Life, 1929-06-14 · page 24 of 44
Life — June 14, 1929 — page 24: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page features a humorous diary column by Baird Leonard, accompanied by two cartoons satirizing domestic life and gender roles. **Top cartoon:** A woman complains to friends about her husband Tom becoming "perfectly" angry if she arrives home five minutes before he finishes cooking dinner. The joke satirizes the "new man" who has taken over household cooking—a role traditionally female. The satire cuts both ways: it mocks both the husband's territorial defensiveness over "his" cooking domain and implies the wife finds this role reversal absurd or emasculating. **Bottom cartoon:** A child tells his mother to return a fish to water before it dies, showing parental incompetence or indifference—basic domestic negligence played for laughs. The diary itself is a gossipy, literary commentary touching on contemporary authors and the Book-of-the-Month Club, reflecting upper-class reading habits of the era. The overall page satirizes modern domesticity and social pretensions among educated urbanites.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Poy - yy) “My dear, you don't know how Tom is. If 1 get home five minutes before he's finished cooking din- ner he goes into a perfect tantrum!" by May 23—Awake betimes, with such a Baird sense of re-juvenation that I could have Leonard started in with pleasure at a kindergar- ten, but it was somewhat reduced, by the realization that I have begun to mark passages in books and make notes in the margins, a business which I have always regarded as a sign of weak-mindedness or senility, and a speedy canvass of my most recent reading matter does show in “Poor Women!”, one of the best collections of short stories that ever I read in my life, a notation on the, spinsters’ hallway in which a man’s hat was hung to frighten burglars, and an angry criticism of Norah Hoult for not making poor old Miss Jocelyn look in the attaché case which she found in the railway car- riage, albeit I do know well that writers who manip- ulate destiny in an unbearable way are far superior to those who dress their fifth act—characters in eve- ning raiment bought on profits derived from the suc- cessful marketing of jam or pickles. I also marked on the back leaf of “The Pathway” a citation that Leigh Hunt's wife must have seen Shelley plain, be- cause she did a bust of him which had no chin so- ever, and that even members of his family admitted that the usual portraits of him were beyond verisimili- tude. By the first post a circular from the Book-of- the-Month Club proclaiming the virtues of their or- ganization and denouncing the sayings of Mr. Lowell Brentano and Mr. John Macrae, which did but awaken my conjecture that such literary organiza- tions do not differ much from Mr. Gelett Burgess’ definition of the Salvation Army, which was that the latter reaches a class of people whom the churches never do. For who but the most indifferent readers could consign the contents of their library table to a board ostensibly, from their own critical animadver- sions, not beyond reproach? Up and did on my new sport suit, the color of which baffles not only me but my dressmakers, and, feeling very fit, out to luncheon Biotto: Y’ better with Gertrude McCarthy, who told me that a bachelor put that fish back admirer had sent her eight dozen tulips on Mother's Sonny before it dies! Day. (Continued on Page 37) comicbooks.com