It is a bitter-sweet season at the Zweibel mansion. Though my sweet betrothed, Miss Bernadette Fiske, has perished from a swooning fit brought on by extreme womanliness, her delicate, lithe-limbed beauty lives on in our square-headed, seven-foot-tall baby boy, N. Aeschylus. The clangor of his iron feet as he frolics about the mansion is just the tonic my nerves require. I had forgotten the wonder that is a Zweibel-child!
I shall remember you forever, my lost love, and have established the Miss Bernadette Fiske Sanitarium For The Prevention & Cure Of Femininity in your memory. But our dear, sweet son has driven all anguish from my ulcerated heart!
Tear the black mourning-crepe from my grounds-keepers! Defestoon my 60-foot statue of its funeral-bunting! T. Herman Zweibel shall mourn no more! The gay company of my son N. Aeschylus has become the joy of my twilight years. His stiff-legged, hedge-decimating romps through the estate’s greensward, the curious manner in which his piercing red eyes behold each bird and butter-fly, and the fact that he is so God-damned big, swell my concave chest with paternal pride. How he reminds me of myself at that age!
Yet N. Aeschylus reminds me particularly of my other sons. I have always whelped the most diabolical little shit-flingers ever to orally mastectomize a wet-nurse, and N. Aeschylus will be no different. I wish his older brothers were here to while away the after-noons with him in boyish sport. But the age difference is far too great. In fact, some of them may even be dead.
What charming brats they were! U. Fairfax was fond of luring his governess into the steam-thresher, well aware that his tiny frame could slip between the great mechanical threshing-knives where she could not. G. Talmadge and R. Buckminster, my twin sons, were fond of fomenting individual mayhem and then blaming the other boy. V. Lucius was quite fond of clubs, with which he would often beat me. It was he who gifted me Mr. Tin, the giant mechanical ro-bot man who eludes me to this very day, and who must not threaten my dear, dear son!
Curse you, Mr. Tin! Show yourself!
An emergency! I must go! Just now, Standish attempted to restrain poor N. Aeschylus from consuming a pint of 40-weight rock oil and was surprised by the boy’s vigorous response. I must now direct my servants in fetching Standish’s limp body from the mansion’s roof. My boys have always been a precocious brood!
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.
