What Early 20th Century Boys Chose First

 

Memories of When Everything Seemed New

Have lately daydreamed I was born around 1900, illusion aided by writings of several who were. All are gone of course, but they sure bring that past alive, nearly to a point of my being able to share it with them. Passage of time, effects of change, weighed heaviest on folks who took a twentieth century's ride, in a saddle, or rumble seat, eventually aboard a plane for many, but not all. My father (b. 1907), sat astride Dobbin, made the whole of 32 miles from Statesville to here. Bet he never saw pavement for whole of the trip. Imagine mounting a horse today for anything other than novelty, or sport. As means for necessary travel, I’d say the Dobbins are long since glue. Are folk of the aughts and teens to be envied? (and being 2021 we must ask, which aughts and teens?) Writers of that era were much moved by ways they had known, but saw disappear by adulthood, calling up a past in columns, sometimes a book devoted to what had been meaningful, but since lost. Edward Wagenknecht (1900-2004) did a history, The Movies In The Age of Innocence, dealing with the silent period, nearly all of which he knew first-hand (he may even have been there for The Great Train Robbery when new). Wagenknecht would later team with Anthony Slide on Fifty Great American Silent Films 1912-1920, A Pictorial Survey. He also taught and wrote on English and American literature. Wagenknecht ended up with sixty books to his credit, including one most personal, As Far As Yesterday (1968), where he, at about age I am now, stirred embers of youth and told of emerging lively arts and which of these engaged him most. There were moments reading when I would have traded my boyhood for his, but couldn’t we say as much of anyone fortunate enough to have come up in the teens, 20, 30, 40’s?

Wagenknecht reflects on comic strips carried in abundance by newspapers. His heroes were many … Happy Hooligan, Foxy Grandpa, most of all Little Nemo in Slumberland. Latter remains a cult favorite, hypnotic for being leagues ahead of anything drawn elsewhere. Windsor McCay of dinosaur Gertie fame was the artist. His strip, outsize to full-sheets and in color, began in 1905, ran for a decade, was revived in 1924, lasted three more years, then quit. Wagenknecht was mesmerized by Nemo, which well I can imagine, as it mesmerizes still. To a boy in 1905, this must have been like a circus come to town each Sunday. Wagenknect’s impressions, from his adult perspective, reveal an impact I hardly got from anything growing up, certainly not from comic books accumulated to age 12, unceremoniously dropped after, ultimately sold. I miss none of them. Was there defining difference between comic strips and eventual comic books? Wagenknect said the latter meant nothing to him … maybe because they arrived post-his childhood, but consider master collector and archivist Bill Blackbeard (1926-2011), who single-handed saved our whole history of comic strips by crisscrossing the US time and again to fill transfer trucks with old newspapers that would jam his San Francisco home to bursting. Blackbeard catalogued millions of strips that otherwise would have been lost to time and decay, as few survive except on yellowed pages he rescued. Blackbeard largely disdained comic books, thought they stood small beside strips, him for instance calling Superman “meretricious dreck.” Was there magic on those daily pages that ten-cent Dells and DC’s could not approach? Have comic book collectors settled all this time for meretricious dreck?

Bill Blackbeard, Famed Rescuer of Comic Strip Art

I never lost myself to comic books as did plentiful peers. There was interest, but never in characters that would have stood me well once time came to unload, my bag being Archie, Hot Stuff, rather than Spiderman, the Marvel crop. Did dabble with Batman, if briefly, when ABC in January ’66 made him meaningful. I had drawn comics during downtime at school, which for me amounted to all of time at school. My sheaves were stapled, had a cover, introduced characters like “Civil and Pokey,” modeled somewhat after Top Cat and friends, sci-fi the format for “Southern Space Slowpoke,” whose logo was a Big S in front of letters that spelled three words of the name. I graduated from these to penning horror stories, which sometimes they let me read to the class. There was even a fictitious pair of “stars” who played in whatever transition my tales made to film ("Joseph Harlem" and "Edward DeLoor"). Parents would have preferred my deeper immersion in studies even as they arranged with our local news-and-mag dealer to let loose one of spinning racks from which one pulled latest comics, this so I could display my collection just like a real store. Diehards surely dreaded cretins that got to these first at newsstands and bent issues forward to see what was behind, creases there to stay. And what of brats putting paws on what we collectors tenderly preserved, cover and pages folded so the comic fit in one rather than both their grubby hands. Many treasures of mine plunged from a 9.5 to a 4.0 (comic certification talk) as result of such abuse, damage once done being for keeps.

Had to ponder by adolescence the point of continuing, movies engaging me way more by then. What I wanted was theatre ads out of old newspapers, not comic strips. Certainly admire Bill Blackbeard’s herculean effort though, and wish in a way to have better appreciated drawn panels and magic applied to them. Wonder how many, if any, comic fans went on to study so-called “fine” art, though chances are most considered comic art plenty fine enough. Saw where the San Diego Comic-Con was cancelled for a second time, two years deprived must be agony for those devoted. Interesting how collectors serious enough will “slab” their books, vacuum-packing to thwart what age inflicts upon all things, a way comics might outlive their owners. Unknowing civilians remain incredulous: You spend a fortune on the thing, then seal it up to where it can’t even be read? Like Ann who inquires rhetorically upon my receipt of yet another lobby card, “You paid that for a piece of paper?,” words fairly spat out in derision (Gee, at least I don’t slab them, my meek reply). To collect is to live one’s life in martyrdom.

Occasional “Children’s Plays” during the early 1900’s went under heading of treats for tots, each sensitive to “propriety of taking children to the theatre,” this preamble to a 1903 review of Babes In Toyland when it opened at the Majestic Theatre in New York. “It may be wise to keep their youthful minds from the stimulating and exciting influence of stage performances,” said James Metcalfe for LIFE magazine, even as he cited “few more enjoyable things in the life of a critic than the frank and outspoken joy, laughter, and wonder of an audience of children,” youth at the theatre OK so long as closely supervised. New Yorker columnist Wolcott Gibbs (1902-1958) recalled from 1935 vantage a policy wherein youngsters “couldn’t go in alone” to Broadway sites, in particular one he wanted to attend by name the “Nemo,” located at B’way and 110^th Street, which Gibbs took for a playhouse devoted exclusive to Little Nemo and his dream travels, Gibbs, like Edward Wagenknecht, a fan. “I was able to only stand wistfully on the sidewalk outside, watching the happy crowds on their way to see Little Nemo miraculously translated into flesh and blood.” When finally an accommodating aunt escorted him inside, Gibbs saw a “disastrous performance … with a troupe of performing dogs … and a mystifying scene in which a fat man spanked a young lady repeatedly with a board,” Gibbs “tricked and furious, in the smelly dark.” A purest pastime for boys like he and Wagenknecht was books. Like with comic strips, these would not so betray expectation. A literary happening to quietly launch in 1900 was The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. I never appreciated impact of his Oz series (fourteen in all) until reading Gibbs, Wagenknecht, others, who came to these at ideal age and were captured fully by the alternative universe Baum created.

A modern parallel to the Oz books may be Harry Potter, each awaited by fervent readership. Baum eventually felt trapped by Oz, tried to quit, but followers would not let him. He finally relented and made new entries an annual event. Wagenknecht remembered this as happiest aspect of Christmas, sentiment unabated by age eighteen when he wrote L. Frank Baum to convey all that Oz meant to him. Baum’s reply, written two months before he died in May 1919, was chatty and appreciative, a balm for his “heart trouble,” the letter concluding, “Thank you for writing me. It helps.” Wagenknecht discovered movies during the aughts, said “practically all the great stories of the world were retold in one-reelers.” These included Oz tales, which Wagenknecht and Wolcott Gibbs also saw staged by troupes travelling to venues the to-be writers might frequent. Could a reader expect absolute fidelity to narrative spun by favorite books? Gibbs attended The Wizard of Oz as limned by vaudeville team Montgomery and Stone. “For grownups,” he said, Oz “must have been charming,” but for Gibbs, who had committed text to memory, “it was just more perfidy and foolishness.” Gibbs later wrote “of a period in almost every childhood, when we can accept simultaneously the reality of actual life and the reality of supernatural happenings in books.” What he saw in the theatre “was all wrong,” Dorothy “definitely grown up … had a habit, unknown to the real Dorothy, of detaching herself suddenly from the events around her and singing a song.” The Cowardly Lion was Gibbs’ “bitterest disappointment … a miserable fake … just an actor dressed up … prancing idiotically on its hind legs.” The play sadly ruined Oz books for Gibbs, his lion no longer living, but mere “cloth and cardboard” (bet he boycotted the ’39 version)

Gibbs was as put out with mock-upping done to Peter Pan, “synthetic animals … Nana (the dog) … transparently not a Newfoundland, any more than the creature that swallowed the alarm clock was an alligator, or could sensibly have been regarded as an alligator by anybody over the age of ten.” So far as Gibbs was concerned, live treatments debased the books he, and others of his generation, adored. Before our era of rife and repeated stage, screen, TV versions of literature, it was easy to imagine harm done by such travesties as permanent, image of the original work libeled from there onward. “It never let up, and presently I began to suspect that all so-called “children’s entertainment” was designed to provide adults with a bogus and condescending nostalgia.” Such plays were “violation of my private ideas,” escape from which came the movies, which Gibbs knew also to be distortions of things he read, but they had at least a patina of realism. Lions eating Christians on screen (“sandals and all”) were real lions. Edward Wagenknecht too found comfort in film, as did Gilbert Seldes, who saw movies as most popular of new-minted “lively arts.” There was integrity also in the circus and “parlor magicians,” these honest enough to admit fooling you, the challenge being to figure out how. Wagenknecht was enraptured by “Master Magician (Howard) Thurston,” sought out the vet performer years later to tell him so. Blackstone, “The Greatest Magician The World Has Ever Known” was also a quest to meet in person. Wagenknecht freely admitted to being a “very childlike adult,” this a badge of honor so far as he saw it, and all more reason for me to enjoy his writing. Birds of a feather, you know.