Non-Parteesian

HIZZONER THE MAYOR--Joel Sayre--Day ($2).

Author Sayre's Rackety Rax got a good press and went to Hollywood; Hizzoner the Mayor deserves an even better fate. Riotously jovial satire, it sets ringing no tocsin of reform but the welkin echoes its topical tintinnabulations. Aside from and under its uproarious humor, Hizzoner the Mayor has grimmer implications that need underlining nowadays for few U. S. citizens. In the perennial Augean task of turning the rascals out, such hearty slapstick broom-thwacks as Author Sayre's may be as effective in the long run as all the Herculean street-cleaning apparatus of a Judge Seabury.

No U. S. city has ever suffered the simultaneous ministrations of Jimmy Walker and Big Bill Thompson. Author Sayre's pleasing idea is to imagine a city that did. Mayor of Greater Malta, a municipality strongly resembling Greater New York, is John Norris ("Jolly John") Holtsapple, who is first seen rising from his bed of alcoholic pain to go down the Bay and welcome Waldo, champion wrestling bear. Jolly John's party has the city in its bag but only a slim margin of control on the Board of Aldermen, whose president, Harrie Satchells, is after the mayoralty. The campaign is a humdinger, nip & tuck all the way. When Satchells at one meeting produces an inflated rubber cartoon of Holtsapple and lets the air out as he asks it embarrassing questions, he is one up. Jolly John (aping Big Bill Thompson's famed performances with jackasses et al.) evens things up by leading out a pig, addressing it as Harrie. By an ingenious scheme for keeping the colored vote from the polls on election day, Satchells gets in.

But Jolly John and his crowd continue to play ball with the administration, and both parties find room in the trough. Meantime a series of mysterious murders, in which the victim invariably has a hoof-mark around the left eye, helps make plain people restive. When the city goes bankrupt for $576,000,000, with its Mayor junketing in Paris, public apathy is at last aroused. At a property-owners' protest banquet, winged words fan the flames. "Poison'ly, Mister Tussmester and fellow goats, poison'ly, I'm getting tired eating all the tin kens our friends in City Hall has been feeding us the last few years. Even a goat becomes gradually tired from eating tin kens, tin kens, tin kens, tin kens." A riot destroys the City Hall, scares the politicians into adopting City Managership. They drop their differences and become a "non-parteesian" party. With the new City Manager at the head of the same old gang, the same old round begins all over.

The Author. Joel Sayre, 33, born a Hoosier, was brought up in Columbus, Ohio. During the War he served "briefly" with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in Siberia; after the Armistice continued his education at Williams, Toronto, Oxford, Heidelberg, Marburg, Bliss Business College. Off & on a newshawk for ten years (on the Ohio State Journal, New York Telegram, New York Daily News, New York Herald-Tribune), he tried his hand unsuccessfully at writing advertising copy, teaching school, studying medicine. Rackety Rax's success gave him a better idea.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.