Attached is a map of the 48 states that will show you which regions of the country produced the greatest number of healthy men who passed their Selective Service physical examinations. You will also learn which parts of the nation provided men who could not pass this examination.
In 1913 a very strong, anti-Federalist step was taken to amend the Constitution and alter the manner in which U.S. Senators were to be selected and replaced in the event of vacancies. The 17th Amendment was passed: it guaranteed that senators would no longer be elected from within the legislative bodies of the state governments, but would be elected directly by the citizens of their respective states, just as the representatives are. Historian Everett Kimball pointed out in this article how the 17th Amendment altered the very nature of the U.S. Senate.
The attached three page article about John Wayne appeared at the very doorstep of the Fifties – the decade that was uniquely hisown. The uncredited Hollywood journalist who wrote this column was doing so in order to announce to the reading public that Wayne was coming remarkably close to being the top box office attraction:
Wayne reached this eminence by turning out film after film for 18 years. Working with a steady, un-nervous strength for four studios: Republic, RKO, Argosy and Warner Brothers. – he shifts back and forth between Westerns, sea-epics and war pictures. With each movie he makes (most of them re-hashes of of standard action-film plots, but a few of them film classics), his fans grow.
All told, the animated cartoon series Tom and Jerry would be awarded seven (7) Academy Awards before Oscar’s attention turned elsewhere.
This 1946 article sings the praises of Fred Quimby (1886 – 1965), the animation producer who ran the shop at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio between the years 1937 and 1954:
Doff the cap to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Fred Quimby, producer of Tom and Jerry’, the only cartoon stars to have copped the coveted Oscar for two consecutive years. Even the distinguished Donald Duck has only been Oscarized once.
‘Tom and Jerry‘ reflect in broad comedy the faults and foibles of human beings, even as you and I. Here we have a thoroughly egotistical cat and a very shrewd mouse… a cartoon representation of the eternal conflict between HERO and VILLAIN. Toma always hopes to outwit Jerry who symbolizes the underdogs of the world.
This short notice appeared in The Lion’s Roar, which was the monthly publicity rag for M.G.M. Studio.
A smattering of opinions on the subject of VJ Day (they all seemed to have been in favor of it) were offered up by a collection of Rome-based American soldiers composed of assorted hues and ranks.
Alfonso XIII of Spain (1886 – 1941) is remembered as a pretty level-headed guy, but non the less, it was news items like this one that made Karl Marx first dip his nib in the inkwell…
Attached are excerpts from a few 1929 British newspapers that condemned all efforts made in Hollywood to produce talking pictures; one snide reviewer went so far as to insist that rather than calling the films talkies, they should be referred to as dummies:
The majority of films in the future will be made stupidly for stupid people, just has been the case with the silent movies for twenty years…
A column from a 1937 issue of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE included these two seemingly random tales from the life of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The brief remembrance on the second page is a bitter-sweet story about young Eleanor and her mother’s vision of her as a hopelessly plain-looking girl.
Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.
A review of Harold Nicolson’s 1921 biography, Paul Verlaine. Numerous aspects of Verlaine’s life and poetry are discussed as are the roots of French Symbolism.
An appreciative essay celebrating the work of Guillaume Apollinaire (born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky: 1880 – 1918) by the high-brow art critic Paul Rosenfed (1890 – 1946).
For Apollinaire possessed the perfect adjustibility of the born poet. He would have found himself much at home in any environment into which he would have been born, whether it would have been one of pampas and herds and lonely hamlets, or one of concrete, newspapers, war and steel.
An American artillery officer from that famous division recalled the last minute of the war to end all wars…
Not too long after the end of World War II, the French, British and Americans found that they had to assemble a coalition of nations (NATO) that would be willing to fight the Soviets for what was believed to be an even bigger rumble in the future – but after losing two enormous wars, West Germany refused to join.
A first-hand account as to the daily goings-on at Hitler’s Plotzensee Prison.
Written by Jan Valtin (alias of Richard Julius Hermann Krebs: 1905 – 1951), one of the few inmates to make his way out of that highly inclusive address and tell the tale. Krebs was a communist in the German resistance movement who later escaped to New York and wrote a book (Out of the Night
) about his experiences in Nazi Germany.
The prisoner who has served his sentence is usually not released; he is surrendered to the Gestapo for an indefinite term in one of the concentration camps, preferably Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald. Incurable hard cases are sent to Dachau…
Assorted quotes addressing some aspects of the 1930 Hollywood and the entertainment industry seated there. Some are prophets who rant-on about the impending failure of talking pictures, others go on about the obscene sums of money generated in the film colony; a few of the wits are well-known to us, like Thomas Edison, George M. Cohan and Walter Winchell but most are unknown – one anonymous sage, remarking about the invention of sound movies, prophesied:
In ten years, most of the good music of the world will be written for sound motion pictures.
Attached are a few words on the W.W. I naval recruiting poster To Arms by illustrator Milton Bancroft.
The article primarily describes what the duties of a ship’s bugler are, what this position represents and why this was such an suitable graphic image for recruiting sailors for the war.
A collection of twelve fashion illustrations depicting the variety of sleeve treatments available during the winter of 1921. Some of the details offered were created by the House of Worth, Captain Molyneux, Martial et Armand and Madeleine and Madeleine.
This is one of the first profiles of Hollywood beauty and former child star Natalie Wood (1938 – 1981).
The journalist went into some details explaining how she was discovered at the age of five by the director Irving Pichel (1891 – 1954) and how it all steadily snowballed into eighteen years of semi-steady work that provided her with a invaluable Hollywood education (and subsequently creating a thoroughly out-of-control teenager).
At sixteen, Natalie co-starred with the late James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and the resulting Dean hysteria swept her forward with him… She cannot bear to be alone. She is full of reasonless fears. Of airplanes. Of snakes. Of swimming in the ocean.
On the matter of the American fashion designer Adele Simpson (1904 – 1995), it must be remembered that she was a prominent player in American fashion for many decades; a woman who had been awarded both a Coty Award (1949) as well as a Neiman Marcus Award (1946). Her creations were highly sought after by the crowned heads of both Europe and Hollywood.
Click here to read about wartime fabric rationing in the 1940s.
