CLUB NEWS
“My chums and I,” writes Charles Lewis of Conneaut, Ohio, “are all Freckled Goldfish. Calling our chapter the Freckled Fantails, we have secret rules, initiations and mysterious departments, such as Juvenile Jupiter Detectives and Secret and Mysterious Order of Humpty-Dumpty. Our password is ——”.
You’ve heard about club members being in good standing. Well, Frank Boyd of Dunellen, N. J., claims to be a member of our Freckled Goldfish lodge in good “sitting.”
“I made some candy, like Andy Blake did in his book,” writes Frank, “but even our dog Towser sniffed at it. Also, my chum and I made a kite ten feet high. It cost us fifteen cents. A stick broke when the kite got as high as a telephone pole, and that was the end of our fifteen cents.”
Speaking of big kites, the new boys in Andy Blake and the Pot of Gold have a lot of fun with a huge kite. Andy himself is a young man; but the boys I refer to are quite young. Hence this story will be interesting to very small boys.
“Perhaps you’d be interested to know,” writes Freckled Goldfish George Lindsay, Jr., of Philadelphia, Pa., “that my father manufactures food for goldfish.”
Well, well! We’re sure glad, George, to have such an authority in our ranks. If any of our Goldfish get the “tummy-ache” we’ll turn them over to you for proper treatment.
“All of the boys around here are Freckled Goldfish,” writes Thomas Keogh of Brooklyn, N. Y. “So I want to join, too. And here’s a suggestion: You have Jerry Todd in the Poppy Ott books, so why don’t you put Poppy in the Todd books? Also, tell me how many members there are in the Freckled Goldfish lodge. The Bob-Tailed Elephant book is the funniest thing I ever read.”
By the time this “Chatter-Box” appears in print we will have not less than 8,000 members in our Goldfish lodge. As for your suggestion, both Scoop and Poppy are natural leaders. We don’t need two leaders in a book. Nor would it be fair to push Poppy in front of Scoop in the Todd books. A better plan is to let Scoop do the leading in one series and Poppy in the other.
“I would like to organize a local chapter,” writes Jim Gordon of Brooklyn, N. Y., “but there are not many boys around here. At the most I could get only five members. Please tell me if that would be enough. Also I would like to know if my dog can join. His name is Tramp.”
If boys, conducting local chapters, want to include their pets in the chapter membership [[xiii]]it certainly is all right with me. It takes three boys to organize a chapter. Many of our chapters have only five members; some have less.
“Ed Nilsson, a Freckled Goldfish, and I are going to organize a local chapter,” writes James Elphinstone of Ludlow, Mass. “We have used Ed’s barn at other times for clubs. But we feel sure our Freckled Goldfish club will be the best of all. The trapdoor in the barn will come in handy during initiations! We have a pole in the old grain chute, extending from the attic to the cellar. We go down it like real firemen. I hope we don’t share Red’s grief and have a baby elephant cave in one side of our barn.”