1949

Articles from 1949

The Japanese Death Ray? (Quick Magazine, 1949)

An odd dispatch from W.W. II appeared on the pages of a 1949 issue of QUICK MAGAZINE declaring that the weapons laboratories of Imperial Japan had been developing a ray gun throughout much of the war. When they realized that the jig was up they tossed the contraption in a nearby lake.


What worked considerably better than the Death Ray was hi-altitude hydrogen balloon-bombs that the Japanese let-loose on the Western states at the end of the war – click here to read about them…

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The Birth of the Slip Dress (Quick Magazine, 1949)

One Autumn evening in 1949, New York fashion model Anna-Lee Daniels and her gay boyfriend, Henry, took it upon themselves to demonstrate just how chic ladies’ undergarments were becoming. Recognizing that the latest slips were so minimal in their design – appearing much like the dresses flappers were often seen wearing back in the day It was soon decided that the two should step out for a night on the town – with young Anna-Lee sporting the slip – just to see if anyone caught on.

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Gettysburg: an Epilogue (Coronet Magazine, 1949)

An article that looks back at some of the lost opportunities squandered by both armies, wondering if the outcome might have been different had their importance been recognized and properly exploited.

At Gettysburg, the heat broke at last, and rain fell on July 4. As doctors and ambulances moved onto the scene, neither retreating Confederates nor jubilant Northerners recognized the great issue that had been decided on that field. Only a few sensed that the twilight of the Confederacy had come.


Read an article about how Victorian fashion saved a life during the Civil War.

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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.

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The Bomb in Soviet Hands (Quick Magazine, 1949)

During the opening week of October, 1949 President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded its own nuclear weapon. Americans were deeply shocked and wondered aloud as to what this would mean – Would the peacetime draft call be doubled?

…Russia had caught the U.S. flatfooted. For the first time in history every American looked straight down the gun barrel of [a] foreign attack.


The pace of the Cold War picked up soon after this event took place.

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Campus Fashions for Autumn (The Diamondback, 1949)

Designing women are working toward the return of the chemise dress, the raccoon coat, the slicker rain coat, the ankle bracelet, multiple chains of beads, etc. Anything they have forgotten, your imagination may safely supply.

Important in high fashion this year are the scissors skirt, long and impossibly tight, the winged collar, featuring a neckline that juts off at a terrific angle, the bat collared suit – which looks more like a cartwheel than a costume. One can happily assume that these creations will never take on the campus…. Safer predictions are that the campus co-ed will take to tweed suits, especially those trimmed in velvet…

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The Two Lincoln Inaugurations (Inaugural Program, 1949)

Callously torn from the binding of the 1949 inaugural program were these pithy paragraphs describing the somber moods of both Lincoln inaugurals. The anonymous author noted that

when Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address, four future Presidents of the United States stood on the platform near him: Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and Benjamin Harrison.


To read the text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, click here .

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