Pop-Eye’s Pals

North Canterbury Gazette, Volume 7, Issue 60, 30 November 1937, Page 8

Pop-Eye’s Pals

A CHILDREN’S COLUMN Conducted by UNCLE GEORGE

Membership of the “Popeye the Sailor Club” is secured by sending your name, age last birthday, birth date, and address, to “Uncle George,” c/o the “Gazette,” Box 40, Rangiora.

CLUB NOTES

Despite the repeated requests for the renewal of stage items at the Popeye Club meetings, when the call for performers was made last Saturday, the response was very poor. I have therefore decided that at future meetings the programme will consist of special films and perhaps an occasional item or two. For the benefit of those members who did not read my column last week I will repeat one piece of news. A splendid new serial, “The Great Air Mystery,” featuring a great airman called “Tailspin Tommy,” has been obtained for the Club sessions. The first chapter will be screened next Saturday AT THE POPEYE SESSION ONLY.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS TO:—

Ray Hopkins, Donald Hindle

THIS WEEK'S ANNIVERSARIES

Nov. 30: MARK TWAIN, the great American humorist, was born on this day in the year 1935. (He died in 1910.) His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born in Florida, Missouri, and his education was somewhat less than that of an ordinary district school. He learned to set type in a local town, and later worked at the printing trade in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere. He took to steamboating and became a pilot. Then he tried his fortune at silver mining, became local editor of a newspaper in Virginia City, and later turned up in San Francisco, where he worked as a reporter. Not satisfied with this varied experience, he went as far westward as the Sandwich Islands, and was actually in New Zealand for some time. Most of his books have been translated into German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, and other tongues. The two of his stories wdiich most of you have read are “Tom Saw’yer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” December 1: The birthday in 1844 of the late Queen Mother, ALEXANDRA, who inspired the greatest song of welcome in history when Tennyson wrote “The Sea King’s daughter from over the sea, We are all of us Danes in our welcome to thee, Alexandra!” She earned a popularity that lasted until her death, at the age of 81, in 1925.

THE BADDER • . THE BETTER!

Tlae badder she is the better she is. Strange as it seems, the more Jane Withers misbehaves, the better movie fans like her mischievous antics. So, for this reason, Jane is permitted to literally run wild in “Pepper,” the new Twentieth Century-Fox picture. Jane throws tomatoes, kicks shins, breaks windows, rides the ’chutes at Coney Island, exposes a fake baron, and in general gets everybody in an uproar. WHY COWBOYS “SPIN” GUNS Playing the part of riding-mato to “Hopalong Cassidy” in Paramount’s series of estern dramas from the pen of Clarence E. Mulford is making Jimmy Ellison into a sure-enough cowboy. Ellison is seen again with William Boyd in the latest of the series, “Bar 20 Rides Again.” The young actor, who has become an expert rider and pistol shot, took up the art of “gunspinning” as practiced in the old West while “Bar 20 Rides Again” was being produced. Before the picture was completed he had become very proficient under tho guidance of Edward Lawrence, Hollywood gun collector and authority on small arms. “Many people,” Ellison explained, “are under the impression that gunspinning by cowboys is simply a manner of showing off. As a matter of fact it is one of the traditions of the Old West when the six-gun was the law of tho land. Besides being able to shoot, it was important to be fast on the draw and to know a few tricks of gun-spinning for use at close range. In those day* many disputes were settled with guns. Thus a man who knew his gup-spinning, bnommtormg an otieipy

on tli® etreofc, might draw, shoot, and spin hifi gun back into ite holster before a witness could tell ho fired the shot,”