“He's pretty bright,” I said. “He refused to pick up a red-hot stove on a dare last week.”
But Papa warned me not to talk about Ogell-muggell at the dinner table, since Mama was excited enough as it was. In such times Papa had to do the cooking….
Papa decided to make Mama a Longstreet Long Lobster Cocktail, which was a long name for it; mostly we called it “Longie,” and everyone knew what we were talking about.
Papa would cut a twelve-inch lobster that had been boiled and cooled into small cubes. To this he would add a half pint of flaked crab meat and a pint of cubed cucumber and a trickle of mayonnaise. When this was chilled, and just before serving, he would add a sauce made of two ounces of tomato paste, a half pint of mayonnaise, a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar, an ounce of onion juice, an ounce of chili sauce, one tablespoon each of well-chopped chives and parsley, a few drops of Worcestershire, salt, pepper, and a fistful of whipped cream well folded in. Then he touched it up with Gramp's secret: some Cayenne pepper and six drops of his best gin. The gin really helps.
But even a Longie, much as Mama enjoyed it, didn't take her mind off her football plans.
She spooned up Longie and said, “The key to it all is Ogell-muggell.”
Papa wasn't listening. He said, “No, it's the gin.”
We spoke no more of Ogell-muggell that night.
Ogell-muggell wasn't his name, of course. His real name was twice as long and twice as hard to say. He was half Spanish peasant and half Tyrol waiter. He was called Ogellmuggell because of a line in a high school play he once saw. Two of the local co-eds were dressed as witches, and they stirred a pot and sang a song that began:
“Ogell-muggell, boil and bubble Stir and sing of coming trouble Ogell-muggell, boil and bubble….”
He was impressed by this song and asked someone if this ogell-muggell was good eatin'. Some town wit said it was, and the poor football player went down to Tom's Tony Diner and asked for a “big dish of ogell-muggell.” Tom winked to the village loafers gnawing their way through their evening toothpicks like eager beavers, and he mixed up oatmeal and catchup, and from then on the football player was known to everyone as Ogell-muggell.
Ogell-muggell was six feet tall and almost as wide. His face was square and bland, and he started life in the icehouse carrying blocks of ice as big as himself. Papa said when they were placed side by side it would have been hard to tell which was Ogell-muggell and which was the block of ice, except that one wore a checked cap.
The College used the High School as a sort of hothouse. They found young human colts and sent them to a boarding house, and if they made good on the high school team, they would one day play for the simon-pure college, at a living wage. They were also on the payroll of the Old Grads during their stay at the boarding house. Ogell-muggell had a simple job there while playing high school football. At nine every day he got up and went out in the hall and pulled down a window blind to keep the sun off a rubber plant in a brass pot. He got five dollars a week for this, and stunted the rubber plant for life. When he made twenty touchdowns in six games, he was allowed to pull down two blinds, and for this his wage was doubled. So you can see how Papa felt when Mama said she was going to bring this honest, hard-working blind-puller over to her side. He was already thinking of the job the Old Grads had waiting for him at College … where he would get a prince's salary at a frat house for counting the bowls used for corn flakes every morning.
Mama opened the attack by forcing a ruling at the next meeting of the school board that every high school student who fell below a certain standard of study would be helped by a personal interview with the board. The board did not notice the gleam in Mama's eye when they passed this ruling; they were all feeling good that they were giving valuable time to speak kindly to some dopes who would drop out anyway to work in the town laundry, or end up in Congress.
Pinterest
