COSTS MORE NOW
Adam gave one rib and got a wife. Robert Kirton, of Pittsburgh, back from the front, lost seven ribs and then married his Red-Cross nurse. This shows the increased cost of living.
WEIGHTY MEASURES INVOLVING UNCLE SAM’S NAVY
THIS is the story of a conspiracy against Uncle Sam—a patriotic plot to be sure, for it is concerned with the son of a Spanish War veteran who was rejected for service in Uncle Sam’s Navy because he was seven pounds shy of weight for height, the said son’s up-and-down dimension being full six feet. It is a story of superfeeding conducted while the young man was skillfully kept a prisoner—albeit a willing one, but just to guard against his “jumping his feed”—by placing his nether garments carefully under lock and key. The New York Sun tells the tale and its happy outcome. It happened in this way:
Young Walter Francis everlastingly did want to get into the Navy and stop this U-boat nonsense once and for all. Wherefore last Saturday bright and early Potential Admiral Francis took his bearings from the compass he wears on his watch chain, yelled, “Ship ahoy!” to the skipper of a passing Brooklyn trolley car, boarded a starboard seat well aft in the car, and then set sail over the waves of Brooklyn asphalt toward the recruiting plant of the Second Naval Battalion of Brooklyn at the foot of Fifty-second street, Bay Ridge.
“Step on,” directed the examining surgeon to young Mr. Francis, indicating the scales in his office. “Step off. Now step out—you’re seven pounds shy for a six-footer.”
Half an hour later Walter Francis, dejected and forlorn, appeared before his father.