Last night, we had a guest who noticed a box marked “Temporary Files” on top of Mr. Rilch’s filing cabinet and asked what it was for. Mr. Rilch explained that it was for papers that would eventually either be filed or tossed out, depending on their accrued value. “I don’t sort them right away,” Mr. Rilch said. “Just when it gets to the point where my hate mail falls on me.” Meaning, when the papers start to get higher than the box is deep.
It occured to me afterwards that the guy probably didn’t know what the heck that meant. It might be his age, or it might simply be due to the fact that it’s a fairly obscure reference. So! Who knows what’s meant by someone’s hate mail falling on them? And no shame if you don’t; I’m just trying to ascertain how obsure that reference is.
Well, what I thought of was when Snoopy, as in the comic strip “Peanuts”, was about to break Babe Ruth’s home run record - at the same time Hank Aaron was closing in on the record in real life - he was getting hate mail from people who didn’t want to see a dog break the record, just as Aaron was getting hate mail from racists who didn’t want to see Ruth’s record broken by a black player. One of the kids, I think it was Linus, asked Snoopy if his hate mail was causing him to lose any sleep. Snoopy, lying on the top of his dog house with a perilously leaning pile of envelopes towering beside him, replies “Only when it falls on me.”
Having remembered that, I wonder if Hank Aaron also said something like that? I’m not finding it on Google.
I think it counts as obscure. You’d have to have been a Peanuts fan in the mid-1970s, and remember a strip which hasn’t been quoted that much since then.
Great reference, though! There was a reason that strip was revered…
twickster: Yeah, I think I’ll wait a few more hours and see if anyone else gets it.
Well, to be fair, Mr. Rilch and I were both in nursery school when the home run race was going on and the strip was published. What we remember it from is the myriad Peanuts collections. We’re familiar with a lot of strips from well before either of us was born. So what I was really trying to ascertain was how many people are familiar with Peanuts in the pen-and-ink medium, not just the TV specials. Or even the TV specials, for that matter, because I remember someone who didn’t get it when we joked about serving popcorn, jelly beans, pretzel sticks and toast as appetizers on Thanksgiving. I have this nagging feeling that Peanuts actually means more to Gen-X than even the Boomers, let alone Generation Y.
I didn’t know the reference but my grandpa was a cartoonist and had collections of the strip in his house. I’ve never seen Peanuts on TV, just in print, and I remember the early years when the kids’ heads were bigger and their faces more infant-looking. Very odd to see.
I wasn’t familiar with the phrase, although I knew what hate mail was.
IMO, (I was born in 1962), it is the late Boomers (I don’t really think of myself as one, unless I run across someone who was born after I graduated HS, which is happening ALOT lately…)–I grew up on Charlie Brown–had a Snoopy pennant in my room, lusted after the Snoopy phone, wanted a pysch booth like Lucy, had a crush on Linus and Schroeder etc. So, l think whoever upthread was correct–Peanuts is more of a 70s thing, rather than a Boomer thing…
Check out the one at the bottom of this page. That was a blast from the past (although, it helps if you have at least a passing familiarity with the TV version).
ur post was a scream.