Those Darn Kids!

As I posted here some time ago, around the time of the New Year, I decided I would write for my two grandsons, every day, a little doggerel based on the word-of-the-day that appears on my tear-off calendar. (I'd given them one for Christmas.) I look at the word in the morning; I write the lines; I text them to the boys and their parents.

I confess--it's been kind of fun (for me, if not for them).

Today's word was katzenjammer, a word I already knew only because of a newspaper cartoon that I used to enjoy in my boyhood--Katzenjammer Kids--a comic about some trouble-making kids. And I see online something else I'd forgotten: They starred in comic books, too. (The cover below tells all!)

I don't remember who told me what the word meant--probably my dad: He had taken German in college (not to mention his WW II service in Europe), and he always loved to tell the story about the day a classmate was reading aloud in class and came to the German noun die Fahrt (journey); he cried aloud, said Dad: "Hey, that's fart!"

Dad thought that was hilarious. So did the eight-year-old I. (So does the seventy-four-year-old I, I'm afraid.)

Anyway, the newspaper cartoon. Below I've pasted a couple of examples of it at the bottom of this post.

Well, what did Boyhood Me learn from all of this? The boy who had to listen to a record of Manners Can Be Fun? Who had to answer the phone by saying, "Dyers' residence--Danny speaking." The boy who had to clean his plate at every meal (or no dessert), who had to say "Please" and "Thank you," who had to go to church every Sunday? Who had to go to VBS (though, in his day, it was "Vacation Bible School"--a term that puzzled me: How could you put vacation in the same phrase with Bible and school?). Who had to "pronounce the participial g in -ing words (no "talkin'" in our house--just "talkinG"). Who ...You get the idea?

Well, I thought those two little kids were awesome--my heroes. The anti-Dyer-boys. And so (dare I blame them?) I absorbed some of their naughtiness, naughtiness which remains (thank goodness).

Oh, the evil influence of comics! (That was the "evil" of my boyhood--not computer games or social media, which, of course, didn't exist.)

I just checked, by the way: The strip started in 1897 (Yukon Gold Rush!); it's still going. (I've put a recent one at the very end of this post.) The boys--Fritz and Hans--were twins. They've been honored on a U.S. postage stamp.

So ... words provoke memories (as if we didn't know that). And today--a word propelled me back to boyhood, back to my father's (naughty) story, back, back, back--back to a time when all was possible, when  the road ahead seemed so long I was positive--absolutely certain--it had no end.

A NEW ONE: