A LEGLESS TORSO

Evening Star, Issue 24157, 30 March 1942, Page 7

A LEGLESS TORSO

MAN OF THE FUTURE RESULT OF MODERN SCIENCE From present indications and dire predictions, the man of the future is going to be a legless torso with oversize skull, bat ears, and bifocal vision. According to the boo-pundits he is already on. his way to this wry transformation. This, they say, is a result of modern transportation and scientific gadgets that have been perfected for his convenience. Give him another 100 years or so, they admonish, and he’ll begin dropping off the personal accessories he doesn’t need. And what ,a funny-look-ing object he’s going to be then. There’s feet, tor example. Nearly everybody you meet has foot trouble. Hard pavements, dyed shoes, ease of transportation—all these tend to make using the feet both unwelcome and painful. It didn’t used to be that way. People never bothered about their feet. They walked on them. To-day we use our feet for tangling with umbrellas and tripping over in aisles, but we walk on them only as- a last resort.

Before the arrival of motor cars, people had to use their feet to get places. They walked to school. They walked to church. They walked to work.

A few had horses, but everybody had feet and could hike without hitching. For that highway mendicant, the hitch-hiker, is motor spawn and hadn’t yet been hatched. In the walking era, people gave attention to it. They turned out their toes, leaned back, and cultivated a distinctive stance. _ The man set the pattern for the vim and vigor stride, and, when walking alone or with his kind, swung out at a jaunty pace. But the woman of the footmobile period had, as ever, fashion to think about. She couldn’t, for example, sport a bustle and a swinging stride simultaneously without creating a hey-day among the spectators. So she minced and was almost as funny. When married folks walked together, the_ husband _ shortened his stride to his wife’s mince. This gave him the prance of. a parade horse marking time behind a band. A Sunday promenade, with the wife keeping her bustle down ,to a quiver, 1

and the husband trimming his stride to a prance, was something to see. Especially when the old man wore pointed patent-leather shoes, a beetleback coat, a horsehair watch chain, and a handlebar moustache. _Um-um! Men gave “ heed ” to their shoos in the walking era. They didn’t tear into a store, try .on one pair of shoes, and tear out with them. No, indeed. They weren’t buying sitting shoes then. It took most of an afternoon to acquire a pair of foot-stalls that would detonate the eye and solace the dogs at one and the same_ time. And squeak; there must he just the right touch of squeak. , A gentleman of those days liked to hear himself coming. Nothing raucous, of course. Just a barely audible chirp, to be sure that his two hours of selection had not been wasted. Silent shoes were all right for undertakers or doctors, hut not for men of affairs. Church deacons liked a definite erk-ork in their shoes. It gave the congregation a chance to get their ruckles ready at collection time. Lodge memhers took their shoes off when they got home—the sock preceding the clock-in alibi. ~ Where people walked in the old davs didn’t matter. The imnortant thin o, was. thev walked. A pedometer record of a day in 1900 would throw a citizen to-day into a medicated root bath by suggestion. Now. if we don t take our torsos for a speed gamble on the highway, we ease ’em into a club chair and listen to the other dummy—C. McCarthy.By 1951 we’ll all be ready for Bergen s knee—if he’s still got one., )