Bungle

Old as the Kansas City Star itself is its reputation for taboos. Its late great founder William Rockhill Nelson 50 years ago kept a list of persons who must not be mentioned in the Star's columns. Moreover, Colonel Nelson being portly, no Star cartoonist dared caricature a fat man. The present-day taboo of the Star and its morning running-mate, the Times, is less explicable, more picturesque. For reasons of his own Publisher George Baker Longan will not permit snakes to be pictured or mentioned.

Untrue is the longstanding legend of the Star office that a cub reporter of 15 years ago was fired when he revealed a snake tattooed on his arm.* But it is true and well-remembered that last year a syndicated comic strip was doctored by the Times to transform a tiny snake into a toad (TIME, Aug. 26).

When Star readers picked up the Sunday comic supplement last fortnight they were more amused than usual. A startling thing had happened. There on the front page, in Cartoonist H. J. Tuthill's "The Bungle Family," was--not one little snake --but a long, fat, wriggling rattlesnake in bright green, yellow & red, in 15 different poses. When Mr. Bungle saw it he shouted in half-inch letters: "A SNAKE!" He then fought and wrestled gruesomely with it through four cartoon panels before it was revealed to be a dummy snake, the practical joke of another character in the strip.

Newsmen asked one another what had happened, could only guess at the answer. Perhaps some unlucky subeditor had blundered. Or perhaps the Star, unable to transform so many big snakes into other animals, decided in editorial conference that it could ill afford to drop out its ace comic, the Bungles, for even one Sunday. Or perhaps Publisher Longan suddenly and completely recovered from his snake-phobia.

*The reporter of the story, Erie Smith, now vice president of American Eagle Aircraft Co. in Kansas City, is so tattooed. But he jovially recalls: "The fact is I was such a damn rotten cub reporter that Longan fired me after three weeks work. The boys on the Star ascribed my dismissal to the snake, but 1 always gave Longan the long end of a long doubt."

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