1950

Articles from 1950

Tensions Build in Washington (Quick Magazine, 1950)

The Korean War was all of two weeks old when this column went to press describing the combustible atmosphere that characterized the Nation’s Capitol as events unfolded on the Korean peninsula:


A grim Senate voted the $1.2 billion foreign arms aid bill. Knots of legislators gathered on the floor or in the cloakrooms for whispered conversations. Crowds gathered around news tickers…
On everyone’s lips was the question: ‘Is this really World War III?’


Click here to read about the need for Army women during the Korean War.

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The Mid-Century Look in Fashion (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Hair as short as a boy’s and feathered into wisps about the face… Accented waist… Long slim look… Spread-eagle effect about the shoulders obtained by deep armholes, bloused backs, big collars or little capes… Mostly narrow skirts but still plenty of full ones.


– so begins the attached two page Spring fashion review that was torn from the Women’s Page of the January 25, 1950 issue of Pathfinder Magazine. Judging from the six photographs that illustrate the column, Christian Dior continued call the tunes that other fashion designers had to dance to if they expected to attract a following. The New York designers whose efforts were singled out for praise were Lilly Daché, Hattie Carnegie, Ben Reig, Ceil Chapman and Vera Jacobs of Capri Originals.


More about 1950s hairstyles can be read here…

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The Mid-Century Look in Fashion (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Hair as short as a boy’s and feathered into wisps about the face… Accented waist… Long slim look… Spread-eagle effect about the shoulders obtained by deep armholes, bloused backs, big collars or little capes… Mostly narrow skirts but still plenty of full ones.


– so begins the attached two page Spring fashion review that was torn from the Women’s Page of the January 25, 1950 issue of Pathfinder Magazine. Judging from the six photographs that illustrate the column, Christian Dior continued call the tunes that other fashion designers had to dance to if they expected to attract a following. The New York designers whose efforts were singled out for praise were Lilly Daché, Hattie Carnegie, Ben Reig, Ceil Chapman and Vera Jacobs of Capri Originals.


More about 1950s hairstyles can be read here…

The Mid-Century Look in Fashion (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950) Read More »

The Arrests of David Greenglass and Alfred Slack (Quick Magazine, 1950)

The arrests of David Greenglass (1922 – 2014: Soviet code name Kalibr) and Alfred Slack (1905 – 1977: Soviet code name El) were the result of the FBI having arrested and interrogated a vital Soviet courier a month earlier: Harry Gold (1911 – 1972: Soviet code name Arno). When Gold began to sing, the spies began to fall like leaves of autumn day. This quick read concentrates on Gold’s fellow chemist, Slack, who had been passing along information to the Soviets since the mid-Thirties, however between the years 1944 and 1945 Slack had been assigned to work in Oak Ridge Tennessee with the Manhattan Project. Greenglass had also been on the Manhattan project, and he was a far bigger catch.

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The Start of the Korean War (Quick Magazine, 1950)

On June 25, 1950 ten divisions of North Korean infantry invaded South Korea. In its narrowest sense, the invasion marked the beginning of a civil war between peoples of a divided country. In a far larger sense, it represented a break in tensions between the two dominant power blocs that had emerged from the Second World War. These well-illustrated pages appeared in Quick Magazine two weeks after the hostilities commenced and serves to summarize the events in Washington and at the United Nations. Within the first twelve hours of the war President Truman committed U.S. air and naval forces to the defense of South Korea and signed a bill to widen the draft pool.


The Korean War ended in 1953. Click here to read about the military results of that war.

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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,

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The World War Two Origins of the T-Shirt (Men’s Wear Magazine, 1950)

A couple of paragraphs from a popular fashion industry trade magazine that pointed out that the white cotton knit crew-neck garment we call the T-shirt came into this world with the name quarter sleeve and had it’s origin in the U.S. Navy where it earned it’s popularity and soon spread to other branches of the U.S. military during the mid-to-late 1930s. When the war ended in 1945 the T-shirt was the only element of the uniform that American men wanted to keep.


There was another fashion innovations of W.W. II, click here to read about it…

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