The Yale Expositor

When We Had Our Rights

Rouse, ye Boozemen! Red-nosed men,
Outraged citizens! Listen, then,
While I break your hearts
With a tale that starts
Back in the I Can Remember When:

When a man might trade a whole week's pay
For a glorious jag that would last all day;
A wonderful day and a wonderful night,
Including a free lunch and a fight.

And when at last
The glad hours passed—
When swooning Nature could stand no more,
He could fall asleep on the sawdust floor,
With his weary head in the cuspidor.

Them was the days! And I drop a tear
On the mournful grave of that Yesteryear.

Did you ever think of the sinful way
We waste our jack on a Saturday?
Blowing the wages on grub and shoes
Which once on a time would have bought good
booze!

Ah, cynical one, ne'er shake your head!
The dime that you spend for a loaf of bread
Would have bought you a schooner of foaming beer
In the joyous days of a vanished year!

Dear old songs! Dear old fights!
Back in the days when we had our Rights!

Ah, golden days! When a yegg could make
A barrel of hooch from one rattlesnake,
One rubber boot and a drug or two,
And pass it over the bar to you
At ten a throw; then, deft and brisk,
Humming a carefree ditty, frisk
Your Sunday suit from tie to pants
And kick you out to lie in a trance
And sleep it off in a watering trough
Till the gang came round with the ambulance.

Them was the days! Them was the nights!
We lost our dough and our liver and lights.
And an eye or so—but we had our Rights.

Rise, fellow Suckers, good and true!
Somewhere a Voice is Calling You!
Somewhere a yegg is catching cold,
Out in the night with a piece of old
Rusty gaspipe! While he biffs
Poor old scared commuting stiffs
On the bean, he pensive sighs,
Wiping his poor, bleary eyes
In an absent way as he wonders when
We'll get him back on the job again.

Shall we then endure to behold his pain?
Shall his weeping rise to the stars in vain?
Shall the poor yegg's tears, like summer rain,
Water a land that is crass and crude
And sown with the seeds of ingratitude?

Shall we tamely sit by our bank account,
Watching it mount and mount and mount?
Shall we hold our peace with the Suckers then
Tell how they got it in Goucher's Den—
Knockout drops in their pail of hops—
Back in the I Can Remember When?

Shall we ever forget sweet days gone by
When we went home loaded with drug-store rye
And woke Wife up with a crack in the eye,
And a bump in the nose when she started to cry
Dear dead days! Dear dead nights!
When the yeggs and the Suckers had their
Rights!

Lowell Otus Reese in The Saturday Evening Post.