Articles from 1956
Here is a short, well illustrated article about the love shared between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainnier III:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen two people who looked more in love. Every time I turned around to change film or grab another camera, they’d start whispering, holding hands… like any just-engaged couple. Pretty romantic.”
“The new Japan is fermenting a mash of new ideas and old customs. It is mixing political democracy with feudal loyalties, free enterprise with giant monopolies, and several shades of Marxism with a hankering for the good old days. The nation that once meekly did what a handful of leaders told it to do is now outspokenly divided on every major issue… For seven Occupation years the Japanese had no choice of sides. We ran the country and fed them slabs of democracy sandwiched between $2,500,000,000 worth of relief and rehabilitation. Japan enjoyed our help and even digested a good deal of the democracy. But when the Occupation lid came off in 1952 it revealed a country weary of being told what to do, curious to taste the forbidden fruit behind the bamboo curtain and relishing its authority over the foreigners who had been giving it orders for so long.”
Attached is a printable page from an R.O.T.C. primer concerning American Military History outlined the events of 1948 that created the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.).
This pact, called the North Atlantic Treaty, united Great Britain, the United States, and ten western European nations in a common security system. Approved by the Senate in April 1949, the treaty provided for mutual assistance, including the use of armed force in the event of a Soviet attack upon one or more of the signatory powers.
Reagan was the first actor to become president, Buchanan the first tailor, Jefferson the first architect and Abraham Lincoln was the first writer to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
The world has long known that Lincoln liked an occasional back-room story. Here is the only record – in his own handwriting – of that earthy side of the Great Emancipator.
Arriving in Hollywood by way of The Trouble with Harry in 1955, and cute as buttons – Shirley MacLaine (b. 1934) was the adopted little sister of the Rat Pack, that odd movie star whose sensitive skin burned too easily in the California sun and one of the few starlets who was actually capable of sewing her own clothes.
There was a time, Humphrey Bogart maintains, when he saw all interviewers and tried to answer all questions put to him…
But I can’t take it anymore, I’ve had to cut the fan magazines off my list entirely. Just the sheer smell of them drives me crazy. They smell of milk. The interviewers themselves treat you like a two-year-old child with their will-Debbie-marry-Eddie and can-Lance-Fuller-live-without-a-wife kind of idiocy. You know the whole sorry groove of the thing.
You can read about David Niven HERE
Following the death of his mother, Nancy Hanks, the future president was but six years old. Lincoln’s father, Thomas Lincoln, then married Sarah Bush and the family moved to Indiana. The Lincoln family was poor and suffered hardships living in the Indiana wilderness but a bond was created between stepmother Sarah and the boy Abraham that was never broken. From the age of nine and throughout the rest of his life Lincoln would call her, Mother.
These are the tender memories of his boyhood that she called to mind just five months after the assassination.
A short paragraph from General Grant’s memoir recalling the the first private interview with President Lincoln, on the occasion in the early spring of 1864 when he was given command of all the Federal armies.
In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted…
Click here to read about a dream that President Lincoln had, a dream that anticipated his violent death.
A short paragraph from General Grant’s memoir recalling the the first private interview with President Lincoln, on the occasion in the early spring of 1864 when he was given command of all the Federal armies:
In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them…
Click here to read about General Grant’s Chief of Staff, General John Rawlins.
Attached, you will find the preferred brandy-based drink recipes of three outstanding Virginians: Nathaniel Bacon, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother’s face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white.
Not since the Civil War has the nation faced such an explosive situation as it will when public schools in the South open their doors next month. In a plea for tolerance, sympathy and understanding in the South as well as the North, Pulitzer Prize award winning journalist Virginius Dabney (1901 – 1995) analyzes and interprets a problem serious to Americans in every section of the country.
This 1956 article addressed the issue of Lincoln’s depression:
Lincoln’s story telling proclivities were well known in his own time. On the old eighth circuit in Illinois his humor and fund of anecdotes were proverbial. What was not so well known was that the tall, homely man needed a blanket of humor to suppress the fires of depression, gloom, and sense of tragedy that almost consumed him.
Click here to read about Lincoln, the joke teller.
A confident declaration makes clear at the top of these columns that all adherents will lose 5 pounds in 2 days if they seriously follow the dictates of the Blitz diet:
Breakfast, lunch and dinner are the same… Eight ounces of fresh creamed cottage cheese; two or three Elberta peach halves and juice…
(F.Y.I. – the Blitz diet allows for Norwegian flat bread, butter, sugar, and cinnamon.)
Attached is an article concerning a page from American Military History and it outlines the losses and gains of the Korean War (1950 – 1953). In five sentences this article gives the number of American dead and wounded, the number of U.N. dead and wounded and the amount of ground lost to the Chinese and North Korean military; a map of the stabilized front is provided.
The attached profile of actor William Holden (1918 – 1981) appeared in print when his stock was about to peak.
When the summer of 1956 rolled around, Holden was already a double nominee for a BAFTA (Picnic), an Oscar (Sunset Boulevard) and was the grateful recipient of an Academy Award for Best Actor one year earlier (Stalag 17). In 1957 his performance in the Bridge on the River Kwai would bring even more pats on the back (although the Best Actor statue would go to Alec Guinness).
This five page interview tells the story of Holden’s initial discovery in Hollywood, his devotion to both the Screen Actor’s Guild and Paramount Pictures. His Hollywood peers held him in especially high-regard:
In a poll of Hollywood reporters recently he was designated ‘the best adjusted and happiest actor around’; by contrast, the same poll identified Humphrey Bogart as a total pain in the keister – click here to read that article.
Situated where the Tennessee River passes through the Cumberland Mountains, forming gaps, Chattanooga was called the Key to East Tennessee and Gateway to the deep South. The possession of Chattanooga was vital to the Confederacy, and a coveted goal of the Northern armies. Chattanooga’s principal importance during the Civil War was it’s position as a railroad center.
Click here to print American Civil War chronologies.
Situated where the Tennessee River passes through the Cumberland Mountains, forming gaps, Chattanooga was called the Key to East Tennessee and Gateway to the deep South. The possession of Chattanooga was vital to the Confederacy, and a coveted goal of the Northern armies. Chattanooga’s principal importance during the Civil War was it’s position as a railroad center.
Click here to print American Civil War chronologies.
