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Tag Archives: time magazine
don’t call me george
The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George” was a lighthearted association with a useful, if incidental, cause. Most railway porters were black, and many passengers called them all George, following the racist custom of naming slaves after their masters. (George Pullman ran the company that made the cars, so the porters were regarded as his servants.)
Strangely, the prevention society was founded not by the black porters, but by white railway employees who were actually named George. Apparently they were either annoyed by the tradition or thought that such a society would be a good joke.
People did think it was funny, or at least inoffensive. At its peak, the society had 31,000 members, including King George V of the United Kingdom, Babe Ruth (whose given name was George), and French politician Georges Clemenceau.
I found some letters from 1937 to Time magazine in reference to an article they ran on the aforementioned Society. I wonder whatever happened to John from Detroit.
Letters, Jan. 11, 1937
Double Interest Sirs:
Your article, TIME, Dec. 7, under People interests me doubly.
Whether porters become “Porter” or merely cease being “George,” I remain
GEORGE PORTER
Wallingford, Conn. Georges v. Electromaster
Sirs: Your issue of Dec. 7 failed to mention that the S. P. C. P. G.* is a trifle more than a “joke,” that it does everything in its power to help “George,” that its last known public appearance was in the U. S. Patent Office in July 1930. Electromaster, Inc., manufacturing cleaning and scouring powder, intended to market the product under the trade-mark of “Let George Do It” and for that purpose filed a trade-mark application. Opposition #10833 was filed by the Society. The Notice of Opposition recites that the society is “unincorporated under the laws of all States and having an office and place of business at in West Monroe St., Chicago, Illinois, not to mention the B. & O., the D. L. & W., the Santa Fe and points west.” Four grounds for opposition are set forth; the second goes as follows: “The mark which we are opposing comprises the hateful admonition, ‘Let George Do It’.
Now it is doubtless true that the Georges have performed most of the useful work of the world since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, but the facile and facetious manner in which responsibility is delegated to us by Tom, Dick and Harry and others too lazy and too incompetent to assume it themselves is decidedly irksome to us Georges. . . . Besides, why should George do it?” . . .
Respondent denies that the trade-mark ‘Let George Do It’ is a hateful admonition; and further denies that the Georges have performed most of the work of the world, or any material part thereof, or that any of it has been of any value to humanity, and demands strict proof thereof. Further answering, Respondent is not concerned, or in any manner interested, excited, pleased or horrified regarding the responsibilities delegated to the Georges by Tom, Dick and Harry, or any others, or that such responsibilities are decidedly irksome to the said Georges, because they have a way of avoiding the seriousness thereof. Besides, why shouldn’t George do it? …
HENRY GOLDHOR
Newark, N. J.
Sirs: Your issue of TIME dated Dec. 7, p. 80, re The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George.” I wonder how many of your readers know of an organization whose purpose it is to discourage the use of a distinguished Christian name to designate an endroit which invites not even the slightest thought of anything distinguished; I have reference to “The Society for the Prevention of Calling Lavatories John.” The Society is of Detroit origin and confine, but it may be that mention of its existence in TIME will prompt the organization of companion chapters in other centers—perhaps even a national unit.
JOHN W. MACNEV
President
“Society for the Prevention of Calling Lavatories John” Detroit, Mich.
Read more:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757243-3,00.html#ixzz0YRZS3SJZ
little hans
I love this story! I did a google search hoping to find big Hans, but came up empty handed. I wonder how the rest of his school years went….
Little Hans
In Munich one morning last week, a little boy named Hans Koegel appeared at the doorway of the Schule in der Blu-menstrasse and nervously entered. Like other children arriving for the first day of school, he clung tightly to his mother, and it was not for several awkward moments that he finally relaxed enough to smile tentatively at his classmates. But even after he did so, his mother and teacher continued to watch him closely.
For several months, parents and teachers all over West Germany have been worried about children like Hans. He is a mulatto, one of some 3,000 who are starting to school for the first time. Almost all are the children of Negro G.I.s, and most are illegitimate. In a nation that still remembers the preachments of Hitler’s Master Race, they were expected to present something of a problem.
Last week, school principals waited worriedly for reports of discrimination or childish cruelty. But as the first days passed, there was only silence. Not one child was singled out for teasing because of his color; not one teacher refused to work in mixed classes; not one Nordic mother took her own child out of school in protest.
As for little Hans, he had become something of a tease himself. His victim: a young towhead by the name of Tűrauf, which Hans thinks is howlingly funny. Tűrauf means “Open the door.”
segregation remembered in 1976
I really enjoyed reading this “old” time magazine article. It’s from the year of my birth, so it’s not that old. Right? In one of my latest youtube videos I interviewed a biracial woman from West Virginia and we spoke of how some southern whites say they are “proud to be white”, but we think they really mean that they are “proud to not be black”. The Washington Redskins part of this article brought that conversation to mind.
Segregation Remembered
My father’s father was born a slave somewhere near Savannah, Ga. My mother’s father was the son of a white undertaker and his mulatto concubine in a small town in North Carolina.
Like many other blacks, my parents migrated North to find education and better opportunities. My father went to Howard University medical school, and my mother went to Howard’s nursing school. My parents wanted to shelter their children from segregation and all its belittling aspects, so they settled in Washington, which turned out to be as segregated a city as one could find.
In the 1950s, a clerk in a department store refused to let me sip from a water fountain, despite my mother’s plea that “he’s just a little boy.” Later, when my family got its first television set, I was entranced by the ads for Glen Echo amusement park. My mother couldn’t really explain why she couldn’t take me there. The reason, of course, was that Glen Echo did not admit blacks. Nor did many restaurants, movie theaters and other public facilities.
My deepest realization of what the Old South was really like came in about 1962, when my father, brother, a friend and I drove South to my grandmother’s house in Stuart, Fla. On the way we were denied a room in a Holiday Inn in Savannah, and wound up sleeping in a “rooming house” (read whorehouse) that hadn’t had an overnight guest in years. In Stuart, my father went into a hardware store to buy a Thermos bottle. The white clerk asked my dad, a distinguished professor of surgery at least 20 years his senior, “What you want, boy?” My father struggled to maintain his dignity as he told the clerk what he wanted. I felt in my gut, for the first time, how hard it had been for black men to preserve their self-respect under a rigid system of white supremacy.
Because of the civil rights movement, I will never have to explain to my four-year-old son that he can’t go to an amusement park or swim in a public swimming pool just because he is black. He will never see me diminish in his eyes because some white man can lord it over me and make me seem like a child.
White Southerners are now taking a great deal of pride in the region’s rapid adjustment to the post-civil rights era. The fact is that every change was resisted, every improvement fought, every overture turned back. Though many Southerners were made uneasy by the oppressive pattern of Southern race relations, most did little or nothing to change it. Not even Jimmy Carter resigned from his church when it voted to exclude blacks. Without unrelenting pressure from blacks and the Federal Government, white Southerners would never have changed. Southern behavior has changed, but the hearts, for the most part, are probably just the same.
White Southerners tend to have a passion for lost causes. The Washington Redskins, for example, were the South’s “adopted” pro football team. They remained lily-white, and they retained their Southern constituency, even though they were consistent losers. My dad and I used to go to Redskins games just to cheer when Jim Brown, Bobby Mitchell and other black stars “integrated” the Redskins’ goal line. It was great. The Redskins’ ownership would rather be white than winners.
Then the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, died, and Lawyer Edward Bennett Williams took over. Williams realized that he was in a new day, and the Redskins began to get black players. Within a few years, they became winners. Now everybody loves them.
Much the same thing has happened to the South. It has become a region of winners. Blacks are playing on the team. Points are going on the Scoreboard. But is the change permanent?
My own guess is that the good impulses will win out. The Southern white man, even at his most bigoted, always had some noble impulses: loyalty, independence, courage. Martin Luther King spoke of the “redemptive power” of nonviolent love, and his followers nodded amen. They believed white Southerners could be redeemed. And if they thought that, after 350 years of oppression, who am I to quarrel?
jalopies
I’ve never heard this one before…..
Half Black Geese
Monday, Jun. 28, 1937
Sirs:
Relative your article TIME, June 7 on the word “jalopy” and Webster R. Kent’s comments (TIME, June 21), I think you are both in error. Approximately ten years ago while in a Los Angeles café with the late Herbert Somborn, ex-husband of Gloria Swanson, approximately eight mulatto dancing girls appeared. Mr. Somborn exclaimed: “What beautiful jalopies!” Pressing him for information, he stated that a jalopy was anything half black and that the word originated in a certain part of Africa, where plurals are unknown, and a jalopy is a African half black geese.
mulatto diaries 