THE CAT'S PAJAMAS LIII

Tad Tuleja

A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES

The dare-devil team of Winston and Myra Jones were the Flying Wallendas of the 1920s. At a time when flagpole sitting, wing-walking, and barreling over Niagara Falls were becoming increasingly popular, the Joneses set the pace for other loonies by the extravagance or their hazardous feats. In 1927 they climbed  the Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure in the world. In 1928 in New York, they swam first the East River, then the Hudson, and finally the treacherous Passaic Narrows, thus completing the so-called Triple Crown of swimming in the space of one day. In 1929, the year of the stock market crash and so many ruined investors were jumping from buildings, they advertised themselves as "defenestration experts" and made an estimated one million dollars catching suicides before they landed.

By the end of the decade, the Joneses were so famous that Robert Ripley had featured them sixteen times, and Chicago cartoonist B.V. Doren had started a weekly panel devoted entirely to their exploits. It was not conspicuous consumption, but rather this newspaper feature, entitled "Keeping Up with the Joneses" that gave us the popular expression. The feature, and the Joneses themselves, expired in 1931, when they ended their careers in a freakish accident. In 1930, as a promotional stunt, the New York Public Library had hired them to read its entire circus collection while perched on the library roof. They managed this feat without trouble, finishing the last book in July, but by that time they had inhaled so much library dust that they died of a mutual case of "bookworm lung."