Roughing it De LuxeCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
Roughing it De Luxe
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
American wit and humor; California -- Description and travel; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Description and travel
If I were in charge of the publicity work of the San Francisco Fair I
should advertise two attractions that would surely appeal to all the
women in this country, and to most of the men. In my press work I would
dwell at length upon the fact that in this part of California a woman
may wear any weight and any style of clothes--spring clothes, summer
clothes, fall clothes or winter clothes--and not only be perfectly
comfortable while so doing, but be in the fashion besides; and to be in
the fashion is a thing calculated to make a woman comfortable whether
she otherwise is or not.
To see a group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on a
pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four
Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated
extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs--it is always
cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest
wrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed in
the especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one on
the outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in her
white ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped off
the cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too,
about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderful
complexions; that detail, properly press-agented, ought to fetch the
entire female population of the United States.
[Illustration: THE WOMAN NEAREST THE WALL HAS ON HER FURS--IT IS ALWAYS
COOL IN THE SHADE]
For drawing the men, I would exploit the great cardinal fact that
nowhere in the country--not even in Norfolk or Baltimore or New
Orleans--can you get better things to eat than in San Francisco. For its
size, I believe there are more good clubs and more good restaurants
right there than in any other spot on the habitable globe. Particularly
in the preparation of the typical dishes of the Coast do the San
Francisco cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane American
foundation, with a delectable suggestion of the Spanish in it, and
sometimes with a traceable suggestion of the best there is in the
Italian and the Chinese schools of cookery.
To one whose taste in oysters has been developed by eating the
full-chested bi-valve of the Eastern seaboard and the deep-lunged,
long-bodied product of the Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does not
greatly appeal. A lot has been written and printed about the California
oyster, but in my opinion he will always have considerable difficulty in
living up to his press notices. It takes about a thousand of him to make
a quart and about a hundred of him to make a taste. Even then he doesn't
taste much like a real oyster, but more like an infinitesimal scrap of
sponge where a real oyster camped out overnight once.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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