The Charlotte News

Saturday, February 7, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Not Yet" indicates that Governor Broughton was about to look into the mess described at Morganton by Tom Jimison in his series of articles appearing in the press across the state during the previous couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the letter writers remain consistent: one, a former patient, confirms Jimison; the other, a former employee, dismissed for "allegedly" mistreating a patient, claims calumnious defamation by Jimison of the poorly paid but dedicatedly sincere staff of the hospital.

Eh, so what if one or two or three of the employees mistreated a few of these animals? They had it comin', the nuts. Ye know? Hey, like-a, try to imagine gettin' in the middle of a melee of a bunch o' nuts on your first day on the job. You'd be mean, too.

Dick Young, in the second half of his article, speaks of the need for regulation of independent food producers out to make a little extra money, sometimes at the expense of sanitation. He cites the example of the children producing the livermush in a cooking pot while their doggie tests out the brew with his tongue.

Eh, the germs 'll boil off in the steamin's. Picky, picky. Hain't ye ever been licked by a dog? What's the difference? He got his rabies shots just last year. No worry need be. We pen him up during the August dog days. Hmmm-boy, that livermush is mighty hard to beat.

What? Naw, that's not dog hair, silly. That's the baby's.

Paul Mallon tells of the Japanese and Nazi propaganda efforts. Frankie's frank franked telegram frankly did not go to Frank at all, and so was a bit of a Franck frank-fed prank, therefore, one might frankly conclude, one not conducive to any franklin's frank-almoign, indeed the probable product of such as spake the line: "Thrice and once the Hedge-Pigge whined," or to whom was spake, "Dost grant me, hedgehog?" That is, as each was spake by Himmler to Goebbels, having immediately witnessed the Fuehrer playing outside in the garden with his dog licking his boiling cauldron full of livermush.

"Amateur" suggests borrowing a leaf from MacArthur on a grand scale, by hitting the Japanese from the Aleutians on their "right", as they hit the Allies on the "left" in the South Pacific, thereby causing them to divert planes and ships from the southern theater to defense of the homeland. It would not be done, probably for the reason of impracticability and being too dangerous to divert too many planes and ships of the Allies, namely those of the United States, away from the primary theater of operation some 4,000 miles south of Alaska, 2,300 miles from Hawaii.

And, "Woo-Woo!" uses some interesting colorations to critique Mrs. Roosevelt's attempts at patronage, both in the appointment of her crony Mayris Chaney to counsel the children on civil defense, and of the unsuccessful attempt to have her other putative crony, Joe Lash, appointed to Naval Intelligence. Just why it was that Ms. Chaney's being blonde accounted in some way, according to the piece sub rosa, for her new $4,600 per annum job at the behest of Mrs. R, we don't know. But there it is, the trip to Bountiful, not unlike the trip a little over four years earlier to Morgantown by way of Elkins and Tygart in West Virginia, with Doris Duke in the tow of Mrs. R. on that occasion, showing off the new poverty-warding digs.

Woo, woo, goo-goo-goo-joob, woo-woo.

With "Woo-Woo!", incidentally, we take it now that we were correct in guessing that "And the Price Tag?" was more likely written by J. E. Dowd than Cash, as the two pieces appear simpatico in their teasings of the First Lady.

Anyway, as we have said before, stroll around the grounds until you feel at home.

It being another lazy Saturday afternoon here at the Tower, still another of our dear old friends dropped by our bower. Ellray Stwangene Joiseykobleski comes from the Bronx originally. Then he moved to Queens when he was six. When he was nine, he moved to the Avenues. Today, he hangs out mainly in the Bowery, during the day that is. At night, he retires to his digs at Central Park West, a hospitable establishment called Corrugation Alms.

Originally, at least insofar as his organized memory based on percipient observation will permit conception, he imparts, the hostelry was titled Coruscation Arms. But, three years ago, a sandblaster, Sandy Striper, hired to clean the stones of the outer façade, thought it wise enough not to omit cleaning the gold-plated nameplate of the edifice nearly clean off, and thereby causing the gold leaf to be completely removed from the "r" in "Arms".

That followed by thirty-three and a third years a similar instance in which the same company, led previously by the chap's father, Randy Striper, did precisely the same thing to the former "P" on the plate, as the place was originally named at the turn of the century Coruscation Palms.

So, it was cheaper then just to skip re-leafing the "P" entirely and instead substitute an "A" for the "a" and an "r" for the "l", there having been several extra already leafed "A"'s and "r"'s laying about the shop of the leafer, Adam L. Eaves, after a quite popular leafing special, in which the public had queued around the block of the leafer's chic shop nine times nine times, had left the leafer with an excessive product when several of the leafing customers failed to show up to accept their leafings, leaving them quite in dispose of their leaves, having taken same.

So, that's how the name of the establishment in which Ellray resides first was transformed from Coruscation Palms to Coruscation Arms. And then when Randy's sand-blastering son, Sandy, repeated the error three years ago, blast it all, he simply, being a little plastered, blasted the "r" bare of its leaf.

But, to the rescue of the thusly denuded "r", the concierge of the hostelry maintained in the basement of the sojourner's respite the original still leafed "l", ready for some problematic eventuality as that which befell from the overly stringent Randy's plastered son-blaster. And so, the original gold-leafed "l" was thereon substituted for the naked blasted "r" to form Alms.

The transmogrification, however, into "Corrugation" from "Coruscation" is a bit more complex: that being that the church across the street, the Congregation of Evangeline was in process of secularizing for want of adequate attendance, to become the Convocation 'sElegaine.

As the Coruscation Alms needed to raise funds for its new wing, the timing could not have been better. So, the Congregation of Evangeline swapped around their "v", a "g", an "e", and the "o", dropping their first "g" and the "r", swapping the latter letters with the concierge of the former Coruscation Palms, née Arms, née Alms, for the "c" and "s", no longer desirable, and voila: Corrugation Alms is extant now across the street from Convocation 'sElegaine, the neighborhood's new Bible store. (It is true that the apostrophe had to be culled from the leftover "f", simply achieved by method of chopping off the uppermost part, that above the cross-member, inverting it, and letting it fall 30° to the right, south by south southeast.)

Simple neighborly trades go a long way toward mutual happiness and prosperity.

Well, that explained, we shall now let you hear Ellray's soliloquizing of the Wolfe Passage, as he so obliged us without the need for the least curry of cajolements, that same Fast Express itinerary on which you may recall we have had the estimable pleasure of our friends Spooky, Waverley, Frankly, Ernesty, Jack, and Willie, boarding us during the past four and a half weeks. As before, should you not wish to peel your ears to its peal, think nothing of it. We shall neither be offended nor rebuffed; neither, in this instance, shall Ellray who, being a rugged New Yorker, gets plentifully rebuffed and shined, sometimes for a fee, sometimes for a frank, most every hour of every day.

If Ellray sounds a little breathless and pressed for time, it is only because he said that he preferred to do the reading from the cold street, by the curb, as he thought it sounded more authentic that way and provided him an atmosphere to which he was more usually accustomed. It was a very cold day, twenty below here at the Tower inside, without the platinum air conditioner running, the thermometer's mercury on the outside being frozen solid and thus indiscernible. Without being abstinent of nature's ordinary intrusions on the sensate being, therefore, Ellray was a bit harried in his delivery in order to keep the circulation steady and the very breath he breathed from instanter freezing the words in mid-air as he articulated them. After it was complete, we had to call the Mercy Hospital to resuscitate him as he fainted dead away on the sidewalk, nearly frozen solid. But, he's okay now and, after some thawing, went on his way back north on the train to his cozy little home, replete, he says, with a marble fireplace, located at the Corrugation Alms at Central Park West on the island of Manhattan.

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