Word: benchley
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...confused with Boston's traditional "sloppy dressers." In its first issue The Twelve Twenty-Five Express, advance Reunion pepsheet, last week published its estimate of the Class of 1912 long before the appearance of the autobiographical 25th anniversary report. Estimator was another ex-Lampoon wit, Humorist Robert Charles Benchley,* who proceeded to set down 1912's "Sobering Statistics": "In 25 years, the Class of 1912 has produced only one Bishop of Albania, or, at any rate, only one Bishop of Albania who later became Prime Minister.-j-"Only one member of the Class has caught a Giant Panda...
...banana knockers' in Eua, Nukualofa, Tonga Islands, only one is a Harvard 1912 man." Some 1912 luminaries who failed a Benchley citation: onetime Securities & Exchange Commissioner Joseph Patrick Kennedy, New York's former Republican State Chairman William Kingsland Macy, Massachusetts' Representative Richard Bowditch Wigglesworth, Author Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday), New York University's Richard Offner, expert on Florentine Art, Japan's steamship tycoon Ryozo Asano, the New York Times's Science News Editor William L. ("Bill") Laurence...
From questionnaires sent out to his classmates, Author Tunis learned that most of Harvard 1911 read no books, boast no intellectual diversions, live generally mediocre lives. By a "personal, house-to-house canvass" Classmate Benchley collected a grim set of 1912 confessions: "I have three children, all of whom look like me. "I have no children, all of them Chinese. (It is only fair to state that this came from a Chinese classmate.) "I have two daughters, one of whom thinks I went to Colgate and the other of whom goes around with a Princeton man. "The only date...
...college, and two years later they changed the name of sauerkraut to 'Liberty Cabbage' ! "I haven't read any books. . . . "No spik Engliss." Harvardman Tunis concluded that the Class of 1911 comprised a "bunch of contented cows" who had accomplished almost nothing. "Of course, "retorted Harvardman Benchley in The Twelve Twenty-Five Express, "any member of 1912 could have predicted this ... as early as 1909." Cracked he: "If I were a calamity-howler, I could show that 72% haven't got $3,-000,000 to their name, 91% can't juggle, and that we haven...
...audit of the "state of the Union." George E. Sokolsky, writing on John L. Lewis, made the flat assertion that the United Mine Workers of America could "come into a town and take possession of it," and "close down any steel or automobile plant in the country." Humorist Robert Benchley was represented with a wry piece on international conferences, the New York World-Telegram's Radio Editor Alton Cook sarcastically "exposed" Major Bowes and his Amateur Hour. Fred Cooper, star draughtsman of the late Life, did one of his oldtime two-page spreads on "Winter...