Adventure Magazine Cover, November 10, 1924 — page 83: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Tales of the Hot Dog Tavern 81 Of jobs and bosses, travel, love and hate And politics and fortune, death and fate. The Hot Dog’s patronage was not confined To ship yard and to shop; its bar was lined With casuals from every trade and craft: Workers and loafers, devotees of graft, Hobos and true tramps-royal, eddying in From the great current of the city’s din; Sailors who sailed wherever billows swirled, And sometimes dwellers of the underworld, _ Who stood beside the clerks who lingered there, Coaxed by the beer and Joseph’s bill of fare. While now and then some corpulent plutocrat With business in the ship-yards, came and sat Before a table while he drank a beer. And thus came customers from far and near, The good and bad, the high and low, immersed In one complete democracy of thirst. And there was talk and song of work and wages, And tales that had been echoed down the ages From Homer and from Rabelais, and speech Of port and city, from a South Sea beach To Behring Straits, from Boston to Bombay, Wherever men had been at work or play. And so it chanced one night a beetle-browed And heavy-featured member of the crowd, Who’d stood and listened to some sailor’s tale Of fire aboard a freighter in a gale, Glanced furtively about the crowded bar, Ay HE. Then cleared his throat and, speaking to the tar, “ AAs Suggested: “Since there ain’t-no dicks about, /°79Y I got a yarn that I might ravel out For them that cares to hear it.” ‘Spout it, kid,” The sailor answered, and the yeggman did. La Tite 7 Py +L a 4 i = * ae << “<1 had cracked a jar at Yonkers. I was driftin’ down the drag, Buyin’ wine for everybody with me pockets full of swag, When I meets a moll who’s foxy, and she says to me, says she: ‘You're a hick to be a yeggman, an’ you take that straight from me, For the yeggman is a lollop, though he gets away with kale; For as sure as boobs are easy where he ends 1s always gat, He may dodge the harness flatties, he may trick the dicks as well But he finishes in Sing Sing, in a narrow little celll’ “Then I says to her: ‘Say, listen; while your chatter’s pretty wise, I ain’t gonna be no sucker like these poor-but-honest guys; Pm, Maybe stir is where I’m headed, but until I lands there, say, € x I gets somethin’ out of livin’ more than three or four per day. : All those honest goofers hope for is a job until they die, Ny While I’m livin’ wide an’ handsome, an’ I’m flyin’ fast an’ high; & An’ when I goes up the river for my gay career of crime, I kin think of how I had it an’ I blowed it in my timel COMICLMOCKKS.GO =