I saw this old “Lefty” Wright comic strip in “Stripper’s Guide” blog recently and noticed this strip from 1937 used the phrase “Be Cool.” So it’s interesting to see that some of the expressions we use today, were around so many years ago.
I would have assumed “Be Cool” came from the 1950s or 1960s, but I guess not.
Now if you never heard of the “Lefty Wright” comic strip, that’s understandable, according to Stripper’s Guide, it was short lived – it ran from April 8 to May 27, 1937.
As for “Stripper’s Guide,” – no, it’s not about anything naked, you know, “Strippers” and “stripping.”
Strippers are people who work in the newspaper business, or I should say worked in the newspaper business. They put everything together back in the dark room so many years ago before computers. I know a guy named Richard to this day, who used to work at a newspaper I worked at years ago, and he was a stripper.
They took the articles and headlines and photos, mostly the photos and “stripped them” together on the negatives, where plates were then made and put on the press and printed.
We used to put big red boxes in place of the photos, including the comics and anything that was an image, that red came out as clear on the page negative and then the photos and images were then “stripped” into the blank spaces. It was a process.
I remember so many years ago, our boss, the owner of the newspaper we worked for, told us about “pagination.” It was a process coming up in the future where the whole page would come out as one piece, instead of stripping everything in one piece at a time. We were in awe when he told us that. Imagine that, one whole piece of paper or negative, that would be all put together and ready for print.
I remember when computers first came out, I asked one of my brothers who worked in IT if it would be possible to have different fonts on the computer, so that when we typeset, we could bounce back and forth from one font to another and make it different sizes at that.
He thought it over and said it probably could be done by being programmed some way, but we never did figure out that way at the time.
Amazing how far things have come from stripping to font creation and beyond
Reminds me of a segment I saw on CBS Sunday Morning – about the creation of the iPhone, which was flabbergasting to everyone at the time. Flabbergasting. Is that a word? The article and video are here, “Apple: The First 50 Years.”
Till next time . . .
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There are always articles on sounds from the past that are disappearing, you know, things like the bell on a typewriter or the sound of dialing a rotary phone and I realized that when I finally 
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