Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for January 05, 2014

He is no ghost, and he is as quick as whip.

Love it!

Gasoline Alley – the way it oughta be!

He may not always be as quick as a whip, OR as Sharp as a Tack… but he is Now always as Sharp as a Whip.

Now, for a Walt story on Sunday as well as weekdays, that’s rare. I wonder if…. No, don’t say it.

I like this comic strip.

Go Walt go!

WHY is living long a MISTAKE,ya jerk? YOU should live so long!!!!

Yes!

Pelican doesn’t want anyone to say it, but I’ll do it anyway. The fact that Jim gives Walt’s age is another hint. 2014 will be remembered as the year that Walt Wallet died. But I also predict that the strip will continue without him.

great commentary. I hope he lives even more as his comments are so right on for us that are his juniors.

My mom would be worse with the guy and since when does SS visit older folks. I know would not make the strip. Always great drawings and dialog.

Once you’re 114 they may feel that they have to go and investigate. I don’t think this is Walt’s first visit of this kind.

114 IS a mistake. According to a strip from 2001, Walt was born in 1898, which means he’ll turn 116 in 2014. 1898 also makes his World War I service a little more plausible, as well as his being allowed to keep custody of Skeezix in 1921. It’s early in the year yet, so he’s most likely still 115.

@Paul1963Ya beat me to it. Walt was born the same year as my father’solder sister.

Since Walt has now outlived all “real-life” WWI vets, will they start rolling back his age to maybe 105 or so and now make him someone who served in the military after the war? Or will they simply not mention his age and background at all, as is the case with Joel (who is about the same age as Walt)?

000-00-0002

If that were true they would have run out of numbers after 10,000 for each district.They do however have some correlation to area of the country (or did in the beginning anyway).

My grandmother was born 11-Dec-1899. We kids only had to remember the day and month, and add one to the current year.

Heck, he’s so old he remembers back when that joke was funny!

Actually the US involvement in World War I ran from April 1917 to November 1918, so if Walt was 114, he would have been 16 or 17 when the US entered the war (unless he came north and joined the Canadian Army – we were in it from August 1914). The 1898 birthdate gives us a 19 year old Walt.

Well, the Social Security guy does say that they know 114 is a mistake. Maybe their computer system cannot handle birthdates before 1900, so anyone older than that comes up as “114”. And one can assume that paper records are lost, if they ever existed at all. Now Walt can be cagey about his age, because who is to say different?

This used to be partially true, but they changed the system to purely random a few years back because with the prevalence of social media and folks saying when & where they were born, SSN’s became a bit too easy for identity thieves to figure out.

It can’t really be 000-00-0002, because the first three digits are never 000, and the next two digits are never 00—but—Rule of Funny.

We know that Walt is a WW1 veteran, and we know that he was old enough to adopt a child in 1921.

I do wish that, just once, the action could take us to Glovania.

I remember seeing the obituary for the first person to receive Social Security. She had worked for the minimum amount to qualify, then retired, and was over 100 when she died. So much for the fiction that you are just getting back what you paid into it.