How pleased everyone is to know that the pretty Palmolive girl who “kept her girl complexion” is married and has a sweet little daughter who has inherited her mother’s skin.
I don’t always take the posters seriously. Now, I don’t believe that that man “would walk a mile for a Camel.” He’d borrow one first. And “contented cows.” Cows are always contented. All I’ve known. But they may have had bolshevikish notions recently, cud strikes, perhaps. Hence the accent on “contented cows,” to reassure us that there is no “Red” propaganda in the milk. Then, there is the parrot; what a long time it takes to teach him to say “Gear-ardelly.” And that sentimental touch, “If pipes could talk.” They do.
Sometimes, in an absent-minded way, I get them confused, movies and merchandise, and find myself wondering who’s starring in “Nucoa.” Then there’s that ecclesiastical looking party, the patron of Bromo-Quinine, whom I always take for some bearded movie star.
But to return to their artistic merits, they are artistic. Take those same “contented cows.” What could be more futurist than the coal black sky under which they so contentedly graze? Or the henna hills so far away, or the purple grass they chew. Matisse and Picasso, great modernists, could not out-do those cows.
The cigarette men are particularly interesting. A bit over done. One cannot help wonder what enthusiasm they would have left for a gorgeous sunset having spent so much on, a cigarette. But I expect they are good men at heart and not so sensuous as they appear. There’s that jolly old boy who hasn’t had such a good smoke in sixty years. One wonders if his teeth are his own. They all have teeth. Everyone has teeth these days. It would be a change to see someone on a billboard with his mouth shut.
Golden Gate Park
Enter slowly, by foot is much the better way, and join the long, loitering procession.
Black-green foliage, the curious old-green of trees that never wither and never resurrect. Something very foreign or is it San Francisco? Cubist effects of the horizontally-lined cypress, vertical lines of the eucalyptus, and the soft, down-dropping of the willow trees and pepper.
Women on the benches tatting, reading, resting. A retired Kansan widower passes, glances sidewise. Well, no harm in looking at a comely woman. Gossip of mothers over baby carriages, “Only nine months old! Mine is a year. Well, we think he’s pretty fine.”