Pathfinder Magazine – Page 6 – Old Magazine Articles

Judith Coplon in Federal Court
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

FBI agents arrested Judith Coplon (1921 – 2011: Soviet code name Kompid) on March 4, 1949 in Manhattan as she met with Valentin Gubitchev, a NKVD official employed at the United Nations, while carrying what she believed to have been secret U.S. government documents in her purse. Hoover’s G-Men FBI were certain that Coplon, a secretary at the Federal Justice Department, was colluding with the Soviet agents in Washington but to prove their case conclusively would compromise an ongoing counter-espionage project called the Venona Project. The failure to prosecute this case successfully began to shed doubt upon the FBI director and his credibility in matters involving Soviet spy-catching.– read about that here…

Years later Coplon’s guilt was made clear to all when the Venona cables were released. However our laws mandate that it is illegal to try a suspect twice for the same crime and she was released.

The Depiction of Mothers in Silent Film
(Pathfinder, 1926

This one is from the more things change, the more they stay the same department; it was penned by an outraged woman who was plenty peeved that nascent Hollywood chose to cast geezers to play the rolls of mothers in their movies. In light of the fact that women had babies at far, far younger ages one hundred years ago, she illustrated her point with an anecdote pulled from the annals of the Chicago Police Department.

The Brutality of Combat
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)

The shock of modern battle is so severe to nervous systems that the hair color of thousands of young men in the Pacific and European theaters of war has turned gray overnight.

Not surprisingly, the young men in question had no interest in resembling their grandfathers
and so the services of a patriotic hair dye manu- facturing firm were secured.

The Blue Eagle
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1934)

Blue Eagle, symbol of the National [Industrial] Recovery Act, is probably one of the best known figures in the country today. Gripping bolts of lightening and a cog wheel in its claws it now hovers over 95 percent of industrial America advertising the success of the first major move of the New Deal… With only one year behind it, it has brought about the cooperation of 2,300,000 employers and 60,000,000 consumers.

– so runs the introductory paragraph for this 1934 article that marked the first anniversary of the National Recovery Administration. This short-lived agency was the brainchild of FDR’s administration that was shot down by the Supreme Court in 1935. Although this article is filled with praise for the NRA, it would not be very long before the editors of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE assumed a more suspicious approach when reporting on this president’s efforts to repair the damaged economy.

More on NRA problems can be read here…

Assessing the U.S. Navy in W.W. II
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

Some four months after VJ-Day U.S. Fleet Admiral Ernest King (1878 – 1956) gave a post-game summary of the Navy’s performance in his third and final report for the Department of War:

• Biggest factor in this victory was the perfection of amphibious landings

• Hardest Pacific battle: Okinawa invasion

• American subs sank at least 275 warships of all types

• Of the 323 Japanese warships lost, the U.S. Navy claimed 257 (figure disputed by Army Air Corps)

Read an article about the many faults of the
German Navy during the Second World War…

TV Viewers And Sports Attendance
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Without a doubt, the strongest impulse to buy the earliest televisions came from sports fans. The deep lust in their hearts to witness their favorite sporting events as it happened, free of a bar tab, was a strong one – and the television industry loved them right back. This glorious trifecta consisting of viewers, TV networks and team owners not only altered the way America watched sports, it totally transformed sports itself. Author Steven D. Stark put it nicely in his book Glued to the Set (1997):

Television has changed the sports landscape — changing everything from the salaries, number of teams, and color of uniforms, to the way that fans conceive of sports and athletes alike,

The Klan in Miami
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

The night before [the Miami] citizens went to the polls to decide among 15 candidates for three commissionerships, the old specter of the Ku Klux Klan was raised to scare away the colored votes.

The scheme didn’t work.

Soap Operas Come to Television
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

The short-lived soap opera These Are My Children was the brain-child of Irna Phillips (1901 – 1973) and it is no matter that the daytime drama lasted less than a year on Chicago’s WMBQ – the significance of the program rests in the fact that it was the first soap opera to be seen on American television screens:

Last week television caught the dread disease of radio: soapoperitis… ‘These Are My Children’, however is no warmed-over radio fare. To make sure of this, Miss Phillips and director Norman Felton built the first episodes backward… Whether [a] soap opera on television can coax housewives to leave their domestic duties [in order] to watch a small screen was a question yet to be answered.

Elsa Maxwell: Life of the Party
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1940)

Reform
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

George Orwell
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

No one perhaps has done as much as the British writer who calls himself George Orwell to persuade former fellow-travelers that their ways lie in some direction other than the Stalinist party line.

So begin the first two paragraphs of this book review that are devoted to the anti-totalitarian elements that animated the creative side of the writer George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair: 1903 – 1950). The novel that is reviewed herein, Coming Up for Air, was originally published in 1939 and was reviewed by Pathfinder Magazine to mark the occasion of the book’s first American printing in 1950.

The Taboos
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Radio executives hated any controversy – as you will see in the attached list of subjects all writers and broadcasters were instructed to veer away from at all cost.

The Lot of Chinese Christians
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

For those who keep records of the harsh treatment dolled out to religious sects by the various assorted tyrannical governments of the world, China is the all-time champion. Since it’s inception, the People’s Republic of China has attempted to coerce or eradicate every religious faith within its borders. Here is an account by an eyewitness to the many assorted atrocities dished out to the Christians in China by the followers of Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976.

An article about Soviet persecution of religious adherents can be read here…

The Duke Went After An Author
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Perhaps one of the unmentioned reasons for America’s revolt against the crown in 1776 was our revulsion of their power to cancel publication of any book of their choosing (there have been exceptions) – primarily books they deem slanderous of The Firm. This certainly was the case in 1937 when the newly minted Duke of Windsor (previously Edward VIII) sought to block all further publication of Coronation Commentary (1937) by Geoffrey Dennis. He succeeded in doing so on grounds of libel – but not before hundreds of copies could be published.

The Wonderful World of Adjectives
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

To grammarians, a verb is the strongest part of speech, but not to radio advertisers. In a survey of 15 national radio programs, the entertainment weekly VARIETY has found that adjectives receive the most voice emphasis and the most repetition. On one program, 28 adjectives were spoken in 15 minutes.

Click here to read about how the mass-marketing techniques of the W.W. I era was used to promote KKK membership…

Ad Man: Heal Thyself…
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 it was generally recognized by the red-meat-eaters on Madison Avenue that the rules of the ad game had been re-written. There were far fewer dollars around than there were during the good ol’ Twenties, and what little cash remained seldom changed addresses with the same devil-may-care sense of abandon that it used to. Yet as bleak as the commercial landscape was in 1932, those hardy corner-office boys, those executives with the gray flannel ulcers remembered that they were in the optimism business and if there was a way to turn it around, they would find it.

Prohibition Builds the First U.S. Prison for Women
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1926)

Alderson Prison in lovely West Virginia was not simply the first Federal prison intended for women, but also the very first prison ever built on American shores to house women only; for as you might have read in this 1924 article, thousands of American women were running afoul of the law as a result of Prohibition.