Baltimore Evening Sun (1 December 1911): 6.
Only 1,264 days more! But time enough to find an easy job for every true believer!
VOX POPULI. If I was one of them judges and clerks, you wouldn’t ketch me wastin’ no time worryin’ none.
From the Thanksgiving proclamation of the Greater Baltimore Committee’s theological department:
Thank the Lord for this, our town—its shady streets, its factory smoke * * *
Which suggests the thought that gratitude, like boomery, may be occasionally carried too far.
Boil your drinking water! Swat humanely the few surviving, chilblained flies! Dodge the tax collector! Send your money to the boomers!
The news that the Hon. Harry W. Nice stands in danger of losing the Job of Assistant State’s Attorney to some other gladiator must give pain to all lovers of the true, the good and the beautiful. The Hon. Mr. Nice, it will be recalled, is one of the gentlemen who authorized the bagging of the May ballots and then kept secret the news, lest Judge Duffy be frenzied by it and run amuck. Certainly a man with so valuable a public service to his credit and of such extraordinary discretion and forethought is one who deserves to be chained to the trough for the rest of his natural life. To turn the Hon. Mr. Nice away, to make him go to work, would be to inflict a gratuitous and inexcusable injury upon one of the most worthy officials of our day and generation.
What, by the way, has become of the Orthodox Charter Commission, or super-Mabonic Rescue League? Is there no man brave enough to volunteer?
From the monthly organ of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association:
Baltimore, without any sewerage system, because of its natural drainage, has been able to keep its mortality below the average urban mortality rate–despite the reckless statements of an individual oracle of the local press.
An exquisite example of boomiferouus balderdash. The truth is, of course, that the death rate in Baltimore is not below the average urban rate, at all, but above the average urban rate, both of this country and of all other civilized countries. What is more, it is above the local rate of any other single city of 500,000 or more inhabitants in either Europe (outside of Russia and Turkey) or North America.
But the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association is not concerned with such unpleasant facts. Its mission, on the boomiferous side, seems to be the dissemination of pleasant, if puerile, fictions. It is still sending out a circular claiming that the death rate in Baltimore is 16 per 1,000 of population per annum–a claim so preposterous that even the Health Department no longer makes it. And going further, it lays down the doctrine that whoever opposes the circulation of that claim—whoever holds that it is indecent to indulge in false pretenses, however good the cause they serve—whoever tries to get at the truth and to point its lessons—is a common rogue.
Such is the boomiferous logic, the boomiferous morality. Thus the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association plays the role of quack and scaramouche, wasting time and energy that might be devoted to its proper business.
Come on, Mr. Maine; we await that list of undoubted physicians who belong to the League for Medical “Freedom.”
Come on, Mr. Joesting; we await the name of that School Board bravo who “was going” to throw a reporter out.
From a letter in The Sun paper bearing the sign manual of the Right Hon. Public Man Biggs, apologist-in-ordinary to the Hon. the super-Mahon and the Hon. the super-Mahonic School Board:
It is not the intention of the members of the committee on rules to interfere with or criticise the system of teaching in our public schools. We will visit the schools to investigate existing conditions, and, if anything comes to our attention that is contrary to the interests of the schools, or prejudicial to the welfare of the city, naturally we would be expected to report on the same.
Just what does the right honorable gentleman mean by this curious paragraph? On the one hand he says that the committee is not going to “interfere with or criticise” the schools, and on the other hand he says that it is going snooping through the schools, alert for things to “report on.” How will it be possible to “report on” anything without criticising it? I ask for light in all good faith. The problem interests and baffles me.
Jobs for a new and super-Herculean Hercules:
- To play a Chopin mazurka with boxing gloves on.
- To sell a Baltimore dwelling at its assessed value.
- To think of the boomers had not laugh.
- Down go taxes! Bring the good old bugle, boys! Up go water rents! And sing another song!
- A chocolate sundae to any connoisseur of immorality who will offer one sound reason for believing that Sunday concerts in Baltimore would cause any appreciable increase in murders, burglaries, embezzlements or wife-beatings.
Biggs and Boggs; the Doctor Subtilis and the Doctor Subtilissimus.
A psychotherapist is one who maintains that all bodily sensations are delusions of mortal mind—saving only the smell of money.
More curious snarls of verbiage from “The Outcry,” the latest fiction from the atelier of Henry James:
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. He sank thus, surely, in defiance of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages, flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective, a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that might complicate, alone floated above.
What a City Councilman spoiled! What a School Commissioner!
A little dictionary of boomiferous definitions:
Rascal–One who says unpleasant things. Scoundrel–One who proves them.
Three cheers for the Hon. the super-Mahon! Carp at him all you please: you can’t help admiring the man. He knows what he wants, and he is not afraid to grab it. Bawling doesn’t alarm him. He is his own boss. Right or wrong, he makes the fur fly. Compare him to the average Prominent Baltimorean. A lion vs. a guinea pig! A hot tamale vs. a plate of noodle soup!