Coronet Magazine

Articles from Coronet Magazine

A Song and Dance Man on Guadalcanal (Pageant Magazine, 1952)

Four years after his stellar performance as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939), Hollywood actor and comedian Ray Bolger (1904 – 1987) was performing in many parts of the war-torn Pacific islands on a USO tour for thousands of very grateful GIs and Marines. Attached is a two page reminiscence about one particular Guadalcanal performance, the men he met and the Hell they paid in the years that followed

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‘Burial at Sea” (Coronet Magazine, 1945)

This is a short anecdote that recalled a slice of life on board a USN troop ship as it ferried men from one bloody atoll to the next. The two speaking parts in this drama were both officers who butted heads regularly until they understood that what united them was the welfare of the
dying young men returning from the beaches who had given their last full measure.


To read articles about W.W. II submarines, Click here.

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Mad Magazine (Coronet Magazine, 1960)

When Mad Magazine first appeared on newsstands in 1952 it was immediately recognized as something quite new in so far as American satirical magazine humor was concerned. The earliest issues were produced in comic book format with almost all content produced by its founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman (1924 – 1993); by 1955 the magazine’s lay-out was altered to its current form. From its earliest days, Kurtzman and his publisher, William Gaines (1922 – 1992), began receiving unsolicited gags from many of the finest writers and performers on radio and TV. This article lists some of the scandals (both foreign and domestic) that the magazine inadvertently generated.

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Glenn Miller (Coronet Magazine, 1954)

Ten years after the death of Big Band legend Glenn Miller (1904 – 1944), it was found that his record sales were going through the roof at 16,000,000 per annum, and Hollywood had attempted to cash-in on his memory by releasing a (bland) Technicolor bio-pic, appropriately titled, The Glenn Miller Story(Universal) – with Jimmy Stewart starring in the title roll. The band leader’s popularity was obvious to everyone in 1944, when he was killed in the war, but no one could have predicted this.

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The Returned P.O.W. (Coronet Magazine, 1945)

Merchant Marine William T. Mitchell, having been locked-up for three and half years in a Japanese POW camp, recalled those terrible days intermittently as he explains what it was like to return to a changed America. One of the amusing stories concerned a time when his captors assembled the camp to announce [falsely] that movie stars Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin had been killed:

The Nips had lied to us, and I fell for it. You believe anything – almost – when you’re cut off from your home.

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Sam Rosenman: FDR’s Right Arm (Coronet Magazine, 1944)

Samuel Rosenman (1896 – 1973) was an attorney, judge and a highly placed insider within the ranks of the Democratic Party, both in Albany and the nation’s capital. It was Rosenman who helped articulated many of FDR’s policies, wrote numerous executive orders and conceived of the moniker New Deal. He was the first lawyer to hold the position White House Counsel and he was an indispensable advisor to Roosevelt throughout the course of his New York governorship as well as his presidency.

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Bananas, Anyone?

Here is the skinny on the Bananas and Skim Milk Diet – also known as the Magic 888 – still in use today, the reducing plan is a crash diet designed to remove five pounds within three to four days.

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Johnny Mathis (Coronet Magazine, 1957)

Here is a moving account of the meteoric rise of Johnny Mathis (b. 1935) – from an impoverished child of the San Francisco slums to the last of the great-American crooners.

Johnny Mathis is just 23 years old , though he appears a hungry , vulnerable 17. When he sings a romantic ballad in high falsetto, his large eyes gaze out over the heads of the audience as if in search of someone.

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Was He Brave? (Coronet Magazine, 1943)

Before December 7, 1941, the average American regarded the Jap as a comical little fellow who bowed deeply from the waist and said, ‘So sorry.’…[and] as a fighting man, the Jap was obviously a joke. His army hadn’t been able to to lick poor old broken-down China in four years… This picture was destroyed forever by the bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor… But what makes the Jap so brave? Briefly, the Jap has two words for it. The first is Shinto and the second bushido,

Was He Brave? (Coronet Magazine, 1943) Read More »