[PW] Looking for possible NEW YORKER humor piece on chemical enginners

[Dennis Lien]

Would any wombat who has access to the COMPLETE NEW YORKER dvd be
willing to check for a (possible) article for me?

I have a client who believes NEW YORKER ran a humor piece on
"why chemical engineers make good husbands."  The NEW YORKER
website free search *did* lead me to this reference:


October 21, 1939
Comment
Comment. [ABSTRACT]
     Comment on a book: "Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage," by a 
couple of
doctors named Burgess & Cottrell. Chemical engineers make the best 
husbands, only
about 10% of the women who marry them being really miserable. Theyare closely
followed by ministers, college professors, and football coaches. Among the 
worst

     by Wolcott Gibbs

but when I checked the issue in question (pp. 13/14), the full entry is not
much longer than the quote above, and there is no other mention of chemical
engineers beyond that one line.

**********

I can find on the web several instances of a humor piece called "Why
Engineers Make the Best Husbands," but (a) chemical engineers are not
specified in the web versions (of course, it may have been adapted as
copier humor or the like for various professions) and (b) it doesn't
read at all like NEW YORKER humor to me.  One example of the text is
at

http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1998/husband.html

************

I also found on the web an interview with John Prausnitz at U Cal
Berkeley where he also claims to have a copy of the elusive NEW
YORKER version:

http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/Publications/journal/volume9/no2/profile.html

but he gives no title, date, author, etc.  (I have suggested my client
contact Prausnitz and have given him his email address.)


I also found via google in book searching that the December 1939 issue
of CHEMICAL & METALLURGICAL ENGINEERING has some sort of commentary on
the Burgess & Cottrell book cited above, and have ordered that issue
from our storage facility to see if it may be a humorous piece.


But since my client thinks there is a NEW YORKER version out there,
and Prausnitz seems to back this up, and I can't find a good candidate
with the free search engine on the NEW YORKER website (or fulltext
search of recent years in ACADEMIC SEARCH PREMIER, LEXIS NEXIS, and
elsewhere), I'm hoping someone with the fulltext NEW YORKER dvd
would be willing to doublecheck and make sure I've not missed
something in that magazine.

Or of course if anyone knows of other possible sources for the
"chemical engineers make good husbands" humor piece out there,
that would be also great...

thanks,

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu