An eye-witness account of life in post-war Berlin: the rubble, the black-market, the politics, the night clubs, the newspapers, the natives and the four occupying armies.sumo men. These sumo wrestlers weigh about 300 pounds and are very agile…
You might also like to read articles about post-war Japan.
Back in the day, some wise old sage once remarked:
It’s Frank Sinatra’s world; we only live in it.
-in 1951, Nancy Sinatra certainly thought these words were double-dipped in truth; married to The Voice since 1939, she tended to their three children devotedly, yet she was served with divorce papers nonetheless in order that Ol’ Blue Eyes could go keep house with the twice-married starlet Ava Gardner (1922 – 1990). The attached article will tell you all about it; it’s a juicy one – filled hearsay, innuendo and the knowing words of a Vegas odds maker as to whether the marriage will last:
Will Frank turn out to be a better husband than Mickey Rooney or Artie Shaw? Will Ava have more luck with him than Nancy had?
(they divorced in 1957)
Attached is a profile of Milton Caniff (1907 – 1988), who is remembered as the creator of Terry and the Pirates (1934 – 1946), Mail Call (1942 – 1946) and Steve Canyon (1946 – 1988).
Click here to read an article by G.I. cartoonist Bill Maulden.
To fulfill her publicity obligations for her roll as Roxanne in her forthcoming film The Subterranean (MGM, 1960: from the Jack Kerouac novella
of the same title), actress Janice Rule (1931 – 2003) struck a number of Beat poses and provided a glossary of Beatnik slang for the readers of Coronet magazine.
Click here to read an article about 1940s teen slang.
If you would like to read about 1920s slang, click here.
Appearing in various magazines and newspapers on the 1945 home front were articles and interviews with assorted experts who predicted that the demobilized military men would be a burden on society. They cautioned families to be ready for these crushed and broken men, who had seen so much violence and had inflicted the same upon others, would be maladjusted and likely to drift into crime. In response to this blarney stepped Frances Langford (1913 – 2005), the American singer. She wrote in the attached article that she had come to know thousands of soldiers, sailors airmen and Marines during the course of her tours with the USO and that the nation could only benefit from their return.
The young man going into the Army has a course in orientation to fit him for fighting. He has to be shown what kind of people his enemies are. He has to be told why it is necessary to fight. In the same manner, the Army is finding that the men returning from war have to be fitted for civilian life. They bring back resentment against men and women who have known little privation and less hardship.
Italians who were assigned to the defense of key hill positions surrendered in droves as the U.S. attack intensified… Many of the Italians had been without food for two days. There water was exhausted. Some of the captives shamelessly wept as the Americans offered them food and cigarettes.
Click here to read about American POWs during the Vietnam War.
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…
A British journalist encountered the United States Marine Corps and found them to be an impressive curiosity that spoke an odd, nautical language. One Marine in particular was singled out and, although anonymous some of you will recognize right away that he could only be one man: Sergeant Dan Daily of the Fifth Marines.
Click here to read about the high desertion rate within the U.S. Army of 1910.
Although Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) enjoyed a lengthy tenure as the president of Harvard University (1909 – 1933), his reign there was not entirely free from controversy. One of the more unpleasant policies associated with his term was one in which he stated that Jewish enrollment to the university should be confined to an admissions quota that should not exceed the 15-percent mark.
This is an article about Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) who attempted to avoid the topic concerning his deep desire to admit Jews by quota and keep their numbers limited to a particularly low proportion.
In 1923 President Lowell came up with a politically palatable solution: he limited the size of the incoming class to one thousand, which meant incorporating an evaluation of each candidate’s non-academic qualities into the admissions decision. How manly was the candidate, for instance? How congenial and clubbable? What promise, what potential for future leadership?
Over time meritocracy won out – until Asians began applying in large numbers…
Here are two Yank Magazine articles from the same issue that report on the all-black combat units that fought the Germans on two fronts in Europe: one organization fought with the Seventh Army in France and Germany, the other fought with the Fifth Army through Italy:
Hitler would have a hemorrhage if he could see the white boys of the 411th Infantry bull-sessioning, going out on mixed patrols, sleeping in the same bombed buildings, sweating out the same chow lines with the Negro GIs.
Click here to read about the African-American efforts during the First World War.
This column concerns Jackie Robinson’s non-professional days in sports; his football seasons at Pasadena Junior College, basketball at UCLA and the Kansas City Monarchs. Being an Army publication, the reporter touched upon Robinson’s brief period as a junior officer in the 761st Tank Battalion.
A 1951 article about the Negro Baseball League can be read here
In 1969, Jackie Robinson wrote about African-American racists, click here to read it…
Click here to read a 1954 article about Willie Mays.
At the very peak of bourgeois respectability, one of the high priests of art and culture, Gilbert Seldes (1893 – 1970), sat comfortably on his woolsack atop Mount Parnasus and piled the praises high and deep for one of the lowest of the commercial arts. The beneficiary was the cartoonist George Herriman (1880 – 1944), creator of Ignatz Mouse and all other absurd creations that appeared in his syndicated comic strip, Krazy Kat (1913-1944):
His strange unnerving distorted trees, his totally unlivable houses, his magic carpets, his faery foam, are items in a composition which is incredibly with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.
The fruits of the Third Reich Population Policy are shocking indeed. Fifteen and 16-year-old girls are having babies with the blessings of their Hitler Youth leaders. Unwed mothers with illegitimate children have the right to evict married but childless couples from apartment houses…laws are passed entitling unmarried mothers to call themselves ‘Mrs.’ instead of ‘Miss’, and providing state subsides for illegitimate children and crushing taxes for childless adults.
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.
Much has been written and much more whispered about relations between American Negro soldiers and white girls in Britain and elsewhere. To get at the facts, Newsweek assigned William Wilson of its London bureau to a candid review of the subject. His findings , largely from the standpoint of the Negro soldiers themselves [are as follow].
A report that anticipated a hefty load of European immigrants for 1923.
