Sunday, June 30, 1946. Wartime powers expire.

The OPA's emergency wartime powers ended at midnight in spite of an effort by President Truman to extend them.

The Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) authority also expired at midnight as did the authority of the War Relocation Authority.

Surplus military vehicles  were being sold.

Sunday was apparently the cheesecake edition of the News.  A photo of an actress was given the full page treatment for no other discernable reason, while later in the paper the famous Jane Russell Outlaw poster was also.

And an add depicted teenagers advertising at home.

A sham election in Poland placed the country under the Communist Party and approved the post war borders with the USSR.

Last edition:

Saturday, June 29, 1946. Operation Agatha.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Art, British Army, Hagenah, Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, Operation Agatha, Palestine

Monday, June 28, 1976. First women in a service academy.

155 out of an entering class of 1,600 at the United States Air Force Academy were women, the first females to be so admitted.  This was the day of their admission.

They were also the first women to enter any US service academy, although the following week women would enter West Point and Annapolis.

Basic recruit training for the first class with women recruits.  Note that M1 Garands were still being used at the time.

The People's Revolutionary Tribunal of Angola found three American and ten Britons guilty of war crimes connected with their mercenary service in the Angolan Civil War.  Americans Daniel Gearhart and British citizens John Derek Barker, Andrew McKenzie and Tony Callan (Costas Georgiu) received the death sentence.

Gearhart was a Vietnam veteran who had advertised his services in Soldier of Fortune.  He arrived in Angola just days before his capture and may never have fired a shot in the war.  Callan, a Greek Cypriot, in contrast, was described by other mercenaries as a homicidal maniac.

Soldier of Fortune still exists, although you don't hear about it much anymore.  It was hugely destested in Africa at the time due to its embrace of mercenaries, with the 60s and 70s being highwater mark of a sort of romantic view of soldiers of fortune.

British character actor Stanley Baker died at age 48.

The News had a report about a hijacking.

And a hijacking of a French airliner.

Apparently Pride Week was already a thing, and Colorado had a pornography law back on the books.

Last edition:

Friday, June 25, 1976. President for life.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, Idi Amin, Uganda

Friday, June 28, 1946. First Hāfu (ハーフ).

The first recorded birth in Japan of a baby born of a Japanese mother and a father who was an American soldier occupying Japan, was announced on Japanese radio, barely more than nine months after the U.S. commenced occupation of Honshu.

The number of such children born during the American occupation from 1945 to 1952 is unknown, but best estimates put it at less than 5,000.  Small additional numbers had British and Australian fathers, with their fate being particularly harsh as British occupation authorities strictly prohibited liaisons with Japanese females and marriage was not an option.  Many of their children were given up for adoption as orphans.  In contrast,45,000 Japanese women became American war brides.

The entire matter was controversial in Japan, as generally it broke a strict cultural taboo regarding interacting with foreigners in this fashion. Cross cultural marriages were enormously looked down upon in Japan at the time and still somewhat are, albeit to a lesser degree.  The occupation period is the only instance in which Japanese women breached the taboo on a large scale.

In this case, the extremely rapid nature of the conception raises real questions about the nature of consent in the matter.

Comedian Gilda Radner was born in Detroit.

Actress Antoinette Perry form whom the Tony Awards are named died at age 58 of a heart attack. There were signs that it was coming, but as a Christian Scientist, she refused to see a doctor.  

She had been born in Denver, Colorado.

The Family Circle magazine featured a photograph of a cat in a wedding dress on the cover.

Last edition:

Wednesday, June 26, 1946. The Nationalist Chinese Strike.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Chiang Kai-shek, China, Chinese Civil War, Germany, Nationalist Chinese Army, Nazi Germany, People's Liberation Army, poster, United States, Weapons

Monday, June 28, 1926. Mel Brooks born in Brooklyn.

Mel Brooks (Melvin James Kaminsky) was born on a tenement kitchen table in Brownsville, Brooklyn to Katie (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky.  His father was an American born Jew of German extraction, his mother was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant.

He'd barely know his father, who died two years later of tuberculosis.

A comedic giant, he's still alive.  Regarding his comedy, most of it is high refined high end Borscht Belt Comedy, reflecting the extent to which that tradition has hugely impacted American humor.

He served in Europe during World War Two.

William Lyon Mackenzie King resigned as Prime Minister of Canada after the Governor General, Julian Byng invoked his reserve power to refuse to sign the formal Order in Council to dissolve Parliament. 

Last edition:

Friday, June 25, 1926. Milk Cow Blues

Labels: 1920s, 1926, Blog Mirror, Calvin Coolidge, Music, The Blues, The Press

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

Thursday, April 18, 1946. Riding clubs, Yugoslavia, minor league baseball, teen queens.

The Powell Valley Riding club was formed in Powell Wyoming.

The League of Nations dissolved and transferred its assets to the United Nations.

Jackie Robinson appeared in his first minor league game in the farm teams for Major League Baseball.  He had previously played for the Kansas City Monarchs.  His current team was the Montreal Royals.

The US recognized the government of Tito in Yugoslavia.

The International Court of Justice held its first meeting.

English actress and 1960s Disney teen queen Haley Mills was born.

She managed to transition into adult roles after her Disney era and still acts.  Probably her most famous early movie was The Parent Trap.

Last edition:

Wednesday, April 17, 1946. Syria becomes independent. Protests in Japan.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, French League of Nation Mandates, Japan, Occupation of Japan, Syria

Movies (Television) in History: Dawson's Creek.

Over this past weekend I was horrible sick with what was probably the "stomach flu".  My wife is now.  I'll write more on that latter.

Anyhow,  I woke up in a bad state (I'll spare the details) and spent most of the weekend on the sofa, falling asleep.  

A lost weekend.

Anyhow, my wife had Dawson's Creek on, which was on as one of the major actors, James Van Der Beek  recently tragically died of colon cancer, something I relatively recently dodged the bullet on myself.  FWIW, quite a few actors who were on the series have passed away, although he's the youngest (although barely so) to do so.  It was a tragic death.

Dawson's Creek, 1998-2003, sucks.

The question would be why I put it up here at all, and I don't have that much of a good reason, but it reminds me of how television shows featuring teenagers of recent years fit a pattern.  The other one is One Tree Hill.  

Their nighttime soap operas, but they're bad, and at worst, perverted.

All the characters, even the supposedly poor ones, are fantastically wealthy living in really good conditions.  They have nearly unlimited access to wealth that most middle class families in the real world struggle for and their lives are more or less unhindered by their parents, who are portrayed as a sort of older siblings, even in their appearance.  Nobody in this world has been worn down by age and responsibilities.  They're all beautiful. There's now an ugly duckling girls or awkward boy amongst them. Their entire lives involve endless love triangles, and at least in Dawson's Creek's case, statutory rape.  They're maudlin in the extreme.

All in all, they're a really weird look at the teenage years of Americans, and its weirder than people want to look back at teenagers that way.  It says something about our society, and not in a good way. That millions of adults would follow a series that deals, at least in part, with sexual encounters of minors, is weird.  Dramas, and comedies, focusing on youth have always been a thing, but not ones that focus on youth as well funded adults lusting or longing for each other.

As a complaint about television scripts, I suppose, it's interesting that television likes to keep a couple that should obviously be a couple nearly being a couple for years, and then conclude with them not being a couple.  This can be a legitimate dramatic element, as in the Western drama Wil Penny, but if its going to be done it ought to serve some purpose.  In television dramas, it simply tends not to.  The Wonder Years, well worth watching, provides another example.

On material details, this is set on the Eastern Seaboard which I don't know much about, but nearly 100% of the people depicted are white, which I don't think realistic.  Maybe my view of the Eastern Seaboard is off, however.  Made when it was, an obligatory sympathetically portrayed homosexual couple is included.

One thing I'll add to all of this is that this entire series' view seems summed up by its horrible theme song, which wasn't written for it, I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole.  Sung in such a muttering style that it hard to understand, the song is a lament that the singer's grandparents had to endure World War Two and her grandfather came back physically and mentally scarred by the war, and then seemingly implied that they had not lived their lives for the moment.  The lyrics are, in part:

o open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I
You know that if we are to stay alive
Then see the peace in every eye

She had two babies, one was six months, one was three
In the war of '44
Every telephone ring, every heartbeat stinging
When she thought it was God calling her
Oh, would her son grow to know his father?

I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be sorry?

He showed up all wet on the rainy front step
Wearing shrapnel in his skin
And the war he saw lives inside him still
It's so hard to be gentle and warm
The years pass by, and now, he has granddaughters

I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be...

The I deserve happiness right now and can obtain it without repercussion sort of view was a common one with younger people at the time, memoirs of Gen X.  Indeed, the show is sort of Gen X Romeo and Juliet and the ballad fits that.  That sort of vapid view has really passed into the the rear view mirror and younger generations don't have it, been afflicted, as they are, by the real world.  The shallowness of the views expressed in Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, and Beverly Hills 90210 help explain the big turn towards inward conservatism in the generations that have followed. 

Anyhow, just skip this and watch 5-25-77 instead.  

Friday, March 1, 1946. Things that almost were.

Kim Il Sung, was saved from an assassination attempt when Red Army officer Y.T. Novichenko caught a hand grenade thrown at him.

Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu, was planned to commence on this day.

Bombshell actress Lana Wood, sister of Natalie Wood, was born.

Last edition:

Thursday, February 28, 1946. Ho Chi Minh asks Truman for help.

Labels: 1930s, 1938, 1939, 1940s, 1946, Franklin Roosevelt, French Indochina, French Indochinese War, Harry S. Truman, Ho Chi Minh, Hungary, Vietnam

Thursday, February 11, 1926. Calles attacks the Church.

Plutarco Elías Calles nationalized all property of the Catholic church in Mexico.

The degree to which the leaders of the Mexican Revolution were anti Catholic in a very Catholic nation is hard to overestimate, although at the same time, particularly in some regions, Catholic viewpoints were very represented amongst the revolutionaries.  Emiliano Zapata in particularly was notably Catholic.

Be that as it may, Madero was not a practicing Catholic and had peculiar spiritual views.  He was in fact a spiritualist and a Mason.  Still, his victory in the revolution, temporary though it was, was seen by Catholics as an opportunity to form a Mexican Catholic political party, which they did.  The Church condemned Madero's assassination.

It was that killing that sparked the second stage of the revolution.   Álvaro Obregón and Calles both featured prominently in that, and both were anti Catholic.  Calles was also a Mason.  In that phase of the revolution, moreover, democratic forces, which had brought about Madero's rise, started to wane and with the murder of Zapata and the victory of Carranza Mexico headed off in a much more radically leftist direction. In some ways the Mexican Revolution, in spite of its romantic portrayal in American cinema, was much more of a 20th Century European Revolution, many of which featured radically anti Catholic leaders against Catholic populations in favor of utopian leftism.

Calles fit that mold and was the sort example in the office of president of Mexico.  His anti clerical laws would lead to the Cristero War the following year.

Mexico remains a very Catholic country to this day and the Mexican people are very Catholic. But like other religious communities, the period of anti religious domination hurt the religious nature of the people nonetheless and the culture of the country.  Mexico has never really recovered from the anti religious views of the revolution.  Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of that has been Protestant Millennialism which has been successful in drawing in religious Mexicans who are unchurched, a byproduct of the revolution.

Actor Leslie Nielsen was born in Regina, Saskatchewan.  He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War Two as an aerial gunner, although he was not deployed overseas.

Last edition:

Wednesday, February 10, 1926. Going to the League.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, German Weimar Republic, Italy, League of Nations, South Tyrol, Tyrol

Tuesday, February 5, 1946. Star of Paris.

Look offered an article on what FDR would have said regarding the ongoing intense look back at the events leading to December 7, 1941, a controversy that most Americans have forgotten occurred.  But it was probably the slice of cheesecake offered up in the form of actress Colleen Townsend that drew attention to the magazine.  Townsend is from California and attended BYU (she was a Mormon growing up).  She entered acting through minor roles in the early 40s, but it was magazine covers that drew the publics attention to her.  She was one of the Yank pinups.  She converted to Presbyterianism in 1948 and married a seminary student in 1950, after which she left acting.  She had a long career as a humanitarian and civil rights worker, and is still living.

TWA's "Star of Paris", a Lockheed Constellation, flew from New York to Paris in the first transAtlantic commercial airline flight.  

The flight took fifteen hours.

More on the flight here:

5–6 February 1946

President Truman established the Tishomingo National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma.

Last edition:

Monday, February 4, 1946. Weather and War Brides.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, boats and ships, It was because of World War Two, Marriage, The relationship between men and women, Weather

Friday, February 5, 1926. Attacking the couriers.

Terrorists attacked a train traveling from Moscow to Riga in Latvia, killing Soviet couriers L. F. Pecherskiy, Theodor Nette and his partner, with the apparent goal of stealing a diplomatic pouch.

A crowd of 10,000 people gathered in Los Angeles to watch the funeral procession of actress Barbara La Marr.

La Marr was regarded as a great beauty and was famous for that, as well as a torrid life.  Only 29 at the time of her death, she'd been married four times.

Last edition:

Tuesday, February 2, 1926.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, baseball, British League of Nations Mandates, Diplomacy, French League of Nation Mandates, German Weimar Republic, Lebanon, Moral depravity, New York, Palestine, Populism, Syria, The written word, Weimar Germany

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

The Truman Administration formed the Central Intelligence Group, with its official duties being:

The Central Intelligence Group is a recently created interdepartmental organization in which the State, War, Navy, and sometimes other departments participate. It coordinates all activities of the Government involved in obtaining and analyzing information about foreign countries which this country needs for its national security. It also furnishes interdepartmental analyses of this type of information or use by Government officials.

The immediate predecessor, the OSS, had been disbanded. The Group itself would evolve into the CIA very quickly.

Qazi Muhammed establishing the Republic of Mahabad. He'd be hung by Iran in 1947.

The Socialist Soviet puppet state of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, also referred to as the Republic of Kurdistan, (Kurdish: کۆماری کوردستان, romanized: Komarî Kurdistan; Persian: جمهوری مهاباد,) was formed in the Soviet occupied portion of northern Iran.

Last edition:

Monday, January 21, 1946. Steelworkers Strike.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Labor unrest, Strike Wave of 1945-1946

Today In Wyoming's History: November 22, 2025. Retiring a number.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 22: 2025.  Former University of Wyoming football player and now player for the Buffalo Bills in the NFL, Josh Allen, had his UW uniform number retired prior to a UW football game against Nevada with the Pokes lost, 13 to 7.

Also, he's married to Hailee Steinfeld.

Thursday, November 5, 1925. The Big Parade.

 

Released on this day in 1925, the film is regarded as one of the greatest films about World War One.

The picture also would be associated with a level of tragedy for its stars.  John Gilbert died in 1936 at age 38 due to alcoholism.  He managed to marry four times in his short life, and was not married at the time of his death.  His costar in the film, Renee Adoree made the transition to sound movies, but died in 1933 at age 35 of tuberculosis.  She'd married twice, but was not married at the time of her death.

Born in the Russian Empire, with his true name never definitively learned, Sidney Reilly, a British spy, was executed by the Soviets.

He had a prolific career as a spy, leading to his nickname as The Ace of Spies.  He was reported a model for James Bond.  Early in his life as an emigre he went by the last name of Rosenblum, which would suggest Jewish heritage.  In the late 19th Century he seems to have worked for Scotland Yard as a paid informant on immigrant matters.  He married widow Margaret Thomas at Holborn Registry Office in London in 1898 after her husband had died under conditions that suggested poisoning, something of note as Rosenblum was working as sort of a herbalist at the time.  She was wealthy and that, by extension, made him wealthy.  Soon after that, he began his career as a spy, spying for the British and the Japanese in the lead up to the Russo Japanese War.

While it is difficult to determine the range of his activities, it is claimed that:

• He pretended to be a Russian arms merchant to spy on Dutch weapons shipments to the Boers during the Boer War.
• He obtained intelligence on Russian military defences in Manchuria for the Kempeitai.
• He obtained Persian oil concessions for the British Admiralty in events surrounding the D'Arcy Concession.
• He infiltrated a Krupp armaments plant in prewar Germany and stole weapon plans.
• He seduced the wife of a Russian minister to glean information about German weapons shipments to Russia.
• He attempted to overthrow the Russian Bolshevik government and to rescue the imprisoned Romanov family, actions which lead to his being sentenced to death in absentia.
• He served as a courier to transport the forged Zinoviev letter into the United Kingdom.

He had been lured by into the Soviet Union by the Cheka, posing as anti Soviet agents.

It's difficult to tell the overall truth of his activities.  British intelligence is notoriously able to keep its secrets for one thing.  Reilly was good at keeping them as well, and as he worked for various entities he had a strong reason to.  Like the James Bond character that's supposedly based upon him, he had a strong affinity for women and married up to three or four times, with other alleged affairs in addition.  His last marriage was to actress Pepita Bobadilla.

Last edition:

Wednesday, November 4, 1925. Now or then?

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 1925 Election, Democratic Party, History repeating itself or at least rhyming, New Jersey, New York

In Memoriam. James Earl Jones

James Early Jones with Barbara and George Bush.

James Earl Jones

The legendary movie actor with the deep unforgettable voice was an Army officer in the latter stages of the Korean War.  Jones never served in Korea, but his service was notable in part because he attended Ranger school as an Army officer and was accordingly Ranger qualified.

Category:  Actor

Passed today at age 98.

Jones was an interesting figure.  He started university as a pre med major but switched to drama prior to entering the Army.  He had considered a career in the service, but a conversion to Catholicism influenced him to leave the Army as he claimed that Shakespeare and the Catholic Church were the only things in his life that were not geared towards killing.  

He played many roles, but is probably best remembered for either being Darth Vader by some, or Terence Mann in Field of Dreams.

He was a fairly private man rarely speaking of his private life, but he did late in life reveal a diabetic condition which plagued him and he was a devout Catholic, albeit with potentially irregular marriages, dating back to his time in the Army.

postscript:

I screwed t his up, as the comments note.

To make it worse, I noted his death at the time it actually happened.

Inexcusable.

Monday, October 1, 1945. The OSS disbanded.

 

The Office of Strategic Services was disbanded.

Due to a clerical error, it had only been given ten days to wrap up.

King Leopold III of Belgium arrived in Switzerland from Austria and issued a proclamation to the Belgian people defending his actions during the war.

June Allyson appeared on the cover of Life.

Last edition:

Thursday, September 27, 1945. Emperors meet.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, 1945 at the movies, Douglas MacArthur, Hirohito, Japan, Movies, Occupation of Japan, Rome, World War Two