Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1920 — Rann-dom Reels [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Rann-dom Reels

By HOWARD L. RANN

THE PIONIO

THE picnic is a place where people go to relax from labor and study the bug family. There Is no place on earth where the habits and personal eccentricities of the wandering and dissatisfied bug can be studied to greater advantage than at a picnic, when the tablecloth has been laid directly over a smoldering ant bill.

Picnics are held In the summer time, when the grass Is long and green and

The Man Who Is First to Get to the Table but Never Can See Anything to Do Except Prophesy Rain and Fight Flies.

which is supported by the patient, perspiring taxpayer, is a lugubrious and insect life is more animated. Great care is taken to read the weather forecast and pick out a day that winds up In a moist rainstorm. This teaches us that the United States weather bureau, agonizing joke. If congress would quit distributing free garden seeds and give out trustworthy barometers instead. fewer picnic parties would have to be hauled home in a hack and wrung dry by anxious parents in the dead of the night. Picnics are composed of people who go and people who provide. Why is 1t that so many people are able to go to picnic after picnic and never have

to furnish anything but a bubbling laugh and two baking powder spoons? The injustice of this arrangement has rankled In many a feminine breast and has caused close nelghilura to refuse to speak to each other except at prayer meeting. There Is also the man who is first to get to the table, but never can see anything to do except prophesy rain and fight files. That we are a humane and tender-hearted people Is shown by the fact that these two classes are always welcome and are even given some of the white meat Men are invited to picnics on account of their lovable attributes and their ability to produce a fire out of water-soaked brush. A picnic without a few men to build the fire and eat all of the surplus potato salad would be a greater failure than an attempt to sell envelope chemises on the African coast. Unmarried men are much sought after at picnics, as they know how to hang a hammock and also how to disport themselves therein. One of the most pathetic sights in life is a picnic party composed entirely of old maids who have no more use for a hammock than a bald-headed man has for a set of military brushes. Picnics would be more popular if they were held on high, dry ground, where the death chant of the coarse, aggressive mosquito could not be heard.