Monday, August 23, 1926. Rudolph Valentino passes, as does Dr. Charles William Eliot.

Legendary silent screen leading man Rudolph Valentino died of peritonitis at age 31.

A huge star of his day, he remains a well known figure of the era.

Dr. Charles William Eliot, the longest serving president of Harvard, died at age 91.  He transformed the university from a respected provincial college into a preeminent research university. 

Theodore Roosevelt called him "the only man in the world I envy."

Last edition:

Sunday, August 15, 1926. Martyrs of the Cristero War and open rebellion.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 1926 Election, actors and actresses, Catholic, Christianity, Crime, Cristero War, Disease, Mexico, Movies, Politics, Railroads, religion

Tuesday, June 1, 1926. Marilyn Monroe and Andy Griffith.

Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles to Gladys Pearl Baker, nee Monroe, who was married at the time to her second husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, but who was not her father.

Newton Baker and Gladys had married when she was only 14 years old. Baker was reportedly abusive.  The couple had two children.  Interestingly, she was born to an American family living in Mexico but one that had strong connections to California, where she grew up.

In 1923 the Bakers divorced and obtained custody of all three of the couple's children.  He, however, kidnapped the oldest two and moved to Kentucky.  Baker was effected by the Roaring 20s and conducted herself to some extent as a flapper and participant in the early feminist movement, which then as later advocated sexual laxity.  She was pregnant when she married Mortensen, who she soon found to be boring, leading to divorce.

Norma Jean's father was likely Charles Stanley Gifford, Gladys's superior at RKO Studios, where she was working.

Gladys and Norma Jeane.

Baker was likely mentally unstable ,which seems to have run in her family.  Based on what evidence exists, it seems like that there was a genetic component to this and she's spend much of the later years of her life institutionalized.

The rest of this story is, of course, well known.  While its speculation, it would seem likely that at least some of the genetic component of her mental instabilities visited themselves upon her daughter, who of course lived a very disrupted early life.

She outlived her daughter and died in 1984.

Andy Griffith was born in Mount Airy, North Carolina.  He was at first a voice comedian and later a famous television actor, best remembered for the Andy Griffith Show.  He was strongly connected to North Carolina his entire life.

The Andy Griffith Show almost defines a certain vision of rural America to this day, and it retains a very strong following.  Unlike the Sheriff protagonist of the show, Griffith married three times and had an affair with one of the shows love interests while it was running.  Irrespective of those failings, he remains widely admired.

Last edition:

Sunday, May 30, 1926. An oral arrangement.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, British Empire, Iraq, Petroleum, Turkey

Friday, March 12, 1926. The Savoy opens.

The Savoy opened in Harlem, and would remain open until 1958.

Japanese destroyers were fired upon by the Chinese from the Taku Forts.

Last edition:

Thursday, March 11, 1926. Governments and labor.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 2020s, 2026, 2026 Wyoming Legislature, Eamon de Valera, Fascism, Iraq, Ireland, Irish Free State, Italy, League of Nations, Northern Ireland, Politics, Unions, Wyoming Freedom Caucus

Thursday, December 31, 1925. Reining in New Years.

The first attempt at a worldwide New Year's celebration was made via international radio when the United States sent out musical entertainment and New Year's greetings from the consuls general of various foreign countries in New York.

There was an effort in many locations in the US to rein in New Years celebrations, which if they were in compliance with the law, should be dry:

European flooding which had broken out on the 29th hit Belgium.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 31:  1925  The legendary Swan Land & Cattle Company issued its corporate holdings report for the year.

Last Edition:

Wednesday, December 30, 1925. Ben-Hur.

Labels: 1920, 1920s, 1925, 1925 at the movies, 1970s, Biology, Clothing, Education, Education Societies, Female Biology, Menstruation, trends, Women

Saturday, November 14, 1925.

 

Last edition:

Thursday, November 12, 1925. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, boats and ships, Jazz, Music, Royal Navy, The Jazz Age, The Roaring Twenties

Thursday, November 12, 1925. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five.

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five (Lous, his then wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, Edward "Kid" Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Johnny St. Cyr on guitar and banjo) recorded their first songs for Okeh Records.

The British submarine HMS M1 was hit by the SS Vidar and sank in the English Channel with the loss of all 69 hands.

Last edition:

Sunday, November 8, 1925. The Eagle.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 1925 at the movies

They were careless people.

 

Donald Trump at Mar A Logo's Halloween 1920s themed party.  Seated to Trump's left was an unhappy looking Marco Rubio with Jeanine Pirro looking back.  The event featured scantily clad dancing women, complete with the timeless barely clad woman in a giant champagne glass.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Donald Trump ought to read a little.  History would be a good start, but also Fitzgerald's great novel.

Saturday, June 13, 1925.

 Last edition:

Wednesday, June 10, 1925. Creation of the United Church of Canada.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Canada, Catholic, Christianity, Protestant, religion

Monday, April 20, 1925. Route shields

The US adopted the shield symbol for highway routes.

New York police raided Minsky's Burlesque for featuring striptease acts.  Not really newsworthy at the time, the event was later made famous due to a 1960 novel that was turned into a film.

Burlesque shows are mostly a thing of the past, although there are odd efforts to reenact them.  Sort of remembered in a cutesy fashion, they were really much raunchier in some ways than recalled, and indeed many stage shows in general featuring women through the 1920s were fairly pornographic.

Last edition:

Saturday, April 18, 1925.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Health, Norman Rockwell, Photography

Thursday, January 29, 1925. 裁軍 and Flapper Fanny.

About 20 people were killed when  representatives of the Fengtian Clique met resistance attempting to disarm about 1,000 defeated Jiangsu troops, who apparently weren't quite as defeated as thought.

Flapper Fanny Says was on day three of its new syndicated run.  The cartoon would run until 1940, during which time Fanny ceased being a flapper.  It had two different cartoonist illustrate it, both of them women.

Last edition:

Wednesday, January 28, 1925. Russian Mercenaries

Labels: 1920s, 1925, China, Chinese Warlord Era, It was because of the Russian Revolution, Mercenaries, Shanghais in Shanghai.

Monday, January 12, 1925. Ordering Thompsons.

The North Side Gang attempted a drive by assassination of Al Capone, with the would be killers armed with Thompson submachine guns.

Capone was inside a nearby restaurant at the time, conducting business, and only his bodyguard was wounded. The event did cause him to order Thompsons himself, which were not restricted from purchase in any fashion at the time.

These would have been the M1921 Thompson, not the M1928 Thompson that is more familiar to most people, although telling the difference between the two at a glance is difficult.  They were extremely expensive.

Period Thompson advertisement.  Thompson marketed them to police and for self defense, but of course at the price, they weren't economically attractive to regular people, and they were to criminal organizations, as well as to the police.

Last edition:

Sunday, January 11, 1925. Jargon of the Juveniles, Times Signal, Zanesville.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Teenagers, The Roaring Twenties, the spoken word

Sunday, January 11, 1925. Jargon of the Juveniles, Times Signal, Zanesville.

 Last edition:

Saturday, January 10, 1925. The KKK gets the boot from Kansas.

Labels: 1918-1919 Paris Peace Conference, 1920s, 1925, boats and ships, France, German Weimar Republic, Kansas, Ku Klux Klan, Racism, Rhineland, Samoa, United States Marine Corps

Friday, April 4, 1924. Wolves in Albany County.

Educational broadcasting began with the introduction of what is now BBC School Radio.

Frank Capone, the brother of Al, received an elaborate funeral in Chicago.  Al closed speakeasies and gambling establishments that he owned in honor of his dishonorable brother.  Some of the press in the crime-ridden town lauded the late mobster and criticized the police in his death.

Wolves raided cattle in Albany County.

Wolves were recently reintroduced in Northern Colorado and there is some angst in some quarters that the reintroduced predators, unable to appreciate the giant dotted lines that make up state borders, will come into Wyoming, which they will, and be shot here, which is a real risk.  Perhaps somewhat mitigating against that, there's been rumors as far back as the 1980s, when I lived in Laramie, that there were already wolves in Albany County.

One of the reintroduce Colorado wolves has killed a calf in Grand County, Colorado, so the first instance of livestock depredation has now occured.  Initially, Colorado's fish and game declined to opinion on whether the wolf involved was one of the new residents, or one of the ones that was part of a pack of ten that established itself by crossing down from Wyoming in 2020.  The fact that they 'ad reestablished themselves on their own, as they will do, does give rise to the question of why an artificial reintroduction in Colorado was necessary.

It probably wasn't.

Gil Hodges, baseball great, was born in Princeton, Indiana.  Hodges died at age 47 after suffering a heart attack.

Last prior edition:

Wednesday, April 2, 1924. Selecting Harlan Stone.

1920s, 1924, baseball, boats and ships, Bulgaria, Calvin Coolidge, Communism, Court, Disaster, Hajj, Islam, law, Mexico, Personalities, Vera Cruz Mexico

Sunday, March 30, 1924. Camp Carey

Wow, what headlines.

I linked this in because of the reference to "Camp Carey", a Boy Scout Camp somewhere on Boxelder Creek, the land for which was donated by former Governor Robert D. Carey.

The Casper Herald also mentioned it on the front page.

It's not there today, and I don't know where it is, or what happened to it.  A search for its fate was in vain, although through that method, I learned that it had been in existence as late as the 1950s and a local figure's obituary proudly noted his role in establishing it.  A Camp Carey Road exists in Wyoming, but it seems to be in the Pole Mountain area of Albany County, which this is not.  Indeed, there's a reference to a military "Camp Carey" that predates this 1924 Boy Scout establishment.

By 1925, Girl Scouts were also using the "woodland paradise".

In 1926, a terrible weather related tragedy occured there, apparently.

Twelve people died from drinking denatured alcohol at a party in Toledo, Ohio.  That is, alcohol with poisons added to it by regulation.

This is very common and is designed to keep industrial and commercial alcohol from being used as a drink.

The German People's Party announced its election platform of a "new democratic monarchy".

Last prior edition:

Saturday, March 29, 1924. Yesterday's news, or not. Morning mail.

1920s, 1924, 1950, 1950s, 1960, 1969, Crime, Mail, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Post Office, Teapot Dome Scandal, Weather

Social Snapshots

 

Tuesday, August 22, 1923. Oaths of Office, Air Mail, No French Concessions, Japanese Navy Disaster, Societal Shifts.

Calvin Coolidge was administered the oath of office for the second time because of a question of whether the presidential oath had to be administered by a federal official. Judge Adolph A. Hoehling Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia administered did the honors this time, at the  Willard Hotel.

The Coolidge's then moved into the White House later that day.

I'm amazed that our disgraced former business magnate President didn't think of having a notary at the bank or something administer another oath to him.

Mail was getting speedier.

France informed Britain that it would not make concessions on the Ruhr.

Kalamazoo, Michigan banned dancers from staring into each other's eyes.

This sounds absurd, of course, but society was having a difficult time figuring out how to adjust to the arrival of dating.  It didn't come in all at once, of course, but the arrival of modern dating, principally in control of the dating couples or prospective couples, had increased enormously following World War One.

We've dealt with it extensively here before, but the 1920s really saw the onset of domestic machinery which would end up changing women's relationship with work.  And it also saw a dramatic rise in the number of young women who lived outside their parent's homes, or who were semi-independent of their parent's household.  FWIW, a really good portrayal of this can be found in A River Runs Through It, in a rural setting, which is of course a memoir of this period.  Much of this would be arrested with the arrival of the Great Depression, which retarded the advance of household appliances of all sorts, and sent many young people, male and female, back into their parent's households.

Among the difficulties being adjusted to were the morality problems the shift presented.  Now presented as quaint, they really were not and were not easily instantly adjusted to, and in some ways can be argued to have never been worked out.  We may in fact be in the final stages of working them out now.  An item from yesterday demonstrated an aspect of that, being the rise of pornography before there was any consensus on how to address that, which there still really is not.

The Imperial Japanese Navy's submarine 70 sank in a disaster, killing 88 of its men.  She was swamped by a passing ship with her hatch open.  Only six men survived, including her commanding officer.

Six men sawed their way out of the Natrona County jail.

Sawing your way out of a jail window is such a Western movie trope that it's odd to read of it actually being done.

Related Threads:

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