Probe, Pry and Test

     --Walt Kelly, 1961                  

Eureka!

Saturday I reported the request of a West Coast blogger who was seeking a quote:  Pogo Fans: Can you help? A reader wants to find the original source of a quote I attributed to Albert The Alligator. It was "funny how a handsome man look good in any old thing he throw on." If any of you have old Pogo books with this particular strip, let me know.

I have located the panel.  The quote is pretty close.

Walt Kelly,  The Pogo Sunday Parade, page 125

  (which just  happened to be the 

penultimate page in the 

fifth book I went through.)

I have to agree with Albert.  "Clothes make the man" has always seemed to me to be an oversimplification, and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a homely but well-heeled man.  You got it, or your don't.  Right, Albert?

Anyway, one of my favorite quotes with regard to style is from Alexander Pope.  "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."  (An Essay on Criticism)  I think this applies to the sartorial as well as to the literary.

Jus' So

Walt Kelly, Gone Pogo, 1961

I was reading the blog Murrmurrs and Murr asked this: Pogo Fans: Can you help? A reader wants to find the original source of a quote I attributed to Albert The Alligator. It was "funny how a handsome man look good in any old thing he throw on." If any of you have old Pogo books with this particular strip, let me know.

This sent me to my Pogo collection in search of the requested tidbit.  I have yet to find it.  (Lots of books to wade through... mostly swamp water, in retrospect, but still.)  Meanwhile, I came upon the above panel, a poignant reminder of the reason I was so enthralled with Walt Kelly in my formative years.