Pidgin Ad

English-speaking residents of Honolulu and adjacent Pacific centres lately marveled, puzzled, then chuckled over an advertisement in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (evening: circulation, 16,000). On other pages were the conventional displays prescribed by U. S. copy-artists -- tobacco broadsides, department store revelations, bank announcements. But up in the corner of one page was the advertisement of Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker, who was either the shrewdest of merchants or blessed with the good offices of the most quick-witted of advertising advisers. Beside a delicate spider-scrabble of Japanese characters stood Musa-Shiya himself, fretted forth in blackest ink with his bare toes tweaking at each other through their sandal-thongs, his best kimono hanging in polite folds and his two hands clasped solicitously beneath an amiable squint-eyed grin. MUSA-SHIYA the SHIRTMAKER (Also kimono make & Dry good sell) obviously aimed to please. "This time," said his message, "I was importent onnounuce for all lady LADY NECKTIE CREEP DE CHINE "All color and other one fancy patten." If Musa-Shiya did not, like Edward S. ("Playboy") Jordan, U. S. automobile manufacturer,* insist upon writing his own copy, how understanding a person must his interpreter have been!

"Well, if you saw this neckties you came right away purchase me. Sappose no more necktie how did you had a stylish this time I say so. All right. "How Finding "Until finding Musa-Shiya Shap please King Street go for River. Before arrived then Fish Market came. Do not paused. Advance away for River but not until River. Then you saw nice sign say so Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker 179. That was the places my shop. Thanks you entered insides purchase me this time." Cosmopolites had seen the same sort of thing done by fawning Frenchmen in foreign lands--the employment of pidgin-English to disarm prospective customers--but Musa-Shiya's stroke outdid them all. Students of advertising waited to see what alert U. S. agency would first seize upon the idea to introduce, say, Turkish tobaccos, Italian spaghetti, Swedish locomotives ("Ay bane one strong feller"), Negress pancake flour ("Hump yo'se'f, boy! Pick up yo' knife an' fo'k!") or Jewish haberdashery ("Oy yoy! Soch a fine goo-ods!")

Nast Coup

Editors and publishers of the women's press, (Harper's Bazar, Good Housekeeping, Delineator, McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, etc.) bit their nails and stamped their feet. Again they had been done in by Conde* Nast, sleek publisher of Vogue. Especially must it have pained Vogue's glossy rival, Harper's Bazar (a Hearst product), to learn that Mr. Nast, than whose technique for commingling business with social activities nothing smoother was ever evolved, was to be the first lecturer in a course on present-day fashions in the fine arts department of New York University, a course sponsored by Manhattan society matrons including Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Mrs. August Belmont, Mrs. Reginald de Koven, Mrs. Murray Crane, and having for its classroom, at fashionable three o'clock on Thursdays, the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Editress Edna Woolman Chase and Miss Caroline Duer of the Vogue staff were announced as assistant lecturers, making it clearer than ever that of all fashion publications, the Nastian was held pre-eminent by New York University authorities. Problems and topics to be treated by Publisher Nast and his assistants, with demonstrations by suitable models: the heavy woman, the elderly woman, good taste in dress, buying and selling fashions, the sartorial education of the young, origins of men's fashions.

Stooping Patrician

"William Roedel, elevator man at the Capitol Theatre, is five feet, six inches tall, and weighs 256 pounds. He is something of a landmark in the theatrical district. His passengers sometimes have to bend themselves into the shape of a crescent--" More than one newspaper reader stopped reading when he got that far and examined the headband of his newspaper to see if he had not picked up the informal New York World by mistake. But no, it was indeed the New York Times. Strange! Something certainly had come over that fatherly, dignified compendium, something that began perhaps, when the Times cracked its joke, amazing because so unexpected, about Fannie Brice's nose three years ago/- something that was again evident when, last summer, the Times departed from its rule against "features" and began printing the labored wit of Funnyman Will Rogers (TIME, Aug. 16). The Times, patrician of the press, was stooping to the popular.

Fatman Roedel was, it seemed, an employe of reputation as substantial as his physique. Even when patrons of the theatre complained that he crowded them in his elevator, he was retained for his faithfulness. And then had come forgers, offering him $15,000 to "look the other way" while they entered an office in the theatre building and drew bogus checks. Mr. Roedel's duplicity had been discovered through his girl friend, aged 19, whose heart he had won with free cinema tickets and whom he had taken to live with him in a $325-per-month Fifth Avenue apartment in his sudden, ill-got prosperity. She had given him away by bragging to an old friend of Mr. Roedel's, the box office man of another theatre, about the new ice-making machine in her $325 apartment.

* Creator of a sport roadster, allegedly for his daughter, and then of advertising copy to sell it: "I am the Playboy. I am the companion of people who know where they are going. It is a great satisfaction to associate with those who possess good judgment and good taste--those who know what it means to own a wonderful horse--those fortunate ones who can have whatever they want. ... A wonderful horse, a gorgeous day and all the world in tune--a tang in the air--exhilaration-- life in its ecstasy."

*Pronounced "cawn-day".

/= When Miss Brice was in Atlantic City, N. J., having her olfactory organ straightened by plastic surgery. Wisecracked the Times: "Fannie Brice has had her nose condemned and torn down, and is about to erect a high-class modern structure on the site."