But there’s nothing new under the sun, of course. Don Marquis was laughing at the same sort of people more than a century ago, as the following poem makes clear. It appeared in The Evening Sun on February 14, 1912, and is reprinted here for what is almost certainly the first time since then. This was Don’s first byline in The Evening Sun — barely a month after he joined the newspaper and a year before he started writing his Sun Dial column.

A SOCIAL STUDY

By Don Marquis

I.

Though Papa was worth twenty millions or more
We had never made much of a social uproar;

Though we paid a gent cash just to prove we were kin
To some prominent kings, yet we couldn’t butt in;

It wasn’t because Papa’s manners were bad,
For he didn’t have any, the darling old Dad;

Even ginks who grew up spading pie with a knife
Have got by with the help of a Wad and a wife.

It wasn’t because we were tight with the kale,
For we burnt it like Pittsburghers, bale upon bale;

 But nobody smelt it. And nobody stared.
And nobody wondered. And nobody cared.

Nobody got jealous. And nobody called.
By Hek! Can you wonder that Mamma was galled?

 II.

But now we are in. The Climbers all hug us.
Newspaper photographers frequently mug us.

For Dad hired a press agent, Jonathan Hepp,
Who landed us space. But it cost us our rep.

He sent brother Jim on a joy-riding whirl
That slaughtered four cripples and one little girl;

And I robbed a bank and got pinched with the loot,
And Papa got served in an anti-trust suit.

“Thank heaven,” says Mamma, “some one is invited
“To something at last,” when Dad was indicted.

Sister Jane ran away with the chauffeur, and Mayme
Bought a title; a Duke was wrapped up with the same;

And Mamma she smuggled – determined and proud,
And bound to rise out of the crude, common crowd –

And she shoplifted some – triumphant and pale
But mostly she smuggled; and landed in jail.

And we’re here – though Mamma affirms that it drove her
Insane, we are in! We have jumped through and over.

And the reason we know we are in is because
Whenever we fracture a fresh set of laws

The papers all say “The family stands well;
They are awfully wealthy and socially swell.”

LETTERS WE’D WRITE IF WE DARED TO

DEAR MR. ROCKEFELLER: Enclosed is a stamped, addressed envelope. Won’t you please tell me by return mail how to develop a golf game to the place where it will bring me a million dollars a week without working at anything else?

Thanking you in advance for this information, &c.

*     *     *

DEAR PRESIDENT HARDING: How in the world did writing editorials that read just like a marshmallow tastes ever get you so far ahead in politics? I have been writing bad editorials for many years, and all they ever got me was a raise in salary. What I want is the confidence of the people.

Eagerly waiting anything you may or may not say, I am, &c.

*     *     *

DEAR LORD ASTOR: I heard a lot of chauffeurs and footmen and things in a hash joint up near the Plaza Hotel discussing whether the Astor family is an English family with an American branch, or an American family with an English branch, and I would like to know the truth of this. If you don’t know, or don’t want to tell, of course, there is no harm done; I want to be tactful about the inquiry and make you feel at ease in saying anything you have to say.

I am, your Lordship, as Dr. Johnson would say, your Lordship’s most respectful, most humble and most obedient servant, &c.

*     *     *

DEAR MR. HEARST: Once, a good many years ago, I worked for you, although you couldn’t be expected to know about it, for the city editor found it out first, and told me to get to hell out of there. But there was a fellow working there that used to be a Congressman, the boys said, and you were being nice to him because he used to be a Congressman, and everything. Well, what I want to know is this: After this Mr. Hylan gets through being a Mayor, and everything, will you give him some kind of a job around one of your offices, with not much to do, and have everybody treat him kindly? Because, you know, he was a pretty good friend of yours when he was somebody. You ought to. Just between you and me, there wouldn’t be much to that man if his friends dropped him, and I’m kind of worried about his future.

I am, as ever, one of your most amused spectators, &c., &c.

*     *     *

DEAR DAVID LLOYD GEORGE: Still getting away with it, old cock? Heh! What?

Regarding you, as always, with a mixture of skepticism and admiration, I am, &c.

DON MARQUIS

Darion and Kleinsinger produced the album (Columbia ML 4963) and staged a one-night performance at New York’s Town Hall theater in December 1954 to draw attention to their new work, but it took another two-plus years before the renamed “Shinbone Alley” finally premiered on Broadway as a full-cast musical production. The Broadway show had been partly rewritten by an up-and-coming comic talent, Mel Brooks, and starred Bracken and Eartha Kitt. (Channing was pregnant when the show was being cast.) “Shinbone Alley” ran for only 49 performances, but several songs remained in Kitt’s repertoire for the rest of her life.

Channing and Bracken were reunited as lead vocal talents in the 1971 animated movie “Shinbone Alley.” Visit my Archy & Mehitabel page for more on the production’s enduring appeal, and click on the images above to see larger versions. The photos come from the Masterworks Broadway website, part of Sony Music Entertainment, which also has a link to buy a digital copy of the album from Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes.

In January 1910, Don was settling into his first solid newspaper job in New York City after weeks of frustration. He had arrived from Atlanta barely a month earlier (on Thanksgiving day) and assumed that one of the big New York dailies would instantly recognize his talent, if not his name. He had been a big deal down in Atlanta, after all: associate editor of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus’s Magazine and an up-and-coming poet published in a dozen other magazines with national readership.

But New York was unimpressed. An expected offer from the Herald never came, and a tryout at the Tribune ended bitterly. So did a brief stint at one of the news services there. Desperate for work, Don submitted freelance pieces to all sorts of publications, including a poem poking fun at recent events that appeared in the February 1910 issue of Mother Earth, an anarchist magazine edited by Emma Goldman.

By January, however, things were looking up. A friend had helped Don get a job on the rewrite desk of the New York American, Hearst’s morning daily, and its editors agreed to pay him extra for additional light fare that they ran on a feature page — with Don’s byline.

“The Wooden Indian’s Story” is one of those pieces. Like much of Don’s later work, humor is a veneer on news of the day — in this case revelations of breakfast cereals being routinely adulterated with sawdust filler. The poem ran in the American on January 17, 1910, and was then syndicated to newspapers across the United States via Hearst’s news service. Don’s friends in the South got a chance to read it when the poem appeared January 22, 1910, in the Atlanta Georgian and News (the source of the image here).

Don was on his way, or so he thought. “I began to be a little known in New York,” he wrote years later. “I was making some pretty good money — for me — what with my salary and this extra stuff. I was doing the kind of work I wanted to do; I was getting a pat on the back almost daily from some of the important people on the paper.”

And then fate intervened. Without explanation, he was fired after just a few months on the job.

“I never ask why I have been fired,” he would write. “When I get fired I just go away from there and let it go at that. The result is always, for the moment, so much more immediately interesting to me than the cause.”

Don’s wife, Reina, was also a talented writer, and together their freelance work got them through the next several months. By the end of the year Don was on the staff of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and in January 1912 he moved to the New York Evening Sun. But we’ve gotten ahead of our story. In January 1910, “The Wooden Indian’s Story” carried Don’s hopes and dreams of a new life in New York. The poem has never been published since it first appeared 103 years ago; it’s time for another look.

The Wooden Indian’s Story

Now all you cooks and carpenters, that make our breakfast food,
Give ear unto my tale and hear how I was turned to wood.

’Twas when I left my father’s house, the larger world to see,
I boarded with a dame that fed much breakfast food to me;
At first I nearly starved because I’d never dined that way,
But very soon I felt my oats, and then I took to hay.

At first she used to poor stuff out of boxes on my plate,
Queer cereals mixed with sawdust – and I ate and ate and ate!
And as the mania grew and grew the taste for wood grew more –
I threw away my dough to buy crates of excelsior.

One night I dreamed a dream wherein I was extremely fed,
And when I woke at dawn I found I’d eaten up my bed;
The land-ladie, she had me pinched, but I ate down my jail –
An outcast then, for I had gnawed quite through the social pale.

And still the craving grew and grew – the circus came to town,
And I attended with my teeth and ate the benches down;
I got to eating billboards, tomato cans and coats;
I boarded on the sidewalks and my dearest friends were goats.

A gradual change came over me, as you’d suspect it would,
And I became transformed to this – completely changed to wood;
They put a wooden tomahawk into my outstretched hand,
And set me fore an Indian sign before a se-gar stand.

This is the gruesome, wailsome tale how I was changed to wood
By careless cooks and carpenters that make our breakfast food.

(Editor’s note: The image from the Atlanta Georgian and News reveals several typographical errors in the syndicated version, beginning with the very first word. In the original version, published in the American, the first word is “Now,” not “Wow.” Proof that typos have long haunted newspaper copy!)

The following poem is one of those forgotten gems. It’s from one of Don’s earliest columns in the New York Evening Sun – before the column got its name, “The Sun Dial,” and even before Don was given a byline. It has never been directly attributed to him until now.

Don was hired at the Evening Sun in January 1912 as a feature page editor, but he quickly moved to the editorial page. Besides writing full-length editorials he also contributed filler material, much of it in the form of single paragraphs under a standing headline, “Notes,” and then “Notes and Comment.”

By August 1912 “Notes and Comment” had been given a permanent home on the right side of the editorial page, and on Sept. 23, 1912, at the top of the column was a poem titled “The Spartan Oyster.” Its preposterous theme and clever wordplay identify the poem as Don’s handiwork, and it was precisely this sort of inspired lunacy that made his readers – and editors – stop and take notice. Don’s byline was added to the column on April 4, 1913, and it was renamed “The Sun Dial” three days later. The rest, as they say, is history.

“The Spartan Oyster”

Dr. Wiley says that the oyster cannot tell the pain it suffers when it is served on the half shell. – News Item.

– – –

The dogfish bark and whimper,
The Catfish mew and whine,
But the oyster suffers in silence
That man in peace may dine;
There are no roistering oysters,
They are Spartan from their birth;
There are no boisterous oysters,
Whether in grief or mirth!

The peanut screams in the roaster,
The popcorn bursts with a cry,
And the blood of the stabbed tomatoes
Flows red as they writhe and die;
And when the cloistered oysters
Are plucked from their quiet cells
Grief makes ’em moister oysters,
But never an oyster yells!

– – –

And indeed the whole clam family has a reputation for reticence.