Chalk Talk / Iowa's Herb Hake Meets Old Man Camouf

Above Herbert V. Hake (1903-1980) was a well-known faculty member who taught scenic design in the theatre department at Iowa State Teachers College (now University of Northern Iowa) in Cedar Falls. He was also a pioneering contributor to radio and television broadcasting, a writer, and a cartoonist. Using his cartoons, he gave amusing, informative “chalk talks” on various topics, including local history.  In 1968, he published A Cartoon History of Iowa, in which (as is common in chalk talks) he drew comic figures which, by adding a few select details, were transformed into different things. Shown above is one of those drawing sequences, in which he begins with what appears to be a meaningless drawing on the left, while on the right it turns into an upsidedown portrait (made of potatoes, wheat and corn) of Tama Jim (US Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson). Below is the same drawing viewed upsidedown, which some people may mistake for Mister Potato Head.

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Roy Moulton, LEM EXTEMPORIZES ON CAMOUFLAGE IN BIG BURG in The Boston Post, May 17, 1918—

Somewhere in New York.

Dear Folks—Old Man Camouf or whoever it was in France who invented camouflage, started something. Maybe M. Camouf knew what he was doing, but I doubt it.

It has spread over this town like a pest of locusts. Of all conditions attendant upon the war and which have been gently wafted across the pond as a direct result of war, camouflage is the most generally in the limelight.

It is being used for purposes never intended by its inventor.

After the New York people forget all about the war they will remember the wave of camouflage which attended it.

Not New to the Ladies
Not that camouflage is anything new. Of course not. There's nothing new under the sun. Men
were practicing camouflage long before this war and the ladies, too, bless 'em, but they didn’t know what they were doing. It took M. Camouf to come along and tell them and to name the art after himself. Maybe he is proud of it.

The first waiter in the world who used the first "dicky" shirt front, practiced camouflage, although he didn't know what he was doing at the time. Then there were the Ascot ties, which effectually concealed the absence of a shirt; then the cuffs, which could be cleverly fastened inside the coat sleeves. In fact there were a million just such contrivances before M. Camouf came along.

When M. Camouf invented his famous art, he meant it merely to cover military appurtenances. By the use of camouflage, a Ford could be made to look like a mere garbage can, sitting serenely on the landscape and minding its own business. A large gun could be made to look like a shock of corn. A soldier could be made to look like a pacifist, etc. So far, so good.

But, during its journey aross the ocean, M. Camouf's art became inflated with its own importance and enlarged its scope. In France it confined itseif to the military. In America it confined itself to nothing.

It spread out like a fan covering every phase of human life and every form of human endeavor. It covered art, letters, religion, politics, society and vers libre. It stopped at nothing.

It was imbued with the spirit of liberty as soon as it struck the land of the free and when it started cutting up it didn't know when to stop. It is going yet.

35-Cent Dog Sells for $600
Just the other day on Broadway a man took a 35-cent mongrel pup that he had found shivering behind an ash barrel, put a $7 blanket on him with “Prince" embroidered in gold letters, and sold the dog to an actress for $600 as a genuine Norwegian fish-hound. That shows what M. Camouf's art can do with the aid of American genius.

A $15-a-week telephone adJuster thought he would like to be a French marquis. So he dressed up like two or three French marquises and borrowed about $100,000. He tried to borrow $50,000,000 from J. P. Morgan & Co. and nearly got away with it.

By the aid of M. Camouf's gentle art, cabaret managers have been able to paim off genuine East Side Hawaiian dancers on an unsuspecting public. The shredded wheat skirts and the brown stain for the skin and the trick is done. In these cases even old M. Camouf, himself, would be hoodwinked.

I don't know of anybody in this village who has the art of camouflage down finer than my old friend Hank Stevens. He is in reality 95 per cent camouflage and 1 per cent Hank. He can take a
$9 bank roll and make it look like a Belgium indemnity. He seems to have a natural affection for money which expresses itself eloquently in his unwillingness to part with any of it, even
under the most favorable circumstances.

Why Hank Gets Nervous
I have never seen Hank when he had not been laboring under a terrific nervous strain. Something has always just happened to him. He has either just lost a tremendous sum of money on the curb or somebody has wished a couple of maiden aunts on him for life. 

Accidents of this sort befall him so rapidly that he never has time to get to work at a regular job. It is natural for those who feel sorry for Hank to do something to express their sympathy. They either feed him a good dollar table d'hote lunch or buy him a few internal applications over the mahogany.

I will never forget the first time I met Hank. I thought he was the saddest looking man I had ever seen. He was hanging over the edge of the mahogany like an umbrella somebody had left, down near the dried herring and clove dish. I had been introduced to him by a mutual friend who suddenly found something to do up in the other end of town.

"I am shad, tonight,” said Hank, by way of opening the conversation.

"That sounds fishy," I said, in my well-known jugular vein.

"No, it's no joke," said Hank. "I am shad. I had a great shorrow. I've had a lotta trouble."

I immediately felt sorry for Hank and bought him a 23-cent present. He cheered up for a moment but soon suffered a relapse which called for another treatment.

"It's tough," he said. "Gosh, I’m blue tonight. I buried the best uncle I ever had—21 years ago and I never got over it."

Hank began to weep and I stole quietly away and left him. At the door I met another friend, who asked: "Who has Hank lost now?”

"His favorite uncle,” I said.

"You must be a beginner with Hank," said the friend."He tossed me that favorite uncle over three years ago. Since then he has used up five aunts, seven cousins and at least 11 grandparents on me. If Hank ever runs out of deceased relatives, I figure I will save a lot of money. But he probably never will. He tells me his family came over In the Mayflower and he can trace them back to the 14th century.”

He Likes Athletics
Hank was the original little office boy who had a grandmother die every time there was a game out at the Polo Grounds.

Another sort of camoufleur is my friend Pete Henkle, Pete is the best-dressed man in New York and he does it all on one suit of clothes. I never got a note from Pete in my life, which was not written on Ritz or Waldorf stationery and if Pete ever had $4 at one time in his career as a Broadway ornament none of his friends ever knew it. He has been known to have $2.67 at one time or even perhaps $3.98, but never more. He can give the best imitation of Vincent Astor I have ever seen.

Pete has always just had a great stroke of luck. Either somebody has just met him in the Biltmore and handed him a check for $8,000,000, or he has just invented a patent submarine torpedo catcher and sold it to the government for a cool billion. If he is not organizing a billion dollar corporation to take over the potash mines or Guatemala, he is organizing a company to build a railroad from Rio de Janeiro to the City of Mexico. He never knows exactly where he is going to sleep that night, but wherever he does sleep, he dreams tremendous dreams.

His engraved calling cards are wonders. "Peter Stuyvesant Henkle, broker,” is what they say, and when he presents them at the desk in the Waldorf and asks to have Senator James Frothingham Frisby paged, he arouses a good deal of sincere admiration.

It is his habit to rush Into the St. Regis or the Gotham and ask if the Punjab of Afghanistan is
stopping there, and has inquired for him. Pete never misses a meal nor a night's sleep and he hasn't had a pay envelope placed in his hands since he was 13 years old. If a general shake down of all the citizens of New York were ordered suddenly to meet some great emergency, Pete would assay one suit of clothes, a pair of cuff links and, in his more prosperous moments, perhaps $1.76 in real money.

His High Marks
He has been interviewed at variousi times as "the last man who talked with the late President Diaz of Mexico,” "one of the few survivors of the Messina disaster," "an eye witness of the Black Tom explosion" and “the only man who ever interviewed the Grand Lama of Tibet."

Last week he started out bright and early Monday morning to pose as a personal friend of the late Abduli Hamid until some kind friend told him what was liable to happen to him and he desisted.

Pete quotes his friends freely, from General Joffre to former President Castro of Venezuela, and generally gets away with it.

Camouflage covers this village like a pall, from the imitation Russian marmot overcoats of Washington Heights to the bone-rimmed glasses and long hair of Greenwich Village and
the “genuine" Vermont maple syrup made on South Water Street, Chicago.

When ladies of 60 pass for 16 with their short skirts and cute hair and venerable old gentlemen of 70 get by as 35, with their toupées and raven-black mustaches and cigarettes, well may we
say that M. Camouf started something. Even if he didn't start it, he gave it a name, so he is partly responsible.

Even the financial reports are camouflaged. They tell us there is plenty of money in this country.

Sure there is, but somebody has got all of it.

Hoping you are the same, I remain,

Yours
LEM

video on creative process in science, art and humor

free online video / full view

 

Arcimboldo, Grandville and William Charles Morris

William Charles Morris

Aha, I have recently run across the work of an American political cartoonist named William Charles Morris (1874-1940). I don’t know if he had any interest or involvement in camouflage per se, but there are examples of his work in which he used visual puns, visual metamorphosis (in the manner of Grandville), and spelled out words with figures.

Given the era he lived in, one of his favorite subjects was US President Theodore Roosevelt. TR had squinty eyes, an arched moustache, and prominent teeth, and Morris made a portrait of him (as he was seeking a third term in office) in which his face becomes the White House, his teeth having “evolved” into pillars. In a cartoon titled “Rabbit Hunting,” the slogan SQUARE DEAL is spelled out by rabbits in the background. 

Rabbit Hunting

Morris also made a drawing, titled “Hi$ Late$t Picture: The Northwe$tern Farmer,” in which he used shape substitutions and visual puns, like those of Arcimboldo.

To my mind, Morris was at his finest when he created a pun-laden portrait of railroad executive E.H. Harriman (as shown above), titled “The Colossus of ‘Roads.’” From our earlier years, we clearly remember Harriman’s son, New York statesman Averell Harriman.

See also the well-known “living photographs” of Arthur Mole and John Thomas at, and a short film discussion of embedded figures.

Prosperity Personified

the face of dread / when deception is too much to bear

Above Agricultural Instruments of Human Sustenance [a visual pun]. Historic engraving detail.

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Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament: An Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, p. 30—

Mr. Pickford was one of the finest Sanskrit scholars of his day. He was very poor; he had sacrificed his life to Sanskrit and his sister. His sister kept house for him in a little village where he was rector, a few miles outside Ipswich; a dour, bitter, selfish woman whom no one liked. So, for his sister's sake, he had put aside marriage, advancement, happiness, and had taken that obscure living in a poky village in a backward county, to make her a home where were few to hate her.

One day a letter came addressed to Mr. Pickford. Through several weeks he had been hoping for it; if it came, it might offer him an academic position where he could carry to fruition his life's work in Sanskrit. Every morning his sister went downstairs to meet the postman and see whether the letter had come: “No, John, it has not come today; perhaps it will come tomorrow.”

Long afterwards the Vice-Chancellor in whose gift that position lay, meeting Mr. Pickford accidentally in the streets of Ipswich, greeted him coldly: “I considered it discourteous of you not even to have acknowledged the offer which I made you.” Mr. Pickford made no comment. But, when he got back to the ugly, lonely, village rectory, he spoke to his sister. “Yes,” she said defiantly, “of course the letter  came; I read and burned it. I’m very happy where I am, and you’re much better off in a place suited to you.”

A little later Horrid Old Pickford killed himself. My father preached his funeral sermon. There was no mention of, no hint of reference to, that story in it; but the Stoic view of self-murder was upheld by the Anglican preacher.

NOTE There is a short video that pertains to visual puns as embedded figures at this online link.

a yankee doodle dante—we crave your condescension

camouflaged figures

Louis Untermeyer, Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. Excerpts from various pages as noted—

[Untermeyer’s father] was a trouble-evader and a peacemaker; it was easy to take advantage of him, which everyone did, especially his children. He was not a talker; he relied on the stereotypes of conversation, and even there he fell into malapropisms. Something cheap was not worth “a hell of beans” and a pitiful occurrence was “heartrendering.” He was never sure whether the first line of his favorite Harrigan and Hart [musical comedy writing team] song was “We crave your kind attention” or “We crave your condescension” (p. 7).

Influenced by the sprightly British journalist-essayist-novelist-poet G.K. Chesterton, I was much given to a style that employed epigrammatic checks and balances, appositions, paradoxes, and puns. I remember dismissing a rather commonplace collection of Gaelic poetry as “A Child’s Garden of Erse” and characterizing the author of an abortive American epic as “A Yankee Doodle Dante.” I referred to a Dowson-Beardsley pastiche as being “less erotic than Pierrotic.” I inquired, since much of the Restoration comedy took place in elegant country houses, was it not a comedy of manors? (p. 44).

It is as a poet that I most resent those resentful of puns, for the pun is, per se, a poetic device. Poetry is essentially a form of play, a play of metaphor, a play of rhyme. The pun is another form of syllabic playfulness, a matching of sounds that, like rhyme, are similar yet not quite the same—a matchng and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance. Whatever form it takes, searching or silly, the pun springs spontaneously from the same combination of wit and imagination which speeds the poetic impulse (p. 45).

“T.S. Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences,” he [poet Robert Frost] wrote to me, “We are both poets and we both like to play. That’s the similarity. The difference in this: I like to play euchre; he likes to play Eurcharist” (p. 46).

When an interviewer, pointing to a world constantly at war, asked [G.K.] Chesterton whether Christianity had failed, Chesterton replied, “No, it has not failed. Christianity has not yet been tried” (p. 72). 

•••

NOTE  Embedded figures are discussed in this posted short video.

Dust to dust / Dali, skulls, and reminders of death

C. Allen Gilbert, All Is Vanity

Ten years ago, we blogged about an American illustrator named C. Allan Gilbert (1873-1929), who was also an early contributor to animated films. Unfortunately, if and when he is remembered, it is inevitably because of the continuing popularity of one of his illustrations, a memento mori (reminder of mortality) titled All is Vanity (1892). It is a double image or visual pun in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror appears instead to be a skull when viewed from a greater distance. During World War I, Gilbert was also among a number of US artists who worked for the US Shipping Board (the Emergency Fleet Corporation) in applying dazzle camouflage to US merchant ships.

Gilbert's skull illusion is skillfully made and undoubtedly deserving of its popularity. But it is somewhat less than original. Throughout history, there have been repeated attempts at designing scenes of daily life that, from a distance, change into icons of death. Below is an example of one made by a German artist in 1866, in which two young people take on the shape of a skull when viewed from a distance. When translated, the label beneath the image reads "blood and decay." The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali alluded to the same symbolism when he devised a "double image" (in a 1940 painting called Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire) that at first appears to be a bust of the French philosopher Voltaire, and then, at other times, perhaps an image of two nuns.

Anon, Blood and Decay

And at last, below is another example, also German, from the 19th century.

Chicago camouflage artist's wife held for shoplifting

Above World War I-era embedded figure puzzle as published in the St Joseph Daily Press (St Joseph MO), April 16, 1915. Artist unknown.

•••

FINDS MISSING WIFE IS HELD AS SHOPLIFTER in Sioux City Journal (Sioux City IA), April 25, 1922—

Chicago, April 24—A three days' search for a missing wife ended when her husband discovered her in the house of correction serving a 10 days' sentence as a shoplifter.

The women is Mrs. Lilian Norman, 22. Her husband, Frank, is well known as a professional skater, having appeared in the College Inn and other places of entertainment. He is also a commercial painter and during the war was a camouflage artist.

They were married a year and a half ago, and until a month ago they resided in Kansas, which state was the birthplace and home of Mrs. Norman. Four weeks ago they came to Chicago. 

Norman believes his wife innocent of the charge of taking a piece of cloth. He says some professional shoplifter, near capture, thrust it in her handbag.

Jabberwocky Meets Kaiserwocky | WWI Parody

Above John Tenniel's illustration of the Jabberwock.

•••

Aha! Now here's a great find. It's a terribly funny take-off on Lewis Carroll's famous nonsense poem titled "Jabberwocky," which he published in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). For those who have never heard of Alice In Wonderland or Lewis Carroll, I haven't any comment. But, to appreciate the parody, you have to have read the original poem.  It goes as follows—

JABBERWOCKY  |  Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

And now on to the parody (author uncredited), called "Kaiserwocky," which was apparently published in the New York Evening Post, then reprinted in The Minneapolis Morning Star Tribune, May 16, 1918, p. 14, as follows—

KAISERWOCKY  |  Anon

'Twas Marnen, and the tommy ats
Did wyem secate in their trench;
All belgiumed with the tinny-hats,
And blank-blank potsdam french.

“Beware the Camouflage, my son!
The Cootie’s bite, the Barbwire’s scratch,
The Ausespiel’s place in the sun;
Verbote the redcrost patch!”

He took his kruppy in his hands:
Long time a blighty foe he sought,
Some scrappy papered Soixaute-quinze,
All poilued in its thought.

And as he kultured his moustache,
The Camouflage rheims through the wood.
And fraicaised o’er with rongetnoir,
Alsaced him where he stood.

Einzwei! Einzwei! And high and dry
He kieled that camouflage gun;
Then prussly monocled his eye
And taubel to Pop when done.

“And host thou kieled the Camouflage!
Come to my lefty arm, my boy!
Dertag is won—’tis au verdun!”
He vonklucked in his joy.

’Twas persching, and the tammy ats
Were numans landing from their tench;
All sammied were the tinney-hats,
The Kamrads deutschly blench.

Robert Williams Wood | Carrot in Camouflage

Robert W. Wood, How to Tell the Birds From the Flowers

Above One of the comparative illustrations in How To Tell the Birds from the Flowers: A Revised Manual of Flornithology for Beginners, with verses and illustrations by Robert Williams Wood (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917). A later edition was published by Dover Publications in 1959. Wood (1868-1955) was a prominent American scientist. In his children's book, each comparative image is accompanied by a nonsense verse. This one reads as follows—

The Parrot and the Carrot one may easily confound,
They're very much alike in looks and similar in sound,
We recognize the Parrot by his clear articulation,
For carrots are unable to engage in conversation.

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Anon, The Versatile Carrot in the Urbana Daily Courier (Urbana IL), May 28, 1919—

There is nothing like a war to change the status of things. Look, for example, at the humble carrot. Before the war it was one of the lowliest of all the vegetables, seldom used except for stews or New England boiled dinners, but it certainly has been doing its bit in the culinary line recently. It has become a past master in the art of camouflage. Grated raw, it is said to be a very good substitute for eggs in certain things. Little slices dried become raisins and currants, and other bits, treated a little differently, masquerade as candied orange and lemon peel. Orange marmalade and certain kinds of jam are made of them, and large chances of them boiled and sugared make wonderful candied fruits of very kind—pineapples, pears, apricots, cherries—and are used by many caterers to give their war cakes and puddings a prosperous and festive look.

Camouflage as an Agricultural Food Source

WWI workers applying ship camouflage (c1918)

Above Over the years, we've located perhaps a dozen World War I-era photographs of dazzle-camouflaged ships in the process of being painted. Here is yet another (source unknown), in which workers are shown applying various paint colors to large areas, as designated by chalk lines and, in this case, even the name of the paint color.

•••

The following are edited excerpts from a humorous question-and-answer column, called ALL SORTS by Newton Newkirk, published in the Boston Post, September 17, 1917, p. 8. It begins with a spurious inquiry from an anonymous New England farmer and is followed by an equally fraudulent answer from the column's author—

QUESTION: …Is camouflage raised from seed or settings? How does camouflage compare in nutritive value with other vegetables? Can camouflage be canned and how? When is the best time to plant camouflage? Please tell me the etiquette of eating camouflage…

ANSWER: …It has been a long time since I sat down to a mess of succulent camouflage like mother used to cook. Your ignorance concerning this well-known vegetable amazed me—I was of the opinion that every agriculturist was familiar with camouflage.

Of course you know what ensilage is? Yes? Well, it will perhaps give you some idea what camouflage is when I say that ensilage bears no resemblance whatever to camouflage—you would never mistake one for the other. Neither does cabbage (accent on the last syllable) belong to the same family as camouflage. Camouflage—at least all the camouflage I have seen—grows more luxuriantly and is much more nutritious than persiflage. Some folks might prefer the flavor of persiflage, but give me camouflage every time.

Camouflage is grown from blubs—I mean bulbs. One pound of camouflage contains more nutrient than half a ton of baled hay. Yes, camouflage can be canned, but I can't go into the canning now. Never plant camouflage until after the frost is out of the ground. If you plant it in January your crop will be a failure. It is good etiquette to eat camouflage until you feel you have had a genteel sufficiency…