This brings back memories of Mister Miller who, in 1967 would tip me a dime for delivering coffee to his office (my father owned a Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant), and place it in my palm just like this, as if he were Rockefeller rewarding me with a small fortune. He didn’t say “Don’t spend it all in one place,” but he might as well have.
Even in 1967 this was a pitiful tip, and carrying a bag full of coffee cups three blocks certainly took more than a minute.
Fifty-three years later I still remember you, you cheap SOB.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It might be different for delivery, but the CFON I used to eat lunch at occasionally had large NO TIPPING signs until about 1975.
Arthur, that was the rule on-site. Deliveries were a different animal.
People like the patron in this comic tend to forget that they also serve who only stand and wait. When you tip someone, you are not just tipping them for the time they spent doing it; you also need to think about the time they were waiting to be available for your task. Jeff does not make $144 a week (big money back then), because it is not possible for him to provide similar services to 144 patrons.
I’m intrigued by the hours implied by the patron’s analysis: eight hours a day, six days a week. So this strip was late enough that an eight-hour day was expected for a porter, but early enough that the porter was expected to work a six-day week. Does anyone know when it was first published?
Brings back memories of a Midwest farmer on his trip to the Big Apple; carrying his (& his family’s) baggage for 3 blocks. In the snow & slush. Two days before Christmas. Got a “Thank you.”
I recall in the early 70s thinking a dime was significant. I guess my parents were well out of touch with reality with that 10 cent a day allowance.
Funny you should mention John D. Rockefeller, who always carried a bag of dimes and handed one to everyone he met, especially children, most likely exactly as Mister Miller did. So replace “as if he were Rockefeller rewarding me with a small fortune” with “as if he were Rockefeller rewarding me with a small coin.”
A dime in 1967 would be the equivalent of 76 cents today.
Mark, I was thinking about Rockefeller and his dimes, but I decided the simile wasn’t clear enough to be easily understood.
And you know I don’t want my comment to show up on similesidontunderstand.com.
Read that Charles Middleton, the character actor whose resume included Ming the Merciless, had an annual gig in his later years. A Nevada casino would do a special Lincoln’s Birthday show, capped by Middleton as Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg address.
He’d receive $5,000 for the five-minute speech, and informed his grandson that this made him, on a per-minute basis, one of the highest-paid actors in the business.
Beyond that, this strip feels like a vaudeville or burlesque routine boiled down — a lot of Mutt and Jeff feels like it was cribbed from ancient gag books or remembered radio. One can easily imagine Budd Abbott making this argument to Lou Costello, and managing to enlarge it so Lou felt obliged to give back a quarter.
@ Bill – Perhaps he based the tip not upon your effort, but on the value of the goods delivered. A 500g brick of ground coffee costs less than €5.00 today (in Germany), which would be equivalent to $5/lb. If someone were to deliver a one-pound bag today, that 76¢ tip would be almost exactly 15%. However, I would expect that the bag you delivered back then was probably much larger than that, and almost certainly cost more than 66¢ in 1967 dollars (the amount for which a dime would have been a 15% tip).
P.S. @ Bill – Oops. I overlooked the word “cups“, and thought you were “…carrying a bag full of coffee
cupsthree blocks…” – which renders almost all of my analysis above moot.Coffee lid technology was not as advanced then as it is now, and there was always some leaking into the bag (and occasionally onto my arms). Even all these years later, the smell of coffee sometimes gives me flashbacks.
In 1965 in Scribner, Nebraska I met a kid who got $5 per month as his allowance. I can still feel that wonder as I thought “$5,” the things I could do with $5.
I used to get $20, but I’ll be darned if I can remember if it was per week, or per month. My parents were very generous (and I was an only), so it was probably per week. Then I would give our family’s dog an allowance from my allowance.
I recently read a book about a serial killer who would leave a dime on the windowsill of ‘good’ kids, but kidnap ‘bad’ kids. As the book took place in Victorian England, I’ve no idea why a ‘dime’, tho; it’s not as tho the kids could go to a foreign coin exchange place. Considering how much research the author (Will Thomas) has done for this series, I’m surprised this misteak slipped through.
I remember a Jewish comedy record from the early-mid 60s about secret agent James Blond, 006.95 (marked down a little from 7.00). At one point he was supposed to contact another agent but he’d been blown up while working at a deli:
WAITER: “I was just talking to him, you know, not a minute before. He was complaining about some customer left him a big fat dime that was ticking.”
JAMES: “It must have been a bomb!”
WAITER: “Hey, buddy, any time they leave you a lousy dime, it’s a bomb.”
@Andrea: The serial killer author may have used “shilling”, but an editor changed it to “dime” for the US market. I am still annoyed that someone thought Americans are too dumb to understand “Philosopher’s Stone”.
‘The serial killer author may have used “shilling”, but an editor changed it to “dime” for the US market.’
Well, Hubby just took all the books back to the library, so I can’t check, but that makes sense.
@ Brian R – I’d be willing to bet a nickel that the original coin was a “sixpence”(*) rather than a whole shilling. As for the UK/US “translation”, it wasn’t just the title: there were a number of terms that needed to be modified, such as “jumper” => “sweater”. I’ve never seen the US edition, but Rowling once wrote that she made the US publisher change all the “mom”s back to “mum”s, which I thought was a little stiff-necked.
P.S. (*) – In Berlin dialect, the old 5 “Pfennig” coin used to be called a “Sechser” (sixer): the name was inherited from an older coin that was based on a duodecimal system.
Daniel J. Drazen: Jewish comic parody of James Bond from the 1960s sounds like the “Israel Bond” stories (MATZOHBALL; YOU SHOULD ONLY LIVE FOREVER AND NOT DIE; LOXFINGER; and one or two others whose titles I’ve forgotten and am too lazy to look up), but I don’t think any of them also appeared as comedy records.
I thought they were fairly funny but not great, but as a goy, what did I know?
SingaporeBill – at the end of the 60s,in junior high I received $3 a week for allowance. From that I was to buy lunch at school – though being smart, I bought it from home for free, had to babysit my sisters as needed and do anything else my parents asked me to do. I brought lunch from home and managed to save up to take my parents and my middle sister to see “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway.
Daniel J. Drazen & Shrug –
I thought it was 006.95 marked down ALREADY from 007. Dad had the record.
Israel Bond was oy oy 7. Dad had “Loxfinger” but while we forgot to look for it, in searching through the books at the house we did not see it.
The name “Israel Bond” alone justifies the series’s existence.
Oddly enough, this brings the thread full-circle for me: at the same time I was delivering coffee to Mr. Miller, I was also occasionally working at my father and uncle’s stationery store down the block. A stationery store that also sold books. Where I first read… Loxfinger.
It just dawned on me that we should looked for dad’s copy in his books – it was not there when we made our final run through of the books left – so many about 1920s/30s comedians that we not take due to lack of room here. No Harpo Speaks any longer by then and never did find the book about dad’s family in the old country that at least 4 of us remember existing and all remember it looking the same. (Apparently he comes from a line of rabbis.)