Sorry about yesterday! Distant connectivity problems. All better now.

For years I've been collecting the work of Rawson, a cartoonist who worked for the Minneapolis paper in the early part of the 20th century. His caricatures can be remarkable. Now and then he captures the essence of a personality or physiognomy with just a few deft lines.

Here's the whole page, celebrating local ladies:

Let us look at each in turn.

Her name was Isabel Davis. President of the Women's Club. Suffragette, reformer. Later arrested for pushing young women off a cliff.

Kidding! Our next luminary, doing her work while the modestly-attired fairies swim around her:

Swamped! No info I can find.

Contention-wise, she was a bone:

Mother of the Girls' Industrial School:

It was a reformatory. The fine print on the bill says "Sauk Center," the maligned home of Sinclair Lewis. The facility closed in 1999. Some of the campus is stil visible.

Savage breasts, soothed:

We usually don't hear about the rock-softening or oak-bending powers.

So . . . farm girls needed to be taught these things?

Seems like the sort of thing one own's ma would teach you about.

Dues are due! Don't make me brain you with my cudgel. I don't know my own strength. You'll probably DIE.

I doubt Mrs. Collins liked this one. She looks her age, and she looks weary of life and its responsibilities.

He'd do ads for local businesses as well, such as this one for Minneapolis auto maker Wilcox:

Car salesmen have been with us for over a hundred years. And they haven't changed much, I'll bet.

This one has a potent reference:

Peacock Alley! The passageway between the Congress Hotel and the Auditorium in Chicago.

This doesn't show the shops, which lined the corridor. Ad for Blum's, 1908:

This marvellous ad makes the place pop to life. Newspaper searches turn up dozens of stories about crime and fashion and gossip in Peacock Alley - it occupied a certain place in the metropolitan imagination.

Every time I think I have a reasonable account in my head of the bare minimum of 20th century civilization, I come up against something from the Oughts, and realize how little I know.

		Now two ways to chip in!

That'll do. Something completely different tomorrow!