egiance that he gave
to any cause near his heart. Baseball--he played on his high-school team
(also he could recite "Casey at the Bat" with a gusto that many a friend
of the earlier days will remember. And here I am reminded of his
"Christopher Columnibus." I recently ran across a postcard a college
mate sent Carl from Italy years ago, with a picture of a statue of
Columbus on it. On the reverse side the friend had written, quoting from
Carl's monologue: "'Boom Joe!' says the king; which is being
interpreted, 'I see you first.' 'Wheat cakes,' says Chris, which is the
Egyptian for 'Boom Joe'"). He loved football, track,--he won three gold
medals broad-jumping,--canoeing, swimming, billiards,--he won a loving
cup at that, tennis, ice-skating, hand-ball; and yes, ye of finer
calibre, quiver if you will--he loved a prize-fight and played a mighty
good game of poker, as well as bridge--though in the ten and a half
years that we were married I cannot remember that he played poker once
or bridge more than five times. He did, however, enjoy his bridge with
Simon Patton in Philadelphia; and when he played, he played well.

I tell you there was hardly anything the man could not do. He could draw
the funniest pictures you ever saw--I wish I could reproduce the letters
he sent his sons from the East. He was a good carpenter--the joy it
meant to his soul to add a second-hand tool ever so often to his
collection! Sunday morning was special carpenter-time--new shelves here,
a bookcase there, new steps up to the swimming-tank, etc. I have heard
many a man say that he told a story better than any one they ever heard.
He was an expert woodsman. And, my gracious! how he did love babies!
That hardly fits in just here, but I think of it now. His love for
children colored his whole economic viewpoint.

"There is the thing that possessed Parker--the perception of the
destructive significance of the repressed and balked instincts of the
migratory worker, the unskilled, the casuals, the hoboes, the womanless,
jobless, voteless men. To him their tragedy was akin to the tragedy of
child-life in our commercialized cities. More often than of anything
else, he used to talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization
that centred its economic activities in places where child-life was
perpetually repressed and imperiled. The last time I saw him he was
flaming indignation at the ghastly record of children killed and maimed
by trucks and automobil