Arthur Baer

“ But in a hotel a man can look at the bill-of-menu and he could order what he wanted and the waiter didn’t want to be kissed and the manager of the hotel wouldn’t bust into tears if he threw a plate at the cashier and missed. He said it was easier to dine with gentlemen than like one. ”

“ Baer is a great humorist. I don’t think that anybody has ever properly defined a great humorist, but whatever he is, “Bugs” Baer is it. This stuff is racial, penetrative, stereopticon in its vivid characterization and true in its exaggerative qualities. Its simplicity may deceive you. Be not fooled. Human nature is here on exhibit, unadorned, as it should be. ”

“ Grandpop isn’t in the carriage because the family wanted to make it a group picture and he didn’t want a good horse ruined by a bad load. So they decided just to take a picture of the horse and the carriage dog which was a white hound with tobacco juice spots.
It’s a funny thing about carriage dogs. They ain’t got no future and nobody cares about their past and they run along under the wagon. Yes, our carriage was a wagon on week-days, and the dog never gets anywhere and if he does he’s got to come right back. ”

“ My only suggestion for an answer lies in the book itself—in the irreducible quality you call his personality or his style. He writes and thinks as no one else writes and thinks; in a way it is lunatic; in another way, not the very greatest way, but in a refreshing way, it is genius. ”

“ Doesn’t time pass quickly when you haven’t got a watch?
We don’t have those old-fashioned celebrations that we used to have when grandpop was alive. That’s grandpop’s picture there in his faded Civil War uniform. He claimed to be the youngest drummer boy in the war, which must have been a musical conflict because every soldier you meet was a drummer boy. ”

“ After he graduated out of the nearest exit uncle gave him enough money to open a barber shop. He thought this would keep Bill quiet. It was a good idea, but used cars aren’t the only things that don’t work.
Bill had eighteen chairs in his place, nine to each barber.
That kept both of ’em busy. When they had eighteen customers in there on a Saturday night they would slap hot towels on all their faces and try to scare the whiskers off instead of using hammers or some more civilized system. ”

“ I never have yet ridden in any cars where the man at the wheel laughed except at some suffering on the part of humanity. The minute he starts to steer he becomes a plague to education and hopes that some orphan asylum will turn up or that somebody will twist a canary bird's neck. ”

“ Grandpop walked away with his Adam's apple chuckling to itself, because he was a man who didn't care if anybody understood him or not, because he always had plenty of explanations for the same questions. ”

“ Bill went to college and when he was about thirty years old my uncle decided that Bill ought to go to work again. Bill didn’t like this so good because he claimed that one backward step would make any man lose his carpet slippers.
Anyway, Uncle borrowed enough money to send Bill to college again for the pest-graduate course. It was a barber college and Bill cut almost as many classes as customers. They used to give would stripes for injuries received in the second chair from the right and perfume was used whenever they couldn’t get anethetics. ”

“ He is always leaving out the intervening, the logically necessary, step, and giving you premise and conclusion as if suddenly. It is one part of his peculiar nature, and others bring him full into the stream of mad humor which is one of the most entertaining of current phenomena. It is engagingly irresponsible; it has none of the usual points of reference, it exists intensely by itself and has probably not a vestige of social or philosophical significance. What on earth does he mean when he says, “Not that pop wasn't optimistic, because he wasn't”? ”

“ Then John took pop out to the rainwater pond and pointed out a big turtle. Pop looked at it enviously, and John said: “Well, you know that turtles live to be a thousand years old?”
Pop shook his tongue in the affirmative.
Then John said: “When he dies we’ll eat him.”
That made pop just as happy as a lark with a broken leg. Then John showed pop a century plant and told him it bloomed once every hundred years. Pop came home and told me that I could expect a bouquet in the near future.
A woman’s idea of beautiful Easter music is the squeak from a new pair of shoes. ”

“ He was very temperamental and possessed that artistic flair that made him get his nails manicured just before he threw a Belgian block through the window of a Chinese laundry. He was always dieting and claimed to be a vegetarian, but when he was invited out to dine he could do more to a free meal than Nebraska's thirty-sixth vote did to the brewery business. ”

“ They swear at the tires, condemn the roads, argue with the signposts, get black in the face with congested Billingsgate, roast all the speed regulations, hurl threats at the pedestrians and renounce civilization. ”

“ Both of ’em were over eighty years old, but grandpop felt much superior because he was a bass drummer in the war, while Yoder was only a kettle drummer.
Grandpop claimed that he had much more territory to cover than Yoder, showing that his general had more confidence in him. That always made Yoder mad and he would squirt tobacco juice in grandpop’s direction.
Grandpop was kind of cowardly except when it came to drums, but this always got him made, too. I always found that no man was a coward when he was mad, because anger is a good substitute for bravery. ”

“ Hotel tailors overcharge you, all right, but they do things quick and they get their mistakes back on time.
And it’s more fun fighting with stranger than with relatives, because once in a while the cops think you are right. ”

“ But grandpop told him that was his story and he would stick to it. So the minister said that grandpop ought to stick to the Sunday edition of the Scriptures and and don’t pay so much attention to the Saturday night extra.
Then he showed the congregation the real passage that didn’t say anything about he who is overcome thereby, inherits the earth.
He said to the old man: “Wine is a mocker and strong drink is raging. But he who is overcome thereby doesn’t inherit the earth.” ”

“ His life shows that all is not tinsel and glory, but that if a man starts out to make good in this world he has a good fighting chance if he is in the draft age and hasn't got busted arches or a friend on the board. ”

“ He is dead now, which is all for the best because there is nothing to run under but those family flivvers and you don’t want carriage dogs getting mixed up with differentials and there’s so many hills that a carriage dog would wear himself out changing gears. ”

“ Grandpop was a very peculiar man and hated everybody in the world. He used to have very queer names for people he didn't like. He called the village pastor a moopus one day because the pastor asked why he didn't come to services. The pastor asked him what a moopus was, and grandpop told him it was a man who whistled at funerals. ”

“ This sentence is unusual for him in that it contains all the customary parts of speech; a much more representative sentence is his question: “Are motion picture directors robustly correct when they claim that average skull age of public is but eight slender years?” His whole work is a cable-language of his own.
He is neither a satirist nor an ironist. What he has is an exceptionally oblique outlook upon the world and an elliptical expression which gives the same effect as small and agreeable galvanic shocks. ”

“ Then Uncle would tell him something sudden and quick and ask him what he charged for drowning by the hour. Morrisey would say about two dollars, and Uncle would tell him to take three hour's worth and charge it to him.
One word would lead to another, because I never saw people who went on a vacation that enjoyed themselves, because most folks travel so they can criticize other folks' cooking and table manner. They get all starched up for dinner, and the women folks change their dresses fifty times a day, even if they have only got two dresses. ”

“ I never ride in automobiles any more. The only chauffeur I ever saw smile turned out to be feeble-minded.
He was driving with one hand and had the other around my waist and he asked me to marry him and I said yes and then his relatives threw a net over him.
Well, good-by, and don't forget to slam the door in your face.
The first motor car ever wrecked in our village
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. ”

“ Funny how so many guys can be vegetarians between bites on a donated lamb chop. Then his wide came back and they had a quarrel. He was a country gentleman. But he had never been out of a big city. You could tell that. When the boys were treating each other to cigars and drinks you could easily see that he was an out-of-town buyer.
His wife and he decided to break up what housekeeping they had. So she took the trapeze and the birdcage and left him without a place to sleep. ”

“ Seems to me that grandpop and Yoder ain’t much different from other folks who are very friendly in group pictures or flashlights, but let you turn your back once and they tear all the buttons off your reputation. ”

“ So mom and us climbed into it and pop started to crank up, but it was like trying to pump water out of a bread box.
Aunt Ella said the dust will ruin my complexion, but pop told her that dust would smooth her complexion off. Which was about right, because Ella was wrinkled like Geronimo who used to take permanent waves out of people's scalps.
Uncle Al wouldn't climb into the car because he said he had a dream the other night. He was invited to a temporary banquet to get some permanent indigestion and he dreamed he was trying to get his shoes on. ”

“ Jerry was about sixteen when he fell in love with a girl from a small town in Pennsylvania. Mom used to tell him that no man should think of getting married before he was forty years old. By that time he would be old enough to know better. ”

“ He used to wear gloves made of thimbles and drum on kitchen tables when people were talking and claimed that he was an ipper. In grandpop's language an ipper was a man who slept with his shoes on. His explanations never matched anything that he was trying to explain and the neighbors used to put their fingers to their foreheads whenever grandpop started to talk. ”

“ And by getting shaved eighteen at a time the customers could get club rates.
Once Bill made a mistake and shaved a guy with the back of the razor instead of the edge. Do you know that this man was the only customer who ever came back the second time?
Business got so prosperous that Bill’s creditors invented the safety razor to drive him into some other business where tools weren’t weapons.
So Bill got married and furnished his house with the insides of a barber shop. ”

“ Uncle claims the school children aren't getting their history right in nowadays schools. It doesn't make 'em patriotic. They take their history like ice cream sodas when it used to be all sulphur and molasses. ”

“ He said the world was full of blixxes and tibbens, and that he was going back into the woods where there wasn't any gumbos. It seems that blixxes and tibbens were people who ate with their hats on. A gumbo was a lady who put bluing into everything she washed on Monday, including her face. ”

“ It would look pretty unsettled then, but another photographer would always come up and ask the old boys to pose in one of those friendly enemy pictures with two old foes, now pals. An armistice would be declared until the picture was taken, and then the battle would start right in where it left off. ”

“ But we never had anything. And you can’t give away something you haven’t got. When we started to get something, we were so used to not giving anything away that we didn’t.
Life is all habits. Eb never recovered from the shock of his wrecked romance. He couldn’t work. And it looked like he might die any minute.
That was fifty-six years ago, and Eb still looks that way.
He used to drive past a little shack ”

“ It used to be mutton on Monday, veal on Tuesday and all those et cetera things, and you had about as much choice as coal on the chute. Talk about forcible feedings, home cooking was force without any feed. ”

“ This does not refer to his predilection for violence, although to refined people there must be something unpleasant in a person who could every week for two years describe the physical encounters of an average household. ”

“ Uncle wouldn't come along and so we bounced down the road from rut to rut when pop started in to indulge in some finely assorted profanity.
Mom cautioned him not to teach the children to swear and Pop choked back so many cuss words that he gained eleven pounds in weight.
It's a funny thing about people driving cars. They never have any fun. They are always sore at the driver ahead of them. They cuss the driver in back of them. They blast all the traffic constables. ”

“ It shows pop driving the first motor car ever wrecked in our village.
We were very proud when pop came driving home the cows that day and discovered the car right in the middle of them. We don't know yet how it got there, but pop thinks it might have been frightened by a scrap of paper in a policeman's hands. ”