Showing posts with label J.R. Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.R. Williams. Show all posts

Saturday, October 31, 2026

Sunday, October 31, 1926. First Feast of Christ the King, Last Sunday before Election, Death of Harry Houdini, Assassination attempt on Mussolini.

It was the last Sunday before the 1926 election, and local newspaper advertisements showed that.


It was also Halloween.



The newly designated Feast of Christ the King was celebrated for the first time.

Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss) died from peritonitis caused by appendicitis and injuries.  One of his acts was to encourage people to punch him in the stomach, but when he was ready for it.  He'd recently been punched off guard in Montreal by somebody who was engaging uninvited in the challenge.

Houdini had been born in Budapest, where  his father was a rabbi, and immigrated to the US as a child.

A fourth attempt to assassinate Benito Mussolini was attempted, and failed. The would be assassin was 15 year old anarchist Anteo Zamboni.  Zamboni was lynched on the spot.

All opposition newspapers in Italy were closed as a result and the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism, the Fascist Italian secret police, was formed.

Whether Zamboni actually tried to kill Mussolini has been debated, and some suspect  that it was a staged event.

Mussolini survived six assassination attempts, assuming that this one was a genuine attempt.  There were forty-two such attempts on Hitler.  There were four on Stalin's life.  I note all that as those who assume that Donald Trump must be ordained in his role by God because he's survived two attempts should take these events into consideration.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 28, 1926. Buffalo Bill Museum formed.

Friday, October 16, 2026

Wednesday, October 16, 1946. Nuremberg sentences carried out.


Joachim von Ribbentrop (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Wilhelm Keitel (Head of the German High Command), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Head of the Reich Main Security Office), Alfred Rosenberg (Primary Nazi ideologist and racial theorist), Hans Frank (Governor-General of occupied Poland), Wilhelm Frick (Minister of the Interior),  Julius Streicher (Publisher of Der Stürmer), Fritz Sauckel (Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment), Alfred Jodl (Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command) and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands) were executed.

Their last meal consisted of sausage and cold cuts, along with potato salad, black bread, and tea.

Sgt. John Woods was the executioner.

Executions started at 1:30 a.m.

Von Ribbentrop was executed first.  His final words were:

God protect Germany. God have mercy on my soul. My final wish is that Germany should recover her unity and that, for the sake of peace, there should be an understanding between East and West. I wish peace to the world.

Von Ribbentrop apparently told the Lutheran pastor who was present that he would see him again. The execution was not done well and it took fourteen minutes for him to die.

Wilhelm Keitel.

I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons—all for Germany.

Keitel was a cousin once-removed of Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner "

I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.

Alfred Rosenberg, nothing.

Hans Frank

I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.

Wilhelm Frick

Long live eternal Germany.

Julius Streicher

Adele, my dear wife.

Fritz Sauckel

I am dying innocent. The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany! God protect my family.

Alfred Jodl

My greetings to you, my Germany.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

I hope that this execution marks the final act of the tragedy of the Second World War and that the lesson learned from this war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany.

The News reported that some women were studying engineering in Colorado.


It was also speculating on the political fortunes of Wyoming's Governor, Lester Hunt.

Hunting season was the subject of a cartoon.


The RMS Queen Elizabeth returned to commercial use.

Gordie Howe made his NHL debut.

Actress Suzanne Somers was born.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 15, 1946. Death of Hermann Göring

Thursday, October 15, 2026

Tuesday, October 15, 1946. Death of Hermann Göring

On the day of his scheduled execution, Hermann Göring committed suicide with a poison capsule.  He asked for Lutheran last rights beforehand and was refused.  Guards noticed his convulsions and summoned medical help., but he died too quickly.

Göring had asked to be shot, rather than hung, as he thought that more honorable.  That request was refused.  How he obtained the poison has been debated.  A suicide note he left claimed that he had kept it concealed the entire time.  Former U.S. Army guard Herbert Lee Stivers claimed in 2005 that he had brought the pill to him at the request of a woman named Mona, and that he did not know that it was poison.  The suicide lead to suspicion regarding several people, including an Army officer who died eight years following this event, so that his name was never cleared.

A major figure in Nazi Germany, the World War One aviator was responsible for at least two major German defeats, one being the failure to be able to destroy the trapped British Army at Dunkirk, a failure that Hitler sharead as he had halted the German advance.  The second defeat was his promise to be able to defeat the British by airpower which lead to the Battle of Britain. While the popular myth has the British on their back feet the entire time, in reality the Royal Air Force was more than capable of defeating the Luftwaffe over Britain.  Here too, while it was a real defeat, the Germans were in fact completely incapable of invading Britain.  

The Luftwaffe would, of course, prove to be incapable of defending German airspace as well.

Göring's suicide postponed the other executions planned for this day.


The May company was selling a brand of kids jeans I've never heard of.

Surplus was available at Cooks.


The Out Our Way cartoon featured something that must have been familiar to the readers, but I've never heard of, renting a garage.


The St. Louis Cardinals took the World Series.

October 15, 1946: Enos Slaughter's Mad Dash

Last edition:

Monday, October 14, 1946. Price controls on meat removed.

Monday, August 10, 2026

Tuesday, August 10, 1926. Executions in Mexico, Hurricane in Nova Scotia.

The Mexican government executed 20 people by firing squad. They'd participated in the uprising several days prior.


A hurricane struck Nova Scotia, sinking two fishing boats and causing the death of 26 crewmembers.

Out Our Way featured the cowboys for today.


Last edition:

Saturday, August 7, 1926. Calles rejects foreign mediation.

Monday, March 23, 2026

Saturday, March 23, 1946. Marilyn Monroe and the Wedding Industrial Complex. Truman warns Stalin, and holds up testing the bomb. No public necking in Japan.

A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and which we repost here via fair use.



Miller had "discovered" Monroe, who was already modeling following her photo spread in World War Two's Yank.  Miller, typical for the era, photographed her in swimsuits, including bikinis (very modest ones by today's standards), but also  had a an entire series of other topics, including the subject shooting firearms.  Here he depicted her in a wedding dress.

The real life model had already been married and divorced by this time, having married at age 16 and then filing for divorce while her husband was deployed in the Navy during the Second World War.  This photograph is actually commonly claimed to be a wedding photo from her first marriage, which it is not, although the veil is remarkably similar to the one she actually wore in her wedding.


Actual photograph of Monroe at her first wedding, when she was 16 years old.

In the studio photograph she's holding some sort of book with a Christian cross on it, with that style of cross depiction very common for the era.  This is what causes us to note this photograph in a way, as it brings up the topic addressed here:

The Wedding Industrial Complex

Notes from the Spesia Underground


A really interesting episode.

This really fascinating look at modern weddings brings up a whole host of things we routinely discuss here, including agrarianism and subsidiarity.  The episode from Catholic Stuff You Should Know points out the extent that weddings were, at at the time the photo of Norma Jean was taken above still remained, community affairs and not big bride focused shows.

We've lost a lot here.

And we really need to recapture it.

While indelicate, this also shows the portrayal of a really beautiful woman before Playboy perverted all of that.

Monroe was, as is well known, Playboy's first, and unwilling, centerfold.  But what's interesting here is that prior to Playboy arriving on the scene, this was not an uncommon depiction of a really beautiful woman.  There were, of course, already some women who were focused on for being really busty, Jane Russell giving an example, but the theme did not absolutely dominate.  To look at the 19 year old Monroe here, you would not have thought of her in that fashion.  A decade later, you would, and even after Life intervened to push her nude photograph first as an art item.  We've dealt with that before here as well, although frankly we need to modify our entry.  That post is here:

Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

Also posted via fair use, Colliers had an article on keeping everyone employed year around, showing how times were in fact changing.

We've looked at that here too.

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Truman presented an ultimatum to Stalin demanding the Soviets comply with the agreement to pull their troops from Iran.

The Rocky Mountain News was a morning paper, so they didn't catch that, but they did catch something else that Truman had ordered the day prior.



The Army issued an order prohibiting soldiers from engaging in public displays of affection with Japanese women.


Out Our Way's gag was based on cleaning out the ash bin of a stove, something that's likely completely lost on modern readers.


Argentina extended its claims over Antarctica.

Mad King Donny must not be aware of this or we'd be staking a claim.

Indonesia Tentara Republik Indonesia (Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia) evacuated Indonesian citizens from the city of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, after which the area was burned to avoid its use by the Dutch.

Commemorated as the Bandung Sea of Fire and a great patriotic act, poor people really don't have much of a say in things like this.

Last edition:

Friday, March 22, 1946. First U.S. rocket to escape the atmosphere.

Monday, March 16, 2026

Saturday, March 16, 1946. Route 66. George Mikan turns pro.

Route 66 was recorded for the first time, the introductory edition of the Bobby Troup work by Nat King Cole.


Troup was a songwriter and actor, married to actress Julie London

London and Troup in Emergency, a nighttime television drama of the 1970s.

He was also a graduate of Wharton, which produced the unfortunate Trump and Gray, but that's another matter.  He served in the Marine Corps in World War Two, by which time he was already a songwriter. The war did not really interrupt his songwriting.

Route 66 was an absolute masterpiece, and has been recorded an innumerable number of times, and was even used for the basis of a television series that ran from 1960 to 1964.

In some very real ways, Route 66 symbolized the post war world and its sense of youth, indicability, and automotive freedom.

Route 66 itself was one of the original U.S. Highways of the United States Numbered Highway System.  It was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected the following year.  It became a huge factor in Depression Era migration to California, which makes the way its nostaglically remembered somewhat ironic, but as 

College basketball player George Mikan, who was hugely popular turned pro.


He was a great player, and notably played with glasses.  He struggled with diabetes in his final years, which focused attention on the plight of pre big money players.


He died in 2005 at age 80, a basketball great.

The Rocky Mountain News focused again on gambling.


An intersting service was being offered:


A tryst with a German Madchen went rather poorly.


To popular one panel cartoons of the day:



Last edition:

Friday, March 15, 1946. Soviets in Iran.

Tuesday, March 16, 1926. Sgt. Stubby crosses the Rainbow Bridge.

Boston Terrier Sgt. Stubby, mascot of the mascot of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, died at age 10.  He'd served for 18 months in France in the Great War, participating in 100 battles and four offensives.  He provided warnings of attacks and of the use of mustard gas, and captured a German soldier by holding him by the seat of his pants.

He was a genuinely heroic dog.

The Casper recaptured fugitives indicated that they'd left Casper by rail.


I posted this page for the bus schedule.  I have a detailed thread coming up on trains, and then noted this.  I wasn't aware that there was a bus by 1926.


A closer look.


What isn't clear is how long the bus trip took.

There is bus service from Casper today.  Greyhound.  We'll take a look at that in some future post.

Apparently unrestrained immigration was worrying some.  Others were worrying about Wyoming's oilfield population leaving for Texas.




Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fuel rocket in the United States at his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts.

Rocketry, like aviation, advanced like crazy.  By World War Two rockets would be in use as ground weapons, air to air weapons, and of course, with the first ballistic missiles.

Last edition:

Friday, January 23, 2026

Wednesday, January 23, 1946. Soviet Agent installed by Truman.

Soviet agent Harry Dexter White was appointed by President Truman to be the American representative to the International Monetary fund despite a warning from the FBI that White had passed secret information to the Soviet Union.

He'd later be exposed by Whitaker Chambers.

The Soviets managed to place an impressive number of operatives into the U.S. government during the 1930s and into the 1940s.  This was in part because the Roosevelt Administration simply didn't take the matter seriously, even though its now very clear that there were warnings, probably mostly from the FBI. There's fairly good reason to believe that McCarthy's "lists" of Soviet agents, which later proved to be quite accurate, probably came from the FBI which had grown frustrated with successive administrations ignoring what it was learning.  The Army likewise had a list of Soviet agents that it closely held, in part out of the reasonable fear that it wouldn't be taken seriously and that if too much was revealed, it'd be leaked.

FWIW, there's every reason to believe that the Soviets continued to attempt to penetrate Western governments after the McCarthy era and also inserted sleeper agents into the U.S.  The great American mini series The Americans is based on this widely known effort, as well as the movie Little Nikita. While known, it isn't particularly paid attention to, today.  As has been noted recently, and not without good reason, there are questions as to whether or not Donald Trump may be a Russian asset of the captive type today, which would explain some of his actions.  He's definitely a Russian asset, but it may be because he simply has a weak 19th Century mind.

The USS Brevard rescued 4,296 Japanese civilians from the ship Enoshima Maru as it sank near Shanghai. The event retains the record for being the largest number of civilians rescued at sea.

The nationwide strike wave had spread to packing plants.


The Army was looking for a way to recruit men into the post war service.


Out Our Way had a cartoon about medical advice, which would still be good advice today.



Last edition:

Tuesday, January 22, 1946. Central Intelligence Group formed.