1939 – Page 5 – Old Magazine Articles

Ginger Rogers
(Film Daily, 1939)

A single page article on the topic of Ginger Rogers (1911 – 1995) and her career as it had progressed up to the year 1939:

Virginia Katherine McMath is the real name of this famous star and she was born in Independence, Missouri, on July 16, but most of her childhood was spent in Fort Worth, Texas.

She is five feet, four inches tall and weighs 108 pounds. She never has to diet because dancing keeps her in perfect condition. Dancing is listed as her very favorite hobby, too.

She had her first taste of real success on the screen with the winning roles in ‘Gold Diggers of 1933′ and ’42nd Street’.

Click here to read about the young Lucile Ball.

Anticipating the Television Juggernaut
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

This 1939 article was written by a wise old sage who probably hadn’t spent much time with a television set but recognized fully the tremor that it was likely to cause in the world of pop-culture:

Of all the brats, legitimate and otherwise, sired of the entertainment business, the youngest, television, looks as if it would be the hardest to raise and to housebreak…

Click here to read about the early Christian broadcasts of televangelist Oral Roberts…

Beating the Beach Censor
(Click Magazine, 1939)

Attached is a printable fashion editorial from a 1939 issue of CLICK MAGAZINE which beautifully illustrated (in color) one of the chic, California beach fashions of the day.

Learn about the color trends in men’s 1930 suits…

Charlie Chaplin Joins With Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith to Form United Artists
(Film Daily, 1939)

Restless with the manner in which the film colony operated, Chaplin joined forces with three other leading Hollywood celebrities to create United Artists; a distribution company formed to release their own films. Attached is a printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:

[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.

Charlie Chaplin Joins With Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith to Form United Artists
(Film Daily, 1939)

A Word on New York Waiters
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

Waiters are to New York City what lobbyists are to Washington and celebrated illustrator, author and all-around foodie Ludwig Bemelmans (1898 – 1962) had some thoughts on this very diverse group:

New York is full of waiters, Chinese, American, Congo, French, Italian and German waiters, Jewish and Christian waiters, Vegetarian and Greek waiters, many good waiters, many bad waiters.

Click here to read an article by Benny Goodman concerning the arrival of Swing on Park Ave.

American Playwright Lillian Hellman
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

The attached profile of playwright Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984) is accompanied by a rare photo of the thirty-four year old American writer, snapped shortly after the opening of her play, The Little Foxes:

Four seasons ago when ‘The Children’s Hour’ was produced, that labeling which is the destiny of every important new playwright began. Second Ibsen…American Strindberg…1934 Chekhov…the rumors ran. In this finest example of Miss Hellman’s highly individual contribution to the current theater, the Ibsen heritage seems most likely to win out.

In 1945 Hellman wrote about much of what she had seen on the W.W. II Soviet front; click here to read it

Emily Post on Society Language
(Photoplay Magazine, 1939)

At the tail-end of a very long interview concerning the problems with Hollywood movies, Emily Post (1872 – 1960), America’s high-priestess of good manners, was asked just one more question – this one involved the English language and here is Emily Post’s 1939 list of what to say and what not to say.

• Don’t say ‘brainy’ – say, ‘clever’.
• Don’t say ‘wealthy’, say ‘rich’.
• Don’t say ‘Charmed or pleased to meet you’, say ‘how do you do’.
• etc, etc, etc.
Emily Post had so many opinions…

Warner Brothers Opens Fire on Nazi Germany
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

STAGE MAGAZINE correspondent Katherine Best was not shy about giving credit where credit was due, as you will read in this article that stands as one big pat on the back for the producers at Warner Brother’s for possessing the testicular fortitude needed to launch the first anti-Nazi movie in Hollywood: Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).

In October of 1940, Charlie Chaplin released his anti-fascist masterpiece: The Great Dictator. Click here to read about that.

Horst Wessel: Nazi Martyr
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

This 1939 article from Ken Magazine lays out the real story of the life and death of Nazi storm trooper Horst Wessel (1907 – 1930) – not the one believed by the fascists he left behind:

In Germany, 1930, a pimp killed another pimp for cutting in on his girl’s territory. The slain pimp was a Nazi named Horst Wessel. Then Hitler came into power, and propagandist Goebbels, in need of a ‘Hell-rouser’, dreamed up the Wessel legend, made him an official Nazi martyr-saint.’

Bauhaus Exhibit Smeared by Critics
(Art Digest, 1939)

With all the best wishes in the world, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that there is something essentially heavy, forced and repellent in most of the Bauhaus work. They are under suspicion of being modern for the sake of being modern and not because of any necessities of their system of living.

-so wrote the well-respected art critic Henry McBride (1867 – 1962) in response to the groundbreaking 1938 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Bauhaus 1919 – 1928. McBride did not mince words in expressing his belief that the Bauhaus was not a genuine art school and that the MoMA showed poor judgment by lamenting it’s passing. McBride is remembered as having been a longtime advocate of modernism, a champion of the 1913 Armory Show, and supporter of the new and untried, but for him, the Bauhaus represented the art of the poseur.

Bauhaus Exhibit Smeared by Critics
(Art Digest, 1939)

Donald Budge: 1940s Tennis Champ
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

An article about Donald Budge (1915 – 2000), an American tennis champ active in the late 1930s who was ranked the World’s Number 1 player for five years, first as an amateur player and then as a pro. This article appeared in print in 1939, when the player’s best days were behind him.

Nazis Against the Christian Churches
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

As pastor of the little Austrian church, the good father was happy until Nazis swallowed the country, mistreated his Jewish converts and threw many of his colleagues into the dreaded concentration camp of Dachau. Shocked, he attempted to preserve a fragmentary picture of events for posterity – and found himself in Dachau. Similar episodes, which are today common throughout Nazidom, only succeed in stiffening the Catholic fight against Nazism.

Paul Terry: The Other Animator
(Film Daily, 1939)

A short profile on Paul Terry, torn from the pages of a prominent Hollywood trade rag:

During Paul Terry’s notable career in the film industry, he has produced more than 1,000 pictures. In October of the current year he celebrates 25 years of continuous work in the cartoon field, which he helped to pioneer.

Today, the fountain of Terry-Toons is a thoroughly modern studio in New Rochelle, employing some 130 hands, all skilled in the imparting of life, voice and voice expression to the characters created on the drawing boards.

Richard Julius Hermann Krebs Under the Nazi Boot
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

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…

Growth and Expansion at the Walt Disney Company
(Film Daily, 1939)

Herein is a 1939 article from a defunct Hollywood trade magazine marking the construction of a 20 acre facility for the Disney studio in Burbank, California:

By 1930, the Walt Disney studio had grown in fantastic fashion. Instead of the 25 employees of 1929, there were now 40 people…By the end of the year there were 66 employees…In 1931 the total number of personnel had jumped to 106…When ‘The Three Little Pigs’ came along in 1933, the studio had grown 1,600 square feet of floor space in 1929, to 20,000 square feet. A hundred and fifty people were now turning out the Disney productions… In 1937, all the employees were still jostling each other… From around 600 employees in the summer of 1937, the organization had grown to almost 900 by the winter of 1938.

Jimmy Stewart: Four Years in Hollywood
(Photoplay Magazine, 1939)

Hollywood scribe Wilbur Morse, Jr. wrote this 1939 magazine profile of Jimmy Stewart (1908 – 1997). At the time of this printing, Stewart had dozens of stage credits and had been working in films for only four years; one year later he would be awarded an Oscar for his performance in PHILADELPHIA STORY:

Booth Tarkington might have created Jim Stewart. He’s ‘Little Orvie and Billie Baxter’ grown up ‘Penrod’ with a Princeton diploma.

The appeal of James Stewart, the shy, inarticulate movie actor, is that he reminds every girl in the audience of the date before the last. He’s not a glamorized Gable, a remote Robert Taylor. He’s ‘Jim’, the lackadaisical, easy-going boy from just around the corner.