1911

Hefty Mitchell’s Offense

Short story by Tom P. Morgan with illustrations by Arthur “Art” Young from Puck (23 August 1911).

Tom Perkins Morgan (1864–1928) was born in the eastern United States but spent much of his life in the western state of Arkansas. By his twenties, after varied experience as an actor and with a circus, he became a published author and until the end of his life continued writing prolifically for newspapers and magazines, including for such publications as Judge, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal and Puck. He became best known for stories about “hillbilly” life, featuring eccentrics with names like J. Fuller Gloom and Rumpus Ridge.⁶⁷ The story reproduced here is of that pattern, being set in a rural community, and it deals with the new ideas, whether welcome or not, that films could bring into such places. For Morgan this was a rare foray into the world of movies and I can find no other film-related fiction by him, though it seems he had some earlier awareness of the new entertainment medium, for he competed in a movie scenario contest in 1909.⁶⁸ The illustrations for this story are by Arthur “Art” Young (1866–1943), who was one of the truly great American cartoonists of that era, best known for a series of socialist cartoons from 1911 to 1917 published in the political magazine The Masses.

“Hefty Mitchell, the manager of the Oh-You-Kid moving-picture theatre, has got himself pretty badly disliked again,” announced the landlord of the tavern. “The married ladies of the town and all the hopeless old maids and some of the old maids that ain’t quite hopeless yet (but, betwixt me and you ort to be – not meaning any harm of ‘em, you understand), and the W.C.T.U. – they ‘pear to regard him as second only to the Rum Demon in nefariousness – are all down on Hefty like a thousand of brick.

“I don’t know why married women, and them that wants to marry, and angular ladies, and other ladies with more double-chins than they need for everyday use, should eradicate a feller just b’cuz he is a bachelor and fat and baldheaded, but it seems they do, every chance they get. To my way of thinking, such perquizzits [sic] are more sins of unmission [sic] than sins of commission that-a-way; but the sort of ladies I have just mentioned seem to regard a predestined bachelor as an enemy to the race, or something.

“Well, it all happened over Amos Austin’s outbreak. Amos is a worthy but stoopy-shouldered citizen, staggering through life under a load composed of a wife with a nose like the beak of a condor and the firm belief that man was made to mourn and woman was made to see that he does mourn; two sisters-in-law who are superior persons, and their husbands who ain’t; a brother-in-law who is subject to anonymous sort of spells, and their children, all of whom elocute, or have musical talent, or something of the kind, and one that steals everything it can lay its hands on. And all of the outfit differ with and from Amos in religion and politics and everything else, and tell him so.

“The other evening, while his wife was out, Amos brazenly slipped off downtown and went to the picture-show. One of the films that Hefty was running was about a henpecked husband who had stood all he just naturally could stand, after which he got a bottle of rum and proceeded to raise hop. He batted his wife and her mother side o’ the head – the henpecked man in the film did – kicked his wife’s brother on the sly considerably, and then chased ‘em all round and round through the house and out of it and through a glass-topped hot-bed, and so on, and bluffed ‘em all, and was free. But just as the henpecked man had returned to the house and had started...