Home Is the Hoosier

Signs in the store windows of Brook, Ind. (pop. 888) said simply: "Gone to the Funeral." No one had to ask whose. Indiana was burying its great Hoosier humorist, George Ade.

Farmers in their Sunday best filed past the casket, in the front room of Ade's rustic nine-room house. They saw his study, piled high with curios--including a life-sized cardboard figure of his friend, Will Rogers, which had once stood in front of a theatre. The neighbors strolled out past the hickory tree where James Whitcomb Riley used to sit. They sat on folding chairs on the grass to hear funeral speeches. Many had been there before as neighborhood kids, invited to Mr. Ade's 430-acre place for picnics. It was 90 in the sun now. Drawled one old neighbor: "George always did have nice weather for his parties." Said another: "He wouldn't want us to be sad. He'd want us to have a bottle of good, cold beer in this heat."

No Indianian needed to be told that George Ade was one of the Hoosier greats: Riley, Booth Tarkington, the McCutcheons (Cartoonist John T. and Graustark's George Barr), Meredith Nicholson, Lew ("Ben Hur") Wallace. Indianians knew him too as Purdue's No. 1 alumnus, and "Sigma Chi's Modern Patron Saint." He had lived there 30 years as a Hoosier squire, though he wintered in Florida--he said the Midwest had no climate, "just an assortment of unexpected weather.''

Elsewhere in a world whose humor had turned to New Yorker sophistication (which Ade liked), and to the staccato gag-making of the Red Skeltons, Jack Bennys and Bob Hopes (which he disliked), George Ade was an almost forgotten name. Columnist Leonard Lyons reported that Humorist Bob Benchley had to repair to the Stork Club to forget, after hearing a CBS announcer tell about the death of "the Indiana writer, George A-bee."

Modern Aesop. George Ade was born a year after the Civil War; his major period of writing stopped in 1914, when a doctor reminded him that he would be unable to collect royalties in a cemetery. There were plenty of royalties--from his succession of Broadway hits (The College Widow, The Sultan of Sulu), and from his famed Fables in Slang. In the Fables, wit-coated little tales told in capital letters, an American generation found a peculiar charm, for George Ade reworked the goody-goody stories of his time through a screen of Big City sophistication, making them gay but not risque.

He knew his small towns, with their "Four-Flush Drummers from Chicago and St. Louis, smoking Horrid Cigars and talking about the Percentages of the League Teams." Before World War I thousands quoted the fable of the two sisters, upright Louella whose "Features did not seem to know the value of Team Work" and Mae, "short on Intelligence but long on Shape." Louella worked in a hat factory, and every Saturday night the-boss "crowded three dollars on her." Beautiful Mae married a wheat speculator, moved into a Sarcophagus on the Boulevard, hired Louella for $5 as Assistant Cook. (Moral: Industry and Perseverance bring a sure Reward.)

George Ade watched the U.S. forget Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, the great humorists of his youth, and knew that one generation's wit is another generation's banality. He saw his own slang ("the cold grey dawn of the morning after"; "I felt like thirty cents") become shopworn cliches. And he came to believe that the only funny thing he ever wrote was

Early to bed,

Early to rise,

And you will meet very few prominent people.

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