Monday, June 15, 1925. Flying out.

The Amundsen Polar Expedition team of six explorers, stranded since May 22 near the North Pole, was able to depart on Amundsen's Dornier Wal N-25 seaplane.  A second seaplane was left behind.

The Philadelphia Athletics tied the record for greatest comeback in a major league baseball game.  Trailing 14 to 2, after six innings, the Athletics scored 13 runs in the eighth inning to win, 17 to 15, tying the record set on June 18, 1911 by the Detroit Tigers against the Chicago White Sox.

Last edition:

Saturday, June 13, 1925.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Education, The Roaring Twenties, The roles of men and women, Women

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

Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold.  Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.  Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection.  She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.

Some time ago we received a comment here from a reader, and the reader emailed me after the recent item on fashion, and reminded me that I said I'd do a threat on the topic.

So here it is.

The threads were these ones:

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The comment was this one:

Anonymous said...

I read this, and your other post on Fran Camuglia. Wow, what a sad life.

I have an observation that I wonder if you would comment on that your post seems to illustrate. The pretty girls of the 50s and 60s looked different than they do now. They were beautiful, but softer, and more natural looking. Even the real dolls like Camuglia, with their exaggerated features, were softer and prettier. Think Marilyn Monroe.

I don't know what's changed it, but maybe the emphasis on "working out" has. Seems like you have really fit girls, and then really out of shape girls, and not much in between.

My replies were:

Thanks for your comment. Her life was tragic.

On your observation, people do indeed look different at different ages in the past, but I haven't really thought of it in this context. Having thought of it now, a little, I think there's something to your observation. As a minor personal observation, "working out" was not really a thing, as you note, in the 70s when I was growing up. Thinking back to high school I can't really think of any overweight kids at all. I'm sure there were some, but it must have been really rare. It seems to me that high schoolers now look older than we did when we were there, but oddly kids of my fathers vintage, who graduated high school in the 40s, looked much more mature. Nobody looked bulked up, or "ripped", or whatever.
This might be worth a post on the site, after I ponder it a bit.

By the way, while I've already noted it in these posts, her life being tragic isn't unique in terms of Playboy centerfolds. Quite a few of their stories are pretty grim, and Playboy contributed to that. In this case, quite frankly, she was off to a really bad start as it was, as she was married absurdly young, divorced very rapidly, and objectified forever when still in her teens.

I noted that it might be worth a post at the time, and then I went on to other things.  The email reminded me of it.

Well, in thinking about it, and I have no real scientific way to discuss this, my observational comment is, on this question, while I think there are some morphological changes we can observe in women, there aren't really that many.

That's probably surprising.

Let's start off with a couple of things, the first being that the first part of our discussion necessarily references young women.  That's important, I think, for reasons that will become clear.

The second observation is that time period and method of illustration matters.  We're not really going to get, for example, very accurate depictions of women, or men, at a certain point in our past.

Let's start with that.

A lot of comments like this, and I've seen them before, are based on photographs.  I.e., in this case, somebody is looking at a photograph of a Playboy model from 1967 and drawing conclusions from that.  But can we?

Probably not.

 Young couple, 1920s. By their dress, this couple was probably at least Middle Class, if not well to do.  Ages, again, are hard to place in photos but even the caption of this photo regards this couple as "young".  My guess would be upper 20s, and that would have been a fairly common marriage age for a couple with means, in this era.

Most early photography was in the category of portraiture.  Old portraits give us a much more realistic idea of what people looked like than "published" photographs do.  And certainly better than pornography does.   Indeed, that's one of the fundamental destructive aspects of pornography, which we'll get into later.  

Anyhow, cameras had to develop for quite some time before snapshots or the like appeared.  In the meantime, illustration really developed and that gives us a pretty good idea of what standards of beauty were up to at least 1920.  Illustration made use of models, who were chosen for their physical appearance, but they rarely strayed massively from the mean. The first real "standard" was Florence Evelyn Nesbit, who became the Gibson Girl.   She was pretty, to be sure, but didn't depart from the mean in a massive fashion

This was equally true of lesser known models, and indeed, it was mostly true for early movie stars as well.

Movies began to take over from illustrations as the bearers of standards in the 1920s and certainly had by the 1930s.  Female movie stars began to be more and more chosen for their beauty as well as their acting talents by the late 1930ss, which did result in an exaggerated standard in the sense that not every woman you meet is going to look like a movie start.

Teenage girls with cameras in the 1930s.

Actress Susan Hayword as a Yank centerfold.

But, nonetheless, while they were pretty, only in very rare instances were they somebody whom you might not meet, appearance wise, at the Piggly Wiggly.

Lauren Bacall as a teenager.

It wasn't until the 1950s that this really began to change.  

Starting in the 1950s, and I'll place the date as 1953 when the first issue of Playboy came out, the beauty standard became emphasized and highly exaggerated in terms of physical features.  The first Playboy centerfold was Marilyn Monroe, against her will, and her features in some ways became the standard.

Or rather her imagined features.

Playboy emphaszied the supposed "girl next store" with teh concept htat she'd lost her moral compass, was sterile, stupid, and very top heavy.  Marilyn Monroe's early movies, indeed the bulk of them, portrayed characters just like that.  The funny thing is that Monroe's own early modeling photographs didn't depict her in taht fashion at all

The photos above, from the 1940s, show a young Monroe as an actual sort of girl next door.  Her physical features were no doubt the same as they were in her earliest movies, but they weren't being emphasized.  Soon after these photographs they would be, and in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, they were on display.

Playboy,. as noted, arrived in 1953.  The 1950s gave us a host of actress that were Monroe knockoffs, some with even more exaggerated features. By the early 1960s a wave of Italian and other European actresses hit, all of whom were very topheavy, although they weren't portrayed as dumb.  Playboy and its followers kept on keeping on and if anything exaggerated things more.  Camuglia comes from that era.

Indeed, it was so notable, it made up one of the comedic lines in 1963's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:

J. Algernon Hawthorne: I must say, if I had the grievous misfortune to be a citizen of this benighted country, I should be the most hesitant at offering any criticism whatever of any other.

J. Russell Finch: Wait a minute, are you knocking this country? Are you saying something against America?

J. Algernon Hawthorne: Against it? I should be positively astounded to hear of anything that could be said FOR it. Why, the whole bloody place is the most unspeakable matriarchy in the whole history of civilization! Look at yourself, and the way your wife and her strumpet of a mother push you through the hoop! As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated. They're like slaves! They die like flies from coronary thrombosis, while their women sit under hairdryers, eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother's Day! And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms. In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I'll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight.

In a lot of ways, we're still in it.  It's what's given us plastic surgery and a host of other horrors.

So, overall, what I'm saying is that actual physical appearance didn't change that much, but rather the publicized standards did, to women's detriment.

So what about the gym?

When Camuglia appeared in Playboy in the early 1960s "working out" wasn't a term.  Indeed, gymnasiums were around, but their atmosphere wasn't quite what it is today.  In a lot of places the gym was the YMCA.  Indeed, in this locality, it was for years, before, some time in the 1970s, private gyms began to appear.  

Early gyms really had all the features of moder nones, they were just less used and sort of used by a clas sof urban people who was unusually into physical fitness, save for weight lifters, who are a different class entirely.

Having said all of that, women have been involved in athletics, if not working out per se, for decades.

Australian female Olympic swimmers, 1932.  These women look pretty darned fit.

Girls basketball team, 1907.  Playing basketball while dressed like this must have been a huge pain.

Indeed, nobody was "working out", really, until the 1960s. There wasn't much of a need to.

That doesn't mean that people weren't physically active, however.  Women were involved in Olympic sports right from the onset, for example.  And as late as the 1970s, at least, an incredible number of women engaged in some sports, such as tennis and golf.  My mother, who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, was an avid golfer at one time, and a real fan of tennis. She also constantly rode a bicycle, and she swam nearly daily up until her final decline.  Yes, she's an unusual example, but not that unusual.

Her mother, I'd note, was also a tennis player.

There's sports, of course, but there's physical work.  And everyone engaged in a lot more physical activity by necessity.

Which catches us back up, sort of, to the 1950s.  As we've discussed here before, domestic machinery really came in after World War Two, and with that, a decline in physical activity.  This meant more women went into office work.

The 1950s also brought the country the "cheap food" policy, and we still live in that era, and that's where things really begin to change.  This was noted the other day on Twitter in a post by O.W. Root

O.W. Root@NecktieSalvage

Currently there are two extremes that didn't really exist en masse before.

1 - Extreme obesity

2 - Extreme gym culture

Maybe one day those extremes will fade and a more  traditional historic norm will replace them.

That pretty much nails it in a way, other than to say lots of people are neither part of a gym culture or obese.

A lot of people are taller, however.  That's been well noted.  It's a nutritional thing, but here's one area where people, including women, have a different morphology than they once typically did.  Contrary to what people tend to think, however, its flatted out since the late 1970s after having really gotten ramped up, around the globe, in the 1890s.

Now, here's one more thing that's changed.  Women in particular used to at one time very much "age" once they hit their 40s.

Contrary to what people think, people don't "live longer" than they once did. Rather, premature mortality has dropped way off.  But people did "age" more quickly.  If you look at photographs of married couples the appearance of women over 40 is often shocking in comparison to now.  Now, for various reasons, women in their 40s are not regarded as old or even middle aged, but often if you go back to mid century they'll have a much older appearance.  I"ve seen photographs of women in their 40s whom you would easily guess were in their 60s.

That's probably all due to the stress of life and hard work.

So, all in all, I don't think the evidence supports the assertion there's been much of a change at all.  I do think that an emphasis on a certain look, or a series of appearances, has changed over time, but more recently its broadened back out, which is a good thing.

Iceland girl delivering milk.

Mexican women in festive dress

Sunday, May 4, 1975. 1,000,000 runs.

The one millionth run in Major League Baseball history was scored by Bob Watson of the Houston Astros.

The Khmer Rouge seized control of South Vietnam's Phú Quốc Island.

Last edition:

Saturday, May 3, 1975. End of the Cultural Revolution.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Arab Israeli Conflict, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, China, Cultural Revolution, Gang of Four, Israel, Mao Zedong, People's Republic of China, Vietnam

Thứ Năm, ngày 1 tháng 5 năm 1975. Chiến tranh Việt Nam kết thúc.* Thursday, May 1, 1975. The conclusion of the Vietnam War. Jeudi 1er mai 1975. Fin de la guerre du Vietnam.

ARVN troops in Cần Thơ  surrendered to the VC following the suicide of Gen. Nguyễn Khoa Nam, age 48, Major General of IV Corps in Cần Thơ.  This effectively brought organized resistance to the VC and NVA almost to an end after twenty years of combat.  The country remains, of course, under the regime that won the war.

Quân VNCH ở Cần Thơ đầu hàng VC sau cái chết của Tướng Nguyễn Khoa Nam, 48 tuổi, Thiếu tướng Quân đoàn IV ở Cần Thơ.  Điều này đã khiến cho sự kháng cự có tổ chức chống lại VC và Bắc Việt gần như chấm dứt một cách hiệu quả sau hai mươi năm chiến đấu.  Tất nhiên, đất nước vẫn nằm dưới chế độ đã thắng trong chiến tranh.

Les troupes de l'ARVN à Cần Thơ se sont rendues au VC suite au suicide du général Nguyễn Khoa Nam, 48 ans, major général du IVe Corps à Cần Thơ.  Cela a effectivement mis fin à la résistance organisée au VC et à la NVA après vingt ans de combat.  Le pays reste bien entendu sous le régime qui a gagné la guerre.

By this point, I'd quit tracking the war on my National Geographic map of Vietnam.  There came to be no point.

Khmer Rouge forces landed on Phú Quốc which was claimed by Cambodia but controlled by South Vietnam.  It was also the location of a large South Vietnamese POW camp.

Hank Aaron broke the career record for RBIs.

Thursday, May 1, 2025

May 1, 1975: Hank Aaron Becomes the All-Time RBI Leader

The New York Stock Exchange dropped the requirement of a fixed commission for stock transactions following pressure to do so from the SEC. 

Footnotes:

*Google Translate text.  I don't speak Vietnamese.

Last edition:

Wednesday, April 30, 1975. The Fall of Saigon.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, Bùi Văn Tùng, Dương Văn Minh, North Vietnamese Army, Operation Frequent Wind, Personalities, Saigon Vietnam, The Fall of Saigon, Viet Cong, Vietnam War

Thursday, April 19, 1945. Broadcasting from Belsen.

Army machine gunners on Okinawa, April 19, 1945.  Not the visible rear sight on the M1917 machine gun and the high angle the gun is being used at.

The Battle of the Seelow Heights ended in Soviet/Polish victory.

The US 1st Army took Leipzig.

Robert Cappa, the famous photographer, took a series of photos in an event that occurred in this battle, in which a tank crewman who was manning a machinegun in a building was killed by a German sniper.  The bloody scene and the soldier's lifeless body is the recalled photograph.  A nearly as dramatic photo of another crewman stepping over him to man the gun is not as well recalled.

Richard Dimbleby broadcast the conditions of Belsen on the BBC.

The Battle of Odžak began in Croatia between Yugoslav Partisans and the Axis aligned Croatian Armed Forces.  The last battle to be fought in the Second World War in Europe, it would continue until May 25.

Pyinmana, the base of the Japanese aligned Burma Defence Army, fell to the 5th Indian Division.

Japanese Gen. Sōsaku Suzuki, age 53, was killed in action in the Philippines.

Nazi Party member Fritz Wächtler,  age 54, was executed by the Nazis for desertion over the surrender of Bayreuth. The charge was unjust and due to rivalry on the part of other Nazis.  

It's amazing to think of this sort of infighting when it should have been obvious they'd all be facing trials by the victors soon.

The U-251, U-548 and U-879 were sunk.

Johnny Kelley won the Boston Marathon.

Last edition:

Wednesday, April 18, 1945. The death of Ernie Pyle.Labels: 1940s, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Army, Canadian Army, Heroes, Mussolini, Okinawa, The Holocaust, The Press, The written word, Waffen SS, World War Two

Monday, April 14, 1975. Collapse In Viet Nam

Operation Babylift concluded.

Congressional staff members, Richard Moose and Charles Miessner, back from South Vietnam released a report stating that "no one including the Vietnamese military believes that more aid could reverse the flow of events." 

Their report further stated that evacuation of Americans from Saigon was being resisted by Ambassador Graham Martin and other senior officials.

The cover of Time featured a crying Vietnamese child and the words "Collapse in Viet Nam".

Soviet power lifter Vasily Ivanovich Alekseyev appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Widely admired all over the globe, he died at age 69 of heart problems, something not all that uncommon for the very bulky.

The Federal Election Commission commenced operating.

Sikkim voted to merge into India.

Actor Fredric March passed away at age 77.  He acted for many years, but is best recalled by me for his role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.

Last edition:

Sunday, April 13, 1975. Start of the Lebanese Civil War.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Apostolic Christianity, Canada, Chad, Christianity, Islam, Lebanese Civil War, Levant, Levantines, Maronite Catholic, Music, Operation Babylift, Operation Eagle Pull, Palestinians, religion

Tuesday, April 8, 1975. "Over in a month".

U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater claimed that the Vietnam War "would have been over in a month" had he been elected President in 1964.

1964 Goldwater bumper sticker.

Seems doubtful.

Goldwater was the most right wing truly conservative Republican candidate to have ever been nominated, far more conservative than Ronald Reagan, and a true conservative, unlike the current occupant of the Oval Office.

A South Vietnamese pilot, Nguyễn Thành Trung, dropped bombs on the Presidential Place and then defected.  

This is an event that I can recall occuring.

He want on to serve in the North Vietnamese air force and then worked as a commercial pilot for Vietnam Airlines.

South Vietnamese Major General Nguyễn Văn Hiếu was found shot dead in his command post.at the  Biên Hòa airbase, 

The Godfather Part II won an Academy Award for best picture, the first sequel to do so.

Frank Robinson became the first black manager in Major League.  More on Robinson:

April 8, 1975: Frank Robinson Becomes Baseball's 1st Black Manager

Last edition:

Monday, April 7, 1975. A meeting in Thailand.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Cambodia, Cambodian Civil War, Indochina, Japan, Khemr Rouge, Operation Babylift, Thailand, U.S. Air Force, Vietnam War, Women

Monday, March 30, 1925. Cougars win the Stanley Cup.

Newly ordained St. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás celebrated his first Mass in the Chapel of Our Lady of Pilar in the Saragossa Cathedral.

He would found Opus Dei in 1928.

The Victoria Cougars of the WCHL beat the Montreal Canadiens 6-1 to become the last non-NHL team to win the Stanley Cup.

Bringing Up Father On Broadway premiered.

Last edition.

Saturday, March 28, 1925. Society Number.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art

Thursday, March 27, 2025 It's Opening Day, and I'm Not Feeling It

A post I really sympathize with:

Thursday, March 27, 2025

It's Opening Day, and I'm Not Feeling It

I'm not feeling it either, and for a lot of reasons.

End Athletic Admissions to Military Academies — Minding The Campus

End Athletic Admissions to Military Academies — Minding The Campus: Secretary Peter Hegseth’s first order to the Department of Defense promised “a focus on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards, and readiness.” To the extent that the Service Academies—West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, and the Merchant Marine Academy—take this directive seriously, they should end athletic admissions. Such a move would change […]

Monday, March 24, 1975. Huế falls to the NVA.

Huế fell to the NVA, with many of its residents, having endured the horror of NVA and VC occupation during the Tet Offensive, having evacuated the city.

Time's cover featured a ARVN soldier with the caption "How Much Longer?"

Chuck Wepner put in a good performance agains tMuhammad Ali in a fight promoted by Sylvester Stallone.

The beaver became the symbol of Canada.

Last edition:

Sunday, March 23, 1975. Advances in the Central Highlands.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Campaign 275, Central Highlands Campaign, North Vietnamese Army, Somalia, Terrorism, Viet Cong, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 75th Edition. Dim Wit.

 Finnish journalist Mikko Marttinen after listening to Donald Trump's recent speeches:

Trump, 78, is the most dim-witted president of modern US history, and old age has made him even dumber.

Of interest, from the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick was peppered with boos and catcalls throughout a town hall meeting in Roswell late Thursday, as hundreds of critics jeered the Republican for backing President Donald Trump’s agenda during his first month in office.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 74th Edition. Surgery by butchers, MAGA Concubines, the Gualieter of Ohio, Portents, and the blind and deaf.

Labels: concubinage, Conservatism, Disaster, Elon Musk, Highways, J. D. Vance, Military, Protestant Work Ethic, The wealthy, United States Forest Service, Wyoming State Highways, Zeitgeist