“There is the thing that possessed Parker—­the perception of the destructive significance of the repressed and balked instincts of the migratory worker, the unskilled, the casuals, the hoboes, the womanless, jobless, voteless men.  To him their tragedy was akin to the tragedy of child-life in our commercialized cities.  More often than of anything else, he used to talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization that centred its economic activities in places where child-life was perpetually repressed and imperiled.  The last time I saw him he was flaming indignation at the ghastly record of children killed and maimed by trucks and automobiles.  What business had automobiles where children should be free to play?  What could be said for the human wisdom of a civilization that placed traffic above child-life?  In our denial to children, to millions of men and women, of the means for satisfying their instinctive desires and innate dispositions, he saw the principal explanation of crime, labor-unrest, the violence of strikes, the ghastly violence of war[1].”

[Footnote 1:  Robert Bruere, in the New Republic, May 18, 1918.]

He could never pass any youngster anywhere without a word of greeting as from friend to friend.  I remember being in a crowded car with him in our engaged days.  He was sitting next to a woman with a baby who was most unhappy over the ways of the world.  Carl asked if he could not hold the squaller.  The mother looked a bit doubtful, but relinquished her child.  Within two minutes the babe was content on Carl’s knees, clutching one of his fingers in a fat fist and sucking his watch.  The woman leaned over to me later, as she was about to depart with a very sound asleep offspring.  “Is he as lovely as that to his own?”

The tenderness of him over his own!  Any hour of the day or night he was alert to be of any service in any trouble, big or little.  He had a collection of tricks and stories on hand for any youngster who happened along.  The special pet of our own boys was “The Submarine Obo Bird”—­a large flapper (Dad’s arms fairly rent the air), which was especially active early in the morning, when small boys appeared to prefer staying in bed to getting up.  The Obo Bird went “Pak!  Pak!” and lit on numerous objects about the sleeping porch.  Carl’s two hands would plump stiff, fingers down, on the railing, or on a small screw sticking out somewhere.  Scratches.  Then “Pak!” and more flaps.  This time the Obo Bird would light a trifle nearer the small boy whose “turn” it was—­round eyes, and an agitated grin from ear to ear, plus explosive giggles and gurglings emerging from the covers.  Nearer and nearer came the Obo Bird.  Gigglier and gigglier got the small boy.  Finally, with a spring and a last “Pak!  Pak!  Pak!” the Obo Bird dove under the covers at the side of the bed and pinched the small boy who would not get up. (Rather a premium on not rising promptly was the Obo Bird.) Final ecstatic squeals from the pinched.