Well, folks, here’s wishing you all a happy Cristobal Colon Day.
Surprised? Mystified?
There’s really no reason on earth why you should be.
Old H. W. has been on a discovery tour, this being the day when we celebrate the grandest discovery ever made. Even department stores are celebrating by announcing that Columbus—pardon, Colon—discovered America but they have discovered oh! such glorious mogadore ties at oh! such amazingly low prices.
So, with the true seafaring man’s daring, armed with nothing but a pencil for a compass and some blank sheets of foolscap for nautical charts, the doughty Day Booker navigated his way through the turbulent, serpent infested subway seas to that domain of spicy stories and gold-encrusted halls, the Big Library.
Anchoring my good ship Santa (Day Book) Maria just off the rocky coast of Fifth avenue Island, I planted my Spanish brogans on terra firma. But I did not land entirely unscathed. A savage in a blue uniform just about nipped my scalp with a very dirty look and a very nasty crack about jaywalking.
However, undaunted by the cold reception, I swept serenely into the Big Library and immediately discovered among some musty old volumes exactly what I had set out to discover when I embarked upon the stormy subway seas in trusty old Santa (Day Book) Maria.
I discovered Cristobal Colon, a Spanish Jew, who probably had hayfever and, taking to the seas to stop sneezing, he almost ran over America in the middle of the ocean. That was in 1492.
Surrounded by heaps of spices— bound between magazine covers— your old explorer sat down with Colon and had a heart-to-heart talk on this and that.
“I can’t understand you Jews over here at all,” he said in a sweetly complaining voice. “Four centuries after I took that trip for my health and incidentally discovered America, an Italian scribbler by the name of Casoni has a dream one night in which he discovers that I’m a Genoese Italian and the next day he puts his dream into writing and now look at me. I’m in all the history books as a guy by the name of Christopher Columbus. I’m a granite statue and a marble bust, plastered all over the countryside with Italians delivering orations in front of me in a language I can’t understand two words of.
“And all the time,” Cristobal went on plaintively, “I’m nothing but a Spanish Jew. Just because an Italian scribbler got the jump on you. What’s come over the Jews, anyway? I’m beginning to think that fellow Bill Ziff who writes for your paper must be right. You lack backbone or something. Here, a couple of centuries later, it is true, a Spanish scholar, la Riega, finally digs up the truth about me, but still you do nothing about claiming me for your own. That fellow Andy Brown who talks on the radio has a word for the way I feel—’I’se regusted’.”
“There, there, Cristobal, old boy,” I said, opening my mouth for the first time since sitting down for the heart-to-heart talk. The old Day Booker’s heart was having a hemorrhage for the disappointed discoverer.
“I’ll see what I can do about it,” I said. “Know what I’ll do ? I’ll go right back to the office and speak to the editors and have ’em start a campaign—or something. We’ll get a good historian to write a new history of America in which he’ll tell the world the truth about you, even to the hayfever—achoo, achoo—pardon me, it’s those spices, Cristobal. Then we’ll organize a lot of Cristobal Colon societies all over the country. Then we’ll get up subscription funds to erect a lot of Cristobal Colon statues at all the colleges and in all the parks. We’ll even—well, Cristobal, rest assured we’re going to put you over in a great big way for what you really are. Toodle-oo, I’ve got to rush off now and get started on it.”
When I left him, Cristobal was smiling placidly, playing idly with an orange, and absent-mindedly preparing to bed himself down among the spices.
“Good-bye,” he said, “I’ll be seeing you at the first Cristobal Colon celebration in Colon Circle. I promise you that I’ll make a personal appearance on that occasion. And on the next voyage of exploration I undertake, I’ll name the first land I bump into Santa Day Book—or something.”
—H. W.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
