Aaaagggghhhh! Nurse, nurse, help! Help! The ghost of my late father, Herman Ulysses Zweibel, is haunting me again! Help! Murder! Police!
I can’t understand what’s been happening lately. In the past week, the phantom of Pater has been routinely materializing in my bed-chamber. What does he want? Why is he here?
Aaaggghhh! There he is again, hovering over my bed in a frightful apparition! Help, nurse, help!
Pater, please, go away and leave me alone! I am a very old man, far older than you were when you passed into the next world, and my frail constitution cannot handle your spectral visits!
Pater never approved of me, so perhaps he has returned from the grave to brow-beat me some more. He always said I was unworthy of the great Zweibel name, and that his mongoloid office boy was more qualified to run The Onion than I was. He said I was simpering and unmanly, and put too much oil in my hair, and wore chartreuse spats, and idled away my time playing with my stereoscope and riding on the Shoot-The-Chutes at the amusement- park.
Well, to hell with you, you miserable old fiend! You were never around when I was a boy! You were always off slaughtering Passenger Pigeons, raiding Wells Fargo stages, or getting into gun-fights with the Schaumburg Kid. I spent most of my youth as Mater’s sewing table. That Singer machine was agony on my back, and I had so many straight pins imbedded in my flesh, I resembled Saint Sebastian! It was no life for a young boy with a great thirst for adventure and glory. I should have been by your side on the wild frontier, scalping Methodists and raping wolverines. But I just wasn’t good enough for you, was I? Maybe if I had been like your friend Paul Bunyan, you would have liked me more, but, no, I was merely your sickly, pasty-complected son T. Herman!
Well, I’m not afraid of you any-more, Pater, because now that I am old I now recognize you for all your faults. And do you know what I did with The Onion right after you passed away? I put in a bridge column, against your strict orders. Yes, you always thought bridge was too effete and decadent, but I did it just to spite you! I also fired your favorite columnist, One-Eyed Ezra, who wrote the moon-shine reviews. What do you think of that?
Aaaggghhh! Don’t swoop down on me like that, Pater! Help, nurse, Standish, Augustus The Stable Boy, any-one, help! He’s after me again! Help!
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.
