Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

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HENRY J. HASKELL % The Man of the Month I by "Her Royal Highness H. R. H." of the "Starbeoms" Column and the University of Kansas. HELEN RHODA HOOPES WHEN Paul B. Lawson (Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas) presents a panic'Stricken candidate for chairman of the depart' ment or such, he follows a little form' ula designed to conceal certain facts from the group gathered to pass judg' ment on the candidate. He is, says the Dean affably, so and so many years younger than I am. And as no one knows just how old the Dean is, and as computation is difficult with' out an abacus or counting on your fingers, the candidate's age is an un' solved problem except that you pre' sume he is pushing forty or fifty or — no, that's as far as we dare go. Now, I shall use this same confus' ing method in discussing Mr. Haskell's age. He is a few years older than I am, and I am just a year older than the Kansas City Star. And that fixes things nicely, unless you go and look it up and find that the Star was born in 1880. Right here is where I jumped the gun on Mr. Haskell. When I was a year old I took my mother back to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, so that she could show me off to admiring rela' tives and friends, and tell all about Kansas City and the mule cars and Independence Avenue and the attrac tive cottage at 5th and Holmes, away out at the edge of town, which they had rented so I could be born there on the first of August. And I was, too. And when, just after my first birthday, we came back to Kansas City, to its rivers and its hills and its muddy streets and wooden sidewalks, my beautiful young aunt would take me out in my elegant baby carriage with the fringe on top; and on the 18th of September, the Kansas City Star was, as it were, dropped in my lap. Nowadays, a man in a car scoots past my house and hurls a wad of newsprint in the general direction of my front door and I go out and re' trieve it. But it is still the Star, and I am still I, though much improved by all these years of associating with the paper. Indeed, the Kansas City Star was my first teacher. It was a dear little sheet in those far'off days; I know, because all of us subscribers received