Articles from Pathfinder Magazine
This is a report concerning how the Hiss/Chambers perjury trial was proceeding before the jury. The journalist pointed out that Hiss’ attorney, Lloyd Paul Stryker, was repeatedly making slanderous remarks about the character of Whitaker Chambers – an indication that the facts were simply not on the side of the defendant.
The Hiss-Chambers Case (Pathfinder Magazine, 1949) Read More »
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.
Judith Coplon in Federal Court (Pathfinder Magazine, 1949) Read More »
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 Depiction of Mothers in Silent Film (Pathfinder, 1926 Read More »
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 Brutality of Combat (Pathfinder Magazine, 1944) Read More »
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…
The Blue Eagle (Pathfinder Magazine, 1934) Read More »
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…
Assessing the U.S. Navy in W.W. II (Pathfinder Magazine, 1945) Read More »
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,
TV Viewers And Sports Attendance (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950) Read More »
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.
The Klan in Miami (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939) Read More »
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.
Soap Operas Come to Television (Pathfinder Magazine, 1949) Read More »
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Elsa Maxwell: Life of the Party (Pathfinder Magazine, 1940) Read More »
