Guest of Blonde Eskimos

1916

Preacher Dwells With Newly-found Arctic People.

SASKATOON, Saskatchewan, Canada. — The tribe of blonde Eskimos which Harry V. Radford of New York, the murdered explorer, reported he had found on Coronation Bluff, far in the Arctic zone, have been visited again by a white man. In a letter received this week from the Rev. H. Girling of Emmanuel College by the Rev. Dr. Carpenter, principal of the college, the missionary announced he reached the fair dwellers of the Arctic on Oct. 10, 1915, and remained with them some time. He asserts that he is the first white man to dwell among the newly-found people.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Sept. 16, 1916, p. 5.

Rat Army Invades Texas

Feb. 1920

Rabbits, Too, Are Now a Pest on Many Farmsteads

ODEM, Texas — For the past several months rats and rabbits have become so plentiful that the damage done by them is becoming serious. A conservative estimate is $100 damage to each farm, done by rats to grain and seed in the barns alone. Some farmers estimate they have 1,000 rats in a single barn.

Rabbits are doing thousands of dollars' worth of damage to cabbage and garden crops. It is not uncommon to see Mexican boys coming in after a few hours' hunt with from ten to fifty. One farmer shot four rabbits with two shots in his cabbage patch and killed seventeen in one afternoon.

The peculiar thing is that these pests are new to the country. Two years ago it was a rare thing to see either a rabbit or a rat.


Kid McCoy, Former Boxer, Staging Billy Sunday Role in Iowa

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — "Kid" McCoy, former pugilist, is at Marion, the county seat to assist in knocking out the devil at evangelistic meetings now in progress there.

The ex-fighter is declared to be as eloquent in the pulpit as he was aggressive in the ring.

Full Beards and Red Petticoats

1886

People who can remember back of the civil war must know that shaving was almost universal in those days, and that when the contrary practice began it so agitated the country that the newspapers were filled with leading articles on "The Beard Movement" and "The Mustache Movement."

Probably most of our older readers can remember when they first saw a preacher in the pulpit wearing a mustache and the shock it gave them. It was, if possible worse than the other sacrilegious act of bringing fiddles into the choir.

The event which started the beard movement was the visit of the wonderful Hungarian orator, Louis Kossuth, who was extremely handsome and picturesque in the full beard and mustache and soft felt hat with curling feather. He introduced the soft hat as well as the mustache, and as he traveled all over the country in 1854 and 1855 and spoke every where to great crowds whom he powerfully impressed with the masterly English which he had learned from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's dictionary while he lay in an Austrian prison he advertised both his hat and his hair very widely. It would seem rather trivial nowadays for the newspapers to gravely discuss the "beard movement," but that was not the most trivial matter with which the newspapers of thirty years ago busied themselves.

Prominent among their themes shortly before the war was "the Red Petticoat Movement." It became the sensible fashion for women to wear red flannel petticoats instead of the white cotton one which had been the universal wear before. This was an innovation that worried the newspapers seriously. Many of them held the red garment to be, if not actually immodest, at least bold and daunting, and a symbol of the degeneracy of the age. Charles Mackay, then visiting in the country, published an earnest poetical appeal for "the white, the modest petticoat," which went the round of the press. — Buffalo Express.


1858

The Red Petticoat and the White

Charles Mackay sends the following lines, on an absorbing subject, to the public press:

Oh, the red, the flaunting petticoat,
That courts the eye of day,
That loves to flare and be admired,
And blinks from far away;
It may delight the roving sight,
And charm the fancy free,
But if its bearer's half as bold,
I'll pass and let her be;—
With her red, her flaunting petticoat,
She's not the girl for me!

But the white, the modest petticoat,
As pure as drifted snow,
That shuns the gaze in crowded ways,
Where follies come and go.
It stirs the primrose on its path,
Or daisy on the lea;
And if the bearer's like the garb,
How beautiful is she!
With her white, her modest petticoat,
Oh, she's the girl for me!