Our Boarding House

Our Boarding House (November 5, 1944)

Our Boarding House was a popular, long-run gag panel created by Gene Ahern and syndicated by Newspaper Enterprise Association.

In 1921, Ahern introduced the Nut Brothers, Ches and Wal, in Crazy Quilt. That same year, NEA General Manager Frank Rostock suggested to Ahern that he use a boarding house for a setting. Our Boarding House began September 16, 1921, scoring a huge success with readers after the January 1922 arrival of the fustian Major Hoople. The Nut Bros: Ches and Wal ran as a topper strip above Our Boarding House.

Ahern once revealed the origin of Major Hoople:

Major Hoople was based on an old fellow I knew quite well when I was growing up. He had been in the Civil War and to hear his tall stories you'd think he had advised Grant and Sherman on every move of the war, telling them exactly what to do every morning. He even insisted he had fired the first shot. He was quite a character and everyone knew him very well. He called himself "General" in spite of the fact that he had only been a top sergeant in the Army. The General was one of those men who always put up a $10 front with a dime in their pockets—a natural subject for cartooning.^[1]

Characters and story

In Toonopedia, comic strip historian Don Markstein described the characters:

Martha scowled a lot, and ran her household the way a Sherman tank might run a stop sign; yet, her boarders, including Buster, Clyde, Mack and others who came and went, managed to hold their own in her presence. But it more likely owes its fame to one character in particular — Martha's husband, Major Amos B. Hoople, perhaps the greatest windbag, stuffed shirt and blowhard ever to "hrumph" his way across the funnies page. It was four months before the Major appeared on the scene (returning from a ten-year absence from Martha's life), but he quickly took over to the point where many people today think his name was the feature's title. Major Hoople had a huge, bulbous nose and an even huger gut. He sported a scraggly moustache and smoked rank cigars. He was seldom seen without a battered fez. In addition to near-archaic expressions like "egad" and "drat", he was often heard mouthing such non-words as "fap", "awp" and "kaff". His favorite mode of expression was long-winded discourses about his prestigious and astonishing experiences, which nobody took seriously and only his occasionally-seen nephew, Alvin, even pretended to pay attention to.^[2]

After Ahern left NEA in March 1936 for King Features Syndicate, others took over Our Boarding House, including Bela Zaboly, Wood Cowan, Bill Braucher, Bill Freyse, Jim Branagan and Tom McCormick. The cartoon feature finally came to an end on March 29, 1981. It continued as a daily feature until December 22, 1984, when cartoonist Les Carroll and writer Tom McCormick decided to retire.

Books

There was a one-shot comic book (1943) and a Big Little Book (Major Hoople and His Horse). In 2005, Lee Valley Tools published Our Boarding House with Major Hoople — 1927 with this introduction:

The best years were from 1921 to 1936 when the originator, Gene Ahern, was drawing the cartoons. During this period, boarding houses were an institution in our society. It was the home away from home where men lived to save money until they got married and moved into a home of their own. Women in the same situation usually "took rooms" with a family. Many boarding houses came into being because the main wage earner of the day, usually the husband, was not doing an adequate job of supporting the household. It is doubtful that many men were as bizarre as Major Hoople, with his get-rich-quick schemes and his morbid fear of work. Mrs. Hoople was the practical, hard-working antithesis of the Major's approach. The resulting interaction was the core of the panel for 60 years.

Radio

The Major Hoople radio series began on the Blue Network June 22, 1942. With Arthur Q. Bryan in the title role, the 30-minute program aired on Mondays at 4:05pm on the West Coast and 7:05pm on the East Coast. The series was written by Jerry Cady (1903 -48). Patsy Moran had the role of Hoople's wife Martha. Conrad Binyon and Frank Bresee portrayed Hoople's "precocious little nephew," Little Alvin. Mel Blanc played the star boarder, Tiffany Twiggs. The radio series ended April 26, 1943. No recordings of Major Hoople are known to exist.

Legacy

Gene Ahern's Our Boarding House (December 31, 1931)

In World Wide Words, Michael Quinion examined the use of the term "hooplehead" by the character Al Swearengen on the HBO series Deadwood:

According to Professor Jonathan Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it probably derives from Major Hoople... The Major was a layabout given to whopping lies about his achievements and addicted to get-rich-quick schemes. One writer has described him as “perhaps the greatest windbag, stuffed shirt and blowhard ever to ‘hrumph’ his way across the funnies page”. Hoople as a derogatory term is recorded from the late 1920s and remained common for decades because the strip continued until 1981. Professor Lighter’s first, and only, recording of hooplehead in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang is dated 1994 (though he has recently found one from 1980 in Dennis Smith’s Glitter and Ash: “The old man said, ‘Speakin’ of Maureen, you know she’s been acting like a real hooplehead lately, like a kid they let out of Creedmoor by mistake.” [Creedmoor is a psychiatric centre in Queens, NY.]) It would not have been possible for Al Swearengen to have used the word in 1876, 40+ years before Gene Ahern invented the character and a hundred years before it was first recorded in print. The producer and head of the scriptwriting team, David Milch, has been reported as saying in essence that he picked something out of the air to serve as a suitable insult without great concern for its etymology. It seems he must have heard it somewhere and it came conveniently back to mind while writing the scripts. It’s definitely an anachronism.^[3]

In 1974, the Kitchener, Ontario pop band known as Major Hoople's Boarding House charted a minor Canadian radio hit with the song "I'm Running After You".^[4]

References

See also

• Out Our Way

Listen to

• June 1997 interview with Frank Bresee who discusses his role on radio's Major Hoople

External links

• Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Our Boarding House