The Laughs That Linger

It’s funny, the things that stick in your memory for a long time.

Which cartoons have remained lodged in YOUR brain for decades after you first saw them?

Several come back to me repeatedly over the years -- for one of two reasons, I think. Either I liked them SO much that they were unforgettable, or for some reason I saw them over and over so they naturally found a permanent place in my mind.

In the latter category are two that my Dad pinned to the wood posts in our basement near the furnace when I was a child. Early on, he delegated me to build the wood fires that heated our home (a canny method of curbing the average young man’s natural pyromania), so I saw these two cartoons many times for several years of my childhood.

From the drawing style, I suspect they had been cut out of the Saturday Evening Post. They could have been New Yorker cartoons, but I don’t remember seeing that magazine around our house in those days.

One pictured a very sick man in a hospital bed surrounded by a conclave of doctors, and one of them is saying, “Well, seeing his name’s Harrison, why not call it ‘Harrison’s Disease’ and leave it at that?”

The other showed several hobos sitting around the remains of a campfire on which sits a pan or large tin can that has been used to cook their recent meal. And the caption was: “Well, it was a good rat, but not a GREAT rat.”

A cartoon I discovered for myself that stuck in my memory appeared in Boys’ Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. I’m pretty sure I saw this before I was 10, but I don’t know where I ran across the magazine . . . either a friend’s house or the dentist’s waiting room, perhaps, because I didn’t have a subscription to any magazine of my own as a boy.

In the cartoon, a post office clerk has had to tie down a package to the scales because it contains, as the “fragile” stickers on the outside declare, helium. He says to the customer who wants to mail it, “Well, the way I figure it, we owe YOU $1.25” (or whatever the amount was). That one appealed to my sense of absurd fairness.

Yesterday morning I was mixing a packet of instant coffee, and when I reached for a mug in the cupboard, I thought: I like a large mug of coffee, but if I pick one of those, and mix a standard packet of powdered coffee in it, the drink will be weaker than if I mix it into a smaller mug.

And THAT brought back to memory a “Beetle Bailey” strip cartoon I must have seen in the Coos Bay World. “Beetle Bailey,” which focused the absurdities of life in the U.S. Army, wasn’t one of my favorites; like “The Wizard of Id” or “B.C.,” it could be hit or miss . . . and I definitely preferred the latter two, with “B.C.” getting a slight edge on the other two for slyness and wit.

(The San Francisco Chronicle, copies of which a Greyhound bus would bring up the coast to drop off mid afternoons at a store on Highway 101 in North Bend, and which my Dad would buy when I was in my teens, had cartoons that appealed much more to my expanding taste: “Hägar the Horrible,” “Broom-Hilda” the witch, and a single-panel gem called “Fenwick” -- a panel of which I’ll mention in a moment.)

Anyway, “Beetle Bailey” featured a tyrannical, short-tempered NCO, Sergeant Snorkel, who made our lazy, goldbricking, eponymous hero’s life miserable. One of the supporting characters was the mess hall chef known as “Cookie.” In this particular strip, Cookie has announced that coffee’s ready, and Sarge thunders, “Well, I hope you made it strong! If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s—“ and in the final panel he looks down at the metal spoon sinking steadily into the mug, “. . . weak coffee.”

I didn’t even start to drink coffee on a regular basis until I was well out of college, but for some reason I got a kick out of that cartoon.

Last one. I mentioned “Fenwick.” Sadly, though “Beetle Bailey” and “Broom-Hilda” carry on, I have not been able to locate any online record of this marvelous cartoon. Fenwick was an everyman—on the order of Ziggy, who’s far more famous, but Fenwick had a more distinct appearance. He had a small brush mustache, might a fifty-something in age, and often wore a crumpled hat and a grey jacket, if I remember correctly . . . Fenwick was what would be known in Yiddish as a “nebbish.”

Anyway, in a panel that’s often come back in memory to give me a smile, we’re mostly looking over our hero’s shoulder, and down at a letter he’s received: a commercial packet addressed to occupant, with the message:

“YOU ARE ALREADY A LOSER -- DETAILS INSIDE!”