South Side High School - Totem Yearbook (Fort Wayne, IN)

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THE TOTEM Right: The approach from the east to the north entrance of South Side gives a glimpse of dignity and beauty. happy days. Left: As soon as spring came, scenes like this could com- monly be observed. Happy and carefree pupils sought out their friends at the close of school. High school days are Left: For many years Miss Emma Shoup has maintained one of the finest, if not the most de- tailed, school libraries in Fort Wayne. Students have an extra- ordinary opportunity in being able to secure the aid of such a complete library where they may find almost at their finger tips the knowledge of the world.

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THE TOTEM The Ccmtoricm Age By DICK STORR The following is ayverbatim report of a lecture de- livered by Professor Bobbie Stonie, teacher of the lit- erary classics, concerning the early classic writers whose works are represented in Perkins and Sinishls Anthology of Early Classic Writings. Professor Stonie delivered this lecture on April 5, 5933: At- tention, please. Today, we are assembled to discuss the writers and their works of the first age of literature concerning which we haven't any definite informationg but, before we discuss these known writers, it might be well to go back a little farther into prehistoric lit- erary ages to examine certain mythical writers who are supposed to be the fore-runners of the writers whom we are to discuss today. Macbeth is generally conceded to be the foremost of these mythical writers, but some upstart students are attempting to prove without any basis for opinion that Macbeth was a poem and not a writer. However, wc may ignore these shallow fellows and go on to another writer of a later period named Vergilius Mil- tonius Homer, a poet who wrote an epic of the Med- iterrean races. He must have had quite a bit of skill and a great insight into human nature for his only existant verse is Dux femina factin, which is thought to mean a woman was the leader of the enterprise. Now we come to the most interesting of these myth- ical writers, Canticle, after whom a certain type of lyric poetry was named. Canticle is not interesting because of his works but because he bore the early form of the family name of the greatest writer of the first recorded age of literary history. His descendant was the famous Eddie Cantor. 'QBefore we go sublime writer, it thoroughly crush heard. It is the write his sublime farther in our Rdiscoarsen of this is best that we bring to light and a theory about which you have all theory that Eddie Cantor did not works but that a man by the name of Will Durant, sometimes confused with an obscure scholar, Jimmy Durante, wrote them. The disciples of this theory say that a man of Cantor's education could not have had such insight into human feelings, but they forget that book-learning is not the only key to wisdom. Then these reprobates aver that they who follow this heinous teaching have found a cer- tain diagram in Cantor's signature which spells Dur- ant, but they can not prove this thing. They also assert that the supposed portraits of Cantor are in reality those of Durant. However, as the proof of these base hallucinations is so very weak, let us con- cur with the generally conceded and well supported truth that Cantor was the real author of the Cantor- 115 ian works. These works of Cantor are masterpieces of what is termed the stage or radio skit. In the skit, one person fat least, so the scholars thinkj asked questions or did things that made it possible for the comedian, as these writers were called, to make a witty remark. As is easily seen, the originals of these skits were meant to be heard and not read, but soon after their presentation, they were printed in book form and sold. As a note for bibliophiles, may I say that there are only ten complete Hrst folio Cantors in existence, one copy of which is in the Library of Congress. Now let us examine an example of Cantor's works and try to see wherein he is a master. The following passage from one of Cantorys skits was presented in 1933 when Cantor was under the protection of Chase and Sanborn, who have become famous as patrons of the arts due to their connection with Cantor: Eddie, you look sad.'7 Cantor: I am sad, Jimmief, Uimmie was his companion.j Why are you sad, Eddie. Cantor: My uncle, Isadore Kepwitz, is dead. Dead? Cantor: Yes, he committed suicide. QfWhy?Y7 -pw Cantor: Well, fsobsl he bought himself a 1000- piece jigsaw puzzle and when he got it together in two weeks found that it was a picture of Hitler. In order that you may comprehend this choice passage, I will give you a few notes. A jigsaw puzzle was a primitive game in which the player had to put together a broken picture. Hitler was the special god of jigsaw puzzles, especially broken maps of Europe, and whenever a player got his picture, he had to put it together twice instead of once. Therefore, Eddie Cantor's uncle committed suicide to avoid putting the picture together a second time. Some students, es- pecially Eggers, insist that Hitler was the God of Suicide, but that makes little difference. Now that we comprehend what the skit meant by this passage, we can see wherein his genius lies. Note the forceful simplicity and the way in which he leads up to the final stage before the curtain is drawn and the world sees the glowing splendor of this beautiful example of skiticism. Jimmie, his companion, does not say enough to break the concentration of the listener or the reader. Lastly, let us attempt to catch a glimpse of the sublime power of this skit. It is an exalting blow at great numbers. In Cantor's time, there was too much

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THE TOTEM of everything. There were too many depressions, too many periods of prosperity, too many laws. But it is useless to name everything. flu was not until the Crash of 3000 that numbers were reduced.j Cantor, the holy prophet, saw the danger of too- manynessg so he professed to be a lower numberist and preached the doctrine of the cutdownistic school. Tn this skit he tells that the jigsaw puzzle had 1000 pieces, a great number, and he infers that two weeks was too many days for a puzzle. He shows that catastrophe was the result of this intemperance in numbers. I-le infers that, if the puzzle had had fewer pieces and therefore larger pieces, his uncle would have seen whose picture it was and never have started and thus escaped the penalty of death. As a foot- note, let me say that it is due to the need of the appli- cation of Cantor's doctrine today, that he is consid- ered a living force at this very hour. Cantor's contemporaries are Munchausen, Wynn, Rogers, and Amos in' Andy. These men, although less forceful and prolific than Cantor, have written much good stuff and have at times hit just as true notes as Cantor himself. They all used the skit or the column fan early form of written skitj as a medium for their ideas concerning the problems of the day. They dealt with the German problem flVlunchausenl, the fire prevention problem fwynnl, the live stock situation lRogersj, and the race dilemma fAmos 'ni Andyl. Cantor, the contemporaries we have men- tioned, and Lewis and Shaw, two less read authors, make up the best of the writers of the Cantorian Age. The Strange Case of R. Nelson Snider I shrink in dread from the awful task which I am now called upon to perform. But my duty stands be- fore me, and I will not waver from the path of true justice. So on with the hideous work, and may heaven forgive me for what I am about to record. Since this annual is the chronicle of the past year, it is only fair to report herein the dark events as well as the happy. Like the little bird , it sees all and must tell all.-aw, go on with the story. There was but one occurrence during the past year which marred the otherwise happy course of events, and, fortunately, this has been kept a secret. I refer to the deplorable affair in the fall of last year, in which our unhappy principal, R. Nelson Snider, be- came implicated. As the details in this unusual case are not very widely known, T will give a history of it. During the basketball season last December, when the Booster Club was decorating the gym for the games, they were faced with a mystery to solve. They decorate the gym in the afternoon before a and when they returned that evening, they would game, would invariably find that the streamers of colored paper had been stripped from the posts and dumped in neat little piles in odd places around the school. The fiend who perpetrated these insane atrocities was clever enough to leave no trace of his identity on any of his work. The strange note in the whole affair was the peculiar selection of places which the vandal chose to deposit his spoils. He might take a notion to stuff them in the pipes of a drinking fountain only to have them suddenly pop loose in the face of an unwary teacher, releasing a month's accumulation of water. Or on other occasions the paper was located among the strings of the piano in the Greeley Room after an unusually tinny piano recital. One day Mrs. Larimore was besieged with a number of compliments that the noodles in the soup were more tender than usual, other people commented on the novelty of hav- ing noodles of different colors. There are still some of those unfortunates who occasionally cough up a paper wad after an unusually strong drink. The climax of these atrocities, however, came when Mr. Flint was found behind some file cases in the ofiice after a search of a week and a half. The poor man had been bound and gagged with the ribbons. In fact, so much paper had been stuffed into his mouth for so long a time that he has not been able to close his jaws since, thus accounting for that hungry appearance which some people have noticed. A reward of a dollar in cash was offered for the culprit dead or alive. A number of unfortunate stu- dents and teachers were killed because of this offer, but none of them really fitted the case. When Mr. Abbett and the school board came out one evening to investigate the scene of the crime, they mysterious- ly disappeared, only to be found the next day locked in the Totem office, suffocated by the lethal fumes of rubber cement. One after another the greatest detec- tives in the country had taken over the case, and each one had received the same ominous warning, a small piece of colored paper torn in the form of a skull. Twice the warning was unheeded, and on both occa- sions the bodies of the detectives were fished from the St. lVlary's River the following morning. T need not go into the details of the discovery of the culprit, for that part is well known. You have read in The Times Jim Savageas remarkable serial telling how the criminal was tracked down by Miss Ley, who noticed that bit by bit her colored paper was disappearing fthe maniac had formed a habit for the stuffj and who finally set a trap for him just in- side the door of the art room. You will remember that 116