Articles from 1956
Here is a short, well illustrated article about the love shared between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainnier III:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen two people who looked more in love. Every time I turned around to change film or grab another camera, they’d start whispering, holding hands… like any just-engaged couple. Pretty romantic.”
“The new Japan is fermenting a mash of new ideas and old customs. It is mixing political democracy with feudal loyalties, free enterprise with giant monopolies, and several shades of Marxism with a hankering for the good old days. The nation that once meekly did what a handful of leaders told it to do is now outspokenly divided on every major issue… For seven Occupation years the Japanese had no choice of sides. We ran the country and fed them slabs of democracy sandwiched between $2,500,000,000 worth of relief and rehabilitation. Japan enjoyed our help and even digested a good deal of the democracy. But when the Occupation lid came off in 1952 it revealed a country weary of being told what to do, curious to taste the forbidden fruit behind the bamboo curtain and relishing its authority over the foreigners who had been giving it orders for so long.”
Attached is a printable page from an R.O.T.C. primer concerning American Military History outlined the events of 1948 that created the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.).
This pact, called the North Atlantic Treaty, united Great Britain, the United States, and ten western European nations in a common security system. Approved by the Senate in April 1949, the treaty provided for mutual assistance, including the use of armed force in the event of a Soviet attack upon one or more of the signatory powers.
Reagan was the first actor to become president, Buchanan the first tailor, Jefferson the first architect and Abraham Lincoln was the first writer to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
The world has long known that Lincoln liked an occasional back-room story. Here is the only record – in his own handwriting – of that earthy side of the Great Emancipator.
Arriving in Hollywood by way of The Trouble with Harry in 1955, and cute as buttons – Shirley MacLaine (b. 1934) was the adopted little sister of the Rat Pack, that odd movie star whose sensitive skin burned too easily in the California sun and one of the few starlets who was actually capable of sewing her own clothes.
There was a time, Humphrey Bogart maintains, when he saw all interviewers and tried to answer all questions put to him…
But I can’t take it anymore, I’ve had to cut the fan magazines off my list entirely. Just the sheer smell of them drives me crazy. They smell of milk. The interviewers themselves treat you like a two-year-old child with their will-Debbie-marry-Eddie and can-Lance-Fuller-live-without-a-wife kind of idiocy. You know the whole sorry groove of the thing.
You can read about David Niven HERE
A short paragraph from General Grant’s memoir recalling the the first private interview with President Lincoln, on the occasion in the early spring of 1864 when he was given command of all the Federal armies.
In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted…
Click here to read about a dream that President Lincoln had, a dream that anticipated his violent death.
Attached, you will find the preferred brandy-based drink recipes of three outstanding Virginians: Nathaniel Bacon, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother’s face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white.
Not since the Civil War has the nation faced such an explosive situation as it will when public schools in the South open their doors next month. In a plea for tolerance, sympathy and understanding in the South as well as the North, Pulitzer Prize award winning journalist Virginius Dabney (1901 – 1995) analyzes and interprets a problem serious to Americans in every section of the country.
A confident declaration makes clear at the top of these columns that all adherents will lose 5 pounds in 2 days if they seriously follow the dictates of the Blitz diet:
Breakfast, lunch and dinner are the same… Eight ounces of fresh creamed cottage cheese; two or three Elberta peach halves and juice…
(F.Y.I. – the Blitz diet allows for Norwegian flat bread, butter, sugar, and cinnamon.)
Attached is an article concerning a page from American Military History and it outlines the losses and gains of the Korean War (1950 – 1953). In five sentences this article gives the number of American dead and wounded, the number of U.N. dead and wounded and the amount of ground lost to the Chinese and North Korean military; a map of the stabilized front is provided.
The attached profile of actor William Holden (1918 – 1981) appeared in print when his stock was about to peak.
When the summer of 1956 rolled around, Holden was already a double nominee for a BAFTA (Picnic), an Oscar (Sunset Boulevard) and was the grateful recipient of an Academy Award for Best Actor one year earlier (Stalag 17). In 1957 his performance in the Bridge on the River Kwai would bring even more pats on the back (although the Best Actor statue would go to Alec Guinness).
This five page interview tells the story of Holden’s initial discovery in Hollywood, his devotion to both the Screen Actor’s Guild and Paramount Pictures. His Hollywood peers held him in especially high-regard:
In a poll of Hollywood reporters recently he was designated ‘the best adjusted and happiest actor around’; by contrast, the same poll identified Humphrey Bogart as a total pain in the keister – click here to read that article.
Situated where the Tennessee River passes through the Cumberland Mountains, forming gaps, Chattanooga was called the Key to East Tennessee and Gateway to the deep South. The possession of Chattanooga was vital to the Confederacy, and a coveted goal of the Northern armies. Chattanooga’s principal importance during the Civil War was it’s position as a railroad center.
Click here to print American Civil War chronologies.
The article attached herein is oddly titled The Dictator and his Woman; a more apt title would have been The Woman and her Dictator
From the start, the relationship between Peron and Evita was a curious and contradictory liason. It is true that she was still a struggling actress when Peron met her, but she had achieved a considerable reputation for spreading her favors around with a sharp eye to the future,
Country Music legend Hank Williams (1923 – 1953)
died just four and a half months after being kicked out of the Grand Ol’ Opry for drunken and erratic behavior. He was at the peak of his fame, earning over $200,000 a year and enjoying the enthusiasm of ten million fans in the U.S. and five million abroad. He was 29 years old and known only for 35 songs. The attached article will let you in on the short and painful life of country music’s fair haired boy.
Like many artists, his creativity was nurtured by an empty stomach. Hank Williams was raised under dreadfully impoverished conditions in Depression era Alabama; suffering from spinal bifida, the illness that eventually overcame him, he sought relief from the pain with liquor and drugs and died in the back of the Caddy that was ferrying him to a gig in Canton Ohio.
The U.S. and Russia are engaged in a race whose outcome may determine the course of history. The goal: development of the most frightful weapon conceived by man – a virtually unstoppable 16,000-mph intercontinental ballistic missile that can drop a hydrogen warhead on a city 5,000 miles away. At stake is not only the security of the free world , but our position as the world’s most technological and industrial power.
In ten lines the U.S. Army history section succinctly outlined Japan’s grim situation and the events that led up to the dropping of the bomb:
By the summer of 1945 it was obvious to most responsible leaders in Japan that the end of the war was near. For the first time those who favored ending the war came out in the open and in June, Japan sent out peace feelers through the Soviet Union. The rejection of the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, however, sealed the doom of Japan…
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years
