On Exceeding His Quota of Misquotations

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to attribute popular quotations to their original authors. (To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott, not Shakespeare.)

Once an attribution has been fixed in the public mind, there is little chance of changing it. I was trying to make that point the other day in observing, “Might as well try to persuade them that (Robert) Benchley didn’t say, ‘Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.’ ”

I knew, of course, that the educator Robert Maynard Hutchins was the author of that sensible precept.

“It was not Benchley but (the humorist) Irvin S. Cobb who first said, ‘Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away,”’ writes Wilson Buckner of San Juan Capistrano.

“My only authority for this is my vivid memory of reading it in O. O. McIntyre (the New York columnist). I was at first moved to go to the library and prove this, but after my nap the urge went away.”

Cobb is a good candidate. He was short and fat and undoubtedly despised exercise. However, I have never heard him credited with that remark.

Carol K. Sterkin of Northridge writes that she was a freshman at the University of Chicago in September, 1940, and heard Hutchins, then university president, make that remark. (Hutchins was famous, or notorious, as you see it, for abolishing football at the University of Chicago.) Later, she says, she looked it up and found the quotation, or one very like it, attributed to a Paul Terry in Reader’s Digest, 1938.

Charles T. Fisch of Redondo Beach writes, “Robert Hutchins, the youthful president of the University of Chicago in the ‘30s, was the first to say it. Trust me.”

“I have always thought that you said it,” writes John Degatina. “One more myth shattered.”

My friend and former colleague Sara Boynoff Coonradt insists it was the New York wit Don Herold.

Jim Healy, the KMPC sports pundit, has taken me to task on the air for quoting a reader who said it was not Green Bay Coach Vince Lombardi who said “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” but John Wayne, in a 1953 movie “Trouble Along the Way.”

“All I can tell you,” said Healy on the air, “is I heard the line well before 1953. In the late ‘40s, it was attributed to Paul Brown, coach of the dominant Cleveland Browns.”

It could have been Brown. It was Brown, I believe, who made his players stay in their hotel at night when they came to Los Angeles for a game with the explanation, “Those women out there are just devastating.”

Meanwhile, I have called Mel Shavelson, who wrote “Trouble Along the Way,” a story about a tough college football coach. “Wayne says it in the movie,” Shavelson said, “but I heard (UCLA football coach) Red Sanders say it first. Finally, everything goes back to Moses.”

Robert D. Schultz of El Toro disputes my attribution to James Thurber of the famous line, “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

“That’s from a Peter Arno (not James Thurber) cartoon which appeared in the New Yorker. . . . Mr. Arno wrote another famous line for a cartoon in which a rich kid rejects a plate of vegetable, even after his mother tells him, ‘But it’s broccoli, dear.’ His reply: ‘I say it’s spinach and to hell with it!’ ”

As Winston Churchill said, up with that I will not put. The wine cartoon was drawn by Thurber, and I doubt that he had Arno write his lines for him. The spinach cartoon was drawn by Carl Rose, and the exact words are: “It’s broccoli, dear.” “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” And the kid is a girl.

I am depressed, though, to learn that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes may not have been the first to say (on seeing a young Washington secretary trotting down Pennsylvania Avenue) “Oh, to be 70 again.”

Ernest Rhodes of Sherman Oaks writes that the Prussian Field Marshal Friedrich Graf (Count) von Wrangel (1784-1877), then in his 90s, saw a beautiful woman out walking and said to his aide-de-camp, “If only one were 80!”

I wouldn’t be surprised if that one really does go back to Moses.