Here is a profile of a very young Al Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003) - long-time NY Times caricaturist. The author of this article, Gilbert Coleridge, has written an honest character study of Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) in hopes to better understand the man in the context of his time. One of the interesting hypothetical questions he poses asks how would Oscar Wilde (a man who lived only for pleasure) have got on during the highly rationed home front of 1914-1918 war?
Another article about Oscar Wilde can be read here.
The Leftists who ran the shop over at New Masses could easily have lived with the muscle-bound posing's of Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955), but when he grew discontent with mugging it before the cameras and started writing anti-FDR editorials in a popular magazine, they knew they had to shut him down. "The artist-editor-author-publisher of TOPOLSKI'S CHRONICLE, the London fortnightly, recently visited America. These are his drawings and comments on an American-Greek-god-sex-hero phenomenon":
"But, however mystically chosen, why Elvis Presley? Because, I think, he possess very happily the godlike value of all-embracing popularity: he is vulgar, yet stylish in the 'zoot' manner - thus he appeals to both the sophisticated and the simple. And his manhood is above suspicion..." "Nobody has been able to figure out to anyone's satisfaction why Sinatra has the effect he has on his Bobby Sox fans. One of his secretaries, a cute dish whose husband is serving overseas, said: 'The doctors say it's just because he's got a very sexy voice, but I've been with him a year now and his voice doesn't do a thing to me'."
"Maybe it's the war."
No matter how difficult the truth may seem, it cannot be ignored that between the years 1950 and 1966, criminals residing in the city of Los Angeles felt extremely ill-at-ease and entirely unsafe. This was due, in no small part, to the fact that the police chief of that city was a fellow by the name of William "Big Bill" Parker (1905 – 1966), a tireless officer who would not suffer hucksters, mobsters, thugs and dope heads with anywhere near the same level of patience enjoyed by today's senior officers of the LAPD.
The count has been lost in the mists of time as to whether he frustrated more Mafiosi than civil libertarians or whether it was the other way around, but this six page article makes mention of the numerous controversial methods that the Chief deployed in his efforts to "protect and serve".
Click here to read a news piece about a Hollywood blackmail scam that Micky Cohen had going in 1949. | 
