run water (I have a well with an electric pump). Simple things we do every day, without thinking. Watching TV, surfing the Internet or reading with adequate lighting.
How about having heat? Yesterday, when we got home, though the power was restored, the heater wasn’t working. What a simple pleasure just to have heat!
Speaking of the weather, what about driving on dry roads? Or being able to see around corners without huge piles of snow in the way?
There are so many things that are easy to take for granted. They exist around us like the air we breathe. Like a car that starts, having clothes to pick from, or a breakfast, if you please. Just take a gaze around you and see something to be grateful for. What about the boots or coat that serve so well? I have a water bottle, with a strap so I can carry it with me wherever I go. I don’t know what I’d do without it. But how often do I stop and give thanks for it? You might be grateful for a treasured piece of jewelry, a cozy bed, or a special painting. Whatever level of health and well-being you have is much to be grateful for and right at your fingertips.
Sometimes these things fade into the background noise of our lives. It’s good to pull them out every so often and give thanks for these taken for granted blessings.
Some simple things I am grateful for:
My job which helps me afford the things I want and need.
The gloves which protect my hands from cold.
Books and films and songs, as well as my favorite TV shows, which so delight.
Peace and quiet.
Thursday night pasta.
The pen pouch I waited so long for which holds all my special pens.
The phone beside my bed, giving me access to the whole world.
My laptop and all it brings to my life.
An attached garage so I don’t have to step in the mess or scrape ice off my car.
My favorite slippers.
Time to write a blog post.
What everyday things are you grateful for?
For all you golf lovers out there, here’s a radio script from one of my father’s broadcasts. There is no date on it, but I’m guessing it had to be in the 60’s.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Once Over Lightly with Alan Scott ~
I sit before this typewriter bug-eyed in awe unabashed, contemplating in cold blood the idea of attempting a paean to a golf score of 62. Jack Nicklaus did it in a practice round tuning up for the Open at Baltusrol in Springfield, N.J. If you are a golf nut as I am you will understand and endorse. If not, I can but hope that you are close enough to one who shows signs of galloping golfomania to be at least indulgent.
Sixty, by gum, two (if you don’t dig golf I will try to explain with this tenuous understatement ) is quite a score. It has never been done before at Baltusrol. It is an average of 3 and 4/9 strokes per hole if you must know. When your friendly neighborhood golf goof foams at the mouth and says “sixty two” in hushed reverential tone you will wonder that he can do it. There isn’t a soft poetic labial anywhere in the words. In fact, “sixty two” lends itself rather to being hissed through clenched teeth. But as a golf score, light comes through it as through stained glass windows and there is organ music in the background.
And there is magnificent drama in the incident. IT DIDN’T COUNT! It is tragedy such as only a Shakespeare could assess in his iambic stride.
How do you find something analogous in the Human Adventure?
The actress who weeps real tears for the camera in a scene which is headed for Oscarville just as an extra kicks over a prop. The UN Delegate who quotes Liviticus with telling effect only to discover that the television cameras have cut away for a station break. These marks of tragic irony pale . . . all of them, pale . . . when measured against the record-smashing round of 62 just BEFORE the Open BEGINS. Stacked against the figure of Jack Nicklaus, King Lear is Laughing Boy.
There is only one who stands in the league with him. It is a salesman named John P. Altemus. He had a hole in one on the thirteenth at Main Line and turned ashen and trembled. He was supposed to be out making calls and the hole in one had to be hushed up to save his job.
In the quiet hours I will raise my glass in silent toast — and I trust you will join me — to John P. Altemus and Jack Nicklaus.
I had written a lovely Alan Cohen post and then realized I’d already done it! So, here is my father to stand-in.
Incredible Things Happen Department
March 6, 1946
Here’s a brace of quickies snatched right off the news wire to prove that the incredible does happen.
In Culver City, California, where all those movie studios are . . . a fire broke out causing damage of several thousand dollars. What burned was an asbestos factory.
And in Long Beach, California a woman named Nadine Ramsey came home with a P-38 fighter plane. She had bought it from the war assets corporation. The plane was worth 165 thousand dollars and Mrs. Ramsey bought it for twelve hundred and fifty. Maybe she didn’t exactly need a P-38 . . . but being a woman, how could she resists a bargain like that?
Mrs. Mary Berkowitz of Chicago, Illinois, is doing her own house work because her maid has left her. The maid also remembered to take with her when she left, a four thousand dollar mink coat, a thousand dollar ring and about five thousand dollars worth of assorted clothing and jewelry.
Mr. Berkowitz was a little wistful about it. You know how it is losing a maid these days. His comment was . . . “Too bad. She was so likeable and efficient.”
“Efficient,” said Mrs. B. “I should say she was . . . she didn’t miss a thing.”
For more of Alan Scott’s radio scripts, visit his web site.
Some how, I’ve got relationships on the brain . . . This was originally broadcast on Februar 26, 1946.
The press service reported that in Spokane, Washington, in the “for-sale” column of the Chronicle, sandwiched in between ads about a gas range and a bicycle was this: “Charter member of Brush-off Club will sell diamond engagement-wedding ring set.” That sounds like a pretty sad story and gets me wondering how the young lady came to be in possession of the wedding ring if she was “brushed-off.” Did she take it as security or had she purchased it herself in the conviction that being forehanded was next best to being married? Murdoch, of course, says in his sour way that it’s probably just a trick ad inserted by an installment jewelry house who will have an engagement-wedding ring set to sell to all comers. But, if it IS legitimate and if there is a Brush-off Club hocking their ill-gotten trinkets, it only confirms what was suggested in an earlier edition of this column, to wit: that the shortages of various commodities are causing a distortion in the matrimonial market. This young lady in Spokane who finds herself brushed-off and with nothing but a few diamond rings hanging in her scalp-belt probably just didn’t have a few fourteen-and-a-half shirts as bait. That’s all.
The young eligibles returning from the wars are not interested as their fathers were in the normal dowry. They don’t cast appraising eyes over the available talent, measuring color of eyes, texture of hair and sundry architectural dimensions. What they want to know is . . . has the old man a slightly used blue suit and is there an older brother with some shirts to hand down? I wouldn’t have mentioned this again but for the fact that a ripe bit was wired in from Clun, England on this very subject.
Clun is a nice little town in England where shortages go beyond gent’s wearing apparel. On the bulletin board of the town hall, neatly thumbtacked, was this notice, “Gentleman with little lard wishes to meet lady with some dried eggs! Object matrimony and pastry.” Man is a modest creature and his wants are spartan. If some of you gals are really serious about hooking a husband, spend a little less time studying the beauty ads and a little more time examining the market shortages. Pays dividends!
It being Memorial Day, I must pay tribute to my father with a post of his writings. I’m not sure what this is. It may not have been broadcast. It was in with other 1946 scripts, but I venture to guess it was more like the 1967.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Alan Scott ~
If you had been standing the other day in one of the many spots in at least a part of’ the East River you might have spotted a swirling green blob moving on the water. It was the color of fresh mint which somehow suggests color even if you’ve never confronted fresh mint face to face. The ebbing tide carried it under the Queensboro Bridge, past the United Nations complex and moved on toward Wall Street. If your imagination happened to have come unstuck from its bridle you could have suspected the green blob of’ being an invading force from Mars or at least a washed in dye marker from some air-sea casualty, drifting in from the most recent world war. It was, in fact the work of an Argentine artist known as Uriburu. The thirty-year-old artist created this extraordinary aquatic canvass by hiring a tug and emptying ten large cans of florescent sodium onto the East River. For good measure, he tossed in the empty cans. You know how it is with modern art. You can’t let anything go to waste.
Whatever else his shortcomings and I certainly don’t qualify as the art critic who could catalogue them, you’ve got to say this for him: he thinks big. His green blob measured at least a 175 feet at apogee and about fifty feet at whatever the other dimension is called. Furthermore, Uriburu is scheduled to do a casual coloring of’ the River Seine in Paris later this month and another later on a river in his home town of Buenos Aires.
Your quick mind will detect a flaw here. If you happened to be . . . as I said earlier where you could see the East River that day, it may well have been that the work of art would have been seen only by you, the deck hand of the tug and Uriburu. It’s a well known fact that New Yorkers never look at anything but the destination panel on the Madison Avenue bus or the BMT subway train. But Uriburu would have been the first to shrug “What of it? I like only transitory things,” he says. “An artist has to be a free man. You don’t want to work in an enclosed space.” And one sees his point. Where could you find a museum these days with enough wall space to accommodate a 175 foot blob no matter what its color or shape.
It’s the river or no deal. And besides playing to a markedly limited audience, there is the matter of how long it lasts. Artists who are remembered through the ages — assuming they have what it takes to make them worth remembering — have traditionally worked in oil or water color on durable canvas or fashioned three dimensional in plaster or bronze. We would not now know Leonardo Da Vinci or Michaelangelo if they fooled around making the blue Adriatic come out in spots other than blue.
But our young artists are not concerned with how many will see their works or how long they might endure and that is their privilege. In the case of the Uriburu Blob on the East River, for example, honest journalism obliges me to report that its short life ended when it was divided unevenly by a garbage scow only a matter of minutes from its birth. Well, as the man says, life is long and art is short or is it the other way around?
I couldn’t help thinking how many works of my own I have let gurgle helplessly down the drain when, after daubing at the kitchen wall with some rubber based paint under the critical eye of the vice president in charge of keeping me off the golf course on weekends . . . and go to wash my hands in the sink. I’ve let some rare beauties get away from me I’m afraid. Or wait a minute, I’ve thought of even greater artistic creations, though it means going back through the years.
Do you remember turning out to play barefoot after a summer rain discovering puddles that somehow had acquired a skim of oil . . . and the delicious swirling rainbow effects you could get with the business end of a stick? I didn’t know it was an oil slick that did it and I didn’t question it. I knew only that it was mine to work effects into and thought it came down from the sky, the magnificent left-overs of the arched rainbow I had seen up there some time before.
I wonder if Uriburu got his idea from such boyhood experience. If I could think so, I think I could like that young man and his ideas. I guess I do anyway. There is something gallant and unshackled about an artist who feels that beauty is no less for being short-lived. After all, how long does a sunset last?
Alan Scott’s granddaughter (my niece) was visiting this week. In honor of her, I present another script from the web site www.AlanScott.info
Law of Compensation department: Bleats about the high cost of living are getting pretty commonplace. That doesn’t make them any less painful but it does reduce their copy value. However, there was one on the newswire from Atlanta, Georgia that strikes a fresh note.
It is the wail of George Simon, the general manager of the Atlanta Zoo. Mr. Simon complains that the high tariff makes it impossible for him to afford the purchase of a new animal exhibit. You probably didn’t know this . . . what with all the attention focused on the daily quotations of the livestock market . . . trying to peg the price of nonexistent cuts of beef and lamb . . . but Mr. Simon says you used to be able to buy two hump camel for five hundred dollars. That would be roughly 250 per hump. Now you can’t get one for less than 900 dollars. Monkeys that used to be reasonably available at 7 bucks per monk are now twenty dollars. Common baboons have gone up from 75 dollars to 100. And the lion who used to call himself respectable if he brought two hundred and fifty dollars in the open market now costs twice that much. How this will affect annual membership dues in the Lion’s Club, I can’t say. Nor is it immediately discernible why the high cost of keeping the cages at the zoo populated should be going higher. Possibly the Fran Buck Local of The Bring ‘em Back Alive Federation Amalgamated has negotiated a new contract calling for shorter expeditions at higher wages and air conditioned jungles.
But Mr. Simon is not too shaken at the turn of prices. It’s the old law of compensation that steps in and saves the day. Just as . . . not many months ago when we were all being admonished never to put bananas in the refrigerator . . . the task was made light by the fact that (a) there were no bananas available not to put . . . and (b) you couldn’t get a refrigerator not to put them in. Simplified it. And so in this case, Mr. Simon isn’t distressed by the high cost of middle aged lions because he couldn’t possibly get the meat to feed them. Comes out even.
I am on the verge of uplifting my updated web site, so the morning was taken up with that. I hope Alan Cohen will excuse me as I go to my father for support once more.
Without further ado, this is Alan Scott with more of this and a little of that.
February 13, 1946
The entire city of New York was practically paralyzed. No office buildings, no theatres, transportation was scant . . . It was a tie-up right enough. Radio was classified as an essential industry so we were permitted to come up to the studios and work as usual. It was just another day named Tuesday as far as I was concerned. But there was a good deal of excitement about it. It was all part of the tugboat strike and Mayor O’Dwyer, after taking a quick inventory of existing stocks of coal and oil, clamped down on heat and practically stopped the city dead in its tracks.
Murdoch says he thinks it was strictly a case of municipal jealousy. New York was afraid that Philadelphia end Pittsburgh, with their transit and power strikes, would hog all the front page space. Things have leveled off some today. Almost everything is functioning again except the schools and I don’t think the juvenile heart of New York is breaking at that prospect.
But when a city like New York stops breathing, it’s noticeable. And it’s an arresting thing to observe how dependent a city of this size can be on a constant supply of fuel. I guess what with the mammoth office buildings and subways and palaces of amusement and canyons of industry, this city uses a hefty supply of fuel every day . . . so much that it’s impossible to store much more than a few days’ reserve.
. . . with the strike as a start . . . some of us suburbanites got to swopping stories on the train going home yesterday and one of the fellows was telling us about his ten room house and how his heater eats oil like Lil’ Abner Yokum eats Poke Chaps. His windows and doors aren’t weather stripped and when the weather bites down sharp and cold he goes through a thousand gallons of fuel oil in a month! That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? When you say it that way. And that brought us to the real nub of the discussion, which was how things can be made to sound big or little, bad or good, depending on the way you say them. We got to work with paper and pencil and figured out that a thousand gallons of oil a month works down to a pint every six minutes. Now, instead of saying a thousand gallons a month . . . if you were trying to impress a perspective buyer with how efficient the heating system is . . . you could say, “We heat this whole big house for six minutes on just one pint of oil.” Sounds different, doesn’t it?
And the same trick is employed on prices, too. Think how much cheaper it sounds to say $29.95 instead of $30. Merchants in this country have learned that trick and have been trading on it for years. In fact, we’re so used to prices like one dollar ninety-eight or two sixty-nine that we don’t notice them anymore.
A couple of boy cousins who were tossed into Australia by the heaving war, told me that when the Americans started getting into that country in sufficient numbers to make them a considerable buying public, the Australian merchants, who had never gone in for it before, started to do the same thing with their prices. And it was odd to see price tags on merchandise reading instead of a flat two pounds, one pound eleven and nine pence!
And then, of course, ultimately we got around to that old chestnut which really clinches the fact that things can be made to sound the way you want them to sound. The pessimist looks at the bottle and says, “It’s half empty,” the optimist looks at the same bottle and says, “It’s half full.”
For more of Alan Scott’s on air radio scripts, please visit www.AlanScott.info.
Been working on my web site updates, so I decided to let Alan Scott fill in for me today. For more of his radio scripts, check out www.AlanScott.info
And now, ladies and gentlemen, may I present, Alan Scott ~ Originally broadcast February, 1, 1946.
. . . Trying to piece together fragments of color thrown off by that big shindig that was held down in Washington back in the early days of 1946.
It was thrown by Texans to honor Texas and when Texans toss a party on their favorite subject . . . you don’t always get a coherent story. In fact, if the story were coherent the party wouldn’t have been a success. Texans have parties for three good reasons: (a) because it’s more fun having a party than not having one . . . (b) it’s an opportunity for Texans to get together in a foreign country, like Washington . . . and (c) to brag about Texas!
Bragging, when it’s done by Texans about Texas has no connotation of unpleasantness. It is the favorite indoor and outdoor sport of that great State and is indulged in only during the open season for Texas Brag, beginning on January first and continuing until the last day of December.
Ever since Texas decided to give in and allow the rest of the United States to hitch onto it, they have looked on the rest of us rather indulgently as though we’re pretty good kids and they don’t at all mind letting the other 47 states consider themselves an annex. And it’s in that spirit that the Texans in the Nation’s capital whopped up this big party. The accounts, as I say, are kind of garbled, but I am able to report that the main dish was broiled fillet of rattlesnake; that Admiral Nimitz made a speech; that Van Johnson made a brief appearance but promptly remembered a previous engagement when he was offered a tasty morsel of rattlesnake; that a few of the boys brought along some live rattle¬snake just in case of a meat shortage and that everybody had a good time.
And that the non-aggression pact with the other 47 states has been renewed indefinitely!
Broadcast on Sunday, March 23, 1941
And now, Alan Scott ~
The “Heart of the News” should be light tonight, it being the first Sunday of Spring. But it acts instead like a heart with something on its mind. And if the heaviness of heart is especially noticeable it is because it is a day that SHOULD be full of glad beginnings. A time when the cool moist earth is freshly turned to receive seeds for a rich harvest. It should be gay with promise; fat and jolly with it.
You’ve observed, haven’t you, that at other times of the year you are disposed to check up and look backward, but when Spring is in the air your head is buzzing with plans for Tomorrow. That’s something that wars can’t change; nor years, nor yesterday’s sorrow. Everybody’s young on the first Sunday of Spring. And the World would like to be young too, if we’d let it.
But the world had something on its mind today. It looked in the mirror of a clear sky and saw that the seeds it was sowing would be scattered by the winds of war and wet only with the blood of men and would reap a harvest of despair.
Men were not ready to go out hand in hand to meet the Spring. Instead they were burrowing deep into shelters to hide from it. The Spring that should be bright with happy promise was blackened by promise of other things; the promise of invasion; the promise of more fearful toll on the seas; the promise of horror and horror, in the Mediterranean, in Africa, in the Balkans and in the Far East. And the world shrugged helplessly in the sure knowledge that even these geographic limits were arbitrary. Horror is a poison gas whose vapor spreads to offend all living things. There is no immunity against horror. The spring sun that floods the ocean will find hundreds of shadows marking the U boats that hide from the Spring in the deeps…to destroy. And when men dare to look to the sky it will not be to welcome the glad pilgrimage of the birds but to watch for the hideous squadrons of death.
This Spring will not sow for the abundance of the harvest but will, instead, bring craft and skill and design to destroy that abundance.
And here we stand . . . all of us . . . not closing our ranks against the real enemy; earthquake and storm, disease and pestilence, famine and want; but rather, allying ourselves with these things against our fellow man.
These are empty generalities, I know, and Murdoch will be impatient with me for being guilty of them. Murdoch and I celebrated yesterday’s sunshine by going to the zoo, and we talked of many things; of strength and courage, of fortitude and captivity and lust and suspicion and of the whole gamut of exciting wonders of the Infinite. And today we walked in Lincoln Park and there was nothing to say because he knew, and I knew that it was the first Sunday of Spring . . . and it embarrassed us. And if he’s listening now and accuses me of talking in hollow phrases my only excuse is . . . that I know only the melody of the message. Who am I to know the words?
I wonder what it is that keeps the heavy heart of the world from breaking on the first Sunday of Spring?
Maybe it’s the comfort of hope . . . hope of that invisible seed whose harvest is dimly promised in the distant tomorrow . . . the seed of harmony and peace.
They say it’s natural and inevitable that men shall fight. I don’t believe it. Do you? They used to say that it was natural and inevitable that children suffer diphtheria, too, and measles and scarlet fever and whooping cough. Remember? “It’s natural,” they said. “A child must get them and get over them.” But enlightenment showed us that we could inoculate against these things. Why should we continue to believe that war is natural and inevitable? Young boys fight more readily than men. Grown men who know their hardness of muscle and soundness of thwack hesitate long before the fight–certain in their knowledge of hurt . . . win or lose. And when men mature philosophically, they don’t fight because they are cured of the illusion of victory. They know that to fight . . . is to lose. My, isn’t there hope that we will yet come of age?
Murdoch and I walked through Lincoln Park this afternoon and the sun was there, smiling as though nothing were out of order. The ice on the pond was thin as tissue and ready to bend with a ripple of water. The trees were busy looking down on the water and then up to the mirror of the sky . . . measuring themselves and deciding on the color and cut of their Spring wardrobe. The birds were gossiping of the winter and whispering of the romances of Spring and Summer. And all of us who were there breathed in the day. . . and it was good. And the big Lake was so glad to be quit of the ice that it ran off laughing to the horizon, shaking itself free. And the choir sound of a Sunday afternoon rose in the sky domed Cathedral to make a hymn of thankfulness and hope.
Maybe the world has its heart in a sling . . . but it’s still able to smile. And there was a song it sang this afternoon. It was just the music; the words are waiting to be written.
It’s a song we want to remember in the days ahead.
That’ll be all from Alan Scott.
To read more of Alan Scott’s on-air scripts, go to www.AlanScott.info
I spend the weekend reading the latest Oprah pick, “Women Food and God.” I will have a few things to say about it, but for right now, here is a little of this and that from Alan Scott for all my dear friends in New York City ~
May 23, 1946
The gripe department hasn’t been visited in a long time and I happened to think of that neglect when I ran across an item about the League to Prevent Perpetual Irritation of New Yorkers. There’s nothing exclusively New Yorky about this League. Any city could have one. The irritations which threaten to be perpetual are just as irritating in East Knee Bend, Nevada.
The founder and president of this New York League is a Mr. Felix Sper, a high school teacher in Brooklyn who also plays the violin. That’s a cumbersome sentence arrangement, isn’t it? Maybe I should have said . . . a high school teacher who plays the violin in Brooklyn. Not much better, is it? In any event . . . the irritations with which his agenda is seized are as follows: cracked cups in restaurants, broken glass on the sidewalk. . . . It’s unfair to interrupt this list so early . . . this didn’t occur to me last night when I noted this on the pad, but now that I review those first two offenders I can see that they sag. If Mr. Sper objects to cracked cups in restaurants does that imply that he likes them only at home? And if he finds it irritating to encounter broken glass on the sidewalk . . . where does he like broken glass? That’s unfair, isn’t it? All right. I’ll continue with the list.
He bemoans the lack of street signs and direction indicators in the subways. And the total absence of house numbers. There I agree with him to the point of making out a formal application for membership in the League. Maybe in your town people are careful to put a number on the house which can be seen without a long glass from the sidewalk. In New York, there is a prevailing secrecy about house numbers which can only be a carry over from wartime restrictions and severe military security regulations. If you’re house-hunting for example . . . .which about five fourths of the city’s population seems to be at the moment . . . and you read in the Sunday Times that there is a vacancy at number 84 Mudpack Drive. You spend the first four days trying to find a New Yorker who knows there IS a Mudpack Drive. Then you follow directions and look for a street sign. Chances are there never was a street sign indicating Mudpack Drive. If there was, it has long ago been removed to serve as a support for somebody’s porch swing or a tent stay for Boy Scout Troop 18. If the street sign is on the corner, it has been twisted by the local athletes chinning themselves on it . . . to the point where it is bent double in rheumatic agony and clearly indicates that Mudpack Drive runs straight up in the direction of the small gray cloud. The cloud is as vacant as anything, but offers few modern conveniences in the way housing. Then when you’ve determined that you are at last on Mudpack Drive, you are faced with the problem of finding number 84. Obviously the first step is to see which side of the street bears the even numbers. This is not as simple as it sounds. The first house has no number. The next one at one time had two thin metallic numbers nailed onto the top step . . . but the second number has been removed and all you have to go by is a six . . . which tells you that it’s sixty something . . . but you don’t know what. At the third house the numbers are concealed behind a clump of fading azaleas. If you go poking around you’ll probably be picked up as a suspicious character with no visible means of support. And so it goes. Finally, with the aid of a Chesapeake Bay Retriever at heel and a special FBI deputy, you locate number 84 and find that it has been sold three times since you saw the ad. You might have made better time if you had used the offices of a numerologist in the first place. But chances are the numerologist would have told you that according to the cube root of the letters in your middle name you would have been unhappy in a house numbered 84 anyway.
I’m afraid I’ve interrupted Mr. Spers catalog of irritations again, but that’s the one that struck me behind the ear . . . the rest of them are a bit on the corny side. Sound, no doubt . . . but stale. He is annoyed by the way women jabber through a play or a movie or a concert; and their monstrous hats which block your view, and the medium sized panic which attends their dropping a pair of gloves or a handkerchief or a coin. His League feels that women’s pocket books should be reorganized so that it would not be necessary for them to block traffic at the subway turnstiles while they sort through the myriad of oddments groping for a nickel. And he thinks women should improve their manners in lines. The League avers . . . through its spokesmen, that in a line outside a movie or keyed up in front of a bakery counter . . . there are two types of female offenders . . . the big tough babe who glares at you as she steps in front of you so that you don’t dare tell her off . . . or the pretty young thing who smiles sweetly and you don’t want to. If it’s any comfort to the Southern ladies . . . Mr. Sper speaks a good word for them . . . which coming from the mastermind of the League of Irritation is a good word indeed. He says, they are more deferential to men, they don’t argue or force issues and their voices are pitched attractively low.
That’ll be all from Alan Scott.
The Positive Slant On the Path 