Recent Articles – Page 81 – Old Magazine Articles

The San Fernando Valley
(Coronet Magazine, 1951)

During the Second World War, millions of American military personnel passed through Los Angeles. Many were attracted to the simple domestic architecture, the smell of orange blossoms, Hollywood, the glorious weather – all of these or none of these, but many of them promised themselves that if they survived the war, this is where they would want to start their lives.

Many of these men fulfilled that promise, and they brought with them the government guaranteed housing loans provided by the G.I Bill – and a dusty, arid flat land just over the hill from Los Angeles called the San Fernando Valley began to grow as a result. By 1951, just six years after the war, two thousand building permits were issued for this area each month.

Design for Modern Living
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

In an attempt to define modernism for a broad audience, architect/designer Alexander Girard curated the Exhibition for Modern Living that was housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts during the winter of 1949. It was a ground breaking exhibit that brought modernism down from the mountain and allowed people to see that modern design was intended to make life more pleasant:

Modern design implies shape for use, simplicity, new forms to utilize new materials, easier housekeeping, and honest expression of mass production… Up the richly carpeted ramp, viewers walk up to a dining room done by Alvar Aalto; past two studies Bruno Mathsson and Jean Risom and a bedroom and living-room representing a variety of designers; then up another level to a space furnished by Charles Eames; and finally to a small balcony overlooking George Nelson’s living area. The quiet simplicity of the rooms and the gentle tones of symphonic music have people talking in whispers. Sighed one woman: ‘I’d like to live here.’

Design for Modern Living
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

An American Red Comments on the Cold War
(Masses & Mainstream, 1955)

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called him the most dangerous Communist in the United States – his name was Herbert Aptheker (1915 – 2003) and in this magazine article he explained to his readers that as he traveled the Western states he saw an America that was heartily sick of the Cold War.

The Woman of the Revolution
(Coronet Magazine, 1959)

Without Haydée Sanatamaría (1922 – 1980), the [Cuban] revolution might never have been. She was the actual founder of the freedom movement known as the 26th of July. Haydée Sanatamaría was known to Cubans simply as Maria.

Atomic Researcher Arrested in London
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

In January, 1950, a British scientist named Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988) was arrested for passing atomic secrets on to Soviet agents.

In his confession Fuchs admitted that the transfer of information began in 1942, shortly after he joined the [British Ministry of Supply] as a German Refugee.

Hitler Rejects Old Treaty Obligations
(Literary Digest, 1937)

This magazine article covered a speech made by Hitler four years into his rule:

In his efforts to wipe out the country’s status as a pariah among the nations, Hitler boasted Saturday, he had rearmed the Reich and seized the disarmed Rhineland. Still denouncing Versailles, he last week erased one of the most painful of the treaty’s blots on German honor with a few words:

‘I hereby and above all annul the signature extorted from a weak and impotent Government against its better knowledge, confessing Germany’s responsibility for the late war.’

Click here to read about Germany’s treaty violations…

Cardinal Innitzer Stands Up
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

With the 1938 merging of Austria with Hitler’s Germany came the Nazi coercion of Austrian Christianity. One of the first clerics to rebel against their repression was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer (1875 – 1955) of Vienna who made clear his outrage in a series of open letters criticizing the various Nazi restrictions involving marriage and the removal of nuns and priests from various schools and hospitals.

Roosevelt Takes Charge…
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

This 1933 magazine article anticipating the reign of FDR appeared on the newsstands on the same day as the man’s first inauguration. The article is composed of various musings that had been published in numerous papers across the economically depressed nation as to what manner of leadership might the Americans expect from their new President.

No President has ever inherited such a load of problems and responsibilities as Roosevelt.

Click here to read President Hoover’s
farewell warning to the nation.

The Military Police in France
(American Legion Weekly, 1923)

A genuinely funny reminiscence written by an anonymous Doughboy recalling his days as an M.P. in war-torn France during the First World War:

Now that it is all over I wonder what did I gain from my experiences as an M.P. in the great Army of Newton Baker’s Best?…Watching the dawn coming rosily up over snow-clad barracks roofs and rows of tents; informing careless privates, sergeants, lieutenants and even majors to ‘button that there button’; listening to the dull bang-slamming of artillery barrages on crossroads; jotting down the names of high-spirited young men found in cafés at the wrong hours -such things aren’t of much lasting value.

Click here to read an article about the sexually-transmitted diseases among the American Army of W.W. I – and the M.P.s in particular…

‘The Dictator and his Woman”
(Coronet Magazine, 1956)

The article attached herein is oddly titled The Dictator and his Woman; a more apt title would have been The Woman and her Dictator

From the start, the relationship between Peron and Evita was a curious and contradictory liason. It is true that she was still a struggling actress when Peron met her, but she had achieved a considerable reputation for spreading her favors around with a sharp eye to the future,

Read about Fascist Argentina…

Read about the post-war Nazi refuge that was Argentina…

The King of Italy Smiles on the Fascists
(The Literary Digest, 1922)

This 1922 news column reported that Benito Mussolini had been granted power by the Italian King:

King Victor Emanuel of Italy has invited the leader of Fascisti, Benito Mussolini, to form a cabinet to replace the Facta Ministry.

A British Tommy to the Mother of his Victim
(True Stories of the Great War, 1918)

One of the most moving letters included in the the 1918 book True Stories of the Great War
was the pair that we have attached herein: a British soldier, heartily sickened by war, composed a letter to the mother of the German he had killed, pleading for her forgiveness. The mother wrote back and her response was unpredictable.
This exchange was first published in a Geneva newspaper.

Click here to read about compassion on the battlefield.

German and Italian P.o.W.s in America
(United States News, 1945)

By the end of 1944 the P.o.W. population within the U.S. stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 340,000 and was growing at a rate between 25,000 to 30,000 each month. The vast majority of them (300,000) were from the German Army and 51,000 were Italians:

There are reports that these prisoners often are pampered, that they are getting cigarettes when American civilians cannot get them, that they are being served in their camps by American soldiers, that they are often not working at a time when war workers are scarce. The general complaint is that the 46,000 American prisoners in Germany are not faring as well as 3000,000 Germans in this country.

Read about the escaped German POWs who the FBI never found…

Princess Elizabeth Comes of Age
(Click Magazine, 1944)

The attached article was about the Spring of 1944 and why it was such an exciting season for Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of England (b. 1926): the twenty-first of April marked her eighteenth birthday and her country was entering the last year of their bloodiest war, while the princess herself held two positions that she took quite seriously: Patrol Leader of the Buckingham Palace Girlguides, as well as Colonel-in-Chief of the Grenadier Guards. There were also times when she was required to join her father when he was in conference with his ministers.

Also addressed in these pages was the royal concern as to who was suitable to be her mate; a list of names was provided.

The New York Social Register
(America, 1932)

Who could write an accurate assessment of social New York better than a celebrated Broadway playwright? Exactly; that is why we were so happy to find this essay by Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) on just that very topic:

The New York Social Register for 1931 contained about thirty-five thousand names, an increase of fifteen thousand over the Social Register of 1914; and the fourteen social registers of the largest American cities contained more than one hundred thousand names – an increase of over fifty thousand names during the same length of time.

These figures are particularly remarkable when one considers that the social register of exactly one hundred years ago, Longworth’s New York Directory, boasted exactly eighteen names.

From Amazon: Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce

The Life and Death of Hank Williams
(Coronet Magazine, 1956)

Country Music legend Hank Williams (1923 – 1953)
died just four and a half months after being kicked out of the Grand Ol’ Opry for drunken and erratic behavior. He was at the peak of his fame, earning over $200,000 a year and enjoying the enthusiasm of ten million fans in the U.S. and five million abroad. He was 29 years old and known only for 35 songs. The attached article will let you in on the short and painful life of country music’s fair haired boy.

Like many artists, his creativity was nurtured by an empty stomach. Hank Williams was raised under dreadfully impoverished conditions in Depression era Alabama; suffering from spinal bifida, the illness that eventually overcame him, he sought relief from the pain with liquor and drugs and died in the back of the Caddy that was ferrying him to a gig in Canton Ohio.