Not So Clever

In the vast and fascinating wasteland called the Internet, there's an image that surfaced a few years ago and has become---at least in certain circles---perhaps even more gazed upon than when published some seventy-five years  ago.  The image is the dust jacket from a book called How To Win Boys.  The title is enough to amuse a certain crowd, but the image is even more thought provoking.  There are no girls present, only a lone young man fishing.  Yes, he is fishing---and surely a girl that bought or was given the book How To Win Boys was fishing too, but what is a girl to do?  Casually walk up behind him, tap him on the shoulder and brightly say Hi! My name's Vera---what's yours? and continue yammering on until he strangles her with his best fishing line?  Or is best for Vera to wait in presenting herself only after he gets bored with fishing and decides to go skinny dipping?

I'll vote for the latter---if only because the image is so mindful of something I drew almost twenty years ago.  The drawing was part of a long series based solely on ancient and salacious movie titles I had collected.  What else could a boy do with a title like Bachelor Bait except to hook on some old proverb?  My drawing on the envelope probably had as much to do with the content beyond the dust jacket.

As I've written before, I don't draw any more except for vary rare occasions.  For one, I'm not that naive exhibitionist anymore, and I find I have more to say than I can illustrate---but whenever I see the book cover above, I wonder if my drawing would have been the same if the Internet was in 1996 what it is now and I had access to it.  Media wise, I lived a very sheltered life then, and drawing was much a creative outlet as entertainment.

Perhaps I would have started writing earlier if I had ready access to the fact that the book How To Win Boys had nothing to do with girls but the uneasy notion of winning boys over to Sunday School.  I recall being coerced into Sunday School once with Popsicles.  It was all innocent and democratic enough---the boy who brought me along got a Popsicle and so did I, and if I did the same, I'd get another.  Even at six I knew that was bribery and wrong.  Actually, I think it was a girl who brought me---the same one who lived down the street from my Grandma and who's mother once served egg salad on Wonder Bread for lunch.  The memory still makes me gag.

Rochelle Hudson, Bachelor Bait.

A movie poster of Bachelor Bait would not have inspired me---I can't find one.  Released in July 1934 by Radio Pictures, the nominal story involves a man who starts a matchmaking service and gets overly involved with his clients.  Naturally it's a comedy, but having been released a month after the Production Code of thou shall nots was reinforced, it's likely to have been more tedious than naughty.  And it certainly did not involve fishing poles.  However, isn't this a strikingly modern looking image of the leading lady, starlet Rochelle Hudson?

That 'boy' on the cover of How To Win Boys has to be at least sixteen---far to old to be coerced by Popsicles. In light of latter-day revelations of sexual abuse, the whole presentation looks lascivious, if not disturbing.  Which, of course, is why it keeps popping up on the Internet.