1951 – Page 5 – Old Magazine Articles

The Wandering Waistline
(Quick Magazine, 1951)

Looking back, the fashion silhouette of the 1950s is remembered as having a very narrow waistline, but in the early days of the decade, as this 1951 fashion review indicates, the feminine waist was a highly contested battle ground:

Where’s the waist? Paris popped the question, but has yet to give the answer. On the one hand, many leading designers showed a tendency to raise the waistline. But they were challenged by a strong minority that seemed determined to drop it [pictures of both high and low are provided herein]…Apparently, Paris has decreed it the year of the wandering waist. Where it will stop may well be up to American women.

If you’d like to read about the feminine silhouette of the early Forties, click here.

My Brother Groucho
(Coronet Magazine, 1951)

In this six page essay Harpo Marx tells the tale of Groucho (1890 – 1977) as only an older brother could see it. From the Marx family’s earliest days in the slums of New York and Groucho’s first entertainment job (he was 13), Harpo (1888 – 1964) briefly recounts his brother’s wins and losses leading up to the team’s first popular show on Broadway (I’ll Say She Is, 1923) and the man’s travails on his T.V. game show, You Bet Your Life.

Groucho’s infatuation with the language has been the backbone of his entire life and has, undoubtedly, played the largest single part in shaping him into one of the greatest wits of our time. Groucho doesn’t regard words the way the rest of us do. He looks at a word in the usual fashion. Then he looks at it upside down, backwards, from the middle out to the ends, and from the ends back to the middle…Groucho doesn’t look for double meanings. He looks for quadruple meanings. And usually finds them.

Click here to read about the manner in which the Marx Brothers would test their jokes.

Television: God’s Gift To Politicians
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

Placing a teleprompter or cue cards below a camera lens seems like old-hat to us – but our grandparents thought that it rendered an amazing affect for televised addresses:

The new technique for speeches on TV – reading from larlge cards with lettering two inches high placed just under the camera lens – makes it possible for the speaker to look directly into the camera lens, giving the appearance of talking directly to the viewer.

Jacques Fath and Elsa Schiaparelli
(Quick Magazine, 1951)

This illustrated fashion review shows four images that depicted the sophisticated offerings by Jacques Fath and Elsa Schiaparelli from their respective 1951 mid-summer collections. What the American women who gazed upon these pages learned is that the era of the padded hips was continuing its march into the next decade.

Fears of a Stalin/Mosadegh Alliance…
(People Today, 1951)

The attached article will give you some indication as to the high level of anti-Soviet intensity that existed in the U.S. in 1951. This short piece, and others like it, fanned the fires that lead to the downfall of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (1882 – 1967) in the well-known 1953 coup that was launched by both the CIA and MI5. The results of of this joint effort (Operation Ajax) were fruitful in the short run, but set in motion a series of events that have created the Iran we enjoy today.

Illustrated with a military-style map, abounding with footnotes and an ominous-looking red Soviet arrow, rudely pointing at the Abadan oil fields, the uncredited journalist hinted that Mosaddegh’s rise and subsequent nationalization of all foreign-owned oil wells would only create a new Iran that was firmly in the Soviet camp. This was not to be the case, for Mosadegh really never trusted the Reds.

The U.N. Counter-Offensive
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

In mid-March the U.N. forces launched a counter-strike in answer to the Communists offensive that was commenced across a wide swath of the front line in early January. General Ridgeway remarked that although the Communists were in retreat, they still had an enormous pool of men in reserve.

The Frenzy for Rudolph Valentino
(Coronet Magazine, 1951)

Even as late as 1951, those eccentric little movie theaters that ran only thirty year-old flicks filled their seats with middle-aged women who still nursed a flame for Rudolph Valentino (1895 – 1926); their beau ideal from the mad Twenties who so many imagined to have been the perfect lover.

British Moles Defect
(Quick Magazine, 1951)

On May 19, 1951 two officials of the British Foreign Office were reported as missing; their disappearance raised many eyebrows within the intelligence community.
One of the men, Donald MacLean (1913 – 1983) had been working in various trusted positions within the British diplomatic corps since 1934, but his handlers in Moscow called him Homer. The other Englishman, Guy Burgess (1911 – 1963) began working for the Foreign Office in 1944; the KGB called him Hicks. The two men were members of a spy ring that would soon be known as the Cambridge Four (the other two being Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. In later years a fifth spy would surface: Roland Perry. All of them were recruited by the Soviets while attending Cambridge University in the 1930s).

The information that was fed to the journalist who wrote the attached article was clearly meant to disguise the fact that all the Western intelligence agencies were totally freaking out.

The Kaesong Cease-Fire
(Time Magazine, 1951)

The Korean War peace negotiations that took place at Kaesong during August of 1951 are remembered as one of the many failed peace conferences to be convened during the course of that war. The talks were broken off early as a result of a series of U.N. raids that were launched in two different enemy held positions – in addition to an nighttime airstrike that almost decimated the grounds where the talks were being held. The U.N. negotiators were especially frustrated with the fact that the Communists wished that both armies adhere to the 38th Parallel as the post-war border; exactly where the war began.

Shopping from Television
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

Before there was an HSN or a QVC – before there was an Adam Freeman or a Mary Beth Roe, there was Your Television Shopper and Leave It To The Girls starring Maggie Johnson and Faye Emerson, respectively. The programs were two of several such shows that aired during the prepubescent days of television broadcasting – and like the shopping shows that came along fifty years later, they, too, moved products off the shelves at a surprising pace.

Click here to read how Hollywood costume designer affected popular fashion…