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Show UJllt UhJmkd about Haile's Private Treasury SANTA MONICA, CALIF. Had it not been a foreign dispatch, dis-patch, a fellow might have thought it referred to one of our own investment in-vestment councillors, specializing in looking after widows' and orphans' or-phans' funds, and having a neat line of European securities to dispose dis-pose of, and prominent in welfare work and uplut movements in his home community in short, a typical specimen of a sub-variety sub-variety that seemed to sort of peter out in the years immediately im-mediately following 1929, some quitting by request, some by indictment and w . . . some just vanishing Irvm S. Cobb . . . , into space, taking with them the clients' remaining cash assets, if any. But this happened to be a cablegram cable-gram from Geneva stating that, when Emperor Haile and Farewell Selassie hurriedly departed from his capital, he so thoroughly cleaned out the bank of Ethiopia that all the invading Italians found in the vaults was a large throbbing throb-bing vacuum. How Mencken Can Write HpHIS campaign will liven right up if Henry Mencken, the official of-ficial human gumboil of the writing writ-ing craft, takes pen in hand to discuss dis-cuss the men and the issues. You don't have to agree with Hen. You may quarrel with his premises and dispute his conclusions. But can he make the language pop like a bull-whip! When he gets excited he throbs like a mashed thumb, and cuts loose like an avenging angel. Expressing himself, him-self, he always picks words of the right shape and the right color. Literary Garbage T ET'S admit that southerners of the Col. Carter of Cartersville type were mainly the far-fetched creations of overly-sentimental fic-tionists. fic-tionists. Let's admit the business of painting a largely imaginary aftah-de-wah south was for many years crowded. But why, in the revolt to debunk de-bunk this sugary romance, should the land so generously spawn a crop of alleged realists who'd have the rest of the world believe the only part of the south worthy of being written about is almost exclusively ex-clusively peopled by loathsome degenerates of the "Tobacco Road" variety? If one of these literary garbage collectors will but look about him, he'll find southerners who might make interesting copy and yet, excusing ex-cusing that they leave the sugar out of the corn bread and the lower low-er case "r" out of the language, are pretty much like the run of their fellow Americans elsewhere. Gas Station Service A N OPEN letter to the gaso-line gaso-line companies; Dear gasses Why must the customer cus-tomer have the windshield wiped if he doesn't want the windshield wiped? Maybe he's in a hurry. Maybe he fears the youth with the squirt gun will only mess up the windshield wind-shield worse than ever. Maybe he's nervous and prefers a blurry outlook so he can't see how many close calls he's going to have from being knocked cold by lady motorists. motor-ists. Even so, unless he fights like a tiger, he must endure the windshield wind-shield wiping. I commend the politeness po-liteness of your attendants, though deploring their frequent habit of apparently going somewhere about a quarter of a mile back of the station sta-tion to make change. I admire your enterprise and your pumps are indeed works of art. Your highway high-way signs so fill the grateful eye that we don't have to look at comparatively com-paratively dull things, such as scenery. But my dear gasses, there comes a time when too much service becomes a nuisance. Heroic First Aid Measures 1 THEN those three gallant men ' were imprisoned in that Moose river mine cave-in up in Canada, facing death in the darkness dark-ness one of them you'll remember, remem-ber, did die and the rescuers finally final-ly bored a slender shaft through to their living tomb, almost the first thing sent down from above was some hot coffee with a slug of brandy in it. Now the Rev. A. A. McLeod has formally protested to the government govern-ment of Nova Scotia about putting in the brandy. So I've been sitting here all day trying to make up my mind, if I'd been buried in that freezing, slimy pit, which I'd prefer to have 'em send along some spiked coffee cof-fee right away or keep the mixture mix-ture up on the surface and lower the Rev. A. A. McLeod with a pitcher of ice water. It's one of those things a fellow really can't decide offhand. IRVIN S. COBB. V N U Sl' rv ice. |