Last Thursday, I woke to discover enormous clothes-moths flapping about my bed-chamber. Horrified, I screamed for Standish, who valiantly tried to slay the winged brutes with a can of Flit. It was soon determined that other rooms were similarly besieged with moths, and that the entire mansion had to be evacuated for fumigation.
As I was wheeled to the court-yard, there was a danger that the exposure to the out-of-doors would cause me to contract pneumonia. So Doc McGillicuddy, my personal physician, recommended that I be taken to what he called the “Senior Day Center” down in the village. There, I could relax and enjoy the companionship of other elderly citizens until the mansion was freed of pests.
As my carriage pulled up to the center, I was aghast at what I saw. “Take me back immediately!” I ordered. “This is the County Home For The Destitute & Infirm! This is no place for a Zweibel!” But Doc explained that the Home was closed in 1947, and that ever since then, the building has served as a sort of recreational meeting-lodge for the elderly.
Wheeled inside, I was soon thrust into a group of people who were not elderly in the slightest. Looking to be in their 70s or 80s, they were young enough to be my grand-children! One of these whipper-snappers dared to speak to me. “Mr. Zweibel, sir!” he said, his face grotesquely contorted into a toothless smile. “As a lad, I used to shine your shoes! You had my out-of-work father jailed for vagrancy! We starved for months! Do you remember me?” I tartly replied that I did not.
Then, a woman in a nurse’s outfit beckoned us into an adjoining room for what she called “exercise time.” She switched on a gramophone, which played a horrendous, cacophonous nonsense involving a great deal of trumpets and trombones, which I later learned was known as “swinging” music. And, indeed, the youths began to clap their hands and rock feebly in their wheel-chairs. Preferring the menacing of enormous clothes-moths over the undulations of pagan savages, I loudly insisted that I be delivered from this coven of Satan immediately. The youth of to-day have definitely gone to pot!
T. Herman Zweibel, the great grandson of Onion founder Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, was born in 1868, became editor of The Onion at age 20, and persisted in various editorial posts until his launching into space in 2001. Zweibel’s name became synonymous with American business success in the 20th century. Many consider him the “Father Of American Journalism,” also the title of his well-known 1943 biography, written by Norman Rombauer.
