The Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society was a fictional fraternal organization appearing in Barnaby, a daily comic strip by Crockett Johnson. In the strip, the group was frequented by Mr. O’Malley—Barnaby’s fairy godfather—although the society’s actual meeting location never appeared on panel. Commonly referred to by its abbreviated form, ELGLMC&MS, this club served as the central gathering place for the various “imaginary” creatures that populated the comic.
Other members of the ELGLMC&MS, such as McSnoyd (an invisible leprechaun) and Atlas (described as a “diminutive mental giant”), occasionally emerged to entertain Barnaby with anecdotes about Mr. O’Malley. Fellow society members considered O’Malley somewhat of a blowhard, yet it was from the ELGLMC&MS that he launched his ultimately successful bid for a seat in the United States Congress.[1]
A variation on the group’s name was later adopted by a science fiction fan organization, The Elves, Gnomes, and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder & Marching Society.[2]
The same name also identified “an ad hoc group [of Marines] that fluctuated in number from three or four to as many as ten,” which included Victor H. Krulak and Lyford Hutchins among its members. This Marine Corps cohort formed to counteract what they perceived as efforts by the other branches of the U.S. armed services to diminish or eliminate the Marine Corps in the immediate post–World War II period.[3]