Ever since I was a child, I always liked reading reminescenes of newspaper reporters, in books usually printed circa 1900-1950. Reporters were different then, than they are now; back then, reporters just observed and reported, nothing more.
Because they were this way, they found the human condition essentially to be ridiculous--but as there was nothing one could do about it, one could at least laugh about it.
The below is from Such Interesting People [Robert Casey, 1943, Bobbs-Merrill]; Casey was a reporter who worked in the middle west (South Dakota, Iowa, Texas, and Chicago) during the golden age of newspaper reporting, the abovementioned circa 1900-1950.
The episode has no date on it, but given the story preceding and the story following, it must have been the winter of 1923, when skyscrapers and airplanes were in their infancy.
And that was the year also when the slush ice was so thick at the entrance to the harbor [at Chicago, on Lake Michigan] and a ship from Duluth got frozen up beyond the breakwater.
Casey then goes into detail about how a public-relations man for a meat-packery in the city got this novel idea about succoring the passengers stranded on board in the inescapable ice; he hired an airplane stunt-pilot and aircraft, from which products of the meat-packery would be dumped on the stuck boat.
Out on the ice the ship Gustav of Duluth nestled like a stranded whale. A lookout reported to the captain that somebody was trying to shout some messages from the breakwater but that he couldn't make them out. The captain tried also.
He thought he could make out something about rescue and keeping up his courage but that sounded silly. He thought of opening up the radio but then thought better of it.
Lots of people began to collect along the shore. By that time, it appears, everybody in town knew the ship was to be rescued except the victims themselves. That is why passengers and crew all ran out onto the deck when the airplane came over.
[The press-agent's] pilot didn't have any Norden bombsight but he had a pretty good eye. He dropped the first ham from about a thousand feet and it went straight through the pilot house. The second missed by no more than a yard.
He never got to drop a third. By that time the victims had crawled over the side and were walking ashore on the ice. In pitting themselves against the perils of the deep they had not contemplated possible destruction by falling hams.
