Old Time Radio at OTRCat!

Monday, March 12, 2007

A historical note:

Small things often stick with you the best.
When I was a child, my pater had a penchant for... odd cars. We had a vineyard, and sold Concord grapes at a roadside stand in the summer, and also sold grapes to a winery. This was back in the waning years of the Highway Road Trip, as I-95 was being built to suck the other asphalt arteries dry. US-9 went right past our house. This was in the early Sixties.

He acquired a used Checker. Yes, the cab Checker. It had a back seat floor area that could sleep four kids. He painted it a weird purplish-grey, and it became his pickup truck...a true pickup being too plebeian for his tastes. In the glove compartment there were several brake-fluid stained postcards of the Saucy and Tasteless variety, the sort procured at roadside stands selling State Spoons, marmalade of indistinct pedigree, and postcards, often of the big-lipped watermelon-eating black folk variety, or the crazed Salesman chasing the negligee-clad Farmer's Daughter.

Charming.

One card had a liver-lipped hobo, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, his bindle resting on his shoulder. He says" Me worry? I get mine from the GIVE-mint.".

Give-mint. I got the mechanics of the wordplay, but puzzled over its precise meaning. Why was this meant to be funny? This was pre-LBJ's Great Society. I was a proto-Bobby Hill, and was much concerned with understanding the clockworks of humor.

My puzzlement etched the word into my mind. He was rather apt, that hobo.
Give-mint.
-------------------

Giraffe
scores a home-run:

Edwards wasn't trying to get the church to look after the poor, he wanted the government to do it. Maybe that is his church.


Give that man a SEE-gar!
That is pellucid.
The Give-mint is Church.
The politicians are the priests and acolytes, and the proffered goodies, the sacraments.

And April 15 is when they pass the plate.

2 comments:

Billiam said...

Good one. I like the story of the Checker. What ever became of it?

The Aardvark said...

It went the way of all flesh.
It was sold.
You know, like in the Sudan.