Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/March 12, 1934

Mr. Marcus Aurelius Kelly, the well-known Red Headed Rooster of the Arroyes, and sports editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, has been sending me a tip on a hot horse in the Kentucky Derby, which takes place at Marse Winn’s horse track down in Looeyville way early in May.

I judge from the extreme naivete with which Mr. Kelly presents his tip to me that he has some idea I am ignorant of horses. He apparently is wholly unaware of the fact that my middle name is Horse, and that I have a copyright on March tips on the Derby. He passes his horse on me with the manner of a slicker doing a sucker a favor.

I have read the name of the horse presented to me by Mr. Kelly backward and forward, and I make nothing of it. I have submitted this name to many of our foremost citizens interested in the Improvement of the Breed of Horses, including The Dancer, The Singin’ Kid. The Warmup Judge, Long Boy, Tommy Francis, The Owl and numerous others, and they all insist that Mr. Kelly cannot mean a horse. They think he is mentioning the name of a prescription for eczema.

But I have read Mr. Kelly’s last letter over again, and am sure that he is talking of an equine when he tells me that Riskulus is the good thing. He even asks me as a personal favor to him. to get down in the future book on Riskulus at a 40, 20, and 10. I shook the envelope containing Mr. Kelly’s letter very carefully, but nothing fell out to substantiate the request, and I have since been wondering what Mr. Kelly expected me to get down with. Doesn’t he know that a race meeting is in progress down here?

Wising Up Mr. Kelly

Now I have no doubt that someone out on the West Coast told Mr. Kelly that Riskulus is a good thing in the Derby. Mr. Kelly is not a fellow to go thinking up horses out of his own head, especially horses named Riskulus. But his is a confiding nature, and he believes what he is told, instead of first coming to his pals for advice.

I never thought to bring it up again, but someone told Mr. Kelly last Fall that Stanford would beat Columbia, and he accepted the statement, whereas, if he called me up, or dropped me a line, I would have set him right. I hope and trust that it isn’t too late to straighten him out on the Derby. I have not as yet taken up the matter and decided on the Derby winner, but I can assure Mr. Kelly that it will not be Riskulus.

I will not deny that Riskulus is entered for the Derby. Indeed, I am informed that he is. Moreover it seems to be the firm intention of Riskulus’ owner, that eminent Pacific Coast turfman Mr. Norman Church, to let the steed run in the Derby, and with the moral support of Mr. Kelly to encourage him—or could it be her?—there is no reason to suppose that Riskulus will not run very heartily. But it is extremely improbable that any horse can carry 126 pounds and Mr. Kelly and win the Blue Grass Stake, unless it is a super-horse.

The last super-horse we had in the Derby was in 1932, when Twenty Grand carried his Derby weight and both Mr. Bill Corum and myself, and won. That really made Twenty Grand a super-super-super horse.

Time Supply a Factor

We have a job lot of beetles down here that are entered in the Kentucky Derby, but the more they race in these parts, the less most of them look like Derby horses. Many of them are winding up in claiming races. Mr. Bob Smith, the veteran trainer of Mrs. Dodge Sloane’s Brookmead stable told me the other day that he had held High Quest out of the Derby for the Belmont stakes, but is sending several others to Kentucky, including the English-bred Cavalcade, and if it comes up mud Derby Day, Cavalcade will be a contender.

Big Jim Healy, who trains the great Futurity winner Singing Wood, owned by Mrs. John Whitney, said the other day that the horse hasn’t been withdrawn as yet from the Kentucky staker. The youthful Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who has just come into all that dough, and who has been mobilizing a racing stable, will be represented in Marse Winn’s heat by one or more steeds.

Colonel Edward Riley Bradley, who won a hatful of Kentucky Derbies, has been running a horse called Boy Valet down here that is entered in the Derby, but the Colonel undoubtedly pins his hopes this year on his filly Bazaar. Many turfmen think this Derby will be won by a filly for the second time in its long history—either by the Colonel’s mar’ or Mata Hari, that swift thing from the West.

But, of course, they are all waiting impatiently for General Runyon’s decision. I have agreed to report by mid-April. I wish I could hold out some hope to Mr. Kelly, but all I can say is that if he must know, I can get him a better price that he asks around the corner.

Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/December 6, 1934

The six-day bicycle race has its uses.

It serves every sports columnist with at least one column every year.

The column can be about the “color” of the race, the weird crowds, the smoke-befogged atmosphere, the noise, the rubbing of elbows between Park Avenuers and East Siders.

It can be a sad column about the veteran riders in the race riding their poor old hearts out against bubbling youth. It can be a scientific column about how the riders take on weight during the race, what they eat, and how much, and why.

Or it can be a reminiscent column about the good old days of the six-day race when it was conducted by Patrick Powers, and the late Harry Pollok in the old Garden, and when “Piggy” Moran, and old Bommy Walthoar, and Walter Rutt, and Joe Fogler, and Al Goulett, and other great pedalers were monarchs of the timber tureen.

The six-day bicycle race was once peculiar to Manhattan Island. Of late years it has spread out over these United States.

It goes good in some towns, not so good in others. It is an excellent excuse to stay up all night, inhaling foul air, and many find it an exciting form of contest.

Business is very nice at Madison Square Garden this year, which is very pleasing to Mr. John Chapman, sometimes described as the “Czar” of the six-day game. Mr. Chapman is a fine old gentleman who has been promoting six-day races many years, and is undoubtedly the greatest promoter of this particular sport the world has ever seen.

Mr. Chapman has an able assistant in a brisk, pudgy young man named Harry Mendel, highly popular with newspapermen. He makes his headquarters to New Jersey, where, in Summer, he sometimes promotes fights.

Mr. Chapman was himself a bicycle rider years back on the old Salt Lake City saucer. This was in the time of some mighty wheel drivers. As a promoter, Mr. Chapman has the faculty of making more money on less receipts than any man that ever promoted anything.

He has a farm in Georgia, and a summer home in New Jersey. He is one of the great old characters of the American sporting game, not much of a hand for seeking the limelight, but a shrewd director of what has become a New York institution.

The riders come from all over the world, are craftily teamed for the races in New York, and elsewhere, and must find it profitable, as they follow the six-day game until they are too old to push a pedal.

They do not make much money at any one time, proportionately to other working men of sport, like boxers, golfers, ball players and jockeys, but they average up in the year pretty well. Some six-day riders have retired well fixed.

They ride not only in this country, but all over Europe, where the game is even more popular than it is here. They are of all sizes. Some of the best riders are quite small. It is a fact they nearly all gain weight during the long grind.

The six-day race in the old Garden was for years the annual carnival of the underworld. Very tough gentlemen of those times attended, drinking champagne by the case in the barroom just off the main entrance, their women attending them with their gentlemen’s pistols concealed in their muffs.

The old Strong Arm Squad, made up of athletic young men wearing blue flannel shirts, often descended on the old Garden daring the six-day race and knocked the tough boys about. It was well known that you dare not toss your overcoat aside while watching a race at the old Garden, or you departed coatless.

These things do not happen at the six-day race nowadays.

It is a quiet, docile pastime, enlivened for the sanguinary minded by an occasional “spill,” or fall of the riders.

Mr. Hype Igoe, now the dean of the six-day fans, goes home at intervals during the race. In the old days, Mr. Igoe never left the Garden from the moment the doors opened until the last instant of the race.

Some of the old time fans think there is too much stealing of laps by the riding teams nowadays, and too much hippodroming generally. The answer of Mr. Chapman to this charge might be that the race is drawing better than ever this year so the new generation of six-day fans must like the current system.

Westbrook Pegler

The Morning Post (Camden, NJ)/January 20, 1917

LONDON, Jan. 20. (By Mail)—Disappearance from the army under a cloud, 21 years a “mystery man” In South America and now ancient British court records are skeins revealed today in the story of the man who came back.

Friends of Sergeant Major Greener, Royal Engineers, have just learned the whole truth in connection with Greener’s sudden leave from his battalion headquarters at Aldershot In 1895.

The irresistible lure of the great war which called the deserter from a remote part of Chile caused him to appear before a court martial, again at Aldershot, just 21 years and three days after he was officially reported missing on the barracks room bulletin board. Desertion usually means death, but this court-martial had only the heart to reduce its victim to the rank of private.

It was back in the days when the Duke of Connaught was commander-in-chief of the Engineers. Greener had charge of a little yard and shed—the balloon works—a particular portion of the Aldershot camp which Is now credited with being the germ of the Royal Flying Corps.

Court records, yellow with over two decades, of life, show that someone was guilty of selling certain army supplies.It meant that Greener dropped of the army world and until he “gave up” in Manchester a few weeks ago nobody knew whether he was alive or dead. Many army rumors, as the years dragged on, credit him with fighting with the Boers at Magerfortein, located him in China, India, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Greener’s own story shows that he was nowhere during all the years but living down the past as a mining prospector in the mountains about Iquique, Chile. It was in this isolated rendezvous that the tales of European battlefields reached the deserter and the call of the army was overpowering. It drew him back to England to face what might mean immediate death.

Virile and erect at forty when he fled from Aldershot, Greener is in the sixties to-day, but still erect and soldierly. His temples are withered and there are lines in his face. He wears the simple uniform of the sappers and is soon destined tor his further “comeback” in Northern France.

Westbrook Pegler

Pittsburgh Press/January 10, 1917

London, Jan. 10—The fighting front holds no terrors for the Y.M.C.A. Its huts are built wherever soldiers go.

A.K. Yapp, general secretary, after a tour of the British sector, is back in London today with an account o the Y.M.C.A.’s work in housing soldiers and providing them with simple luxuries that do much to maintain the buoyant spirit of the Tommies.

“We have established huts in the catacombs of Ypres and Loos,” he said. “There are others in the Somme territory recovered from the Germans, forming little cheer-posts for Tommies amid the awful desolation and knee deep mud of the recent battlefields.

“From the camps at the base the hut lines extend ‘way up to advanced positions of the front. We are even developing the dug-out idea for housing men temporarily and providing them with warm food and chocolate. In November we gave the soldiers on one twelve-mile line to the front 161,230 cups of cocoa, tea and coffee. These were men going up for their turn in the attack or returning to the base camps after being relieved in the trenches.”

Many of the Y.M.C.A establishments are well within range of the German shell-fire but these usually are protected as well as possible by natural concealments.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/October 24, 1905

IF Admiral Dewey is so confident that the high officers of our navy are too old for efficient service somebody should invite his attention to what one of them, who had not been born the day before, did in Manila Bay. The enemy’s ships had been wound with ropes to keep them from falling apart—which was a low-down trick—but the “elderly naval man” in command of our fleet ordered his gunners to fire at the ropes. His callowest lieutenant could not have done better than that.

THE CZAR

Strange ruler—seeking in a summer sea

A port from ice and interference free,

And sacrificing, to secure that blessing,

All (and much more) that made it worth possessing.

THE MIKADO

Monarch exemplary! Whose private worth

Drove the embattled foemen from the earth,

When diplomatic enemies assail,

Your formidable virtues all turn tail!

EDWARD VII

Now with the Japanese in firm alliance

You bid the Russian Bear a stern defiance—

That is to say, when they’ve knocked out his brains

You fling your fearless hoofs at the remains.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/October 23, 1905

THIS Hall of Fame matter has become, as was to have been expected, ridiculous. Edgar Allan Poe is denied a place and James Madison is selected by a heavy plurality. It was needless to drag the name of that political imbecile from the sunless pantheon of American presidents and damn him with a deeper obscurity.

Erected by the widow of Colgate, the millionaire soap maker, a tomb “probably the most expensive of its kind In the United States,” will hold the ashes of “Dandy,” her favorite horse, and incidentally keep green the memory of the family product.

I venture to submit the following lines for inscription:

His virtues here inscribed where all may see ’em.

Dandy reposes in his horseoleum.

Whose massive marbles, fit with Time to cope,

Proclaim that even after life there’s soap.

When a President shall have regulated to his taste the American birth rate and done it by talking, and when he shall have set up an Alphonse-and-Gaston code of football etiquette, I should like to invite his attention to the abuses that have crept into the national game of “Simon says thumbs up.” It is not at all what it was when its illustrious inventor left K as a legacy of delight to a grateful posterity, and I was recently beaten at it by an unsportsmanlike conspiracy between a girl of thirteen and a lad of ten. For what have we Presidents?

Mr. Hall Caine explains that he does his best thinking in church. Good, but the doxology and the benediction must have a paralyzing effect on the thing that he remembers with.

“I am convinced that the 2,400-pound projectile fired by the 16-inch gun is more effective in proportion than the 1,000-pound shot of the smaller guns.”—Secretary Taft.

In proportion to what? The expense of firing it? If so, its destructiveness is truly volcanic.

No, Mr. August Belmont’s vermiform appendix may have been “cast as rubbish to the void,” or may have wriggled away into the Incommunicable Afar, but he is not “out of danger.” His life is still shadowed by the imminent peril of remaining what he always was.

“Japan does not wish to disturb the Philippines.” Minister Takahira.

No more did Dewey.

First class in statesmanship stand up.

What is our need of a merchant marine?

To supply the navy with experienced seamen.

And what is the purpose of a navy?

To protect our merchant marine.

Of what advantage are colonial dependencies?

They are a good training school for the army.

Why have an army?

To garrison our colonial dependencies.

Isn’t this what Is called reasoning in a circle?

No, in a spiral: The longer you go on the more you are in the air.

Judge Alexander Hamilton, political almoner for the insurance companies, has had a narrow escape. He came within an ace of sailing from Liverpool on a steamer that arrived safely in New York.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/July 6, 1905

MR. ROCKEFELLER appears to have the right to plead the statutes of heredity—his father is said to be worse than he. But maybe the old man does not profess religion.

No, there is a limit; we refuse to believe that Colonel Roosevelt “compelled” the Czar to name a day for the plenipotentiaries to meet. The lone conqueror of Spain is firm, but not unfeeling.

California gentlemen charged with enforcement of the Chinese exclusion law are forbidden to scalp, skin, disembowel or otherwise annoy the Mongolian stranger at our gate with a ticket of admittance. In the judgment of the Administration these harsh measures are bad for that thing of faith and hope, “our trade with China.” It is thought that our disesteem of Chinamen can be sufficiently attested upon the persons and property of those already here.

The harshness of the Cossacks toward the people of Poland is believed to be most distressing to General Sherman Bell of Colorado. And it is wrong for other reasons.

No doubt Russia’s explanations with regard to each British ship that she sinks are entirely clear, but it may sometime occur to Great Britain to ask her to explain the necessity for so many explanations.

One would hardly have thought of “graft” in connection with the industry of providing yellow dogs with good homes and giving religious consolation to green turtles on their way to the headsman’s block, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is accusing its officers of shameless equitability. Shade of Henry Bergh! (if he is dead) has it come to this?

Says Uncle Sam: “This war must cease—

behold the olive branch of peace!

If from the stem the leaves you twitch

Prepare your backs; It is a switch.”

The name of the gentleman designated to prosecute the suits against the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad for giving rebates is Purdy. Better make a note of it; it is not likely to come up again in a long time.

Washington, July 4th.

O.O. McIntyre

Palladium-Item/October 1, 1926

NEW YORK. Oct 1.–The prince of today is the pauper of tomorrow and vice versa, along Broadway’s meandering mile.

An obscure cabaret performer of a few years ago has just purchased a seaside mansion with a front yard yacht dock and private beach. It is filled with rare hangings, round-shouldered Persian vases and richly woven carpets. It was purchased from a comedian who was elevated for a fleeting moment and wound up in a sanitarium to begin a fight for health and a footllght “comeback.”

The other day a policeman found a woman kneeling in prayer in the rain near Union Square. At a hospital, she was identified as a leading lady of ten years ago. She had been of the laughing crowd that was still laughing and gay a few miles north.

Broadway is not consciously cruel—it often merely forgets. Life has been keyed up. Its dazzling lights have no effulgence for those eddied into backwaters. And as dancers drop out, the dance goes on. Spenders scatter their gold with infinite indifference and often wind up with their outstretched tincups along side streets.

It is not fiction that several Broadway beggars once had favorite tables at old Rector’s and Delmonico’s. It was Diamond Jim Brady who said “Being a sucker is a lot of fun if you can afford it.” But few can afford it, and thus Broadway careers so often become spectacular and brief. And those who can become so surfeited they usually move to the country.

_______________________________________

Certain New York streets attract certain people, business and professions. Park Avenue attracts high-priced surgeons. William Street is called Lawyers Row. Maiden Lane is the great jewelry district. Nearly all the hardware stores are on Chambers Street, and Duane Street is filled with retail shoe stores. Most all the Syrians in New York live on Rector street.

_______________________________

Romance flowers quickly on this crowded little island. A sudden shower and a group was pocketed under a Broadway awning for ten minutes. He and she talked impersonally as strangers in a city will, and as the skies cleared she gave him her name and telephone number. Two days later they were married.

Not all of these hurry-up marriages end unhappily. A New Yorker who has acquired much wealth in building operations sat next to a strange lady at a matinee. She accepted his invitation to dinner, and the next day they were married. That was 19 years ago and they are still happy.

_________________________________

It seems to me women drive more carefully than men in crowded centers. They are not given to rounding the corner on one wheel and they sound their horn at the least provocation. While there are few women driving taxis today, I am told that not one has ever had an accident.

I once attempted to pilot a car through heavy New York traffic. At the first corner I tangled up all around me in a snarl. A traffic officer called out: “What’s the idea, young squirrel?” A discerning gentleman. He instantly spotted my nuttiness.

____________________________

A druggist reports he increased his business 25 percent by establishing a six-hour kodak film finishing service. The service itself was not profit-making, but the extra business came from those who bought other articles while getting their films.

O.O. McIntyre

Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN)/October 2, 1926

NEW YORK. Oct. 2. Diary of a modern Pepys: Aroused by an air letter from Marshall Nellan, the cinema director, amusing enough to compensate for being awakened. So to breakfast and sat next to a fellow who put salt and pepper in his coffee. Walked along the Park Avenue mall and sat on a bench and a man I took to be Will Hays strolled by and I inquired: “Is this how you run Hollywood?” and it was a stranger who eyed me curiously and stopped at the corner to talk to a policeman, pointing back at me.

Home and made short shrift of my labor, and to dinner and saw C. D. Williams, the illustrator, with two lovely ladies. Then to stroll along the brilliantly lighted Rialto with my wife and to bed.

Perhaps no writer in America has a more devoted following than Abraham Cahan, editor of the Yiddish daily “The Forward.” More than a quarter of million workers erupting from factories, lofts and sweatshops at dusk snatch this curiously printed journal to read on the homeward journey.

He is the oracle of thousands who live in the dark tenements of the East Side. At 22 he was driven out of Russia by the czar and his sympathy for the oppressed is keen. The majority of his readers are humble and uneducated workers.

Cahan is of the intelligentsia but, despite several brilliant novels, has cast his lot with the submerged. He is not a thunderer although his ideas are radical. He is nearly 70 years old.

The chronic drug addict invariably has a sort of lusterless oyster white pallor. In this way he is often spotted by the law and caught with dope. Consequently many through artificial tanning are now appearing the brown of an autumn leaf. One on Broadway gives a hilarious touch to what is otherwise tragedy by wearing a yachting cap to accompany his heavy tan. And pianissimo it is related a deceptive type of hypodermic syringe has been made to look like a -fountain pen.

The opium smoker is the most listless of all addicts after a debauch. His skin is onion colored, dry and febrile. He cannot eat and is consumed by burning thirst. A year or so ago narcotic statistics placed the number of “hop heads” in New York’s Tenderloin at more than a thousand.

There used to be a little cafe hard by Times Square that was their rendezvous and often they would be seen sitting at tables ghostly pale, silent, and shaky, gulping table water by the quart. Many made no secrets of their habit and related their experiences with candor.

Fame flits. There is the yarn of a matron entering “Pop” Ederle’s butcher shop shop on Amsterdam Avenue the other day. The walls held several pictures of the famous “Trudy.” The patron looked them over. “My daughter,” said the butcher. “That so. What did she do?” asked the patron.

A new racket of side street panhandlers. They approach a victim with a telegram which reads: “Report at Long Island studio in the morning. Glad you have sobered up,” and the name of a director is signed. They pose as motion picture small part players winding up a spree and need enough to rent a room and have breakfast in the morning. The scheme usually clicks and as a result they can afford to send themselves telegrams daily.

A New York business man has caused the dismissal of three taxi drivers because they were discourteous. One attempted to block his path when he had the right of way across the street and the other two applied insulting epithets because the victim secured witnesses, the number of the taxi, and discharge resulted.

O.O. McIntyre

Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN)/October 30, 1926

In describing a first night audience, James K. McGuinness in the New York Evening Post writes:

“You saw Mr. O. O. McIntyre, who verifies for newspapers the hinterlands’ worst suspicions of this godless town, with a spry ear cocked for new witticisms. He went the whole way on dress, sporting the only tailcoat noticeably in evidence; and on his right wrist was strapped an oblong watch, which may, or may not, set a fashion for the bloods.”

That was not a wristwatch. It was a misplaced liver pad.

Writes Charles B. Parmer in the Morning Telegraph: “O. O. Mclntyre’s home has become the rendezvous of those men and women who are moulding thought for tomorrow. That is as it should be, for he is the only commentator on life and manners who is expressing the true spirit of the American people to the masses of the world today. The rest are mountebanks.”

Thanks, Col. Parmer! I can say that you wrote the finest piece lately about George M. Cohan that has ever been written. But I wish you’d warn the “thought moulders” to quit leaving their lighted cigarettes on the piano. It’s beginning to look scrofulous and only six payments have been made.

S. J. Kaufman in the Evening Telegram writes: “O. O. McIntyre continues to improve. Look for a serious novel from McIntyre one of these days.”

I’ve been working on it at odd times for several years. I went through it the other day. I’ll sell it for two marbles and a skipping rope.

In the Cincinnati Post: “When O. O. McIntyre met Michael Arlen it is said that after 30 minutes he said: ‘I like you. You are the only Armenian I ever met who didn’t try to sell me a rug.’ “

I couldn’t think up anything that witty in three weeks, let alone 30 minutes. But Irvin Cobb did say It and I happened to be there, sitting around as dumb and intelligent looking as an oyster.

Says a Philadelphia columnist:

“Of all the senseless drivel doled out to helpless newspaper readers the palm goes to that turned out by O. O. McIntyre in New York. He makes the metropolis just about as glamorous as a dead cat on a can of ashes and not half as interesting.”

Nize baby, et opp all the compliments!

There is something sad in the deletion of an electrical ad near Grand Central, bloming a Florida real estate venture. The line “Where Ocean Breezes Blow” has been removed.

I have often thought one of the most irritating things about New York was that sustained semi-pity it has for smalled cities. It is not a pose. It is genuine, and thousands here are convinced that those who do not live In New York are really missing the big thing in life. They cannot grasp the big fact that as a general thing people in such cities are far happier and contented and have just as many advantages as the metropolis.

A New York newspaper has run the deadly parallel column showing how some early prose of another writer was the same as the later poetry of Theodore Dreiser. This is not the first time Dreiser has been so accused. He was once accused of lifting a paragraph of George Ade’s description to fit a character in, if memory serves me, “Sister Carrie.”

Mr. Ade was not at all offended, but a stir was made. This apparent plagiarism is not at all infrequent. Many writers have done it. In the trade it is called “unconscious assimilation.” Some haunting lines or phrases remain in a writer’s thought, and innocently he claims it as his own, and no one is perhaps hurt.

Olga Nethersole, who pioneered in portraying the stage courtesan, has returned to America after a long self exile in England. She was in the ascendancy when I sat with the gallery gods, and she was excoriated by the press and pulpit. Her derelictions so far as I can remember consisted in being carried upstairs by her lover in “Sapho.”

That would be rather tame stuff now, with all the Rialto vulgarity and nakedness, but 15 years ago theatres were closed to this estimable lady. Yet today New York sits enthralled and applauding as a play with a lesbian theme is unfolded with no mincing of words.

“The Great American Ass” has created a stir in literary circles. It was written under the name of Roy Bradley, but the author is Instantly recognized by New Yorkers as C. L. Edson, a gifted homespun scrivener of Arkansas, who left Park Row in distrust several years ago. Edson handles a dour subject with amazing skill. Watch this prediction! Edson will become a commanding figure in. American literature. There is a savagery to his stuff that clings.

There is a record of 15 cafe fistfights on Broadway which had inceptions in arguments over the European debt settlement. It’s an excellent subject to avoid, and what most of us think will not count anyway.

t is like our tax problems. We see them one way and the tax officers see them another, but they are always right, which is not as it should be. My own opinion is that more people should go to court with income tax disputes. Many of the impositions are absurd and show a machine-like understanding that would not be tolerated in ordinary business. A nation expecting tolerance should show tolerance, and this income tax officials fail to do.

The other day a man showed me a letter from an income tax official, whose only job is to see that justice is done the taxpayer as well as the government. The letter was as intolerant as I have ever read, and the good man, who was permanently injured in the war, wrote on the top of it: “We are not in Russia” and sent it back.