Forgotten pundits
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- June
- 17
My youngest asked me for help with an English paper the other day. She needed to find someone who wrote in a regional voice, but they had to have done their writing between, say, 1890 and 1918.
My first thought was to drag out a book about/by Kin Hubbard, because Old Abe certainly spoke in dialect. Unfortunately, Hubbard — whose name is actually Frank McKinney Hubbard — did much of his more famous work in the 1920s and ‘30s.
We settled on Margaret Penrose, simply because my stack of Dorothy Dales was readily accessible and the books were written in the early 1900s. But I had gotten out my Kin Hubbard book and found myself flipping through the pages and chortling.
Few people know Kin Hubbard these days. He wrote and drew for the Indianapolis News initially in 1891, but more successfully at the Sun from about 1899 to 1901, and the News (again) from about 1901 until his death. He was an Ohioan born and bred, the son of a newspaper editor father, and he spent some time at art school before drifting into newspapers first as an artist and then as a columnist.
He specialized in political satire, much of it out of the mouth of Abe Martin (who first saw print in 1904), a bewhiskered and grizzled denizen of Brown County, Indiana.
You may not know Old Abe, but you’ve probably heard what he had to say, including this: “When a fellow says, “It ain’t the money but the principle of the thing,” it’s the money.”
I thought of Hubbard again this week, after a comment from a reader who was pleased to have seen Don Marquis and archy and mehitabel appear in this blog. There were brilliant writers whose names these days are unknown. I’d like, occasionally, to bring their writing back to view.
So here are some of Kin Hubbard’s more telling quotes, found through a Google search:
“There’s no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn’t tell you about it?”
“We would all like to vote for the best man, but he is never a candidate.”
“Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.”
“Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he’s overcharging you.”
“Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.”
“Some folks can look so busy doing nothing that they seem indispensible.”
“The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.”
“It ain’t a bad plan to keep still occasionally even when you know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.”
“Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.”
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on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 10:04 am by Randi Weiner.
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Not forgotten, just sort of moved to the end of the bookshelf. Thanks for moving Hubbard to the front. He is an Indiana favorite. Ball State University has a literature project that talks lots about Kin (and other luminaries) at http://www.bsu.edu/ourlandourliterature/
Have fun inspiring school projects.