Arnold Glasow

Class of 1927: A ‘happychrondriac’

Humorist and businessman Arnold H. Glasow kept the nation laughing with his insightful and quirky views of the world. His knack for creating snappy observations began in high school inn Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and was honed at Ripon College.

He was born July 2, 1905, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. At Ripon, he majored in English, served as president of Phi Kappa Pi and for two years was editor-in-chief of College Days. He wrote jingles for “Campus Chaos,” part of a column called “Squirrels on the Hill.”

This proved to be a “good training ground for writing and publishing,” Glasow later said. For more than 60 years, Glasow published a syndicated monthly newsletter of humor and inspiration to businesses around the country to share with their customers. At the newsletter’s height, there were more than 100 publications representing 45 states with a circulation of half a million each month.

For decades, Glasow also had a humor column in the Chicago Tribune and was quoted in national publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest.

He still is cited in anthologies of humor, although some of his quotes are attributed to “Anonymous” or other people who happened to repeat them.

In 1995, at the age of 90, he published “Glasow’s Gloombusters,” a selection of about 800 of his best writings from a 70-year career.

“Writing humorous commentaries day after day calls for some super-fast reading – the ability to fathom a page at a glance,” he said. “Again, I have Ripon to thank for developing this knack. The truth is that I bought very few textbooks during my four years in college. The night before a quarterly exam I’d borrow one from some less procrastinating classmate and go through it faster than I went through my quarterly allowance.”

Ripon presented him with the Distinguished Alumni Citation in 1977.

“My intent has always been to bring cheer and optimism to a world which too frequently abounds in negative thinking,” he said. He added at another time, “The one fact about my work that has been most interesting to me is that I first learned to write one- and two-line gags for the ‘Squirrels on the Hill’ column of The (College) Days. You see, you can never tell just how you’ll be able to cash in on a college education.”

He died in 1999 at age 94.