President Abraham Lincoln told many parables during the Civil War; he told this one to General A.J. Cresswell on the last day of his life.
To read the story behind Lincoln’s beard, click here.
Flying comfortably above Aberdeen, South Dakota, the passengers of a Northwest airliner got an eyeful for almost a full hour.
A father/son gag cartoon by the seldom remembered cartoonist A.D. Walker from Harper’s Magazine.
American cartoons drawn prior to the mid-1920s were created in the he-said-she-said manner until the cartoonist Peter Arno (1904 – 1968) shook things up a bit and introduced the format we are all familiar with today: one drawing, one caption.
“There has been a 76% increase in illegitimate births among high school students since 1950. 123 newborn infants were ditched in school lavatories or elsewhere on school premises during 1954 as compared to only 17 during 1949.”
“This was revealed in the 1955 revised report of the National Association on Morality Standards in the Public Schools.”
Attached you will find a number of black and white images illustrating the general look for 1950s golfers – and if you’ve been looking for an article that explains the fashion sense of every single retired U.S. President for te past fifty years, you may have found it.
The fashions illustrated herein also provide today’s costume designers with a sense of how retired crooners preferred to look as well.
A 1956 article by Eugene Bordinat (1920 – 1987), one of Detroit’s grand old men of automotive design; during his reign at Ford, Bordinat oversaw the styling of such cars as the Mustang and the Falcon:
The average American likes to think that he is an independent thinker and a rugged individualist, while actually he is closer to a sheep and follows the herd. He resists change. He wants just enough change in cars so his neighbors will know it is the latest model, but not so much that he has to explain to his friends why he bought the strange contraption…The stylist must consider these factors when he out-lines his advanced thinking on trim and color…he must be sure that the scheme isn’t so radical that it will frighten the color-timid public.
The very first engagement of the conflict, when the North Koreans crushed South Korean defenses at the 38th parallel, demonstrated the superiority of the North Korean Army. On June 28, three days after the opening attack, a tank/infantry force leading the main North Korean thrust entered Seoul… In the face of the onslaught, the South Korean Army retreated, leaving most of its equipment behind. Whatever effectiveness it may have possessed was already lost.
An important news item came across the wire in mid-may, 1949:
The delegates from Western Germany’s 11 states gave final approval to the draft of the constitution for the new Federal Republic of Germany.
– but what matter was this to the thousands of Bavarians who were highly distrustful of the new government; they had their own gloried past that was largely due to the royal family known as the House of Wittelsbach:
A strong faction is campaigning for the return to the throne of former Crown Prince Rupprecht. The eldest son of King Ludwig III, deposed in 1918, Rupprecht is a tall, thin man of vast education. He led Bavarian troops under Kaiser Wilhelm. In World War II, he was exiled to Italy. Since then he has been living with his family at Leutstetten Castle on Lake Starnberg near Munich.
If the Bavarian people desire monarchy, I shall respect their desire.
Nice work if you can get it…
Seasoned Washington journalist Felix Morley (1894 – 1982) discussed the complicated issues involved in the diplomatic recognition of Communist China:
All the obvious arguments are against recognition. The Red regime in China has imprisoned our official representatives, confiscated American property, flouted and insulted us in a dozen different ways.
But in recent years we have mixed up diplomatic recognition and moral approval. The absurd result is that we recognize Russia and not Spain, and are at present opposed to recognizing China even though we fear that may be cutting off our nose to spite Stalin’s face.
The Berlin Blockade was already six weeks old when this article appeared proclaiming that peace with the Soviet Union was still possible:
Russia and the U.S. are in the midst of another showdown on peace. Odds favor a settlement, not war.
Peace terms are shifting closer to compromise. Russia is more interested in seeking peace, less interested in stalling… Each side is out to get the best possible terms. But prospects for easing the tension of cold war are good.
Click here to read about the Berlin Blockade.
“Old hits still with us, and likely to hold their stages indefinitely, include ‘Harvey’, ‘Born Yesterday’, ‘State of the Union’, ‘Oklahoma!’, ‘Show Boat’, ‘Carousel’ and ‘Call Me Mister’. And, to be sure, the booming ‘Annie Get Your Gun’. With such a crop heartily and tenaciously around, it again becomes apparent that the branch of the amusement business known as legitimate theatre could well make use of some playhouses that have been sold down the river to pictures and to radio. And right along with them went all of 42nd Street, once the most spectacular theatre street in the world but now shorn of the drama and a paradise for second-run films.”
A page from a 1945 YANK MAGAZINE which offers a smattering of sports info.
Tenderly ripped from the brittle pages of a 1944 issue of YANK MAGAZINE was this short paragraph which explained all the goings-on within the sun-bleached confines of Hollywood, California:
Rita Hayworth steps into the top spot in the Columbia production, ‘Tonight and Every Night’; Ethel Barrymore returns to the screen after 11 years’ absence to share honors with with Cary Grant in ‘None but the Loney Heart’…In ‘Something for the Boys’ Carmen Miranda will sing ‘Mairzy Doats’… etc, etc, etc.
There wasn’t a single soul in 1939 would have imagined that television would be the sort of venue that would allow millions of strangers to see Tyra Banks get a breast exam, but that is the kind of institution it has become.
STAGE MAGAZINE correspondent Alan Rinehart was astonished that so much dough was being invested in such a young industry, yet he recognized that T.V. was capable of much good, but was also capable of generating the kind of banality that we’re used to.
What then, will be the entertainment value of television?…What’s to be the entertainment? Why should we tune in? Will we get more than we will on the radio?…The revolutionary idea about television is that the medium has been developed before the art. It’s as if the piano had been invented before music, or paint and canvas before drawing.
In New York last week, on the polished floor of the Rainbow Room, Rockefeller Center’s skyscraping night club, Hawaiians, Chinese, Scandinavians and Africans stamped whirled, leaped, and gesticulated to a dozen different kinds of music…it was an exposition of no little cultural and social importance – ‘Dance International,’ a festival showing the progress of the dance in all nations since 1900.
In their quest to document the evolution of dance in the United States, the audiences were treated to Modern Dance performances by Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Paul Weidman and Paul Haakon.
The British Broadcasting Corporation announced that they were capable of transmitting television programming as early as 1935:
The British engineers plan to begin with a single broadcasting tower, capable of transmitting television images to receiving sets within a radius of about thirty miles…British engineers are not the first to try television broadcasting. A station has been operating regularly in Berlin for several months.
The aggressive ambitions of Japan know no bounds. The occupation of Peiping [Beijing] will lead to further aggression in Shantung and Shansi and other northern provinces, and will result either in the establishment of a new puppet regime in North China.
The Shanghai SHUN PAO, an independent newspaper, bewails the futility of the uncoordinated resistance which has prevailed among China’s forces since the capture of Jehol, and it adds:
The only possibilities now are peace by compromise or a continuance of war. Despite the dangers of the latter course it is the only possible solution, but resistance must be coordinated under an able leader, China must fight or become a second Korea.
