Ralph Parlette

              RALPH PARLETTE





ORATOR~PRESS HUMORIST PLATFORM PHILOSOPHER




THE SIGN OF QUALITY




Exclusive Management The Chicago Lyceum Bureau, 705 Orchestra Bldg., Chicago
Exclusive Management:  Chicago-Mutual, Chicago; Co-Operative, Omaha; Columbian, St. Paul





TO PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T HEARD PARLETTE



R
ALPH PARLETTE is coming to speak in your city.  You are invited to hear him, because you will get your money's worth.  Saint and sinner always get their portion—and then some—when Parlette speaks.




A few years ago Ralph Parlette was a country editor struggling along on a meal ticket and faith in the future—both getting punched day by day.  He wrote stuff that made people laugh—and think at the same time.  The stuff was widely copied.  People read it and called him to the platform.  His success was immediate and emphatic.




To-day Ralph Parlette is a standard lyceum attraction, with more calls than he can accept.  He has filled over a thousand paid engagements the past seven years, upon city and Y. M. C. A. star courses, and before the leading Chautauquas, universities and other audiences that demand the best.  Where he speaks he generally returns, and his fee and audience generally increase at each visit.  His season never ends.




Ralph Parlette is a unique blending of philosopher, preacher, orator, entertainer and humorist.  He speaks and writes in desperate earnest, but wit and humor beam from almost every sentence.  His humor is not the kind that merely makes you laugh while you are getting it.  While your mouth is open he drops in a sugar-coated truth that soaks into your system and becomes a part of your creed.  His humor is not borrowed.  It is his own original brand, as natural as life.  Best of all, he brings an inspiring message, fit for any pulpit, his word pictures are most vivid, and his climaxes have been pronounced masterpieces of oratory.




Here is a glimpse of the three lectures he will give most this season.  A few more in the barrel, if wanted.  No matter what the lecture subject, it is the same kind of good cheer out of the same spigot.





The University of Hard Knocks



A joyous talk about the education that comes not from books but from bumps.  The story of the two kinds of Knocks we get all along life's pathway—the Needless Knocks and the Needful Knocks, and how we get glorious education from both—how the first kind drive us back to common sense, and the other kind chisel us angelic.  It shows how every knock is a boost and puts the 
knocker
 out of business.  This is his latest lecture —Parlette's Prescription for Punky People, and it is good for the soul, for it is full of salve for the sore spots and soothing syrup for all children under ninety-five years of age.  It is a message of cheer for the strugglers, and makes life's motto, 
To-morrow brings better things.





Pockets and Paradises



A violent but philosophic discussion of wealth and the fellow who owns it.  A picture of the mad rush to-day for the dollar, and the 
golden age
 in store for this land when men will become animated pockets, if the rush continues.  Then Parlette turns back to the Paradise Adam owned before he wore pockets, and shows how our Twentieth Century Paradise beats Adam's and how our real wealth has no pricemark.  The Lord made us all millionaires, sent us all the good things free.  The kingdom of the Almighty Dollar is only the pocket the Devil sewed into Adam's first pair of trousers.  Wealth is in the heart.  In this lecture Parlette shows how he manages to live on $1,000,000 a year, and then sends everybody home feeling millionairish.





Weighed in the Balances



A noisy protest against the Strenuous Life and a cheerful plea for symmetrical development.  This lecture 
goes after
 the faddishness and perversion of the age, holds up fullweight manhood and womanhood as the triumph of time and the crowning glory of eternity, and makes you do a lot of weighing while you sit and listen.  A man is the noblest work of God—also the scarcest.  He is more than a bunch of beefy muscle, or a pale tank of intellect, or a red-eyed saint with a long face and a torpid liver.  He is an equilateral triangle of the three M's—muscle, mind, morals.  The close points a glorious future for America, with a dramatic picture of Babylon's end to warn us against light weight.






P
ARLETTE SAYS:  
I believe in my own lectures because I have first tried them upon myself.  If you don't like what I say, come to me afterward and set me right.  A doctor in Pennsylvania said to me after the lecture, 'That speech was worth a hundred dollars to every person in the room, so you have left $60,000 in the crowd.'  Of course, I don't believe that, for I never saw so much money—I am a newspaper man.  I am more inclined to agree with the Texas man who wrung my hand at parting and faltered, 'Anybody who wouldn't like that lecture would show his lack of ignorance, now wouldn't he?'






FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE HEARD PARLETTE



To reproduce the appreciative utterances of Committees and Newspapermen from New York to 'Frisco would require volumes, but the character of their comment appears in the following excerpts.




Wonderful Word Painting




Wheeling, W. Va., Chautauqua:
  To say 
The University of Hard Knocks
 was a great lecture, is mildly expressing the thought of all who heard it.  * * His peroration was a wonderful example of word painting.  No pen can do it justice.  Mr. Parlette will be welcomed by large audiences as often as he may appear, if the management are able to secure him next season.—


News.




A Happy Philosopher




Elyria, Ohio, Chautauqua:
  Unquestionably, the three best lecturers of the Chautauqua were William Jennings Bryan, Ralph Parlette and Sam Jones.  * * Ralph Parlette!  He came in a manner unheralded, but he departed with flying colors, a delightful humorist, with a happy philosophy to impart.  All his lectures were lessons aptly taught, and mines of rich ore, so replete in sound philosophy and happiest fancy.—


Democrat.




A Brilliant Orator




Phoenix, Arizona:
  Mr. Parlette is unquestionably among the most entertaining and unique humorists on the American platform.  Wit, humor and satire flow from his lips in a rapid, nervous style that compels laughter and applause.  But to merely distinguish him as a humorist is to do him a great injustice.  He is more, a brilliant orator, who shows people's sorrows in a new light, as subject for laughter, and not tears, and he is capable of capturing and holding an audience as few men can.—


Republican.




A Complete Success




Bloomington, Ind., State University:
  Here, probably, the highest priced course in the State was conducted the past year.  Parlette closed this course June 1st, and the Committee report:  
He was a complete success in every particular.  Mr. Parlette, with his sparkling wit, homely philosophy and pleasing manner of delivery, held the attention of one thousand people on a desperately hot night.  His ideas of wealth and of an earthly paradise were presented in a way that struck his hearers with unusual force—a force carrying conviction.  Those who heard the relation of his wonderful satiric dream of the future, the masterstroke of his lecture, will not soon forget it.  Behind every one of his jokes was a lesson deep as the heart of humanity.  As in the case of the best of Riley and of Holmes, the lightness of the exterior served only to heighten the effect of the whole.




A Regular Sun Bath




Grand Haven, Michigan:
  Ralph Parlette, one of the most unique and strangely interesting figures on the lecture platform, appeared last evening before one of the largest crowds of the course, and his work was immensely appreciated.




Mr. Parlette does not joke.  He is serious, desperately serious, and some of his sparkling, sunny points have a pith that is pure and strikingly personal.  In all his seriousness, Mr. Parlette is funny and original, and his wit is as keen as a lancet.  He shoots criticism directly at his audience, but his light heart and sparkling optimism serve as a gentle anæsthetic for the dart that is about to come.




Mr. Parlette has a way of ridiculing the weaknesses of an audience without hurting its feelings, and when he finishes the room is full of sunshine and the same abused hearers are looking at life in a way that had never appeared to them before, Last evening he weighed the human race in the balances with his ideal man.  To be sure, he picked the faults of our race in a manner that kept us all in convulsions of laughter at our own expense, but when he closed the audience had only one fault to find, and that was because he did not talk longer.




Mr. Parlette is a newspaper man of Ohio and a lecturer of America.  He is funny, but he can preach a beautiful sermon, and his lecture is better than a regular sun bath.  If he comes to Grand Haven again within the next fifty years, he will find men and women who are still being warmed by some of the sunshine he turned loose last night.—


Tribune.




A Boost from Boston




Dean Alfred A Wright:
  By all means, call it 
The University of Hard Knocks.
  You can't invent or discover a better title for that admirable lecture.  This is three times I have listened to you with increasing delight.  You are doing great good to all the people.




An Ovation at 'Frisco




The San Francisco Y. M. C. A.
 secretary, F. E. Swanson, reported:  Mr. Parlette lectured to a crowded house on 
Pockets and Paradises,
 and to say he pleased is putting it mildly.  Not once did he lose the rapt attention of the audience, and at its close he received an ovation seldom given any speaker.  The lecture itself is replete with the richest humor, never descending to the commonplace or partaking in the slightest degree of the vulgar, which so often mars the humor of many entertainers.  Beneath all these runs a vein of philosophy, the effect of which is to make one feel that the world is largely as we paint it and life a glorious heritage, full of opportunity.




Ralph Parlette, the Funny Man



A neighborly view, from Henry Whitworth, Professor of Languages, Ohio Northern University




Who is you fellow tall and spare,


Of lantern-jaw and dusky hair,


With breakfast food and coal-oil can?


It's Ralph Parlette, the 
Funny Man.


He Ralph Parlette, that guy?  O fudge!


Why, he's as sober as a judge,


Would order Mirth put under ban:


That's not Parlette, the 
Funny Man!


'Tis he:  I've known him quite a spell;


Know all his forebears just as well.


He 
laughs at night
—hush!  that's a plan


Of 
Honest John,
 the 
Funny Man.


For music then the laughter fills,


And Wisdom's diapason thrills;


He lures them skyward many a span,


This wise Parlette, the 
Funny Man.


He plumes his wing for lofty flight,


He mounts to regions of delight:


And counts it joy heaven's heights to scan,


This goodly soul, the 
Funny Man.


With heart aglow for human weal,


With sense of need for human zeal,


To stir men's lives, where'er he can,


Our Greatheart laughts; the 
Funny Man.


Some day the gate will open wide,


And myriad angels by his side


Will welcome home, as seraphs can,


Our large-souled Ralph, the 
Funny Man.





Tears and Laughter




Newark Y. M. C. A.:
  Carried his audience with him from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again so suddenly at times that tears and laughter were commingled in one breath.—


Leader.




Roared Its Delight




Cincinnati, Ohio:
  In this city Mr. Parlette has appeared fifteen times.  On the occasion of his second lecture upon the Unity Course, one of the most famous courses in America, the 
Enquirer
 said:  The Unity Course closed yesterday in the Grand with the great audience cheering Ralph Parlette, the humorist, who had entertained it in a rarely good vein.  * * He is considerable of an actor and he illustrated his points in a way that caused the audience to roar its delight.  Beneath the veneer of wit and humor was a stratum of hard horse sense in the shape of a plea for symmetrical development.  He will be returned next season.




High Moral Tone




Claremont College, California,
 wrote the Bureau:  
We wish to express the gratification not only of ourselves, but of the audience, with Mr. Parlette's lecture.  Not merely the laugh remains, but the consciousness that he pressed home worthy ideals of life.  His lecture followed our series of revival meetings in the College, and it was a beautiful continuation of them in its helpfulness and high moral tone.




Parlette Makes His Dates




The Clinton, Indiana,
 committee write:  Mr. Parlette arrived last night a little after eight o'clock on a belated train.  He galloped to the hotel at break-neck speed, inquired of the first man he met in the lobby for a room, fell over his grip and otherwise attracted considerable attention and provoked considerable merriment.  But he soon appeared at the church where he was to lecture and proceeded to make up for the lost time.  He did so in a very captivating manner and soon had his large audience completely in his power.  Everyone was pleased, thoroughly pleased, with his lecture.




A Button Burster




Topeka, Kansas:
  This was Parlette's recall to the great Topeka Auditorium the same season at a higher fee, and at its close brought three engagements in neighboring towns.  The 
Herald
 says:




At least a quart of buttons, pins, and hooks-and-eyes would have been picked up this morning on the floors of the Auditorium if all those who bought tickets for the Ralph Parlette lecture had braved the wind and rain to occupy their seats.  As it was, the supply was a little short of that amount, but the four hundred or so who did hear Mr. Parlette did not begrudge the loss.




The subject of the lecture was 
Weighed in the Balances.
  The subject matter was good, solid, hard sense—common sense—but the dressing given it so much livened it that there was little time for anything but laughing and trying to quit.  The speaker's argument was for a symmetrical, three-fold development of the man in soul, mind and body.  In making it he hit everybody on earth except the few people who were sitting in front of him.




Beautiful Necklace of Truth




The Hutsonville, Illinois, Herald
 thus gives vent to its appreciation:  
Great
 is a terse and expressive way of describing the lecture given by Ralph Parlette in the Auditorium at Hutsonville last Saturday night.  When he appeared on the platform the crowded house applauded vigorously to show how gratefully it had kept in mind his excellent lecture of a year ago.




Showing his teeth in a Rooseveltian smile, Mr. Parlette bowed his acknowledgment and began his famous lecture on 
Pockets and Paradises.
  He lived up to expectations.  The thread of common sense ran through his flashes of wit and humor like a silken cord through beads of diamonds and pearls.  Oh, it was a beautiful necklace of truth; and he that hangs it about his neck may well remember Parlette as the giver of a good gift.




He told us that monopoly has grasped so many of the good things of life that too many think that there is nothing left to be enjoyed without paying tribute to the trusts.  Then he showed us the bounties and beauties which God has given that no trust can corner and which have grown common and are unnoticed because they are free.  
To truly appreciate a blessing.
  he said, 
one must have lost it.  And the true end of human life is to gain happiness and the happiness that brings no regret.




But he seasoned his common sense remarks with Attic wit and played on the risibilities of the vast audience with the skill of a Paderewski invoking the soul of music from a piano.  They smiled and tittered and giggled and guffawed; they leaned forward and laughed; they leaned backward and laughed; they laughed at Parlette, at what he said.  at one another.  The silvery laughter of fair women, the mellow laughter of men, the treble laughter of children, one differing from another in time and force and pitch, swelled out a grand chorus of laughter that would have sounded joyous even within the pearly gates.  Oh, it was laughter, spontaneous, gladsome laughter; for no one so well as Parlette can 
jigger the diaphragm.






PARLETTE'S WAY OF SAYING THINGS



Pride is the upholstering of laziness.




I can't find many great men that got their start with steam heat.




Verily, diet and destiny go hand in hand!  One apple busted Eden.




The sermon was so impressive the other night that the choir paid attention.




The battle is to the worker, not to the party with the manicure set and the pedigree.




Even the successful fish-pole needs a stout line at one end and a stouter liar at the other.




Life is a mad battle with dirt, dust and devils, and happy the man who hires his house-cleaning done.




If there is one thing some people enjoy more than doing a good act, it is telling about it afterwards.




Some people are born fools; some people acquire it in college; and some people have gold bricks thrust upon them.




The pen is mightier than the punching bag—but the latter is a mighty good side line to carry on the road to success.




Even the loafer is useful.  He helps to swell our census figures; he is the cipher that fills.  And his vote is valuable.




And yet with paved streets and wireless telegraphy I don't enjoy myself any better than when I used to shave with soft soapsuds.




I can't understand why I have failed to coax grass in the front lawn where I want it, when I can't fight it down with a hoe in the garden where I don't want it.




Why does the father bolt his horse in the barn, but let his boy prowl around at night?  And why does he chain up a five-cent dog and let his daughter flutter at random?




Raising the wages will never settle strikes.  Bath rooms, button-hole bouquets, reading rooms and ragtime don't touch the spot.  Human nature never gets enough, and never will.




My son, I have paid out a good deal of money to learn that when the deacon borrows money of you, ask security on his note, just as you would from an ordinary sinner.  Some people are so busy with the promises of heaven they forget all about their promises here on earth.




How I would like to take George Washington and Ben Franklin to the modern celebration of the glorious Fourth and say:  
Here, patriot fathers, is the grateful nation you have founded, to-day commemorating your heroic work of '76.  Would you rather see the dog fight or the old maids' carnival?




About six more long-faced friends with new remedies to try would have fixed me, that last spell of the grip.  After Job had suffered boils and other assorted calamities, three friends came to overflow his cup of sorrow.  I love friends.  They gladden life, and can often be worked for a small loan, but when I am sick I don't want them to come and spill tears on my pillow.  They mean it all right, of course.  So did the innocent and lovable youth who looked into the shotgun.




The main idea with volunteer firemen and heroic rescuers is to smash things so there won't be much loss if they are burned.  We jam into the burning building and save things so thoroughly it would be dollars in the owner's pocket to let the whole outfit go to ashes.  The idea is to make a fire so destructive people will be more careful in the future.  A friend of mine had a fire last summer that did $50 worth of damage, but gallant friends did about $500 worth of rescuing.




I am thirsty for information.  I drink out of every muddy pool or babbling brook I pass.  Some of the information is very muddy and brackish, and some of the fish I swallow are very scaly.  I am a living interrogation point.  I bore everybody around me with questions, until they move away.  People tell me some 
whoppers,
 while a suppressed smile flits around the company.  I swallow them and beg for more, very much as a cow in the pasture takes in a miscellaneous load; then I go off in the shade to chew over my cud of information.




Ah!  I would that all our young men could realize how their success hinges on getting the right kind of a wife.  Would we to-day remember Ahab if Jezebel had jilted him?  Ananias would have gone down to an unknown grave if it hadn't been for Sapphira, and it wouldn't have been so-fiery, either.  How much of the world's history would have been written differently had Adam married into another family!




Be Happy To-day



The good Lord has the curtain drawn pretty tightly over the future, and I have never found the clairvoyant who could find a peep-hole at any price.  I have had my full share of trouble.  I have had trouble to give away.  I have had so much trouble I used to peddle it.  But I am learning better sense.  I have had joy because I didn't know when the trouble was coming.  I have never seen cattle having a better time than in the Chicago stockyards.  I have watched Texas steers walk up the bloody tramway to their eternal cold storage and joke with the steer just ahead.




So we can best enjoy to-day, because we cannot see to-morrow, or where the man with the scythe is hidden.  If we could get premonitions and tips on the future from day to day, this would be the saddest world in the solar system.




Verily, in the midst of life we are in death.  There were the old reliable risks of our forefathers.  We have also the deadly trolley and the ice cream soda, the limited express train and the unlimited ballroom train, the auto and the microbe, floating palaces and floating kidneys, smokeless powder and complexion powder, skyscrapers and beard scrapers, soubrettes, cigarettes, socialists, pugilists, brain fag, high jag, elevators, fried potaters, false teeth, embalmed beef, tainted dollars, tall collars, tight shoes, tighter booze—oh, a lot more things to terrify us.  If I sit down to figure over it I don't see how I can get through the day and save my scalp.  But why cross the Jordan until we get to it?  Let us get all the joy possible out of to-day, for that is the best preparation for to-morrow, and whatever overtakes us, or whenever it comes, we are ready to set up housekeeping on the other side.





Trying to Live in Chicago



My life in a Chicago flat is a flat failure.  I wouldn't say this if I could get a flat with at least two windows to dilute the damp darkness on a bright day, or one big enough to permit the bread to rise.  I don't object to the piano academy in the next flat, nor to the dancing school over our heads, nor to the twins cutting teeth all night in the flat below us.  I can patiently inhale the gas from leaky pipes, and pay for it by meter, for I am getting the benefit of it.  I will cheerfully climb five stories of corkscrew stairs.  I will bask in a landscape of garbage.  But I want a little sunshine and a breathing tube.




And I hate to surrender all my rights as a freeborn American citizen to the janitor.  He is the king of Chicago and when he speaks the board of trade must hush up.  Make him low obeisance or shiver over a dead radiator.




Reared amid the uncultured grass, fresh air and sunshine of a country town, it is hard to give them all up for city luxuries.  Brought up on water from the pump, it is awkward to hunt up the danger signals in the daily papers before diluting my system with the gray juice and germs of Lake Michigan.  Accustomed as I am to slap my neighbors on the back, I chafe at being arrested for assault and battery when I greet my Chicago neighbors.  Having all my life worn my largest diamonds on the country streets and accustomed as I am to carrying a roll of bills sticking out of my vest pocket, I can't appreciate getting sandbagged on my front doorstep.  I hate to bolt a door and set a time lock every time I go through it.  It is so embarrassing to put on a dress suit and send up a card when I go to the next house to borrow a cup of applebutter.




When I go to the postoffice, it is so much nicer to go around the corner than to ride two hours in an epileptic cable-car.  I don't enjoy loafing on the counter of the department stores, like in the grocery at home.  The crowd is so different, and the floorwalker snickers when I ask them to trust me till Saturday night.




Oh, I think I'll give up city advantages and move back to the country; back to the breath of clover blossoms instead of the stockyards; back where I am honest until I prove myself a rascal.  Here in Chicago I am a rascal until I can prove myself honest, and I haven't been able to do that, so far.