Nurse! Turn this room inside out! No one in this estate will eat their bread and gruel until my prosthetic ears are found! I just saw the things not one, maybe two hours ago! Where in the name of the Apostles could they be?
I will be just beside myself if they are not found by night-fall. They are made of a fine, hand-tooled silver, a gift to me from the Imperial Highness of the Potentate of Prussia back in 1907. At the time, I naturally laughed at the peculiarity of such items; little did I know how sorely I would later need them.
No, no, Nurse, you imbecile, that’s my ear-trumpet! I am looking for the actual ears! You unscrewed them off me last night—where in blazes did you put them?
A shiny guilder to anyone who finds and returns my prosthetic ears!
These ears are unique and priceless. And woe to the wretch who tries to steal them! In 1922, a simple sharecropper working a patch of land on my vast holdings broke into my mansion, removed the ears from their glass display case, and secreted them in his over-alls. A six-day manhunt took place all over the county, and the sheriff and his posse finally tracked him down in his crude shanty, cowering with his wife and nine babies. He was going to return the ears, he pleaded, saying that he only took them so that his earless wife could know what it was like to have ears for a little while on her birthday. I considered clemency, but decided to have him pressed to death anyway as an example to other would-be ear thieves.
If these ears do not turn up soon, the Zweibel Estate will become Hell itself. I will make life so hard for these wretched lummoxes who pass for my servants that the atrocities of Ivan the Terrible will seem like a fairy-picnic!
What? What did you say, Nurse? Screw the ear-trumpet to my left ear so I can hear you. Why, by great Jupiter’s whiskers, my prosthetic ears weren’t missing—I was wearing them all this time! Oh, now I remember. Standish put them in for me this morning so I could listen to Amos & Andy on the wireless! Huzzah! Standish, you can stop immolating the indentured servants now, for I have found my ears!
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.
