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Show Western Hostelries. SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. They have mighty fine hotels in this town. I've stayed at several of them and friends of mine have been put out of some of the others. . And once I enjoyed a fire scare here when the alarm, at 3:30 a. m., brought to the lobby a swarm of moving picture actors without with-out any makeup on and not much else. This was in the era of the silent films, but you wouldn't have dreamed it to hear the remarks of an hysterical lady star when she dis- chow had been for- irvin S. Cobb gotten. The current husband also was temporarily missing miss-ing but she was comparatively calm about that She probably figured a husband could be picked up almost any time whereas darling little Ming Poo had a long pedigree and represented rep-resented quite a financial Investment Invest-ment and anyhow was a permanent fixture in her life. Through the strike here, the traveling trav-eling public seemed to make out. Maybe visitors followed the old southern custom stop with kinfolks. Think, though, how great would have been the suffering had the strike occurred during prohibition days when transient guests might have perished of thirst without bright uniformed lads to bring them first-aid packages in the handy hip-pocket hip-pocket sizes! Bellhops qualified as lifesavers those times. Humans in the Raw. AS I behold vast numbers of fellow fel-low beings strolling the beaches, yes, and the public thoroughfares thor-oughfares too, while wearing as few clothes as possible and it seems to be possible to wear very few indeed in-deed I don't know whether to admire ad-mire them for their courage or sympathize sym-pathize with them in their suffering or deplore their Inability to realize that they'd be easier on the eye if they'd quit trying to emulate the raw oyster which never has been pretty to look upon and, generally speaking, is an acquired taste anyhow. any-how. For a gentleman who ordinarily bundles himself in heavy garments clear up to his Adam's apple, this warm weather strip-act entails a lot of preliminary torture. At first our gaUant exhibitionist resembles a forked stalk of celery bleached out in the cellar. Soon he is one large red blot on the landscape, with fat water blisters spangling his brow until he looks as if he were wearing a chaplet of Malaga grapes. In the next stage he peels like the wallpaper wall-paper on an Ohio valley parlor after flood time. Destructive Hired Help. SOMEBODY found a stained glass window in an English church dating back to 685 A. D., but still intact. And from the ruins of a Roman villa, they've dug out a marble mar-ble figure of Apollo the one the mineral water was named after in a perfect state although 2,000 years old. These discoveries are especially Interesting to this family as tending to show that hired help isn't what it must have been in the ancient time. We once had a maid of the real old Viking stock who, with the best intentions on earth, broke everything every-thing she laid finger on. Moreover, she could stand flatfooted in the middle of a large room and cause treasured articles of virtu, such as souvenirs of the St Louis World's fair and the china urn I won for superior spelling back in 1904 at the Elks' carnival to leap to the floor and be smashed to atoms. She didn't have to touch them or even go near them. I think she did it by animal magnetism or capillary attraction at-traction or something of that nature. The first time we saw the Winged Victory, Mrs. Cobb and I decided it must have been an ancestor of Helsa who tried to dust it with the disastrous results familiar to all lovers lov-ers of classic statuary. - - - The Reaping Season. CERTAIN crops may not have done so well, due to weather conditions, or, as some die-hard Republicans would probably contend, con-tend, because of New Deal control. But, on the other hand, hasn't it been a splendid ripening season for sit-downs, walk-outs, shut-ups, lock-outs lock-outs and picket lines? It makes me think of the little story the late Myra Kelly used to tell of the time when she was a public pub-lic school teacher on New York's East Side. She was questioning her class' of primary-grade pupils, touching on the callings of their respective re-spective parents. She came to one tiny sad-eyed little girl, shabby and thin and shy. "Rosie," she asked, "at what docs your father work?" "Mein poppa he don't never work, Teacher," said Rosie. "Doesn't he do anything at all?" "Oh, yessum." "Well, what docs he do?" "He strikes." IRVIM S. COBB. e-WNU Service. |