Sentimentality for the good old days is not a new emotion.
On February 13, 1922 Al Posen with his Them Days Is Gone Forever yearned for better times.
above from The Shreveport Journal of February 13, 1922
Here’s Allan Holtz talking about the Posen and his comic strip:
It seems to me that having to do a daily comic strip with the same punchline every day is the very definition of hell for a cartoonist. Yet Al Posen started a comic strip with exactly that gimmick, and of his own free will! In Them Days Is Gone Forever, which debuted with the then tiny United Feature Syndicate on February 13 1922, not only does Posen tell a gag in rhyme every day, but he ends the rhyme with the exact same punchline. Al Posen must have had a masochistic streak a mile wide.
Some more samples from February 1922:
Allan Holtz tells us it lasted three years, but then was revived by Posen as a Sunday topper strip for another syndicate from the last half of the 1930s to the first half of the 1940s. That syndicate, The Chicago Tribune-New York News, ran their “topper” strips at the bottom of the page.
Possibly Posen brought the strip back because of an earlier advertising campaign.
During World War Two Posen contributed PSAs to the military utilizing the concept.
More samples of the strip can be found at the Barnacle Press site.
Some background about Alvah Posen is at the Syracuse University Library.
I’m not sure – I feel there’s a strong vein of nostalgia you could mine pretty effortlessly, more or less indefinitely, Then it’s just coming up with the a daily rhyme.
I cannot read these – the misogyny is so blatant. Yes, I realize it’s ‘a different time’, but still . . . were women SO HATED in ‘the good ol’ days’?