Reprieve

Last week Joe Palooka, dumb but lovable comic-strip prize fighter, was wandering across the sands of an African desert to an uncertain fate. In a moment of despair he had joined the French Foreign Legion. Now he thinks he is being sought by the Legion as a deserter. Little does he know what his followers in almost 500 newspapers know: that fortnight ago the President of France pardoned him after receiving a request from President Roosevelt.

When Cartoonist Ham Fisher decided that Joe had got over his grief and should return to the U. S. to defend the heavy weight title, he found no way to get Joe out of his five-year enlistment without staining his spotless character. Presidential intervention was the only hope. So Cartoonist Fisher wrote to Presidential Press Secretary Stephen Tyree Early, got permission to have President Roosevelt solve the dilemma. The President ap peared in the strip on two successive days, first reviving Knobby Walsh, Palooka's manager, after telling him that Joe had deserted and was to be shot; later expressing his interest in Joe's defending the championship.

Syndicate managers last week could think of no previous occasion when an incumbent President had appeared in the funnies. There seemed little likelihood that comic cartoonists would seek the prerogatives of political cartoonists.

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