Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on ‘The Whimper of the Sea-Gull’)

"Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;
He weeps because he's not an ea-gull.
Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,
Could you explain it to your she-gull?”—American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “The Sea-Gull,” in On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds, edited by J. D. McClatchy (2000)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on the Echoing ‘Footsteps’ of Fiorello La Guardia)

“When the valid votes are counted,
Will his future be feast or faminy?
Will he eat his lunch in a one-arm joint,
Or in a swell estaminet?
For Fiorello’s footsteps
Still echo in the corridor;
Reform is a horrid word enough,
But Fusion is even horrider.” —American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Don’t Bite the Hand That Puts the Foot in Your Mouth” in Everyone But Thee And Me (1962)

Seventy-five years ago today, Fiorello La Guardia—the “Little Flower” of New York City—died of pancreatic cancer. Having guided New York through the Great Depression and World War II, he had stepped down as mayor after three terms less than two years before, utterly exhausted—and, after so much time in the public eye and more than a little irascibility, the city had grown tired of him, too, according to public opinion polls.

By the time Ogden Nash recalled his legacy 15 years after his death, La Guardia had recovered his popularity. The musical Fiorello! won the Tony and Pulitzer Prizes in 1959, and the mayor was posthumously hailed for his attempts to root out corruption. And in 1961, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. had turned decisively against the Tammany Hall political machine that had sustained his own rise—and that had been the object of La Guardia’s tireless (and noisy) anti-corruption efforts.

La Guardia had won his first campaign for mayor by campaigning on the “Fusion” ticket (primarily GOP-backed, with additional support by breakaway Democrats and independents). By the time Wagner ran for a third term, the “Reform” movement, which had sprung up among Manhattan insurgents three years before, was now spelling a threat to the power that Tammany Hall had enjoyed again after La Guardia’s departure.

Wagner’s defeat—and the fall from power of Tammany boss Carmine deSapio—proved in the end that Reform was, Nash’s contention to the contrary, “horrider” than Fusion to the old political machine.

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on His Great Reading Intentions)

“So every summer I truly intend
My intellectual sloth to end
And every summer for years and years
I’ve read Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers.”—American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Have You Read Any Good Books Tomorrow?” in Everyone But Thee And Me (1962)

For many of us now, it was going to be during the pandemic that the “intellectual sloth” would end. But even Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexander Dumas might be a stretch—in these days of distraction, passivity and enervation, they’d be simply too long to read.

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on Sports in Winter)

“All winter long, yes, every day,
I throw the sporting page away,
I turn my faithful radio off
And grimly settle down to scoff,
Since contests that as sport I list
In wintertime do not exist.”—American light-verse master Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “—And Don’t Forget Weight-Lifting, Shot-Putting, and the Ladies’ Junior Backstroke Championship,” in Everyone But Thee and Me (1962)

In case you’re wondering: Nash thought that hockey belonged to Canadians. As for basketball, he saw it as “A game indulged in by giraffes/And only good for scornful laughs.”  (If he felt that way 60 years ago, what on earth would he think now?)

Football? Back then there was no 17-game, 18-week schedule; no rival conferences facing off; no playoffs extending forever; and, instead of a Super Bowl in mid-February (like this year), the NFL Championship game was played on December 30, only a bit over a week from the transition from autumn to winter.

Many fans of the three sports just mentioned might quarrel with Nash. But I’m all for what he waits for in winter: the “grapefruit knights” of spring training, when he could “sail serenely into harbor/With Phil Rizzuto and Red Barber.”

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, Lamenting the ‘Intellectual Prig Apostate’)

“Such a one is so erudite that he frequently thinks in Aramaic,
But he expresses himself in slang long passé in Passaic.
His signature is purple ink in an illegible curlicue,
And he compares baseball to ballet, and laments the passing of burlesque, which he refers to as burlicue….
For the most part, my feelings about him I silently conceal,
But when he comments that ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ burns with a hard, gemlike flame, I can only cry that he is robbing Pater to paw Peale.”—American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Just How Low Can a Highbrow Go When a Highbrow Lowers His Brow?,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 1958, reprinted in Everyone But Thee and Me (1962)
 
This year marked the 50^th anniversary of the death of Ogden Nash, one of the masters of light verse. Yet, as far as I know, no major commemoration marked the sad occasion.
 
But, as the excerpt I’ve quoted shows, Nash was equally erudite and delightful.
 
Want further proof? Well, for this season of the year, are you ready for some football—or, to be more exact, Nash’s tribute to the late Hall of Fame defensive end, Bubba Smith?
 
“Few manage to topple in a tussle
Three hundred pounds of hustle and muscle.
He won't complain if double-teamed;
It isn't Bubba who gets creamed.”

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on Procrastination)

“How drear, on a planet with plenty of woes,

That sloth is not slumber or torpor repose;

That the innocent joy of not getting things done

Simmers sulkily down to plain not having fun.

You smile in the morn like a bride in her bridalness

At the thought of a day of nothing but idleness.

By midday you’re slipping, by evening a lunatic,

A perusing-the-newspapers-all-afternoonatic,

Worn to a wraith from the half-hourly jaunt

After glasses of water you didn’t want,

And at last when onto your pallet you creep,

You discover yourself too tired to sleep.”—American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), from “Procrastination is All of the Time,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1939, reprinted in Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from “The New Yorker,” edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder (2001)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on a Door and a Dog)

“A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.”— American poet Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "A Dog's Best Friend Is His Illiteracy," in The Private Dining Room (1953)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on Dogs, Virtuous and Otherwise)

“They cheer up people who are frowning.

And rescue people who are drowning.

They also track mud on beds.

And chew people's clothes to shreds….

Dogs are upright as a steeple

And much more loyal than people.”-- Ogden Nash, “A Introduction to Dogs,” from his The Face is Familiar: The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash (1941)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on Christmas for a Harried Hubby)

“The days of September, October, November are like globules of 

   water on the forehead of a tortured prisoner dropping;

Each is another day on which he has done no Christmas shopping.

At this point the Devil whispers that if he puts it off until Christmas  

  Eve  the shops will be emptier,

A thought that which nothing could be temptier,

But Christmas Eve finds him bedridden with a fever of nearly  

  ninety-nine degrees, and swaddled in blankets up to his neck,

So on Christmas morn he has nothing for Mrs. Revere but a kiss and

   a check,

Which somehow works out fine, because she enjoys being kissed

And the check is a great comfort when she sits down on December  

  26th to compile her next year’s list.”—Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “All’s Noel That Ends Noel:  Or, Incompatibility is the Spice of Christmas,” in Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art, from the Editors of The New Yorker (2003)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on the Hippopotamus and Us)

“Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.”—American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), Family Reunion (1950)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, Paying Tribute to Savannah)

“Certainly every schoolboy knows that famous remark made by the late Mark Hanna:
‘I care not who makes our Presidents as long as I can eat in Savannah.’”—American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Foreword” to Harriet Ross Colquitt’s The Savannah Cook Book (1933)

(Anything this “schoolboy” of the second half of the 20th century learned about Mark Hanna had nothing to do with food. Maybe my older—or more Savannah-centric—readers can verify the “remark” allegedly made by this Gilded Age political handler? 

Whatever. As one who has eaten in this fair Southern city, I fully endorse the sentiment.)