A STAMP OF APPROVAL FOR A FRIEND

Miss Agatha Fangquill left us this week, and the large circle of her friends have lost one of the liveliest counterforces, small but punchy, against the idiocies, frenzies, obtusenesses, pomposities and other social evils of our time.

She existed only in the mind and pen of my old journalist friend Dave Snell, who once said that, “In this business you either sink or swim or you don’t.”

Miss Fangquill’s weapon was the rubber stamp. (Snell once did a favor for a guy who made them, and the thanks were an endless supply.) “The person(s) responsible for this will report immediately to Miss Fangquill in Room 318,” I find in lavender ink at the bottom of a letter from Snell earlier this year, detailing the cancer about which neither he nor Miss Fangquill was able to do anything.

That stamped warning, and others such as the one that said, “Whoever did this reckons not with the wrath of Agatha Fangquill,” used to appear on copies of the stuffier memos that arrived in the interoffice mails at Life in the years Dave was a writer and copy editor there.

He also liked to stamp and return fatuous commercial letters. He once bought a hat and subsequently got a letter saying, “Now that we have your hat requirements on file, etc.” It went back, with Miss Fangquill’s command to report to Room 318. It drew an anxious call from a salesperson, wondering what it was that the store had done to offend.

If there is such a thing--and I know there is--Snell was a hyperactive adult, whose extracurricular energies went into humor that was created largely for the pleasure of his friends.

When I met him in the mid-’50s, he was bulky and bespectacled and already bald. He had been a top reporter and sometime cartoonist for the New York World-Telegram, and his widest public exposure as a humorist had come during the Army-McCarthy hearings (until now Washington’s most compulsively watchable show).

Snell drew a board game called Monotony. It used all the personages and places of the hearings and it had no ending; there was no way to win it. It was ingenious, and the cartoon was reprinted in Newsweek and other national publications.

More often the pleasures were ours. He had noted that “Hotel Plunge” just filled the one-column headline width in the tabloids, and he had collected several samples of its mournful use. In his sign-lettering period, he turned out an ornate, Victorian, gold-tinted placard reading Hotel Plunge and put it over the door of the office we shared in the old Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center.

He took up jewelry-making for a time, and favored us all with cuff links and tie-clasps, mine in the form of a silver squiggle that only our fellow-sufferers would recognize as the copy editor’s initials--which meant our story had been approved.

Snell collected things--a radio in the guise of a hand-cranked wall telephone, a large relief map of the United States retrieved from the trash, which he decorated with tacks and gave a new legend saying “Map Showing Location of Colored Pins.” Our office resembled a failing pawn shop.

His reputation as a saver of discarded items stayed with him. Some while after he joined Life, the World-Telegram got a new telephone system and the corridors were cluttered with ancient cables, switchboards and dusty containers. The managing editor, Dick Starnes, took one look and said, “My God, Snell’s back!”

In one of his finer hours, Snell did battle with the New York Telephone Co. over a disputed phone bill. Stamped chidings from Agatha Fangquill were unavailing; the dispute escalated and the company threatened to discontinue service on a certain day.

Snell fired off a letter pointing out that he had allowed the company to install a neighborhood service box, whatever it was, on the rear wall of his garage in Queens. The box thus being on his private property, he wrote, he was taking an ax to it on the day his service stopped. This produced a fast phone call from a living human being, who hastily arranged a compromise agreeable to Snell.

The last word was his. He sent a check and, on the back where the endorsement went, he typed, “I have been a naughty telephone company.”

He was from Minden, La., where his father owned and operated a cotton gin. His mother, Ada Jack Carver, was a prize-winning author of short stories. In his earlier days, Snell augmented his income with some professional wrestling. He was a masked villain, whose trade name I’ve long since forgotten.

Much of Snell’s humor derived from his affectionate joshing of Southern folkways. In addition to Agatha Fangquill, he invented Justice of the Peace W. P. Spillage, whose alarming views arrived rubber-stamped on post cards. There was also the Polksville Clarion-Epitome and its items about Highway and Mrs. Patrolman Brunnage, the International Quicksand Corp., Creators of Swamps and Bogs for Home and Industry, and the Norman Bates School of Motel Management.

Snell’s cartoon figures, large, bald and sad-eyed, were weird looking but oddly affecting and, I always thought, unintentionally revealing in their melancholy. As is so often the case, Snell’s deliberately low-brow humor was a masquerade for a sharp intelligence, a surprising amount of insecurity and more than his quota of private anxieties and sadnesses. After the magazine years and until his death this week, he was a successful and gifted free-lance writer, a gentle family man.

The letter earlier this year announcing his bad news was characteristically self-chiding and funny. Then at the bottom, just above Miss Fangquill’s comment, Dave said, “I’ve got out of the habit of pestering God by praying at Him morning, noon and night, the way my religious-fanatic Great Aunt Pid used to try to make me do. But I’m asking His help in meeting whatever must come with dignity, grace and good humor.”

He did.