Word: capps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Having lived (gasp!) in the vicinity (shudder!) of Harvard for the past eight years, cartoonist Al Capp feels that there is such a thing as a single "Harvard type." When one says "Harvard man" in a comic strip, according to Capp, a particular image immediately occurs to the reader. The public has fixed ideas, and "just as the Bowery stands for a bum or Wall Street stands for high finance, the name of Harvard stands for something--a sort of confused superiority...
Only a few images, Capp says, can be used in this way. The figure of the Radcliffe girl, for example, will not have any significance to Capp's 60 million readers; therefore he does not use it. Whenever he uses the Harvard name in Li'l Abner--and he has done so fairly often it is always in a disrespestful way, but "the more disrespestful treatment," Capp says, the more delighted the reaction at Harvard...
Just one of Capp's Harvard characters is based on a specific individual. A "smart Indian lawyer" called Harvard G. Polecat (the "G" is for "graduate") has, according to Capp," all the facial and physical characteristics of Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr." This fact has not disturbed Capp's friendship with his Cambridge neighbor...
...Capp's most recent use of Harvard in his strip pertained to the hallowed Dogpatch tradition of Sadie Hawkins Day. It seems that thirteen new bachelors were needed to participate in the annual race, and that someone in Dogpatch who could read saw in a newspaper that Harvard was awarding 2000 bachelors' degrees. Moonbeam McSwine, one of the more picturesque local characters, was dispatched to Cambridge to recruit the necessary bachelors. She met with surprisingly little resistance...
About twelve years ago, Capp introduced in Lil Abner a young Harvard student, the son of the late George Capley." This gentleman had somehow become engaged to Daisy Mae, the Dogpatch heroine. Daisy, however, did not meet the staid Mrs. Capley's standards for a daughter-in-law: her feet "weren't big enough," she had a figure. After her hair had been properly disheveled and she had been provided with clothes that didn't quite fit, Daisy was pronounced ready for Boston society. She looked, Capp says, "like a bag of turnips...