Up an Alley to a Wild Place
The Dill Pickle club in Chicago is where visitors from the country and New York are taken to have shivers and shocks. Most of Chicago’s best people go there, and all of its worst people.
Lecturers (who once were professors of comparative ethics at the University of Copenhagen or Bayreuth, and are now deans of lunchrooms or prominent night watchmen) deftly set aside the laws of gravitation and attraction, and show where Newton and Galileo were wrong. The drama is dragged upward by the hair of its head, and a successful evening at the club is measured by the number of women who leave before the meeting is half over.
To get to the Dill Pickle, you go through a tight passageway (too narrow for a fat secret service man to get through) into a blind alley, and continue westward till you come to a garbage can. Right alongside this can is the doorway into the club.
One Saturday night a Chicago detective was showing a friend from Kansas City all the tough places in town. Finally, they came in sight of the Dill Pickle Club, where an affinity masquerade was effervescing. The ex-garage in which the club is housed was brilliantly lighted; clouds of cigaret smoke poured from the windows, and the strains of an orchestra almost in tune cleft the night air.
“There’s one wild place, Jake,” said the detective.
“Tough, eh?” responded the visitor.
“You said it. Every guy that goes into that hall is searched for concealed weapons—and if they find a guy who ain’t got any concealed weapons, they give him some.” John Nicholas Beffel.
Popular Mechanics cover (1904)
Cartoons Magazine
, published monthly beginning in 1912 at 6 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, specialized in social and political cartoons wrapped with editorial from around the world. Poems, essays and jokes (as the above excerpt illustrates) framed the cartoons, but the whole point of the magazine was to feature cartoonists. Chicago Tribunecartoonists John T. McCutcheon and Clare Briggs were frequent contributors. Editor Henry Haven Windsor (1859-1924) was also the founder and first editor of Popular Mechanics Magazine.
I have a much read copy of the September 1915 issue if Cartoons Magazine, the cover was done by William Donahey of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The cover has a man in a stove top hat sinking in a field of wheat saying, “Good Night!” Billion Bushel Wheat Crop.
Is it worth anything? If so how would I go about selling it?
John,
Unfortunately, I have no idea of its worth. That is a question for a dealer in ephemera. Good luck! It sounds great!