Definition of "star boarder"

[Espee]

One of Chaplin's shorts is "The Landlady's Pet" aka "The Star Boarder."
My mom (with only a bit of little personal experience) tells me it's someone who's been there so long, or has such a pushy personality, that he's calling the shots almost as much as the landlord/landlady/host family.
I first saw the term in reference to Marilyn Monroe, as a youngster, being victimized by "an elderly star boarder."
Any thoughts?

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's exactly what it was -- usually a middle-aged blowhard who thinks he runs the house. Major Hoople, from the comic strip "Our Boarding House," was the definitive example.

 

[Fletch]

Are you really a "boarder" if your wife's the landlady?

 

[LizzieMaine]

If you only show up five years into the run of the strip, yeah.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Repel Boarders!

 

[kiwilrdg]

The sailors in the second picture are on the port side of the ship, not starboarders (note orientation of the vent pipe and the small boats).

 

[Espee]

Take a look at this from 1898-- the attorney for the fellow being sued for support, suggests he was not the woman's "husband by contract" but rather, a star boarder. The justice doesn't know what the term means, and no one in court will explain it to him. Almost makes it seem indecent....
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F1091FF63B5811738DDDA80994D8415B8885F0D3
(Mebbe Justice Cohen vould know a different void for such a ting...)

 

[dhermann1]

This whole "boarding house" thing belongs in the "Vintage things that have disappeared in your life time" thread. I think the 50s were the last gasp of the phenomenon.
But "back in the day" a widow lady might set up her home with several paying guests, who ate at the common table every evening. They'd pay a couple of bucks a week, and in return they had a room, usually a shared bathroom, and could sit in the parlor of an evening. Many many people passed their entire lives with living arrangements of this sort. Millions. It seems charming in retrospect, but I'll but most of us would not like it much today. Talk about no privacy. And on the lower rungs of the social ladder, there were boarding houses that were pretty seedy places indeed. You'd get a chicken stew in the evening with a lot of thin gravy, and maybe a mouthful of chicken. Plus lots of hockey puck textured biscuits.
Made for great comedy material, obviously.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We still had boardinghouses around here until the fishing industry collapsed in the '90s -- they were very popular with the sort of industrial fishermen who spent most of their time on the water. They could rent rooms by the week or month without having to worry about being tied down by leases. They tended to be in the rough part of town, and never looked particularly clean from the outside.

 

[kiwilrdg]

When my grandmother was a child her family moved from a logging camp to running the lumber company boarding house. When anyone at the table reached across someone's plate rather than asking for something to be passes she would exclaim "I'm the only one here that was raised in a boarding house and I don't use a boarding house reach." (I don't know how she caught us because she was almost totally blind.)

In the past, privacy was more a matter of coutesy on the part of others than the seclusion that it is today. I hear people talking about college dorms and military barracks today as though they were such public living quarters but even they are usually just shared rooms today rather than open bays.

Based on the way she taught me to cook I know at least one boarding house had very good food.

Star boarder is not a term that I am really familiar with but since my great grandfather worked in town at the mill there was not a need for any such arrangement (illecit or otherwise).

 

[Espee]

I noticed a long, two-story old building in La Puente CA about a dozen years ago, called "Wagon Wheel Inn" or something like that. Then the exterior got modernized, somewhat.
I happened to meet someone who had lived there... down on his luck... and he said the was one bathroom for upstairs and one for downstairs. But that's really a "rooming house"... they were on their own for meals, and there couldn't have been much of a parlor.

 

[rjb1]

A comment on the poor quality/quantity of food generally available at boarding houses in the old days comes from a song that one of the soldiers (Holley/Van Johnson) sings in the movie "Battleground" (1949).
A portion goes: "There is a boarding house, far, far, away, where they serve ham and eggs three times a day..."
It's a parody of a religious song called "Happy Land".
"There is a happy land, far, far away, where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day..."

 

[Stanley Doble]

I always thought the "star boarder" was the boarder who paid the most money, rented the biggest room, and had been in the house the longest. He was steady, sober, did not cause trouble and always paid on time.

Consequently he (or she) was the most popular with the landlady, got the best slice of meat off the roast or turkey at dinner time, and could ask for special treatment and get it. While others got "why can't you be more like Miss Mannerly" or "why can't you pay on time like Mr. Starr".

At least, that would be my guess.

And, the oldest version of that parody was from a Mark Twain book called The Gilded Age written in the mid 1880s. The song went:

There is a boarding house far away

Where they serve ham and eggs three times a day

You can hear the boarders yell

They give the landlord h*ll

Three times a day.

There was an English version that substituted "fish and chips" for "ham and eggs". At the time ham and eggs was standard fare in cheap restaurants and boarding houses, any place that served it too often would be open to criticism.

It looks like a comic song from vaudeville, or music halls in England, or possibly from amateur concerts and entertainments.

Such parodies used to be considered screamingly funny like "Sam you made the pants too long" from "Lord you made the night too long".

 

[kiwilrdg]

Chicken and biscuits (meaty gravy over biscuits), SOS, or pancakes and sausage would be the common lumberjack boardinghouse fares. They are very cheap to make and filling. Starchy and fatty foods that are now used as breakfast foods make a good hearty but inexpensive dinner and can be quickly stretched if more teams come back from the camp unexpectedly.