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J. Wellington Wimpy: War hero and hamburger ambassador
Stand and salute.
Wimpy is a pathetic man. He's a lazy, gluttonous, cowardly, self-centered con artist. He's the classic low-status character attempting to put on airs, donning an attitude of superiority to hide his destitution.
He's poorly dressed, frequently bereft of money and housing, and he fails over and over again to put his brain to good use. But, despite all this, Popeye calls him a friend.
"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". So rang out J. Wellington Wimpy's famous catchphrase, repeated shamelessly for time immemorial. Imagine being famous for guiltlessly mooching off of your own best pals.
But did you know Wimpy is also a bit of a war hero? Or, at least his name was, technically.
That's because, during World War II, Wimpy lent his name to a British twin-engined, long-range medium bomber. The Vickers Wellington, nicknamed "The Wimpy," was tremendously effective in raids on Cologne, Essen, and other German cities.
According to a 1942 article in the News and Record, "The Wellington bomber got its name from the comic strip character, who is well known to all English soldiers because the Popeye strip appears in the London Daily Mirror, one of the two most widely circulated of English papers among the military forces. Incidentally, J. Wellington Wimpy's consuming passion for hamburgers was responsible before the war for the introduction and popularization of this typically American 'amburger in England."
So, the next time you want to dismiss Wimpy for being a lousy mooch, just remember: J. Wellington Wimpy is a veteran of the Allied armed forces, and deserves to be venerated with the greatest of heroes.
13 Comments
Dudley Moore's character in the movie "Bedazzled" opens the movie working in one of their locations.
We used to make schnorring runs of the conference rooms where I worked, based on the logic that nobody eats *all* the food brought in for meetings, and nobody in their right mind schedules a meeting after about 3:30pm, so whatever's left behind is fair game. It was after one such run that I got back to my desk with a large styrofoam cup (intended for coffee) full of buttered popcorn and in figuring out how to eat it without getting my keyboard all greasy, realized that chopsticks are perfect for such nugget-sized messy foods (they work for Cheetos too). On another occasion I scored two large styrofoam clamshells of rice (one white, one brown) that hadn't even been opened when they ordered Chinese food.
