Richard Armour (1906–1989)

Richard Armour's “Drug Store Days: My Youth Among the Pills and Potions” (1959) may be one of the funniest memoirs you will ever read, even if it is far from the funniest of Armour's books.

Armour grew up the son and grandson of California druggists. He did not follow the family tradition and instead became a college professor and humorist, author of numerous textbook parodies such as “It All Started with Columbus” and light verse.

Most of the humor in “Drug Store Days” comes at show more his own family's expense. Both of his quirky grandmothers complicated family life. His dad's mother had been married to the drug store's original owner and continued to act as if the store were hers, coming in every day and staking out a position near the ladies' restroom and making announcements whenever it was occupied. "Besides, as long as he owed her anything she felt that the store was really hers and that she was entitled to drop in and criticize and help herself to peppermints," Armour writes.

As for his maternal grandmother, she lived with the family for several years and insisted upon a nip of alcohol at bedtime. When Prohibition came in, she refused to change her habit, and in fact refused to go to bed without her nightcap. Fortunately his father, being a druggist, had remedies in his store containing enough alcohol to give his mother-in-law a good night's sleep and himself a little peace in his home.

Another frequent subject of Armour's memories is his Uncle Lester, his father's unmarried brother, who seem favored by their mother, at least as long as he stayed unmarried. She did her best to discourage any woman who might take an interest in Lester.

Armor's father was a tightwad who squeezed maximum profit out of everything, while refusing to install a soda fountain in his drug store at a time when soda fountains were a major source of revenue for his competitors. He probably didn't like the thought of his son, and perhaps his mother, consuming most of the profits. As for his mother, she had a jealous streak, especially after her husband installed a couch in the basement of his store.

Richard Armour had a gift for finding the humor in just about anything, including Christopher Columbus, Karl Marx and his own grandmothers. Thank goodness he chose not to become a druggist. show less

Imagine making light of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s bloody purges. Well, more than 60 years ago Richard Armour not only imagined it but wrote a book about it, “It All Started With Marx.” All these years later, it remains a funny and, oddly enough, educational book.

Armour was, after all, an educator first and foremost. His students at the California college where he taught English knew him as Dr. Armour. So when he wrote his satirical books (or show more perhaps they should be called parodies of textbooks), he based his humor on facts, usually those found in other, more serious books on the same subjects. Like Mad magazine during its heyday, Armour informed about the very things he ridiculed.

Thus we find lines like this: “Marx did not live to complete ‘Das Kapital,’ nor have many readers lived to finish it.” The facts, then the gag, all in one neat sentence. Two pages later, commenting on the size of Russia, Armour writes, “From the earliest times the Russian has had plenty of elbow room, which explains why he puts his hands on his hips while dancing.”

Like Henny Youngman, a contemporary of Armour’s, he keeps the one-liners coming, one after another. Some fall flat, but they come so quickly that readers never breaks stride. If one gag isn’t funny, the next one will be.

Armour’s books on history, art, literature and a variety of other subjects were popular during the Fifties and Sixties. I discovered them when I was in high school. Much of what I read in them reenforced what I read in traditional textbooks. I missed “It All Started With Marx” back then. It was good to catch up with it now. It’s never too late to learn. show less

The subtitle says it all: A short history of American literature for long-suffering students, for teachers who manage to keep one chapter ahead of the class, and for all those who, no longer being in school, can happily sink back into illiteracy. American lit relit is Richard Armour at his punny best, taking us through American literature one pun at a time. He covers all the usual suspects, from Anne Bradstreet though Whittier, Poe, Twain, Hemingway and many others.

It helps to know a bit show more about each author and work, but not necessary for enjoyment. For instance: “[St. John de Crèvecœur] asks the question, ‘What is an American?’ … [he] answers in about six thousand words. Apparently it didn’t occur to him to say, “An American is a person who lives in America.” Or: “Who does not know the opening line of many of Longfellow’s poems? Before answering this question, here is another. Who knows the rest of the poem?” Armour adds footnotes to his text to further explain the text and they are sometimes funnier (or punnier) than the text – read the explanation of why Henry James did not eat at home and then read the footnote.

The text is complemented by black and white illustrations by Campbell Grant. I found myself looking to see which authors were wearing shoes, socks or slippers. I haven’t yet discovered the significance or if the fact that Twain’s slippers had polka dots had any relevance.

This book may not help you pass a college course in American literature but it will make you laugh and/or groan. show less

I was quite a number of pages into "Through Darkest Adolescence," Richard Armour's comical lament about raising teenagers, before I realized that, since the book was published in 1963, I myself was one of those teenagers in question. From then on the book became a little more personal, even a little more amusing.

Armour is at his best in the opening chapter where he discusses adolescence as a disease, a disease that is not contagious and that you get only once, although it can hang on for show more several years. For a few people, he warns, it can last much longer, as among those people who act like teenagers well into middle age. After writing about some of the more serious symptoms of this disease, he concludes, "Some day a Dr. Salk will probably come along with a vaccine for adolescence. If so, the only question will be which Nobel Prize he should get -- the one for medicine or the one for peace."

From there, he moves on to such topics as getting a chance at the bathroom when there are teens in the house, teen parties, what to do when your kids are old enough to drive and problems related to cutting hair and straightening teeth. He uses his own son and daughter as examples, which must have embarrassed them terribly. However, since he was born in 1906, his kids may have been well into adulthood by 1963.

Armour wrote light verse to rival that of his contemporary, Ogden Nash. Unfortunately some of his poems are often wrongly attributed to Nash. We get a nice sampling of his verse scattered throughout this book. Here is one example:

We've only a teen-age daughter,
A two-legged creature indeed,
And yet from the shoes
She incessantly strews,
You'd think we've a centipede.

Armour's wit seems to fail him late in his book when he addresses the subjects of smoking and drinking. His strategy for discouraging these behaviors is to encourage his kids to smoke cigars and consume large quantities of alcohol on the theory that after this they will not want to smoke or drink at all. Of course, this strategy fails. None of this misbehavior, and I'm referring to that of the parent, seems funny now, and I doubt that it was funny even in 1963.

However I do recall that when I was a little boy my father offered me a sip of his beer. I cried loudly at the taste, and my mother came running from the kitchen, giving Dad a firm lecture when she found out what had happened. But I have never wanted a beer since. So maybe Armour's strange strategy might have worked if he had only tried it a decade earlier. show less