Thompson 341011

Cliffside, October 10 — On different subjects: George Hall’s tunes singer Frizti White, I believe is her name, is great for that type of popular singing…. “Froggie” McClintock, heard many times with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, throws me into fits with his Popeye the Sailor Man imitations. At the front of Mills Drug Store I met Broad Moore. Probably the four longest feet in the county were measured, heel to heel and toe to toe. Moore’s shoes are a quarter inch longer than mine, so help me…. And the most notable complaint in Cliffside: The price of “fatback.”

On Saturday morning I was casually sitting at Mills Drug Shop; I say casually sitting because it was ordinary sitting. A young fellow about six years of age came by and seated himself at my table. He looked at me: I looked at him and said, “Hello Sonny.” The youngest replied, “Hello.” In a short time he was on his way. Whether he was doubly interested in the monstrosity of smoking a recently acquired pipe and reading a Photoplay magazine from behind spectacles which I hate to wear, I do not know. However, the young fellow has in his possession something that I did not have at that early age. He has a simple forwardness which is both likable and lovable. At that age, I would not have approached the table in the first place and if someone had said, “Hello,” I likely would have skittered down an alley, as O. O. McIntyre would say.

The first year of this column will be rounded out next month. During that year the most appreciated communication from any reader is the brief letter from Hon. Oscar J, Mooneyham, Avondale lawyer and Pharmacist. The past week’s mail brought this letter. The real encouragement which the letter radiates is due to the thoughtful act of its writer. A small clipping accompanied the letter which concerns this column in future significance. The real appreciation we feel is because of that.

The story of late hour comings-in is of age. Those grand raidings of the refrigerator are memories which you file and which you turn over on re-thought. I have not reached the state of matrimony as yet, so it is not necessary to say that I carry my shoes in hand to gain entrance after a night with the crocheting circle. Yet in attempting to convey six feet of awkwardness through French doors and so on, it is without effort that I fall over a chair or table which has been moved, “because it suits so much better there.” After reaching the refrigerator, the dishpan, on schedule, falls from a hanger on the pantry wall. That is such a beautiful soothing effect to the head of the house between 12 and daylight. And this paragraph comes to this: The above mentioned head of the house says that your scribbler can make more noise than a hound dog at liberty with all the bones his dog nature could desire. Grrr, Arf, Arf.

Radio broadcasting, seemingly, has reached an irreproachable degree of service. Here in this little village of Carolina we heard the take-offs of planes in Hawaii, which inaugurated the new mail service on the islands. The Postmaster General in Washington made introductory remarks, Hawaii took the microphone like the flash of your eye and there the sound of electric inertia starters on the planes was as simply heard as if you stood by the fuselage of the plane itself. The announcer in charge mentioned the “little grass shack” just around the corner, and it must have sent an amused ripple of approval over the nation as indeed it did give me a kick—and so with the entire broadcast.