Exhibitors Herald World (Oct-Dec 1929)

December 21, 1929 EXHIBITORS HERALD-WORLD 77 J, C. Jenkins — -His Colyum LORDSBURG, N. M. December 4, 1929. DEAR HERALD-WORLD : We know of no place where one's mind is so prone to wander back through the dim and hazy past and to make comparisons with the present like driving alone through the California and Arizona desert. There youVe got nothing else to think about. While we were driving that desert we thought of old Cincinnatus, and the thought came to us that if we had that old patriarch, who tried to put agriculture on the map, with us in the car, we would say something to him like this, "Say, Cincy, suppose you were set down in this desert with your yoke of bulls and a breaking plow and you had your choice of trying to rip up these cactus and other shrubbery or going back into the corn belt and get you a Ford tractor and a gang plow and do a little farming along present day lines, what would you do? Would you yoke up the bulls, or would you take the wife and kids and hike for Nebraska?" Then we thought of Socrates and Xanthippe, his wife, and how he used to teach his philosophy to Diogenes, Alcibiades, Antisthenes and Plato [Editor's Note: Hey! Hey] day after day and would come home at night with his head full of philosophy and not a particle of sowbelly and beans in the house for Xanthippe and the kids. And we thought we'd like to say to him, "See here, Soc, old timer, don't you think that when you came home night after night and brought nothing with you to feed your family with except a lot of theories as to the whys and wherefores of this universe, that instead of Xanthippe turning a pail of water upside down over your gourd, as she used to do, she would have been justified in working you over with a rolling pin? Did you see that Lincoln that just whizzed past us with a Pennsylvania license headed for California? Do you hear that mail plane buzzing up there headed for El Paso? How do these things dovetail into your theories of the beginning and the ultimate extinction of all things?" Then our mind reverted to present day things. We thought of the two dollars a word that the Saturday Evening Post paid Al for telling the American people about his selling fish down in New York and why he wasn't elected president, when everybody knew why already, and we compared this with an event in ancient history and found that Al wasn't in it, for historical research has disclosed that Julius Caesar paid Marc Antony $1,569,435 for making a few remarks at his grave, in which, among other things, Marc said, "The evil men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones." Now, we don't mean that Julius paid Marc the money at that time, for Julius was dead, but the investigation discloses that Julius had loaned Marc that amount of dough before Brutus bumped him off, and after the funeral was over, it is said that Marc went back to the office where Julius kept his daybook and other records and took a rubber eraser and scratched the account off the records. Some folks may question this as not being in line with good, legitimate business, but we believe that Marc's head was working all right, for he knew that where Julius was going the temperature would be such that no money coined in those days could stand up under it, so why waste a lot of good dough in that manner? Then, too, Marc knew that Cleopatra and some more of the girls were going to put on a whoopee party and he had an invitation, and he knew also that it cost real dough to trot with Cleo when she got her trotting harness on. And he also remembered that he would be a little short of readv cash if he paid that account, so he just scratched it off and told Mrs. Caesar that he paid that account to Julius just before the baseball season opened, and if he had lost the whole works on the Roman Reds, that was his fault. That's the way one's mind runs when driving that desert alone. The mind will involuntarily revert to past as well as present things. We remember that when a boy and we got the ague back on the Dowagiac creek in Michigan, our mother would wrap us up in a cold, wet sheet just as the chill was coming on and would drench us with ash bark tea. We survived, but why we did is another of those miracles we read about. Ash bark tea, as you probably know, will dye a piece of woolen cloth a fast, jet black color that no laundry in the country can wash out. And we are wondering to this day if that color is still manifest in our carbureter, ignition system and other internal machinery. [Editor's Note: Well, we didn't believe in the desert theory in the first place.] Back in those days, when a person got the measles, the doctors wouldn't permit the patient to drink anything but hot drinks, and the most of them checked out on account of it, when a good, big swig of icecold water would have driven the measles to the surface and the patient would have been out in the barnyard milking old Bess and doing other odd chores the next evening. Time was, when a man's appendix vermiforma got clogged up, the doctors would say that the patient had "Congestion of the intestines" and would dope the unfortunate with blue mass and other forms of dynamite, and as a result, the graveyards are full of folks whose appendix would look a darn sight better in a bottle of alcohol. In comparing the past with the present, we are inclined to think we would sooner be living today than to be one of old Soc's students of philosophy back in the days before the "talkies," bobbed hair and circingles, and before Grasshopper Sprague took us on that wild ride and tried to park his flivver in the lobby of the Brown Palace hotel at Denver. And that's that about the past, the present and that desert. * * # But let's talk about fishing tackle. When you are driving from Wilcox over to Lordsburg and when you are about half way, you will come down over a ridge into a wide valley, and in this valley you will see the prettiest lake you ever laid your eyes on. It is about a mile long and three-quarters of a mile wide, and the water is as blue as any ocean water on earth. It is a beautiful lake and it looks awfully bassy, and you will want to get out your fishing tackle right away. This lake comes right up to the Southern Pacific right-of-way, and you will itch to stand on the rightof-way and cast for bass. But don't you try it, for you can go out there and hunt for six weeks and you won't find a drop of water in that lake — not a drop. It is the driest lake in New Mexico, and she has a lot of dry ones. It's drier than a bone; in fact, it's drier than Hodges and Larry ever were, and that's pretty dry. You will wonder what became of the water. Well, there never was any there. That valley hasn't seen a drop of water since Marc and Cleopatra pulled that wild party that time, and it probably never will see any until Texas starts going Democratic again. That river in Kansas that Sprague told about getting so dry that you could scratch a match on it, hasn't got a thing on this lake, but from a distance, it sure is a pretty lake. What? No, you are entirely wrong. That wasn't what ailed us at all, the only thing we drank since morning was a glass of milk! Tomorrow we will be milling around with those Long Horns down in the "Lone Star State," and, boy, you can take it from your Uncle Clem, she's SOME state. J. C. JENKINS, The HERALD-WORLD man. P. S.— The HERALD-WORLD covers THE field LIKE AN April SHOWER.