A Fistful of Fig Newtons (24 page)

Johnson Smith was also the Bible of the go-getting entrepreneur, always alert for new opportunities offering “untold riches.” “Make big money stamping key chains,” advised the catalog, or “Raise mushrooms in your own ‘Mystery Mushroom Garden,’ ” an avocation which “has earned several dollars a week for satisfied users.”

Every live wire, life-of-the-party in those days had a complete repertory of parlor tricks. Totally equipped by Johnson Smith & Co., of Racine, Wisconsin, he was prepared to conquer every
social gathering with the sheer audacity of his wit and with the legerdemain he displayed. You needed at least a steamer trunk, apparently, to bring your equipment to a party, because “Diminishing Billiard Ball,” “The Handkerchief Vanisher” (“practically undetectable; never fails”), “The Mesmerized Penny” (“defies the law of gravitation”), and “The Mysterious King Tut Trick” were merely basic equipment. The truly dedicated social climber would need the “Spirit Medium Ring” as well as the expensive but effective “Mysterious Chalice.” This was obviously a time when people provided much of their own entertainment and did not or could not rely on the movies, television, or the canned humor of the stand-up comic. For this reason the joke books which filled several pages of the catalog were popular and highly functional.
One Thousand Choice Conundrums and Riddles
was one such smash seller. It featured such boffolas as:

This crusher must have panicked them from Kalamazoo to Keokuk, and for only a dime you got 999 more, “enough to last you for years!” And that was the unvarnished truth! Some of those jokes are still kicking around, and writers are earning Big Money selling them to comics who apparently never read the Johnson Smith & Co. catalog. If you have any doubts about this, read a couple of these joke books, and then watch television for a month. Furthermore, the timelessness of the Johnson Smith catalog is not restricted to its gag books. For example, the Ouija board, invented by a Baltimore man as a parlor trick, is selling in greater numbers today than it did when it was introduced and distributed by Johnson Smith.

The chatty quality of the unknown caption writers is also unique and seems to emanate from a single, crotchety yet ribald human being. On the one hand he cozies up to the reader, nudges him in the ribs, and says: “Here’s your chance, boys. Put on one
of these Bunged-up Eye disguises. The effect as you enter the room is most bewildering. Real fun!” On the other hand, he thunders from his soapbox in tones of outraged virtue: “Your heart will burn and you will wonder how such awful things can be, and you will feel like others that you must become a crusader and go out and fight and tell others and warn against the danger.” He is exhorting us to buy
From Dance Hall to White Slavery
–
The World’s Greatest Tragedy
(“an absolute steal at 35¢”).

It is this eerily personal style that sets the tone of this great volume of human desires and vanities. A very necessary and ubiquitous ingredient of the catalog is the consistently provocative illustrations, again the work of anonymous, humble artists who probably never signed a picture in their lives. For example, the grotesque drawing illustrating “Joke Teeth with Tongue” foreshadowed the best of the later surrealists. The man’s startled yet strangely evil expression as he displays his seven-inch rubber tongue and his gleaming celluloid false teeth is enough to make us wonder what it’s all about! On the same page is another fine, unsigned work illustrating “The Enormous Vibrating Eye,” obviously the work of an artist of another school. He, nevertheless, perfectly catches the raffish cloddishness of a man who would wear such a monstrosity. The cap he wears in the drawing betrays a touch of sheer genius. Physical infirmities also abound in the Johnson Smith humor world. “The Swollen Thumb” is a good example, incidentally illustrated nicely with a pair of rubes peering dolefully at a giant, bulbous thumb.

Apparently another sure-fire laugh-getter was the substitution of phony items for commonplace objects. Most of them were made of soap and were “guaranteed to liven up any party.” A real wit could spark up his friendly gatherings with soap cheese (“it might fool even the mice”) and soap biscuits (“a few of these mixed in with a dish of regular crackers will really start the fun”). You bet, especially after a couple of martinis!

Soap gumdrops, soap cigars, soap pickles, soap chocolates,
and even a bar of soap soap that dyed its user an indelible blue made life exciting for the friends of a Johnson Smith addict. There is no record of the number of murders, assault and battery cases, and simple divorces that this single line of Johnson Smith specialties provoked. A man wearing an enormous vibrating eye feeding his wife and kids soap pickles is a commonplace still life in the world of Johnson Smith.

Everything, or almost everything, came by mail in the early twentieth century. The mailman was often the only link between the great outside world and a largely rural America. Mail order catalogs had an irresistible appeal to simple folk who rarely saw more than a crossroads general store. During the days just before World War I, few homes were without the Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Johnson Smith & Co. catalogs, especially if there were boys in the family. The Johnson Smith catalog was predominantly male in its appeal and was not all fun and games. In fact, the catalog had a kind of Horatio Alger upward-and-onward appeal to the young man of the period. He could order correspondence lessons from Johnson Smith in everything from playing the ukulele to
New and Simplified Methods of Mimicry, Whistling and Imitation
to
Polish, Self-Taught
. In a day when education beyond the fifth grade was a rarity, these self-help courses represented serious educational opportunity to people who often studied by kerosene lamps.

The constant drive for financial success, which has played such an important role in creating the character of America, is well documented throughout the Johnson Smith catalog. One example is
The Book of Great Secrets: One Thousand Ways of Getting Rich!
(“To persons who work hard for a living and then don’t get it, we have a few plain words to say. Every person wants to make money and wants to make it fast and easy. This book will tell them how.”) For only a quarter this fantastic volume outlined moneymaking schemes ranging all the way from home recipes for Holland gin and to corn cures to a formula for treating “various
diseases to which horses are subject.” It would be interesting to know the number of people who read this volume and then went on to fame and fortune using the Johnson Smith tested formula for making “Eye Water” or “Tomato Catsup.”

To the superstitious and the basically ignorant, attaining wealth has often seemed to be a matter of either luck or secret, sinister, mystic knowledge. Johnson Smith stood ready to provide the struggling clod with the hidden key. If he couldn’t make it as an honest veterinarian or plumber he could at least master hypnotism and gain his ends by treachery. The pamphlet
Mysteries of Clairvoyance
is only one example of numerous appeals that Johnson Smith made to the superstitious side of rustic America:

All of this for only a thin dime.

The mixture of primitive mysticism and modern technology is one of the things that makes the Johnson Smith catalog so endlessly fascinating. Its pages are jammed full of appeals to every human vice and fear. Cupidity, nobility, lust, piety–all are given equal space, and significantly there is never a sense of embarrassment or shame anywhere. Violence is taken for granted in almost every form of activity. “Emergencies” are continually encountered on every hand. Johnson Smith was pre-eminent in the field of providing personal tools of mayhem for the righteous. Nowhere is it hinted that the bad guys could, just as easily as the good, mail in their quarters for the “Silent Defender” or
“Aluminum Gloves.” These case-hardened lightweight knuckledusters are described as “very useful in an emergency.” The buyer was advised to “buy one for each hand.”

On the very next page we are tempted with the “Spring Steel Patent Telescopic Police Club,” “the most reliable arm for self-defense.” It was designed to be telescoped for concealment and could be carried in the hand without being noticed. When an “emergency” arose, this is what happened according to the caption writer: “Your adversary is caught quite unprepared and is landed a stinging blow of a totally unexpected nature, rendering him completely helpless.” Since this little beauty was made of spring steel, the writer was probably understating the case. The warning “Do not mistake this club with weak imitations” is well taken. Many items displayed in the catalog carry similar advice. Apparently there were unscrupulous “imitators” everywhere dealing in spurious exploding cigars, sneezing powder, hand grenades, and horse liniment. Since Johnson Smith always sold the real thing, there was a sense of security which went with a mailed order to Racine, Wisconsin. And there was something to it. In the glory days of the company, mail order flimflams were everywhere. Every magazine was filled with appeals to the unwary. Fifty cents sent off to an important-sounding address in Chicago most often brought nothing in return. Johnson Smith stood like a rock of integrity in the midst of this sneaky landscape.

Johnson Smith also recognized something that only began to appear in more sophisticated advertising circles years later: that advertising must be entertaining in itself, whether or not the customer buys. They knew that if he read the catalog for sheer enjoyment eventually something would grab him. Throughout the catalog, usually at the bottom of the page, little gratis knee-slappers were thrown in.

As feeble as this joke was, it made no attempt to sell. It was just there, like the dozens sprinkled throughout the catalog like raisins in rice pudding.

There was one thing in the catalog more than any other that became identified with the company. It was sent everywhere and probably became as much of a classic in the field of vulgarity as any practical joke ever created. Johnson Smith introduced this zinger to the waiting populace, which immediately embraced it wherever yahoos proliferated and low buffoonery flourished. In fact, it sets the tone of the entire Johnson Smith catalog.

The first time it appeared in the catalog few suspected that it would attain such timeless significance. Even today, one hears references to its unfailing success at achieving hilarity and bringing cringing embarrassment to its victims. There are few alive who have not heard of it, yet many have never actually seen one. Johnson Smith & Co., now of Detroit, Michigan, still carries a full line, and if you’d care to order one, they would be delighted to comply.

“The Whoopee Cushion” says it all. Here is what Johnson Smith has to say about their classic:

The accompanying illustration leaves nothing to the imagination.

Today this catalog is just a very funny coffee-table curiosity, because we are still too close to the life and times it describes. In two hundred years it will be a truly significant historical and social document. It might well be the Rosetta Stone of American culture.

You know what I’d like to do? It suddenly hit me. Some time when I’m coming through here late at night, and there are no cars behind me or ahead of me, I’m going to stop, jump out with a paint brush and a can of black paint, and paint a huge, jagged crack right down the side of that tile wall. The next son of a bitch that comes through is going to flee the tunnel screaming, “The tunnel cracked, the tunnel cracked!” like the mob in Thurber’s story about the day the dam broke in Columbus, Ohio
.

“The tunnel cracked, help, help, flee for your lives!” I wonder why they call practical jokes “practical”? That’s the one thing they aren’t
.

The line moved arthritically. Number 69, in the Charger, had fallen asleep, his head lolling back and forth on the cushions of the Dodge, a sorry crew of Scarlet Knights indeed; shaggy and tired from a weekend in the Eighth Street fleshpots. I studied each of them as we rolled slowly forward: a lumpish lot. Only divine intervention would get them their Rutgers diplomas, from what I could see. But then, you never can tell about God, and the academic world, I mused, remembering what Aunt Florence used to say: