Friday, July 1, 2016

TAD Dorgan and the Origin of the Hot Dog


[1919] Full-page Hearst News advert in Moving Picture World, Feb 22 


“We take him to a dago joint down on the east side and let him eat a lot of ravioli and listen to the wops. He always got a kick out of that… then we take him up to the McAlpin and set him up in a window on the top floor where he can look straight up Broadway. He just sits there and looks at the lights and traffic and talks about the old mob up at Jack’s café.” — Ike Dorgan about his brother’s last days, to Westbrook Pegler in ‘Death Claims Tad Dorgan, Phrase Maker’ in the Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1929


[1939] Philadelphia Inquirer,  June 17
[1919] The Moving Picture World, Feb 8, with photograph of ‘famous “TAD”’ (1877-1929).  Movie houses showed TAD cartoons in weekly newsreels from Hearst News.

6 comments:

  1. That Pegler column appeared in The Philadelphia Iquirer on June 17, 1939.
    http://preview.tinyurl.com/jdkhs3f (via Fulton History)
    D.D.Degg

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  2. I was hoping you would get around to
    debunking the TAD/hot dog myth.
    http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/hot_dog/
    D.D.Degg

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra also informed me that the Frank Merrriwell dime novels referred to them as "doggies" in 1899 and in 1901 a character is referred to as resembling a "dried-up hot-dog sausage."

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    2. But you are right D., I have been a little lax lately. I'll take notice and not sluff off in future.

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  3. Snopes has a story about hot dogs in Yale from the 5 October 1895 Yale Record. Another article had a link to a Dec 31, 1892 article in the Paterson Daily Press where "hot dog" is mentioned twice. I never did find any "hot dogs" in a Tad cartoon but there may be some somewhere. Although I could never find the exact date Tad began as a cartoonist his fame did not come until about 1903 or 1904 so it is unlikely he "invented" the term. I believe (could be wrong) the original Tad attribution may have come from Mencken's book The American Language of 1919.

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