Killer Molasses!

On January 15, 1919, a molasses tank in Boston exploded with great force and flooded the streets with a huge wave of molasses that killed 21 people, crumpled the steel support of an elevated train, and knocked over a fire station.

Getting The Christmas Tree

Looking for Christmas tree photos for other blog posts, I found these photos...

Brining home a Christmas tree on a Vespa reminds me of those motorscooter kids carrying home a 3-foot-tall bookcase during Cleanup Week.



Real men cut down a real tree: sawing down the National Community Christmas tree for the Christmas Pageant of Peace in Washington, D.C., 1959.

Modern Woman Monday: Kate Smith

Find out why I'm celebrating Kate Smith -- and asking myself, as the Memorial Day weekend nears, if this is the America people defend & fight for... Seriously.

Baby Got Back-Fat

A back cover illustration from The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, published by Elbert Hubbard, titled (or captioned) "Removing his Pocket-book."



I'm too amused & enthralled to really research this one, kids... Besides, isn't it time you told me something?

The illustration dates to 1909; Vol. 30, December, No. 1, of The Philistine.

Looking For Vintage & Retro Fun?

I've started two new vintage carnivals: The History Is Ephemeral Carnival and The New Vintage Reviews Carnival. The premiere edition of New Vintage Reviews has been published here, and the first History Ephemeral carnival will be published within the next few days -- so keep looking!

WWII Home Front Greeting Card

It's hard sometimes to believe we are at war; we not only don't make the sacrifices former generations have had to make, but we don't note the war in typical everyday ways. Exhibit A), this WWII home front greeting card. (The racism also marks the time period.)

Where Did The National Enquirer Go In 1978?

Sure, I've been mocking the 1979 National Enquirer bits, but have I ever really considered just how far the National Enquirer has gone? No, I don't mean the depths of hell, the limits of decency -- I mean on the map.



All for me!

Oh, the quality reporting! Logging 1,183,338 miles, they went to London to cover the world's first test tube baby and even went to Guyana twice in '78 to cover the Jamestown suicides.

And don't you go thinking they just sent 'reporters' to Alaska to gather information about "secret Soviet psychic research" -- they went to Moscow too.

Hankie History To Sneeze At?

In Modern Woman Magazine (Vol 14, No 5, 1945), a little snippet on hankies:

Historians credit Marie Antoinette with the invention of the pocket handkerchief. She was so broken up at leaving her home in Austria that she cried all the way to France and wiped her eyes with bits of lace torn from her dress and lingerie. Anticipating future tears, she made it a point always to have a piece of lace tucked in a pocket of her dress. This, say the historians, was how handkerchiefs were born.

I don't know if this is true, even if it is said that Marie-Antoinette made an observation that a square handkerchief is most convenient and pleasing, and so King Louis XVI published a decree ordering the new lengths.

In any case, because of this, I do not think it's right that we sneeze, tear, snot or otherwise 'goo' onto hankies with French motifs, including but not limited to, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Statue of Liberty, or French language.

Rosie The Riveter, More Than A Hill Of Beans

At the museum conference last week, I had a chance to meet the Famous Be'an Collectibles. Yes, I hugged the beanie version of Rosie the Riveter. But the saleslady made me give her back.

Mixed Fortunes

What's this old gypsy fortune telling book got to do with one woman's Uncle Stuart & his knickers and another woman's parent's marriage? Read it, if you dare.

Modern Woman Monday: Bra Retardation Is Real People; The Figures Don't Lie

Oprah says eight out of 10 women are wearing the wrong size bra today. Well, 50 years ago, 47 out of 100 women didn't wear the right fitting bra either.


I don't quite know how to do the math... that's 50+ years to add another 37 percent points, times two breasts -- carry the nipple... At this rate, we're gonna have to carry our nipples.

The bottom line is, ladies, we're not getting older & wiser; we're getting older & saggier.

See another Formfit ad, likely from the 40's, boasting the same sad figures to boost lagging sales along with sagging boobs.

Marvels From 1954's The Family Physician -- Or Bad HMO?

Within the pages of The Family Physician, by Dr. Herman Pomeranz & Dr. Irvin S. Koll, 1954, there are many things to marvel at. On the inset photo page between 142 & 143 we find the following marvels:

A Miracle Of Modern Science

Nail swallowed by four-year-old boy was successfully withdrawn from his duodenum when doctors induced him to gulp chocolate malted milk containing magnet attached to a thread. X-ray shows magnet in contact with nail, which appears as curved line beneath it.

Self-Operation

Photograph shows doctor removing his own appendix; assistant and nurse helped him to hold instruments. He did this to "get patient's attitude."

If I had to choose between gulping chocolate milk with a magnet & thread (just like mom used to make!) or operating on myself, I'd gulp, baby.

I can't even understand the "get patient's attitude" dealio-mcbob. I mean are there patients who actually operate on themselves? Or was the unnamed doc responding to those patients who, like visitors to art galleries, think they can do that themselves.

Modern Woman Monday: Consumption Information Gives Me The Vapors

From pages 96 & 97 in Pathfinder Physiology No. 3, Hygienic Physiology, by Joel Dorman Steele, PhD., 1888.


First an illustration of the "deformity" of tight lacing of corsets (which I've already disputed -- NWS), then this gem on "consumption":

Consumption is a disease which destroys the substance of the lungs. Like other lung difficulties, it is caused by a want of pure air, a liberal supply of which is the best treatment that can be prescribed for it.*

...* If I were seriously ill of consumption, I would live outdoors day and night, except in rainy weather or midwinter; then I would sleep in an unplastered log house. Physic has no nutriment, gaspings for air can not cure you, monkey capers in a gymnasium can not cure you, stimulants can not cure you. What consumptives want is pure air, not physic, plenty of meat and plenty of bread, -- Dr. Marshall Hall.

I've always heard consumption and the vapers were catch-alls for undiagnosed illnesses, like cancer, and/or diseases in the minds of fragile women. But in case I am wrong, anyone tried monkey capers for their consumption?

Hooray! Whee! For Chef Boy-ar-dee!

Still on my quest for more information about this ad, I discovered Chef Boyardee was real. Who knew?

The Mystery Of The White Squaw

Silent Porn Star* investigates this clipping from 1935.

Before You Decide About A House...

Investigate improved Asbestocel.
Removing it must be hell.



Via Flickr.

Remember When From 1959

Because I've been digging through & scanning old issues of The Saturday Evening Post, be prepared for a number of scans from them. Up now, Remember When? Pictures With A Past.


Text reads:

Recognize the smiling lad at right? Frank Sinatra was just one of a New Jersey quartet, the Hoboken Four, when he got his start on the amateur hour of Major Bowes (center) in 1936. From radio Frank turned to singing for the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, then to films. He proved he could act as well as sing. Now past his forty-first birthday, he's still going strong.

Calvert Gostle

Text reads:

Here is a grim idea aborning: That planes could attack as well as scout. These Army officers fired a Lewis machine gun from the air in 1912. I made this photo before the take-off. The tests, at 500 rounds a minute, succeeded. The plance did not shake apart. Even so, early World War I air battles were fought with revolvers.

C. J. Mac Cartee

Text reads:

This stirring scene points a moral, as did almost everything in 1921. It was: Women can master the motorcar. Left, how to caress a radiator cap and get shocked by the ignition. Right. a familiar scene of the day--how to inflate a pneumatic tiree and patch a punctured tube. This was habit-forming.

Ezra Quincy

Mrs. Alexander's Advice To Negro Youth

In 1948, this was a nicer way to say, "Don't be uppity!"



Sadie T. M. Alexander comic page via University of Pennsylvania Archives.

Sotheby's (To) Auction Hoax

Sotheby's is to auction off this famous hoax photo on July 17th, in London:

"Elsie was playing with the gnome and beckoning it to come on to her knee. The gnome leapt up just as Frances, who had the camera, snapped the shutter. He is described as wearing black tights, a reddish jersey and a pointed bright red cap. Elsie said there was no perceptible weight, though when on the bare hand the feeling is like a 'little breath'. The wings were more moth-like than the fairies and of a soft neutral tint. Elsie explained that what seem to be markings on his wings are simply his pipes, which he was swinging in his grotesque little left hand." (Edward Gardner, Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel, 1945)

This is one of five "Cottingley Fairy" photographs taken by Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths which together comprise, the most famous hoax of its kind every perpetrated in the history of photography, and one which deceived a number of eminent public figures, most infamously, the writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

From the catalog note:

From July 1917 onwards, in the small village of Cottingley, near Bingley in Yorkshire, the fifteen-year old Elsie Wright and her ten-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths produced a series of photographs (some taken as late as August 1920) showing fairies and gnomes in rural settings, mostly in company with one or other of the girls themselbves. Originally conceived as a joke, the group came to be taken seriously through a series of accidents three years later. The theosophist Edward L. Gardner, who was interested in the paranormal, came to hear of them, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who subsequently wrote extensively about them in Strand Magazine (December 1920 and March 1921) and in his full-length book The Coming of the Fairies (1922: see Sotheby's sale 15/16 July 1998, lot 448, for a copy inscribed by Doyle to Frances Griffiths). Despite attracting ridicule from sceptics in the huge publicity which ensued, Doyle, Gardner and others involved believed implicitly in the genuineness of the photographs, which they believed bore witness to protoplasmic thought forms emanating from the girls psychic auras. Doyle's credulity and reputation ensured that the story--which has been the subject of numerous articles, books, television programmes, and films, including Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997)--remained well known from 1920 onwards.

The mystery was not properly solved, nor the hoax fully explained from a technical point of view, until an extensive investigation by Geoffrey Crawley was published between December 1982 and April 1983 in The British Journal of Photography. This finally prompted public confessions from the unrepentant perpetrators themselves, who explained how they had produced coloured cut-out drawings which were mounted with the help of hatpins, and then used super-imposition techniques. However, Frances Griffiths maintained until the end of her life in 1986 that one of the photographs was not produced by trickery, but showed genuine fairies.

Hey Day Protest, 1967

Newspaper photo of a student wearing the traditional "skimmer" hat and a gas mask to protest the study of germ warfare at Penn State.

Nickel Penny?

Did you know there was once a nickel "penny"? Properly, a 'penny' is always a copper coin, but during the run-up to the Civil War, the US turned to nickel due to shortage of precious metals, resulting in a one-cent nickel:



But that's not the kitschy part -- in 1871, a chinaman ran afoul of a debtor's attempt to substitute these for more valuable 'indian head' coins, according to the New York Times:

"...Some way individual conceived the idea of a "new way to pay old debts," and, obtaining some of these coins, started for his Chinese washman, whom he owed just $3...[The washman] asked the broker, "how muchee." His countenance fell as the broker informed him that it was but one cent, and, after stating the circumstance, went to look for the deceiver."