It was 100 years ago, on March 20, 1916, that Don Marquis added a fanciful bit of filler material to his daily newspaper column in The Evening Sun. He claimed that a cockroach had crawled onto his typewriter the night before and left a message by diving on the keys, one at a time. Many more messages would follow from the labors of Archy the cockroach, including wild tales of a neighborhood alley cat, Mehitabel. It was brilliant stuff, and it’s still with us today. Let’s celebrate!

Plans in New York City include performances of actor Gale McNeeley’s one-man show, “Archy and Mehitabel”; a walking tour of New York’s old Newspaper Row on Sunday, March 27; and a special gathering of Marquis fans on the evening of Tuesday, March 29, at Jimmy’s No. 43, a bar/restaurant in the East Village, where tales will be told, Archy poems will be sung, and toasts will be raised to Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel.

Further events and exhibits will take place throughout 2016, all under the banner of archyFest! See below for event details:

GALE MCNEELEY’S ‘ARCHY AND MEHITABEL’

Gale has entertained audiences across the country with his “Archy and Mehitabel” show and is coming to New York from his home in Southern California. He will perform Sunday, March 20, at the West Hempstead Public Library on Long Island; Wednesday, March 23, at the Jericho Public Library on Long Island; Thursday, March 24, at the North Shore Public Library on Long Island;
Monday, March 28, at the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Library; and Saturday, April 2, at the Forest Hills Library in Queens.

For more information, visit Gale’s website at www.galemcneeley.com.

DON MARQUIS WALKING TOUR

Please join us for a walking tour of Don Marquis’s old haunts along New York’s Newspaper Row on Sunday, March 27. Newspaper Row includes Park Row and the area surrounding New York City Hall in Lower Manhattan. We will visit the sites of the old Sun and New York Tribune offices on Nassau Street; the building where Don created Archy and Mehitabel; the former New York Times building, where Don was a regular at the tavern in the basement; and the last home of The Sun, which is still flanked by an ancient brass clock and a thermometer bearing the Sun motto, “It Shines for All.”

The walk (very easy) starts at noon and will take about an hour, and it will end with a drink and a toast to Don at a nearby tavern. Please meet at the Benjamin Franklin statue at the intersection of Park Row and Nassau and Spruce streets. The walk will be led by John Batteiger, creator of the DonMarquis.com website and the Don Marquis page on Facebook. There is no charge for the walk, but Batteiger won’t complain if you insist on tipping him. 

Reservations are encouraged. Please send email to johnbatt@me.com.

ARCHY’S 100TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

We have reserved the back room at Jimmy’s No. 43 on the evening of Tuesday, March 29. The address is 43 East 7th Street (downstairs), between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, down the street from McSorely’s Old Ale House. We will gather in the bar area after 8 p.m. and move into the back room at 9. 

Your host, John Batteiger, has been digging up arcane facts about Don Marquis and Archy and Mehitabel for 20 years, and he will do his best to keep his fascinating and laugh-filled anecdotes as brief as possible (no promises!). With any luck he will have laryngitis, and we can quickly move along to snippets of Gale McNeeley’s “Archy and Mehitabel” show and a selection of Archy poems and sketches performed by Kathy Biehl and Seth Sheldon, stars in the upcoming New York production of the Marx Brothers musical “I’ll Say She Is.”

Did you say “party favors”? Sure, we’ll have some! And good times, too. Please join us! There will be no cover charge for the event, but we will pass around a hat if all goes well. There is a cash bar, and Jimmy’s offers a full restaurant menu. Reservations are not required, but they are requested so we can get a ballpark head count. Send email to John Batteiger at johnbatt@me.com. When all else fails, call him at 415-515-6174.

As Mehitabel says, “Cheerio my dearios!”

If you will be in New York City on Wednesday, July 29, please join us for dinner and drinks to celebrate Don Marquis’ 137th birthday. 

A few fans will be gathering that evening to talk, relax and tell stories about Don and his crowd. If someone feels the urge to channel Archy and recite some poetry (nothing too serious, of course), that’s fine, too! 

A location hasn’t been determined yet, but perhaps a tavern with a dining room near City Hall (and the former homes of The Sun and the Tribune), or maybe Keen’s Steakhouse, further uptown, where Don’s co-workers toasted him in 1922, when he left The Sun to join the Tribune staff.

If you’re interested in attending, send a note to john@donmarquis.com. And if you’re in Boston a few days beforehand, some folks plan to be there July 25-26 to see the Blunderwood typewriter (see below) on display in the Rose Kennedy Greenway. An early birthday toast might be in order.

Another forgotten bit of silliness:

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
By Don Marquis
New York American, January 17, 1910

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.”)