Articles from 1955
In the Digital Age, Beulah Elizabeth Richardson (1920 – 2000: stage name Beah Richards) is largely remembered as an award-winning actress, but it has widely been forgotten that she was also a poet and playwright. The attached poem is an honest expression of her reaction to the tyranny experienced by too many African Americans.
This article served to introduce the boy who is now Charles III (b.1948) to American magazine readers and answer all their questions as to how impossibly glamorous his life was when he was only six years-old:
“Despite his scant years, Charles is already launched in his training for chairman of the board. In that training, the ancient and splendid trappings of British royal tradition still play a part, but in the main Charles is unmistakably a child of the mid-Twentieth Century.”
The editors at Coronet recognized that Oral Roberts was not your average minister, who was simply contented to preside over thirty full pews every week; they labeled him a businessman-preacher and subtly pointed out that the man’s detractors were many and his flashy attire unseemly for a member of clergy:
God doesn’t run a breadline…I make no apology for buying the best we can afford. The old idea that religious people should be poor is nonsense.
Perhaps the above headline gives a wee-bit too much credit to the flappers for changing the sex codes of North America – but it certainly would never have happened without them. They were one of the necessary elements, in addition to motion pictures, recorded music, automobiles and greater job opportunities for women, that, when mixed together created a new social contract. The attached article spells it all out as to how the flappers of the 1920s had stripped the female body of its Victorian wrappings and proudly displayed it in the sunlight.
You might also want read about sex during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
At the beginning of World War II, our army was a mixture of callow boys and and domesticated men. The older men were homesick for wives and children…There were plenty of lonely wives, too, and it soon became evident that a fair number of them were committed to the belief that continence was bad for women.
Marriage vows were one of the unsung casualties of the Second World War: by 1944 many married women who hadn’t seen their drafted husbands in years began producing babies; you can read about that here…
In 1943 a woman on the home front introduced a sexual component that she believed would bring an end to the problem of industrial absenteeism – click here to read about her idea…
Icebergs are disappearing from Canada’s Atlantic coast; forests are growing in the sub-Arctic of the east and air bases have been established on Baffin Island.
Two months after James Dean’s fatal car crash, photographer Sanford Roth (1906 – 1962) penned this reminiscence of his unique friendship with this actor so many years his junior:
Dean was what Hollywood loosely labels a nonconformist, an individualist in the Brando stripe. He wasn’t easy to know.
Those were the days when the talkies had taken over from the silent films and movie executives began a wholesale raid on the New York stage for promising young talent. It was fertile territory. In a comparatively brief period they signed Clark Gable, George Brent, Jimmy Cagney, Joan Blondell, Spencer Tracy Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, Francis Tone and a score of others. While I was in Broken Dishes I had been screen tested by Samuel Goldwyn for a feminine lead opposite Ronald Coleman…I reached Hollywood with my mother on December 13, 1930.
