[Ads-l] Famous Pogo Quote

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Great find, Fred. I attempted a variety of searches for the quotation
in NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com, but I only found additional
instances of the June 24, 1950 Pogo comic strip in: Syracuse Herald
Journal, Syracuse, New York; Madison Wisconsin State Journal, Madison,
Wisconsin; Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi.

The quality of the text created by OCR (optical character recognition)
for Pogo is terrible. See the example below. (A problem for many comic
strips.)

A search in Google Books shows a match in the following collection.
(GAT found the strip in another collection):

Year: 1951
Book: Pogo
Author: Walt Kelly
Quote Page 122
Database: Google Books Snippet match; data may be inaccurate and
should be verified with hardcopy

[Begin low quality OCR text]
... 4^W ,i UNVE&TI6ATORS?/ BIG OL' TRIAL-, PON'T TAKB UFE > 6O
6ERIOUS, SON — IT AIN'T NOHOW PERMANENT. H?Y— FETCH soMe BRANCH WATER/
I 6ONE BE ALBERTS LAWYER IN THE TRIAL, CHURCHY,- AN'. 122.
[End low quality OCR text]

The garbled text above reveals enough to indicate that the comic strip
in the book matches the June 24, 1950 comic strip.

Garson


On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 10:48 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> When I was a boy, Albert the Alligator was one of my role models.  I
> thought that he was an alligator with savoir faire.
>
> As a result, I have bought Pogo by Walt Kelly: Through the Wild Blue
> Yonder.  The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, volume 1.  The quotation is
> there, on p. 131, in a strip dated 6-24 [1950]  It's spoken by Porkypine.
> The strip began in May 1949, so there's only a narrow window for an earlier
> appearance.  In the interest of the advancement of knowledge, I will reread
> the earlier strips.
>
> GAT
>
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 10:13 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> One of the best-known quotations from the comic strip "Pogo" was "Don't
>> take life so serious, son -- it ain't nohow permanent."  I am trying to
>> trace the date of the first "Pogo" installment to include this quote.  When
>> I search Newspapers.com, I come up with an appearance of these words in the
>> Long Beach Independent, June 24, 1950.  Can anyone confirm or disconfirm
>> whether that was the first appearance?
>>
>>
>> Fred Shapiro
>>
>> ________________________________
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998.
>
> But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
> your lowly tomb. . .
> L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112
>
> The Trump of Doom -- affectionately (of course) known as The Dunghill
> Toadstool.
> (Here's a picture of one.)
> http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/james-gillray/an-excrescence---a-fungus-alias-a-toadstool-upon-a-dunghill/3851
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org