Recent Comments

1. 10 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Seems like they’d be eating Cricket Burgers in Electric Acres. My sister and I raise 2,200 acres of hard red winter wheat every year – Going to be tough to do that with electric tractors! (HRW is the type of wheat used for premium loaves of bread – or buns for burgers!)

2. 4 months ago on Gasoline Alley

   LOOKS like Gasoline Alley is going to be one of the strips which gets to celebrate Christmas this year. Appearances of members of the Wallet family are so few and far between, I’m not sure I would recognize most of them if they put in an appearance! Still, it’s pretty sad that not even Gasoline Alley remembered Pearl Harbor Day on December 7! Not even Beetle Bailey and Blondie remembered either – and they were all there back in the day. In the meantime, my hat’s off to my Uncle Gabe, who was one of the first to be trained in the use of the newfangled stuff called radar – he joined before the conflict started – he’s the soldier we’re welcoming home in my profile photo. Because of his specialized training, Uncle Gabe saw service at Normandy, in India, Greece and worked against the Desert Fox – Rommel – in the Sahara. Also hats off to Uncle Loren, who was on a troop transport headed to Pearl Harbor when they received word of the attack. He was in the service during the entire conflict and eventually spent time in Tokyo as well as Korea. The Albin cousins and cousin Royce were at IwoJima. Hats off to Uncle Ernie, who was there when they liberated the concentration camps. Uncle Harley was involved in combat during the final days of World War II and the early days of Korea. Hats off today to all those who have served over the centuries – we owe more to them than we can ever repay.

3. 6 months ago on Mutt & Jeff

   WHEN you put it that way – it makes a LOT more sense – Too bad we wouldn’t be able to prevail upon Go Comics to check out the Boston Globe and rescue these vintage strips from the meddling of the poor folks who probably truly believe that people ALWAYS paid a few dollars for a bowl of soup. BACK in the 50s, my Dad had a favorite diner he liked to stop at – they served a steak dinner for $1 – the dinner included a T bone, Texas toast with real butter and honey, a baked potato with real butter or sour cream and chives, unlimited refits of coffee, juice, milk or a soft drink, and a salad with lettuce, an entire tomato – sliced or diced – and a large-sized Kosher dill pickle. Of course, we lived in Colorado – which was Cattle Country – so beef was plentiful – and cheap. But just before that – during the war years – You kept hoping there would be someone invited over for Sunday dinner so you would have an excuse to sacrifice a chicken to the pot. My mother was always upset when she cut up a chicken for Sunday dinner and discovered an egg bag with some little eggs in it – that meant she had given up a hen who was still producing eggs. And that was even before the price of eggs rose from SIX cents per dozen to the unbelievable high price of EIGHT cents per dozen!

4. 6 months ago on Mutt & Jeff

   I’m going to guess again because this one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As Wally Cleaver could tell you, even as recently as the 50s, if you paid as much as sixty cents for a bowl of soup – you were in a VERY fancy restaurant! And the drawing on this one looks more like it was in the 30s or 40s, when meat was either too expensive for most people to have it most of the time – or being rationed. So Jeff’s first observation – to be quiet or everyone will want a fly in their soup – is probably where the joke begins- but the rest of the conversation wanders off the subject. This is apparently a case of a 20-something youngster trying to adjust a joke which was written during a time period which he/she knows nothing about.

5. 7 months ago on Mutt & Jeff

   Love this one. Cars in the background look like late 1940s 0 is this is actually pretty realistic. When the U.S. entered World War II – in 1941 – the country was just coming out of the Depression – when most people had a tough time getting enough quarters together to be able to fill their cars up with gas. When WWII broke out, a lot of farmers were still using horses for farm work – and the military actually had a cavalry unit at the same time they were trying to develop effective aircraft. During WWII, auto manufacturers stopped turning out new automobiles and, instead, turned all of their manufacturing facilities toward providing military equipment. So people who had Model A and Model T automobiles just kept them all up and running. And, in those days, it was considered a Patriotic duty for people who had parts for automobiles to help people who wanted to keep their automobiles running to keep them tinkered up and functioning. The war ended in 1945. When the R.E.A. brought electricity to our rural community in 1946, it was not uncommon to see a freight wagon, pulled by a team of horses, in the same street with fully functioning Model A and Model Ts, along with some of the latest models cars. If you look at some of the old Gene Autry or Roy Rogers movies, you will notice this mix of early model cars in the same street as a newer model cars and horses, either individual horses or horse-drawn carriages or freight wagons. It was an interesting time to be sure!

6. 7 months ago on Pluggers

   My Aunt’s wall phone needed One long ring to get to the main operator, who could hep you call someone in a big city or a different state. If you gave the phone one long crank and a second short crank – you got a local operator, who could help you call someone in your town or one of the other surrounding towns in the county. And, usually, when you made a local voice! call, the operator you were speaking to would be someone you knew and you would recognize their voice! As a general rule, everyone in town knew who was working as a telephone operator.

7. 7 months ago on Pluggers

   I would have to agree with that! At least, in those days, you didn’t have to worry about someone mugging you because they believe you might be carrying a $1,000 phone in your purse! In the early advent of cell phones – it was cheaper than your average phone bill. But, then, with all of the extras tacked on to cell phone service – people are paying phone bills which are higher than anyone in my generation could have even dreamed that they might one day be paying for a telephone! Also, you lived with a LOT of other interests which did NOT center around your phone – Your boss probably wouldn’t call you at midnight to tell you about something extra you needed to do – If you were asleep when the phone rang – and there were no answering machines – your boss would just have to wait until you were near the telephone and awake before calling you!

8. 7 months ago on Pluggers

   Actually – I predate the time when you needed to have a number in order to call someone – One of my aunts had a wall phone with a crank. When you grabbed the handle and began cranking, the sweet lady would say “Operator” – and you would say – Operator, I would like to speak to my sister, whose name is — and she lives in city and state – and the operator would connect you, since your sister was usually the only person in that city and state with her name who had a telephone. I also predate the time when you needed an address to be able to mail a letter – There were eleven kids in my Dad’s family and 10 kids in my mothers family. So we lived in a small town with a hundred or more people who had the same last name, since most of my aunts and uncles lived in the same town. One of my aunts lived in a different town and had married a gentleman who had around 11 siblings – most of whom also lived in the same town. When my cousins wrote to me, they just put my name, city and town on the envelope and the letters always got to me even though there were a hundred or more people in the same town with the same last name. Likewise, when we wrote our cousins – we just needed their name, city and state – and, even though there were a hundred or more people with that same last name in their town – the right cousins always received the letters. My sister actually worked as a telephone operator, living in a nearby town. She was stunned when she realized her 9 to 5 job meant 9 PM to 5 AM – The rates always reduced at 10 PM and were reduced until around 6 AM – so she was amazed at the number of people who made calls during those hours! She finally decided it was too spooky to to walk to work after dark and return home before dawn most days – so she finally gave up that job and came back to our town and worked at the Mom and Pop drug store! Not totally convinced all of the technology has really benefitted us.

9. 7 months ago on Pluggers

   You’re probably a SENIOR Plugger if you remember that, once upon a time ALL phones were hooked to one spot in the house and had a little dial with numbers 1 through zero on them and you had to dial the right numbers in the right sequence in order to make it through to your party. You are even a MORE Senior Plugger if you remember that, once upon a time, most phones only had ONE number – zero – and when you dialed THAT number, a sweet lady would answer the phone and ask you who you wanted to talk to. And IF you said Joe Doaks in Chicago, Illinois, you could be reasonably certain she would find your party right away because there was probably only one person in Chicago named Joe Doaks who had a telephone.. You are even more senior if you remember the time the telephone company representative came around to your house and asked if you would like to have a telephone and your folks told them that there was no reason for you to have a telephone because you didn’t know anyone who had a telephone, so there would be no one you would need to call. OH – and you took pictures with a little black box called a camera. And, after you had taken a bunch of pictures , you took a little roll of stuff called “film” out of the little black box and took it to the drug store, where they wrapped up the little roll and sent it off to a place called KODAK to get it developed. And you would keep checking back at the drug store until they told you that your pictures had been developed. And you took the pictures home and put little stickers on the corners and put them in a book called an album and 80 years later, you could STILL see those pictures because they had NEVER been on a computer page which crashed and dumped ALL of those pictures out into outerspace!

10. 7 months ago on Nancy Classics

    Little Lotta didn’t begin to make regular appearances until around 1953 and was popular up until 1993 – However, since Little Lotta’s size also seemed to give her super human strength, which she often used to dispatch bullies, maybe Sluggo SHOULD have been thinking about making the acquaintance of Lotta – since Sluggo seems to have a bad habit of frequently running into bullies!