BENCHLEY      

 

When, in the year 2000, my office proposed that I represent the firm at a gathering of international taxation practitioners I was not the least bit reluctant – especially since, for once, I was not expected to present a paper or to have any organisational involvement.  And who would resent a few days in Brussels?  And, given the shape of the planet, one might as well continue onward after the conference, and do a bit of client stroking in London and New York. 

 

My New York sojourn was pivoted around a visit to the headquarters of First Boston Corporation, the (at the time) pre-eminent merchant banker.  First Boston had its Australian operations based in Melbourne, and was a client of my office.  The First Boston people arranged for me to speak to “the whole team” at corporate headquarters in Manhattan, which I duly did; but before that there was a gathering with about a dozen or so vice-presidents on the floor below.  These senior executives were a much more formidable challenge than the full team that assembled later, not least because their typical age would have been no more than 30.  My short presentation was soon taken over by rapid-fire questioning about Australia’s taxation system.  My interlocutors were mostly intrigued by a peculiar feature of Australian taxation law – a provision now long since repealed.   At the time Australian residents were exempt from tax on foreign income that was taxable in its source country.  This is in contrast to the present system and to the system that then applied in the USA, namely the aggregating and taxing of worldwide income, with credit then given for tax already paid on foreign income in the country of source.  

 

The First Boston people I visited that day occupied the 99^th and 100^th floors of the World Trade Center.  A short while later First Boston relocated……..that is, before the obscenity of nine-eleven 2001; but the memory of my visit will forever be overlaid by what happened so soon after the visit, and the annihilation of the then occupants of those two floors.

 

While the ostensible reason for my New York mission was client service, my underlying focus was a couple of days of sight-seeing, and a bit of Big Apple immersion; and, specifically, staying at The Algonquin Hotel.    

By the way, The Algonquin is on West 44^th Street, mid-town Manhattan, and in the twilight of my morning visit to the First Boston offices I walked the four miles to the World Trade Center, soaking it all in. 

 

 So why The Algonquin?  Well, The Algonquin was renowned for the so-called Algonquin Round Table, the literary group that gathered there through the years, roughly 1919 to 1929.  The group met in the Rose Room for lunch, daily!  Members of the Round Table were a disparate group of actors, writers, critics, and New York people about town.  Attendance was fluid.  So-called “charter members” included Alexander Woollcott (drama critic, and – subsequently - the inspiration for the leading character in the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart play The Man Who Came to Dinner), George S. Kaufman (himself), Harold Ross (editor of The New Yorker), Dorothy Parker (critic and writer), and Robert Benchley. 

A couple of quotes from Wikipedia: “At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country.” “The group was devoted to games, including cribbage and poker [and] had its own poker club…….which met at the hotel on Saturday nights…….The group also played charades……and the ‘I give you a sentence’ game, which spawned Dorothy Parker’s memorable sentence using the word horticulture: ‘You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.’”  

 

There are those who have regarded the members of the Algonquin Round Table as unserious, indeed frivolous; nevertheless, their ethos has endured.  There’s much to be said for an outlook that’s light-hearted rather than serious.  As much as any of the Round Table members, Robert Benchley typified this attitude.

 

My early acquaintance with and admiration for Robert Benchley I attribute to my uncle, Bill Warren, who cultivated in me similar admiration for the aforementioned Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.  And for Stephen Leacock.  And James Thurber.   Humorous writers all.  My recent re-acquaintance with Benchley has been triggered by a gift from my son-in-law: Pluck and Luck, a volume of Benchley essays rescued from an op shop – the volume not the son-in-law!  Martin has no desire to be rescued. 

 

Robert Benchley lived from 1889 to 1945, a modest span terminated, according to one source, by lung cancer and to another source by cirrhosis of the liver.  Choose your vice!  He is described as a newspaper columnist, as an American humourist, and as an actor.  There was much overlapping of his disparate careers.

Benchley’s paternal grandfather had been Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, later jailed in Texas for his active role in the “underground railroad”, the clandestine movement that provided the wherewithal for Negro slaves to escape to the North.  Later, Benchley’s father had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and spent four years in the American Navy before returning to Worcester (Massachusetts), later becoming Town Clerk.  Benchley’s older brother, Edmund, trained at West Point, served in the Spanish-American War, and was killed in the Battle of San Juan Hill – when Robert Benchley was nine years only.  Absent from Benchley’s biographical background are the stereotypical tropes of success through failure, or triumph through adversity.

 

One source notes that “Benchley was the pampered son of prosperous parents, groomed for corporate boardrooms.  He declined such a fate.”  He embraced humour: he wrote his senior school literature thesis on How to Embalm a Corpse.  At Harvard, his fraternity after-dinner speeches were acclaimed for their pseudo-serious nonsense.  After Harvard he worked as a copywriter, meanwhile submitting humorous essays to magazines.  He wrote a book review of the phone book: “It is the opinion of the reviewer that the weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages.”  He was, for a time, managing editor of Vanity Fair.  The anecdotes are endless.  One time he cabled the office from Venice: “Streets full of water.  Please advise.”

 

Benchley’s published output was prodigious.  Over his career he was drama critic for Life magazine and, additionally, wrote for Life’s The Wayward Press column (1920 to 1929).  He was a long-time contributor to The New Yorker.  There were twelve collections of his essays during his lifetime, and ten posthumous collections.  I have read my recent acquisition, and re-read a volume pulled from my shelf.  The Pluck and Luck compilation was published in 1925, and the author acknowledges prior publication of the 50 “articles” in Life, The Detroit Athletic Club News, The Bookman, College Humour and Theatre Guild Program.   The other volume, Benchley – or Else!, was published posthumously in 1948 as “a collection of Benchley’s articles”.  There are 70 of them.  The publishers do not indicate where first published, or provide a chronology.  It matters little……22 lifetime collections of essays, all told more than 600, made Benchley a busy beaver indeed.

But, that’s not the half of it.  Benchley wrote/ featured in/wrote titles for or narrated 50 feature films.  And played in 51 short non-feature films, nearly all of which he wrote!  Much of this output might be consigned to the inconsequential basket, nevertheless it does indicate that Benchley and his humour was taken very seriously in the day, and that he had a huge persona in the eyes of the American public.   His on-screen mien was typically droll, verging on lugubrious, invariably accepting of his hapless predicament; the average Joe in a pickle. 

 

Now, I don’t expect that Robert Benchley has much of a following these days.  Not so long ago his writings were accessible only on library shelves or from op shop bins, so scarcity was an issue.  But these days much is available through book dealers on line.  And, I see that three Benchley volumes are available (complete, and gratis) for download through Project Gutenberg.  As to the uncollected writings in magazine archives, well good luck sourcing them.  

 

With the films:  these have long since faded from public screening, but the internet provides hope.  Numerous short-subject Benchley films can be accessed - simply Google “Robert Benchley Movies”.  

 

The question is whether there is anything in the Benchley catalogue that is a must-read or a must-see?  I’d suggest “yes” - so long as you undertake your search with a mindset like “sly”, “amusing”, “interesting”, “droll”.  A dedicated rainy afternoon might reveal two or three readers or viewers who find Robert Benchley’s humour to be fine-tuned to their wavelength.  Or a whole new generation!

 

And The Algonquin?  I read somewhere that prestigious hotels aim to “refresh” their rooms every five to seven years, and to effect major renovations every ten to fifteen years.  I suspect that, when I visited in 2000, The Algonquin people hadn’t read this.  Or that they were exponents of the tired but comfortable school – and, what the heck, no amount of shazam can convert a room from smallish to palatial. Anyway, the intervening 25 years have, I see, achieved major improvement and generated some spruce…..such that, today, the single room rack rate is $A909.  The many on-line photographs illustrate a very affable establishment indeed.  181 rooms, by the way, should you wish to take the family.  No amount of history or nostalgia, however, has been able to save the Rose Room - which had been re-modelled out of existence in 1998.  

 

Sadly, among The Algonquin’s voluminous web-site content there is no reference to the Round Table, past or present.  But scroll carefully through the numerous photographs on the Bookings.com site, and at #14/57 you will see Robert Benchley, above the sideboard, in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, amused and contented.  

By way of postscript:  The famous quotes of famous people tend to be somewhat corrupted over time and through the constant re-telling but, for what it’s worth, here are some bons mots attributed to Robert Benchley:

 

#   The only real cure for a hangover is death.

#   If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get out of these wet things and into a dry martini.

#.  Even nowadays a man can’t step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.

#   I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.

#   Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

#.  If Mr. Einstein doesn’t like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from.

#.  The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.

#.  The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

#.  There is a fairly prevalent notion that if you have been behind the scenes where the chorus girls are, you ought to go to confession right away, but that it is worth it.

#   Bear-hunting has never been the same since the supply of bears ran out.

 

Gary Andrews

 

 

 

 

 

SHOW AND TELL NUMBER 2

       

A little over a year ago I posted a blog with the name Show and Tell.  Now for the follow-up.  Like its predecessor, Number 2 has the same origins in a lifetime accumulation of odds and ends, gathered together for no reason other than their lack of present-day utility, and their appeal to the curious.  These items have been appreciated by groups of older folk at the nearby Senior Citizens’ Centre.  The flash of recognition of some item remembered from long ago but not seen for years has a special sweetness.

 

Shoe Stretcher 

 

I had thought that this item might be covered by the description “shoe softener”, but a search under those words produces references to numerous preparations and unguents for application to stiff leather to unstiffen it, not to primitive mechanical devices such as this.  And I had recollected seeing this type of device in retail shoe establishments, where a rather-too-tightly fitting shoe was subjected to a softening up by the sales assistant as an alternative to the shrinking of the customer’s foot. That process may sometimes have occurred; but, apparently, the preferred use for this contraption was for the softening of shoes to make space for bunions.  So not so much of a commercial application, but a household one.  

 

This particular implement has no branding or maker’s attribution, so it may well be a product of the blacksmith’s art.  If so, the craftsmanship far exceeds the importance of such a mundane item.  It’s easy to see how this leather softening device functions but, although it’s a whopper of a tool, I’m guessing that it’s for shoes only - the throat is not long enough for the device to be used on calf-height boots, even where the boot leg is scrunched up.  Equestrians with bunions may simply have had to suck it up.

 

Boot Lacer 

It’s not a bad idea to avoid double negatives.  Indeed, it’s likely a good idea.  Yet a double negative can hold separate meaning from the opposite.  For instance, I wouldn’t claim that over all I had a good time when I was enlisted for National Service Training in the Australian Army, but then the experience was not bad either.  This is really a silly oversimplification, anyway, because the experience comprised a multitude of experiences spread over months.  And here I’m about to reduce all of that to one aspect only –  the boots.

 

But, before the boots hit the ground, a bit of background.   It is January 1958.  The Korean War is sufficiently in the past for Australian people and Governments to be tiring of National Service for young men, and tiring of the compulsory system that had pertained since the Korean War.  The system had been bastardised from “all 18-years old men” to the “birthday ballot” (roughly one in three).  The Navy and the Air Force were no longer involved.   So, my time of service might be described as the dying days, but it was serious nonetheless, at least there no choice but to take it seriously.  For those desperate to know, compulsory National Service Training was abolished a little later, in 1959……..only to be revived in 1962, for 20-years old men, in response to the Vietnam War…….then finally abolished in December 1972 when the Whitlam Government came to power.  

 

Memory hasn’t failed, but it has gone through the blender:  I know we travelled one time to camp at Puckapunyal in army trucks (direct from the depot alongside the Yarra near Yarra Park – long gone), but I equally know that we trained from the then Spencer Street Station to Dysart Siding south of Seymour, thence to be transferred to army trucks for the short run to Puckapunyal.  Or maybe it was to the Army's Site 17 on the other side of Seymour.

 

That day of first arrival at Puckapunyal each recruit was issued with two pairs of boots.  Mine are with me still.  I am not anti-army and, (pun alert!) in defensive mode over the years, I have remarked that the Army often got things right; and issuing footwear that was likely to outlast the next war was one such instance.  Another, was separating the some hundreds of each intake into recruits of roughly similar backgrounds and levels of education.  Consistent with this approach, was the identification of men who were illiterate or of very limited education [yes, in Australia in 1956, there were about 30 of these in that summer intake] and the separating of these men from much of their regular training, and intensively educating them during their time in camp.  For that the Army can be forgiven a lot of its foibles.

 

And, before I’m completely lost in nostalgia, I must revert to the boot lacer.  The name is comprehensively descriptive, but that’s not enough.  One needs to know that the boots of its day – at least the boots for which this gadget was the accompaniment – did not have eyelets through which laces were threaded; the boots had hooks.  The laces were pulled around the hooks rather than through holes, a much faster process for execution during surprise attack when one was caught in one’s bunk.  And the little lacer is just the ticket. 

 

 An interesting feature: embossed on the handle is the maker’s mark: Wm. LEEMING, Nth. MELB. & PRAHRAN.  And in the tiniest of lettering:  USA.  Since when did a Melbourne firm have its products manufactured in the USA?  Well….if you Google Wm. LEEMING the first entry to appear is an item from the collection of Museums Victoria, an 1885 commemorative ceramic plate from Leemings Boot Stores, 109 Swanston Street.   Leemings is described as “arguably Victoria’s most advertised bootery”.

 

Butter Paddle (Antique) 

 

Check out “butter paddle” on the internet, and you’ll see plenty of examples, and they all have similar features.  They have grooves, for controlling the pats of butter while being shaped and squeezed, and for allowing the buttermilk to drain away.  They are paddle shaped, and they come in pairs.  So, what’s with this item?  The lack of a mate might be attributed to bad luck, or even carelessness, but the lack of grooves seems to be an impediment too far.  Moreover, the small face would drive the typical milkmaid bananas.  And yet it is a butter paddle, the internet identifies it as such.  By adding the search word “antique” an array of shapes appears before you; and by “asking about” the image an even more curated bunch of butter paddle images appears.  They are varied beyond belief, but an extensive image crawl reveals not one like my (by now becoming extremely valuable) artifact – a rustic dairy tool, no less.  Hand crafted, for sure; born from the rarest of river-rescued huon pine, undoubtedly.  Who knows the death toll of intrepid timber getters?  Do not think cheap when you submit your offer.

 

“Silvermoth” Box 

 

“Protects your Clothes from Moths and Silverfish”, so says the slogan on the packet.  Unlike its rival products, the contents of this box were powder rather than mothballs.  Whether or not the product was effective, there was undoubtedly a marketing flaw: since the little box was placed in a darkened spot, where the pests were presumed to loiter, it tended to be forgotten.  So, the lethal contents might well evaporate before the householder realised that a replacement was needed – the very antithesis of planned obsolescence.  This box, empty and odourless, was found in the back of a built-in attic wardrobe when we moved the family home in 1975. The telephone number numbering system comprising two numerals and four digits [MU 3829] was discontinued in 1960, and who knows how many years prior to 1960 the packet had done its work? 

 

Snake Bite Kit 

 

I don’t recall whether these little snake bite kits were part of each Boy Scout’s necessary accoutrements, probably not.  But they would have been included in the gear kept at the scout hall, and would definitely have been taken to every camp and outdoor excursion.  I see an identical item on eBay, comprehensively described thus: 1910s Vintage Antique Cylinder Cutter Lance Snake Bite First Aid Kit.  The illustration shows how there is a lance at one end of the gadget, customarily kept safe in its capped compartment.  The other end has a hollow compartment too – also capped, for storing Condy’s Crystals [aka potassium permanganate], a popular antiseptic and disinfectant.   The conventional first aid response to being bitten by a snake was: (1) to wipe away from the fang punctures any venom remaining on the skin, (2) using the lance, to excise the bite, (3) to suck the venom from the wound, (4) if the bite is on a limb, to apply pressure to the bite area, and apply a tourniquet “above” the bite.  In recent times most of this routine has been deleted from the recommended procedure: no excising of the bite area, no sucking of the wound, no tourniquet.  In short: bandage, immobilise the limb, anti-venene as soon as possible, and hospitalisation.

 

I see that a little short of 600 Australians are hospitalised each year with snake bite, so it’s a frequent enough occurrence for all schoolchildren to be taught snake bite first aid.  There’s plenty of information available on the net, but that’s not much use if you’re foolish enough to be bitten beyond telephonic reception.

 

Tyre Tube Repair Kit Tin 

 

This kit is for bicycles not for automobiles.  And it’s a bit of a puzzle, because the tin is empty.  So, use your imagination, and picture the missing pieces of tiny sandpaper, the supply of rubber patches, the tube of glue, a scraper, a wax crayon, a piece of chalk, and a couple of small tyre levers.  Absent is the tub of water for locating the leak in the tube - inconvenient to organise at home, and rarely waiting handy by the roadside.  

 

Cigar Case 

 

Just as in the movies of old, where the cowboys with black hats were the villains (baddies) and those with the white hats were the heroes (goodies), so too with the dispensing of cigars.  There was a code.  If the film character offered his guest a cigar from the box or the humidor he was okay, but if he helped himself to a cigar without proffering one to his guest then he was most decidedly on the nose.  This vignette is part of a large mythology about cigars, including about humidors themselves.  “A humidor’s primary function is to maintain a steady, desirable moisture level inside……A humidor is the only tool that creates the perfect stable environment to protect your cigars…..Using the wrong type of water (that is, not distilled) can introduce mould, leave unsightly mineral deposits and, worst of all, compromise the flavour and longevity of your cigars.”

 

The pictured case is clearly not a humidor, and one can but hope that in its real life its contents hadn’t been breast-pocketed around for days or weeks but, rather, had been lovingly transferred from a humidor this very morning on the way to the owner’s city club.

 

Draft Horse Bit

 

This is a brute of a thing and, given that the bit is the focal point of contact between horse and rider or driver, first reaction is to pity the horse that had to mouth it.  Sure, a horseman or horsewoman might be unsparing with the whip, but careless or thoughtless or sadistic deployment of an ill-fitting bit must represent the ultimate agony for the horse.    But that’s not the sense one gets from the literature; and the numerous on-line illustrations of multi-shaped and multi-sized bits suggest that horse people were and are very particular about the choice of bit for their horse.  The pictured bit is somewhat on the large size, and was likely for a draft horse.

 

My acquaintance with horses is less than intimate, but not unfriendly.  There was one time when my cousin Graeme. and I were venturing from his family farm at Chinkapook, riding bareback together on faithful Jewel.  I had not buttoned my holster, and after a bit of a jolt my six-shooter cap gun dropped to the track below.  No problem, you would think, but after some very serious deliberation we concluded that if I dismounted to collect the gun we wouldn’t be able to get me back on to Jewel's rump – Jewel  was a very wide-arsed mare, somewhat pregnant at the time.  So, with some reluctance (and with some imprecation heaped on me – it was my cousin’s six-shooter!) we continued the several miles home.  When my uncle took us back to retrieve the revolver next morning, inevitably the laws of a malevolent universe had turned a cog, and on this remote bush track the revolver had been crushed by a passing vehicle.  

 

My other horse anecdote is equally ignominious.  In my early office years one of my colleagues, Adrian Seymour, commuted each morning to the Melbourne CBD from Lilydale, some 35 kms distant.  His folks were serious horse people, and so was he, and they had a substantial rural property to indulge their passion.  The influence on Adrian’s workmates was enormous: over the early years of our careers we had numerous days out at the farm, and numerous horse-riding excursions.  One such is the trigger for my second horse anecdote.  There were more than a dozen of us, and we assembled at a riding school in the Dandenongs to be allocated our horses for the day, and to be saddled up.  Some time into the excursion we were proceeding along a country road at a fairly brisk canter, me more optimistic than skilful, when the road took a sweeping corner.  So did my horse.  My willingness to play along was somewhat stymied by the fact that the saddle strap under the horse’s girth had not been properly tightened, and the saddle - and I - did a 180 degrees rotation.  The horse was somewhat disconcerted by the sudden appearance of saddlery and rider under its belly, but it didn’t bolt.  It was pulled up safely by one of our group and, unbelievably, no harm was done to man or beast.  With a seriously tightened cinch, we were soon on our way again.

 

Reverting to the pictured bit, it should be mentioned for the benefit of the unaware, that in her wisdom Mother Nature had equipped horses with gaps between the teeth to the rear of their lower jawline – the so-called interdental space - gaps that allow bits of appropriate size to be inserted.  So, the symbiosis between man and horse was pretty much engineered from the start.

 

Adjustable Date Stamp

 

In the business offices of my memory the sorting of the morning mail used to be something of a ritual, and part of that ritual was the stamping of each item of mail with today’s date.  This date-stamping represented permanent (and incontrovertible) evidence of receipt; and I expect that, tucked in the corporate consciousness somewhere, was the atavistic belief that there was a sound reason why such a process was for “legal” purposes, or was at least prudent practice just in case.  The Date Stamp has four rubber rings, each one with numerals or letters embossed – day/day/month/year. The rings, and hence the embossed specifics, are rotated each day using a simple finger or thumb action.  In these electronic days one presumes that there is some less old-fashioned process for achieving the same comfort re the incoming mail.  Regardless, items similar to this device remain available from every stationer, and on line.  Time has not rendered them redundant. 

 

So, how come this Adjustable Date Stamp has a place in a “show and tell” line-up?  Simply because this specific date stamp has been superseded, and is indeed unusable.  Its available dates range from 1 January 1979 to 31 December 1990.  More so than every other item in this Show and Tell compilation this Adjustable Date Stamp has no function whatever.

 

 

Gary Andrews