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Life in Post-War Vienna (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Published six months after the German surrender was this account of post-war Vienna, Austria: the people, the shortages and the black-market. Originally liberated by the Soviet Army, the Americans occupied the city three months afterward; this is an eyewitness account as to what Vienna was like in the immediate wake of World War II. Reading between the lines, one gets a sense that the Viennese were simply delighted to see an American occupying force swap places with the Soviet Army, although the Soviets were not nearly as brutal to this capital as they were to Berlin.


In compliance with the Potsdam Conference, Vienna was soon divided into four zones of occupation.

Meet Joseph Goebbels (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938

Goebbels is the creator of the Hitler legend. He is the white-washer of the Nazi reputation. In the 1920s the party had an unsavory name because its ranks included a clique of of homosexuals. As early as 1922 a Nazi meeting at Munich voted that no woman should ever hold political office. Goebbels twisted the party’s abnormal dislike of women into something ‘respectable’ – the doctrine that a woman’s place was in the kitchen and the maternity ward.

Dinner with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (Literary Digest, 1922)

This article is a simply wonderful read for many reasons and the chief among them is that the journalist hated Los Angeles. The New York writer Karl K. Kitchen was dispatched to Beverly Hills to interview the recently divorced Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and he seemed to have had a nice enough time with the estranged couple, so much so that the Hollywood Royals invited him to dine at their house. The whole article is written in a very chatty way and there is one small, but distinct, slanderous aside referring to Jewish power in the nascent film industry.

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.

Goering in Italy (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The journalist who penned the attached article was in the dark as to the reasons why Reichsmarshal Herman Goring appeared in Rome during the opening weeks of January, 1937, but he wisely presumed that it had something to do with the Spanish Civil War – and he was right.

The 1938 Spies (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

Suddenly last June, a Federal grand jury in New York City hoisted the curtain on ‘America’s most significant spy prosecution since the [First] World War’ by indicting 18 persons for participating in a conspiracy to steal U.S. defense secrets for Germany. Subsequently, only four of the 18 could be found for trial. The others, including two high officials of the German War Ministry, were safe in – or had escaped to – the Fatherland.

Broadway Theater in Wartime (Yank Magazine, 1945)

New York’s Broadway theater scene during World War II:

Show people will never forget the year 1944. Thousands of men and women from the legitimate theater were overseas in uniform -actors and actresses, writers, scene designers, stage hands – and all looked back in wonderment at what war had done to the business… Letters and newspapers from home told the story. On Broadway even bad shows were packing them in…


Click here to read a 1946 article about post-war Broadway.

The Churches Resist (Literary Digest, 1933)

Here is one of the earliest reports from Hitler’s Germany on the the Nazi hierarchy butting-heads with the Christian churches. As the fascists forced the Catholic and Protestant clergies to coerce, the churches reminded the new government of the autonomy they have always enjoyed (more or less).

The Onslaught of Standardized Tests (World Week, 1958)

Written in 1958 with the aid of the Educational Testing Service, (Princeton, New Jersey), the article attempted to persuade America’s high school students to get used to standardized tests because they’re a really cool idea and they’ll make your life better. Illustrations are provided to indicate how the testing work and how well such tests had proved useful to the Air Force in weeding out sub-standard candidates for flight training. The journalist seemed to imply throughout these columns that the egg-heads were really doing us all a big, big favor by creating these tests.

The Women of the U.S. Coast Guard (Think Magazine, 1946)

From the icy sweeps of Alaska to the tropical Hawaiian Islands, trimly clad girls in the dark blue of the Coast Guard SPARS have served since their organization was founded in 1942 to fill the shore posts of men at sea.

Communications and radio work were an important phase of their duty. Another field in which SPARS were exceptionally active was aviation, with young women in navy blue working in control towers, instructing fledgling fliers via the Link trainer, and parachute riggers…SPARS were also required to familiarize themselves with weapons.

Ranking woman officer is Captain Dorthy C. Stratton (1899 – 2006), Director of the Women’s Reserve, appointed on November 24, 1942).

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