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The French air corps, with three dozen planes, was larger than all the other air forces in the world put together.
the plane’s designer, a strong-willed and difficult fellow named Anthony Fokker, was Dutch and the plane itself had been partly built in Holland.
the singer Maurice Chevalier,
mjp 10/30/13 back from a weekend in New York three days ago.
The Vickers Vimy hangs in the Science Museum in London, but few notice it.
In the autumn of 1920, he entered the University of Wisconsin,
Europe had its first airline in KLM as early as 1919,
In many ways Charles Lindbergh’s greatest achievement in 1927 was not flying the Atlantic but getting a plane built with which to fly the Atlantic.
the great circle route,
years.
11/2/2013 MJP
The Mississippi and its tributaries drain 40 percent of America, almost a million square miles spread across thirty-one states (and two Canadian provinces),
He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.
His life was work. There was nothing else.
Eight million Belgians were in real peril of starving.
The achievement can hardly be overstated. It was the greatest relief effort ever undertaken on earth, and it made him, deservedly, an international hero.
During the war, as part of his business operations, Hoover illegally bought chemicals from Germany. This was an exceedingly grave offense in wartime.
(It was an offshoot of that other avian term for females, still in use in England today: bird.)
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offense for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes.
the tunnel’s designer and chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, dropped dead from the stress before it was finished. He was only forty-one, but at least he had the honor of having the tunnel named for him.
The Bath massacre was the largest and most cold-blooded slaughter of children in the history of the United States,
Eugene O’Neill produced his longest and densest play in 1927, Strange Interlude, which took five hours to perform
That's long! mjp 11/11/13
In Hollywood, a young cartoonist named Walt Disney was inspired to create an animated short feature called “Plane Crazy” featuring a mouse who was also a pilot. The mouse was initially called Oswald but soon assumed a more lasting place in the nation’s hearts as Mickey.
Modern baseball has a certain air of timelessness that is much cherished by its fans. A visitor from our age transported to a major league ballpark of the 1920s would find himself, in most respects, in entirely familiar territory. The play on the field, the sounds of the crowd, the cries of the vendors would all be reassuringly familiar in ways that many other aspects of life in 1920s America would not.
uniforms had no numbers. Putting numbers on uniforms didn’t start until 1929, when the Yankees and Indians introduced it.
Baseball was a treasured institution but a poor investment. Its most elemental problem was that its games were played during the day when most people were at work.
Growing up in Denison at the same time was a girl named Donna Mullenger, who would later become famous as the actress Donna Reed. Today people in Denison remember her with great fondness. Hardly anyone remembers Clarence Chamberlin.
It takes some effort of imagination to appreciate how novel radio was in the 1920s. It was the wonder of the age. By the time of Lindbergh’s flight, one-third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
11/13/13 mjp
Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village.
calvados,
“I should have been suspended long ago,” he amiably told reporters.
a pet raccoon named Rebecca—to
Seeing Dr Bomzer today. 11/19/2013 mjp
On June 1, 1925, he pinch-hit for a player named Wally Pipp, then did not miss another game for fourteen years, until May 1939, a total of 2,130 consecutive games—a record of continuity that stood for sixty-four years.
This was the world of The Great Gatsby, published two years earlier. Sands Point, where the Guggenheims clustered in three substantial houses, was the wealthy East Egg of the novel.
One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit.
By the late 1920s, Chrysler was doing so extraordinarily well that he could afford to build a magnificent monument to himself. The result was the fabled seventy-seven-story Chrysler Building, which was the world’s tallest building upon completion.
confluence
(One Ford product still with us from this process is the Kingsford charcoal briquette.)
supplied.
At Villa Verona in Geneva, IL at the plant. 11/21/13mjp
“There’s nothing in it—just a couple of wops in a jam.”
Mount Rushmore was a granite outcrop so off the beaten track that no one had even noticed it until 1885, when one Charles Rushmore of New York happened to pass by on horseback and bestowed his name on it.
Stone Mountain had certain resonances. It was where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915.
and—to widespread consternation—Theodore Roosevelt, who was chosen, it seems, not for his greatness but because he and Borglum had once been chums.
The developers were brothers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen. Of all the business titans America produced in the 1910s and 1920s, none were more extraordinary or are now more forgotten.
As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
H. L. Mencken called it “the one authentic rectum of civilization,” but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic.
At first, many pictures were shot in the dead of night to minimize the complications of background noises.
mjp 12/3/2013
Peter Lorre,
With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.
wish to tell you that I am innocent, and that I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all. I am an innocent man.” As an afterthought he added, “I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
For passengers, the possibility of waking up in Denver or Memphis when one was expecting Omaha or Milwaukee added a frisson of uncertainty to every long journey, while the shuntings and recouplings in the wee hours meant that almost no one got a good night’s sleep. The romance of travel wasn’t always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
