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The Newest
-Boy
Slim Summerville Is In The Front Lines, Despite That Rude Captain
By HELEN LOUISE WALKER
WHEN Slim (George) Summerville gets to be a grandfather (which is a funny thought, in itself) and his grandchildren cluster 'round his knee and chirp, "And what did YOU do for the Great War, Grampa?" Slim is perhaps going to be just a leetle mite embarrassed.
"We-ell," he will have to admit, in the drawl that is already pretty famous, "I didn't do much for the Great War— but the Great War did a lot for me!"
"WHAT?" they will cry, recoiling in patriotic horror. "Not — a profiteer.'' Tell us it isn't true, Grampa! Not that!"
"No! No!" he will amend, hastily. "Not a profiteer. A comedian."
Which will still take some explaining.
For, if it hadn't been for the Great War — then there would have been no pictures like "All Quiet on the Western Front" to picture the horror of it all. And if there hadn't been a picture like "All Quiet," in which a note of comedy was needed to make the public able to bear it at all, then Slim might have been still plugging along as "comedy relief" with nary a featured role — let alone stardom in the offing for him. You see.^ That's how things work out sometimes.
But I'd better tell you right away how it happened that he didn't win any medals in the real War — lest you get a wrong impression. Let him tell it.
I
Froulich
Long, Long Ago
T was like this," he says. "When I was drafted and went up to register, the officer in charge took one look at me and said, 'My Gawd! Look at what we're getting now!' They wouldn't even take my name.
"I was seventy pounds under weight for my height . . . But he needn't have been so rude about it. Not that I was anxious to go to war, you understand. I just didn't like his tone!"
One can hardly blame him. But if, by any chance, Slim should encounter that rude army officer to-day, he could make an impolite gesture (if he were that kind of a man) and say, "Yah! Yah! Yah!" Or something like that.
For his very — er— skinny-ness is worth lots and lots of big round silver dollars to him now, although to-day he is fatter. Hardly more than forty pounds under weight, I should say, at a rough guess. (After his remarks about that officer, I didn't like to inquire the exact figures.) Anyhow, it is a little ironic that the physical lack that kept him out of the real army is the very thing that marks him to-day as the "typical," amusing enlisted man. He looks as the public thinks a private should look. Which is swell for Slim!
{Continued on page loo)
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