I wasn't looking for relationship advice today. I was looking for golf. But my favorite 1920s cartoonist Fay King was tucked into the same page of The Washington Times, and she stopped me before I got anywhere near the sports section.

The Overheard Conversation

King's whole column runs on something she overheard. This one starts with two girls talking about boyfriends.

"The other day I overheard two dainty little girls talking over their boy friends and one was most enthusiastic about how 'swell' is a certain young man she met recently! It struck me as very sad to hear her say: 'I can't ask him out to the house because Ma and Pa are so funny and the place is such a sight!'"

King doesn't let it go. Her answer is immediate, and it's not comfort. It's a correction.

"If that young man is interested in her, and is really falling in love with her, he will love everything and everybody in any way connected with her. She should by all means ask him out to the house, no matter how faded the furniture, how poor the neighborhood, how plain Ma and Pa may be. He will love them because they belong to her."

The Real Threat

Here's the part that turns this from a nice sentiment into an actual argument. King doesn't think plain parents are the danger to a young romance. She thinks the opposite kind is.

"There are ultra modern frivolous mothers who smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails, who are a source of much more real embarrassment to their daughters than the mother who is content to be just plain and sweet. Young men are more often frightened off by mothers who treat them too familiarly, and force daughters on them."

The mother isn't dangerous because she embarrasses the daughter in the old sense, wrong fork, wrong dress, wrong sofa. She's dangerous because she's competing. She wants to be flirted with too.

King's closing line is the one I keep coming back to. Overambitious, demonstrative mothers, she writes, are more of a handicap to daughters than sweet plain mothers who are satisfied to remain in the background.

A hundred years on a newspaper page, and it still lands like it was written for a group chat this morning.

The Golf

I was finally able to make it to the sports page. Fitting, given today's the final round at Muirfield, that the archive also handed me a full season of Walter Hagen getting himself into trouble with the British press.

It starts simple. An AP wire out of London quotes Hagen explaining why the Americans keep sweeping British golf: "They're too gosh darned lazy, it seems to me... A lazy man cannot win championships at anything in the world today."

The British pros did not take it well. By June 28, Ted Ray and George Duncan are on record blaming worn-out greens, brutal tournament schedules, and bad timing, anything but laziness.

Then, a week later, Hagen walks the whole thing back. "You couldn't express their troubles in two words," he tells the press on his return to New York. "I don't want to say anything now because I am always being misquoted."

And then, today, July 19th, three weeks after the original quote ran, United Press correspondent Paul W. White files the real twist. The phrase "too gosh darned lazy" never sounded like something an American golfer would actually say. It sounded like something a British comedian doing an American accent would say. White notes the London music-hall stage has comedians imitating Americans with lines like "You're gosh-darned right, I reckon." In other words: the quote that started an international golf incident may have been assembled out of a stage caricature of how Americans talk.

An article ran on the next page to Fay King's column, same day. It’s a different kind of relationship trouble. A man in his early thirties writes to advice columnist Beatrice Fairfax about his fiancée, 26, and a holiday party that went sideways.

"A kissing game followed, and it befell my fiancee to be kissed several times by this married man by way of a fine."

He says he kept his composure at the time. The letter makes clear he hasn't since.

"I considered it such a degrading desecration of the girl I love that I nearly lost my mind."

Fairfax's answer isn't really about the party. It's about who she thinks holds the line in any relationship. Her argument: men will rise or fall to whatever standard a woman sets, and holds up, without irony, an old bit of verse: "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever."

"Since the world began, women have set standards and men have tried to live up to them. That's the way we progressed out of the jungle and gradually came to have civilization and ideals."

It's a strange piece to read now, earnest and a little bit alarming, and paired with King's column it makes for a good snapshot of what a woman was allowed to be in 1926. Charming, but not too charming. Firm, but never the one asking for anything for herself.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources

The National Daily, July 19, 1926
Daily News, July 19, 1926
Durant Daily Democrat, July 19, 1926
Atlantic City Sunday Press / The Sunday Gazette, June 27, 1926
The Plain Dealer, June 27, 1926
The Herald Statesman, June 29, 1926
The Buffalo News, July 3, 1926
Brooklyn Eagle, June 26, 1926