Word: websterisms
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...Webster dips his pen only rarely into politics. For Lincoln's Birthday 1940, Webster drew a forlorn, storm-whipped, benighted, wilderness cabin, a light in its window like the fever of birth. The caption: Ill-Fed-Ill-Clothed-Ill-Housed. During the war he drew a cartoon showing soldiers, under fire in the Pacific, listening to a radio's soapy-voiced report on the progress of a strike. But mostly he is content to give the U.S. newspaper public a much needed, and not too loaded, laugh for its three or five cents' worth...
Only a few, like Webster, still try to stick to the comic strip's old and worthy function: holding a mirror to a recognizable U.S. life. The late Clare Briggs's Mr. and Mrs., as an appreciation of marriage, made books like Cass Timberlane .look as naive as Daisy Ashford. Harry J. Tuthill's remarkable Bungle Family, almost alone among comics, dared to gaze steadily at the plain, awful ugliness and clumsiness to which the domesticated human animal is liable. When you have counted these -and Frank King's mild, wholesome Gasoline Alley, Chic Young...
...becoming a cartoonist, he al ways wanted most to be a clown. When he was grown and married, he got his wish. He made several tours with Ringling Bros., one with his wife and the late cartoonist Clare Briggs. (Even now, when the circus comes to Bridgeport, the Websters dress up and ride in the parade.) Ethel Webster became a good enough bareback rider to receive, and reluctantly turn down, a professional offer. She is also pretty certainly the only non-professional woman ever to ride down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on the nape of an elephant...
...Webster once wrote to his friend Franklin P. Adams, who had misspelled it Casper in his column: "Mr. Milquetoast has spoken to me about your spelling of his name. He says that his family has always spelled it with an a, but that they are notoriously bad spellers and you are probably right...
When Lewis Perry became principal of New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy in 1914, he found the school deep in traditions and a $250,000 debt. It had been founded the year Cornwallis surrendered, by John Phillips, whose nephew, Samuel Phillips, started Andover. Daniel Webster went to Exeter; Presidents Lincoln, Grant and Cleveland sent their sons. Other Exonian notables: Booth Tarkington, Robert Benchley, Banker Thomas W. Lament (now president of the trustees...