Friday, October 13, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Abner Simp
The daily strip debuted on July 23 1923* through the auspices of the New York Tribune syndicate. The star of the show is a hayseed from Mudsink, Tennessee, come to seek his fortune in the big city. He rooms in a boarding house run by Mrs. Whang, with the typical penny-pinching, sharp-tongued qualities that seem to come with the profession. The other roomers are mostly just a blur of standard characters, but the stenographer Lucile stands out as a possible romantic interest for Abner.
The strip starts out as primarily gag-a-day, with featherweight continuities barely making ripples. However, as the strip gains a little steam Abner gets a taste for speculating in the stock market and eventually lucks into a copper mine stock that goes through the roof, making him a very well-to-do boob. He invests some of his money by paying off the boarding house's mortgage and Abner finds himself on the other side of the landlord-roomer divide. Now his problems are those of a rich man. But it is not long into this new phase of the strip that either Little or the Tribune decided to call it quits. On October 25 1924** the strip ended without so much as a farewell.
* Source: Syracuse Herald
** Source: Nashville Tennessean
Labels: Obscurities
What's with "This ain't no fire—it's an earthquake"? Does it hint at the 1906 SF earthquake and fire?
: 10/13/2023 10:46 AM 
It was a well known conceit of San Franciscans , following the chamber of commerce's lead, to never refer to the cataclysm of 1906 as "The Earthquake", and instead as the "the Fire". This being, that a fire would indicate a man-made disaster, something that could be controlled, and one would assume that as great fires happen in cities, the conditions that led to it are not allowed to happen again.
Earthquakes are unpredictable, uncontrollable and are an alien thing to most Americans, so their possibility might scare away tourism and investment.
So, by the fireman exclaiming that it's not a fire, but an earthquake, it's a humourous inversion of a then well-known take associated with California boosterism, insisting that that was a FIRE, and not, or only insignificantly, a Quake.
: 10/16/2023 3:42 PM 