He appeared on Meet The Press and Chuck Todd made some reference to how "Governor Dutton" was going to do tonight.
There was a slight awkward pause before Tester picked up on it as a Yellowstone reference.
I haven't seen Yellowstone and I have no reason to believe Tester, whose a farmer from a multigenerational farm family, has either.
Stuff it Chuck.
The office of the Governor of Northern Ireland was created. The office assumed the role previously held by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the prior 750 years. The charge of the office was to "do and execute in due manner as respects Northern Ireland all things which by virtue of the Act and our said Letters Patent of 27 April 1921 or otherwise belonged to the office of Lord Lieutenant at the time of the passing of the Irish Free State Constitution Act 1922."
This office would only exist until July 18, 1973.
Gabriel Józef Narutowicz a hydroelectric engineering and politician was chosen to be the first President of Poland. He'd serve for five days after assuming office on December 11, as he was assassinated on December 16.
John Elroy Sanford, better known by his stage name Redd Foxx, was born in St. Louis.
Foxx came up with a raunchy nightclub act before being cast in Sanford and Son in 1972, which propelled him into national fame. He was legitimately great in the role in which he portrayed an aged (beyond his actual years) father to a son who co-owned a junkyard with him. The series had a predominate African American cast and dealt with the themes of the time, running until 1977. A hugely popular series, it is still well remembered, and oddly its name is recalled in the Wyoming restaurant chain name "Sanfords".
The Calais-Mediterranée Express luxury train resumed service on its entire route in France.
Home Box Office premiered with its first broadcast being a NHL game between the Rangers and the Canucks.
President Nixon announced that he had asked for the resignation of everyone serving in his cabinet or whom he had appointed to office.
Meet The Press, the longest running television program in the United States, premiered in that format. It had previously premiered on radio as American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press on October 5, 1945.
While I very much favor This Week over Meet the Press, it occurs to me that somewhat ironically, as I listed to the audio podcast variant, I listed to it closer to the radio version.
The first guess for the then 30-minute Thursday night program was James Farley, the Postmaster General and DNC Committee chairman. The initial moderator was Martha Roundtree, reprising her role from the radio variant, and the only woman moderator of the show to date. Roundtree hosted the program until 1953.
She died in 1999 in Washington D.C., nearly blind since the 1980s, due to the harsh effects of primitive television lighting.
As noted, I do listen to it, but I'm not a fan of the current moderator, Chuck Todd. Indeed, I was hoping for a second female moderator in the form of Kasi Hunt.
On the same day, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov told a Moscow audience that the means of making an atomic weapons were no longer secret. American intelligence took that to mean that the Soviet Union knew how to build a bomb, but didn't necessarily have one. The Soviets, who had penetrated the American government fairly successfully, suspected that the US was working on such a weapon by 1942 and started their own project accordingly. Nonetheless, they had not developed a bomb by this point themselves, but were only two years away from doing so.
Canada invited Newfoundland to join the Canadian Dominion.
M*A*S*HOkay, now down to the perhaps even more recalled television series M*A*S*H..This is one Korean War drama that nearly anyone who owns a television has to recall, as it's still on television all the time as a rerun.I was a fan of this series as a kid, but I have mixed feelings about it now, even though I'll occasionally catch it as rerun even now. Well acted and written, the very long running and hugely popular television series was billed as a comedy when it was first released, even though it was a dark comedy even then. While it always had comedic elements, as the series progressed towards its final seasons it was heavily moving towards being a drama.The series varies distinctly from its early, middle and late seasons. The early seasons are extremely faithful to the book and do a better job of portraying the feel of the book than the later seasons. The middle seasons were perhaps the most comedic, and the late ones the most dramatic.While this series was enormously popular, its only the really early ones that get the feel of the book, and to some extent, the Korean War, right. The series ran so long that the tour nature of the war, in which servicemen were in the war for only a little over a year, is completely lost. Running much longer than the war itself, the series began to have sort of a peculiar feel to it, for those history minded.One thing worth noting about the series, as compared to the movie, is that the Radar Reilly character, who is played by Gary Burgoff in both the film and the series, and is the only actor to make that transition, was played much differently in the series. The movie portrays the character much more accurately than the series, outside of its first couple of years, as the movie (and the first year or so of the series) accurately reflects that character as a cynical devious professional soldier, as opposed to the lovably childlike character he later became in the series.On material details, the most accurate ones in terms of materiality are the early ones, but the series never became bad in these regards.
The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS. One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.
I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972. Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s. My family watched it regularly.
The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.
Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing. While fondly remembered, I never liked it. I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.
We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it. I never did and never have. It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s. It ran until 1981. Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.
The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not. It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers. In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation. Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia. Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.
FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel. Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.
On this day in 1972 the Israeli air force bombed ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon in retaliation for the Munich Massacre. An attempted interception by the Syrian air force resulted in three Syrian aircraft being shot down.
The British sitcom Are You Being Served? premiered.
Hugh Hefner sold himself as a champion of free speech who created the Playboy brand to set off a sexual revolution that would liberate men and women alike, but over the years he used Playboy to manipulate women to compete for his favor and silenced whistleblowers
I frankly wouldn't normally bother to watch this show, but I did, in part because of my opinion on Hefner and in part because my wife was watching it. Her interest was sparked because she had been a follower of the "real life" show that followed Hefner and three of his later prostitutes, and let's be blunt, that's what they are, which was a fairly popular show at one time. Indeed, this documentary includes the last three notables of that lamentable group among those interviewed, with Holly Madison, the principal one, being a major, and very damaged, personality in the show.
Let me be start by being blunt. Hugh Hefner is one of the worst and most despicable figures of the 20th Century.
I know that's making quite a statement for a century that included among its notables such individuals as Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini, but it's true. Just as those figures were dedicated enemies of Western civilization and values abroad, Hefner was at home. In the end, the West prevailed over all of these political figures, but it didn't prevail against Hefner. The destruction he caused is vast and ongoing.
I'm not going to give a full biography of Hefner as I don't know it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up. What I can relate is that he was from the Midwest, served stateside in the U.S. Army during World War Two, and then went to work for one of the then existing girly mags after the war. Apparently according to his own recollection and that of his friends, he was jilted by a girl while in high school (with there being video footage of her, she was quite attractive and very intelligent looking), and then reformed his central personality into the early Playboy image as a result.[1] There's more than a little room to doubt that, but what seems clear is that he was a man who was essentially devoid of morals and driven principally by lust and its monetization, although what came about first is questionable. The love of money is indeed the root of all evil, and it's possible that he loved money first and came into lust as a result.
Anyhow, in the early 1950s he went out on his own with a brilliant marketing idea that became Playboy magazine
Dirty magazines of all sorts had existed for a while, and indeed, while I haven't published on it, it's pretty clear that there was a trend towards more and more risqué treatment of women in print starting wth the advancement of photography in the first quarter of the 20th Century. It was still the case well into the first 1/3d of the century that illustrations, rather than photographs, dominated magazines, but even by the 1920s black and white salacious magazines existed. By the 1930s, trends overlapping from the 1920s were such that magazines of all types were more and more willing to take risks with female figures for magazines and magazine covers. By the late 1930s the female figure with a tight sweater was a pretty common feature on magazines of all types and one of the major magazines featured Rita Hayworth in 1940 in a pose so risqué that it rivaled anything put on the cover of Playboy early on. So the trend was on.
At the same time, this trend also started, and indeed was much advanced, in the movie industry, until the Hays Production Code put the brakes on it in 1922.
Something happened in the World War Two timeframe that's really not terribly clear to me, other than it seems to me that it was there. At one time, I would have been inclined to attribute the 1953 introduction of Playboy nearly entirely to the Second World War, but that's unfair. Going into the war, it was already the case that pinups were around.
During the war, however, millions of unattached young men spent years away from home at a time when that was quite uncommon, and that had some sort of accelerating impact. Keep in mind that an unmarried man in his 20s or even 30s likely lived at home, with his parents, prior to the war, and indeed again after the war. During the war, this wasn't true at all.
As a result, during the war, the girly mag and related publications received a big unrestrained boost. So did prostitution and other sexual vices as well. And the seeping of sex into things in general, at least in the service, did. Quite a few U.S. Army Air Corps crewmen flew into combat in World War Two in bombers with paintings of top heavy naked women on the fuselages of their planes, or painted on their flight jackets.
The genie might not have been fully out of the bottle by war's end, but the cork was loosened. At the same time, a famous study by Kinsey was conducted during the war, which ostensibly revealed that the average sexual conduct of American men was libertine. It's now known that Kinsey himself was plagued with sexual oddities, and like a lot of people in such a position, he sought to justify them. His study, as it turned out, largely focused on the incarcerated, hardly a representative slice of American men, and it went so far as to essentially force some minor males into sexual acts. It's flaws, to say the least, and was perverted to say more.
That study, however, was released after the war and formed an inaccurate pseudo-scientific basis to challenge Western sexual morality. And that's where we get back to Hefner. Unlike the girly mags that had come before Playboy, Hefner's rag was able to claim to be mainstream.
Slickly published with high production values, Hefner took the pinup of the 1940s and published her in centerfold form, starting with purchased photos of Marilyn Monroe for the introductory issue. It was an incredibly misogynistic publication, darned near outright hating women while celebrating an extremely exaggerated example of the female form. Like nose art on World War Two bombers, all the 1950s examples of Playboy centerfolds were hugely top-heavy. They were also all young, and portrayed as blisteringly stupid and willing and eager to engage in unmarried sex. They were also all sterile. Playboy didn't run articles on young women getting pregnant.[2]
In the climate of the time, just out of the Second World War, just following Kinsey's study, and in the midst of the Korean War, the magazine was an instant hit. It began to immediately impact American culture and became accepted, if still regarded as dirty, as a publication. It crept into male dominated settings of all types, there virtually not being a barbershop in the United States that didn't have it. Women in popular media came to rapidly resemble, to some degree, the centerfolds who appeared in the magazines, and by the late 1950s the US was in the era of large boobed, blond haired, probably dumb (in presentation) starlets.
Playboy had this field all to itself for quite some time and in the 1960s it really expanded. While the early magazine was sort of weirdly conservative in away, the explosion of the counterculture and the introduction of the pill were tailor-made for its expansion. While in the 50s, the suggestion was that the Playboy man could have all of these big breasted girls next door for himself, by the 60s it was an outright free for all.
Around that time, Hefner himself began to essentially live that way. By the 70s it was completely open, with the Playboy Mansion His big, and creepy, parties were a cause célèbre in the entertainment community. It meant you were somebody to be invited, and many such celebrated figures of the era were, such as Bill Cosby. . . .
Yeah. . .
Well, anyhow, in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s being invited to the party of a pornographer wouldn't have been something a person wanting a public career would want. By the 70s, the opposite was true.
And that meant, in essence, the new sexual libertineism advocated by Playboy was essentially the American, and indeed Wester World, standard. Even where not outright accepted, it seeped into being. The magazine was everywhere, including in many middle class homes, sending the message to boys that lusting after big chested girls was not only normal, but desirable.
It's been a disaster.
Now we're reaping what Playboy helped sew, although the entertainment industry still hasn't quite figured that out. Women want out of the sex object status that Playboy foisted on them but don't quite know how to get there. The "Me Too" movement is part of that.
Part of things being corrosive is that they corrode. You can't just corrode a little bit. That's happened to society, and as we are now being told, a little late in the day, that happened to Hefner.
As this series reveals, all things Playboy were gross. The life inside the Playboy Mansion as one of Hefner's concubines was controlled, gross and revolting, including to at least some of the subjects of his loveless attention. One resident, whose father lived there, and who practically grew up in the mansion, not too surprisingly had turned to teenage lesbian sex with one of the female inhabitants and later tried to write a book about what she'd experienced in her early years. It was pretty clearly suppressed, once released, by the declining Playboy empire. Another former male employee was basically threatened if he went public with what he knew.
Suicides of Playboy models were a feature of its earliest days, with at least one of its most famous centerfolds (already a teenaged wife by the time she posed) being one example. According to this show, however, other suicides featured among the women of Playboy with the news being hushed. At least one well known centerfold was the victim of a murder, and a murder was referenced in the show without it being clear to me if that was the same figure or not, as I don't know the names of the characters involved.
Playboy was declining by the early 80s, a victim of its own success. Penthouse came in, and started to erode its market share by being grosser. Hustler came in and was grosser yet. A race to the bottom ensued. Then the Internet arrived, and they all rocketed into the gutter. People weren't willing to pay for the smut they could access for free.
At the same time, however, it seems like there's some effort to crawl back out of the gutter. The Me Too movement is part of that. Its members are clear that they know that they're being treated wrongly, if they can't quite figure out how to define why they're being treated wrongly, and what the origin of the standard they are grasping for is. And the depths of the salacious portrayal of women on magazine covers arrested in the 1970s. At that time, the nearly bare breast of a model could appear on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, and Farah Fawcett could be seen nearly falling out of her swimsuit on the cover of Time. Advertisements in magazines don't feature minors in nearly pornographic poses anymore. That era is over.
What isn't over is the decline of television, however and movies, which remain sex fixated. They may be behind the curve on this, or not. Having embraced the descent, however, they can't get out of it as easily as print can and has. The Me Too movement might be helping it to do so, however, as now actresses are expressing regret over nude scenes they've done in conventional films, and some are clear that they outright will not do them.
What also isn't over is the sex fixated nature of certain aspects of Americans culture, even while it is over in other areas. It's interesting. We see both sides at the same time, with part of the American left simply defining itself by sexual desires in a literal sense, while at the same time, posts like this have become amazingly common on Twitter.
if someone could marry me that would be great thx
That girl isn't looking for the Playboy man, and she sure isn't the Playboy "Playmate" bimbo.
So how do you undo six decades of destruction.
Well, it probably won't be easy, but if Playboy's story teaches us anything, it seems that at certain tipping points things can and do happen quickly. Playboy wouldn't have been a success in 1943, but in 1953 it suddenly became one, and it changed views pretty quickly. That came in the wake of two world wars, a smaller hot war in the Cold War, nearly universal male conscription, and the flooding of the universities with a massive number of young unattached people. It also came just before a massive cultural rejection by one generation of the values of prior ones, and a massive infusion of money into society at an unheard of level. And it followed a bogus scientific revelation followed by a genuine scientific pharmaceutical introduction.
But there was some tipping point that was reached before the wave started to crest. Another one seemingly might be getting reached now.
We haven't fought a big war for a long time, even though we've fought some smaller ones. Our military is at its smallest level since 1939. A lot of the glamour of university life has worn off, and the post Boomer generations face economic realities that resemble the pre-1940 situation more than the post 1945 one.
A seeming rediscovery of values is going on as part of that.
Cont. part 3
Part 3 of this documentary aired last night, focusing this time on the Playboy Clubs.
Other than being aware of the existence of the clubs, at one time, and the demeaning costumes the "Playboy Bunnies" wore at them, I really didn't know much about them. This episode did a good job in providing the details.
Basically, I guess, we could term these as nightclubs with the hostesses dressed in skin tight costumes featuring bunny tails and rabbit ears. An interview with Hefner on the costumes had him note that he'd adopted the rabbit symbol as rabbits had a certain reputation at the time he did, which was a coy way of noting that rabbits engaged in the "act" constantly. The rabbit in the symbol is portrayed as male, and of course his real world female subjects were that, female.
This may say all that you really need to say about Playboy. The entire Hefner bullshit line about caring about women and women's right's was simply cover for their being viewed as living, dumb, objects of sex. That's it.
The episode showed that's in fact how Playboy Bunnies ended up being viewed. Rules for members of the Playboy Clubs, and you had to pay $25.00 initially to be a member, were strict. You couldn't touch a bunny. . .at the club. But outside the clubs, rapes of the women who worked there were common. A request by a "bunny mother" for security or at least male assistance for the hostesses leaving the clubs at night was for instance rejected.
That's bad enough, of course, but at the VIP level of membership the rules in practice evaporated. One Bunny noted that she was raped by a VIP member who was in fact immediately expelled, but another woman who later worked as a "bunny mother" noted how the bunnies were frequently sodomized with it being traumatic for them not only because it occurred, but also because in that less pornified era it was a shock for them, this act being common due to a fear that the perpetrators would get the women pregnant.
Two instances of kidnapping were noted, with women being kidnapped and raped. In one instance it can't really be blamed on Playboy, which then restricted women at that club, which was a resort, to dorms which they basically couldn't leave on their off hours, but another detailed the kidnapping by the late Don Cornelius, a VIP member who was the host of Soul Train. In that instance two new bunnies who had spent an evening with a Cornelius entourage ended up held for a couple of days in his house, being subject to abuse there, before one was able to call out. The police were not called and Cornelius did not lose his VIP membership. Cornelius killed himself in 2012 at age 75, apparently suffering from the onset of dementia, and therefore like Hefner escaped any earthly implications of his conduct.
This episode principally revealed, once again, the misogynistic nature of Playboy and Hefner. Hefner portrayed himself as a lover and defender of women, but in reality, they were tools and objects to him, and he made them the same to a wider male audience.
One thing of note there, and a significant one, this third episode featured, like the prior two, interviews with Hefner that were done by some very major figures. These include a female interviewer I somewhat recognize but can't place a name for, George F. Will, and William F. Buckley. It may not be fair to comment on the interviews overall, as they haven't been shown, but what is obvious is that he was treated like a significant figure and at least in the questions asked, he was pretty much thrown softballs or was allowed to get away with non answers that nobody would tolerate in a serious interview now. Essentially, society was winking at him.
Cont, part 4
This entry was posted earlier, then evaporated for some reason when I tried to post it. For some reason updating this thread has been a bit difficult.
Episode 4 dealt with two figures who lost their lives in connection with Hefner. One was Hefner's executive secretary who was arrested outside the mansion with cocaine on her person and later killed herself, and the other was a bunny who killed herself. Both were mixed up with drugs, and the suggestion was that they were both "mules" who were supplying illegal drugs to the mansion.
It was clear that illegal drugs were very much a thing in the mansion, in spite of Hefner's claims to the contrary. One of his girlfriends of the period made that very clear and confessed to being a mule herself.
A suggestion was vaguely made that both of the women featured may have come to bad ends externally, but there was no real evidence to suggest that, and the better evidence is to the contrary.
On a final note, it's hard not to notice that Hefner in this period has the appearance in interviews of a person whose suffering from drug withdrawals. He's highly figity, jumpy and underweight. He didn't look right during this period.
Cont, part 5
I'll make this entry relatively short, even though in some ways it may be the most telling and illustrative of the story of Hefner and the Sexual Revolution he was part of.
Part 4 of this series deals mostly with going ons in the Playboy Mansion from 1976 to 1981 and Hefner's then "girlfriend". The girlfriend immediately before that was Barbi Benton, who left in 76. The show deals hardly at all with Benton, so far, but the suggestion is vaguely made that even though Benton tolerated Hefner having serial sex partners, she kept the lid on things descending into outright depravity.
When she left, the next one, Sondra (Theodore?) entered the picture. She wasn't a centerfold originally, unlike Benton, but a 19-year-old who attended a party at the mansion with a high school friend. Hefner seduced her that night, although it seems pretty clear she allowed that to occur, and she rapidly went on to being his principal concubine.
As one of those interviewed, with Sondra Hefner was allowed to do things that he wouldn't be allowed to do with "a grown ass woman". The house descended into complete and disgusting depravity, the likes of which I'll generally omit, with Hefner often forcing what amounted to a show of which he was the voyeur.
There's a real lesson in here. Hefner claimed, during his lifetime, that he wanted to be part of a movement of his age redefining society's relationship with sex, but he never had anything deeper than that to say about it. It's pretty clear he was just a self-centered egotistical weirdo, and in fact at one point was interviewed praising being self-centered. With the rails off, which seem to have come fully off with Benton's departure, he collapsed into full scale depravity of the grossest sort. To a very large degree, the same thing has happened with American society.
Being fascinated with a person's own lust really isn't an ethos, but a recipe for destruction. That happened to Hefner's character, and it was inflicted on a lot of those around him. It couldn't have happened but for independent developments in the 1960s, including pharmaceutical ones. The central figure of this episode, his girlfriend from 76 to 81, was frank that she never recovered from her experience in those years. A larger societal recovery may be going on, but it hasn't fully occurred by any means yet.
Footnotes
*It's admittedly unusual for us to start a review of any kind prior to a series being completed, but here we've done so as the points made, and the horrors revealed, are sufficient to do so. Additionally, given schedules and what not, its very possible that we may not view the reamining parts of the series.
On this topic, it could legitimately be asked why review this documentary at all, on this site. Actually, however, its one of the very sorts of things this blog was designed to examine.
The very first entry here claimed the purpose of the blog as follows:
Lex Anteinternet?
The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new.What the heck is this blog about?The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.
How does this to comport?
Well, the blog has clearly gone beyond "the practice of law prior to the current era" and, as noted before, it theoretically is a sort of blog based research for a very slow moving novel I'm theoretically writing.
Part of that research has been to take a close look at how life really was in the 1910s, and that's expanded out to how life really was in prior eras. And part of that is social history.
That's why this topic is very relevant.
All too often, portrayals of the past are based on our concepts of values and outlooks of today, which are very often wildly off base. For this reason, particularly for badly based historical depictions, social views are expressed from a fully current. . . I wouldn't call them modern, point of view. As modern in the Western world are blisteringly fascinated by sex, and frankly a pornographic concept of sex, this sort of view is extremely common in works that are ostensibly works of historical fiction. It isn't limited to this, however. This also tends to be the case with other common aspects of society, ranging from the roles of women in society, the attitudes towards that, and frequently matters of religion as well.
As somewhat minor examples, just recently I was flipping through the channels and one of the more modern Westerns was on, complete with a female gunfighter wearing trousers. Well, not very likely. When women started to actually wear trousers, right around 1900 or so, it was somewhat of a controversial matter, and it required, to put it delicately, an evolution of undergarments.
To give another example, there is a popular television show on Vikings where they are the celebrated protagonists. To the extremely limited extent I've seen it, which is extremely limited, it not only is completely historically inaccurate, but it's also somewhat hostile to religion, by which would have to mean Catholicism as there was only one Christian Church at the time, divided into east and west though it was. In reality, the Viking era was heroically Christian and obviously so, so much so that the Vikings themselves, by the end of the Viking age, were Latin Rite Catholics.
On the topic at hand, television and Hollywood have really endorsed a sort of combined Cosmopolitan/Playboy view of women in recent historical dramas, or tend to. The women tend to libertine and more often than not sterile, in an era when neither was anywhere near true. Indeed, the irony is that many of our ancestors would regard our current conduct in this arena as not only shocking, but appalling. The further irony is that in large part the Me Too movement seeks to reach back into this prior era, where the standards they're reaching for were the social standard, even if widely ignored.
1. It's interesting that to be a "playboy" was originally a type of insult, and remained so to some degree when I was young. In its original sense it meant a superficial male who played women. It was sort of a nicer and more superficial way of saying that somebody was a womanizer.
2. Prior magazines were pretty clearly depictions of prostitutes, with all the nasty vice and lack of personal knowledge that goes with that, or of what were essentially burlesque models, whom the vieweres knew that they could look at, but never touch.
Related Threads:
An interesting example of how rationing and material shortages impacted daily life during World War Two:
It would never have occurred to me, but wartime shortages meant repairs rather than replacements, and must have been a boon to repairmen. . . when they could obtain parts.
By 1942 nearly every household in the US would have had a radio and they were depended upon for news and entertainment. They were, back in those days, fairly repairable as well. Indeed, even as late as the 1970s my father installed replacement tubes in radios and televisions we had in our house and I can recall at least one radio repair shop and two television repair shops in town.
Nothing like that around now.
Why would a major east coast storm have "an American model" and "a European model"?
Heard on the Today Show's weather report as I headed out the door, just as they were synthesizing the models.
Today in World War II History—January 24, 1942: Battle of Makassar Strait—first US naval surface action in Asian waters since Spanish-American War: US destroyers and US & Dutch aircraft sink six Japanese ships at Balikpapan, Borneo. US Flying Tigers P-40s shoot down 12 planes over Rangoon, Burma. New song in Top Ten: “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.”
The Battle of Makassar Strait was significant for the reasons noted, although the Japanese land action at Balikpapan was successful.
The Germans relieved a Soviet encirclement at Sukhinichi in a type of action that would remain common for the rest of the war.
Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan.
Abie's Irish Rose premiered on NBC. The radio comedy involves a wealthy Jewish widower whose son begins to court, and then secretly marries, an Irish Catholic girl. The theme had been a long-running popular one and this was a radio adaptation of a play that had first premiered on May 23, 1922, and then made into a film in 1928.
It would be made into a film again in 1946.
The play, written by Anne Nichols, was loosely based on her own story, although in her case she had been raised in a strict Baptist family and married an Irish Catholic man. It was an enduring American theme had appeared before, in other settings, by other authors, and would continue to be later. For example, O. E. Rölvaag had included it in his sequel to Giants In the Earth, Peter Victorious, but with the Irish Catholic girl marrying a Norwegian Lutheran. It'd repeated directly in Brooklyn Bridge, the 1990s television show set in the 1950s and would, in a different twist, be repeated in the film Brooklyn, also set in the 1950s, with an Irish immigrant woman and an Italian American man, both Catholics but of different ethnic backgrounds. In some altered form, perhaps involving somebody of Hispanic origin, it's probably ripe to be repeated.
Chiang Kai-Shek was still living at the time and officially the Republic of China sought reunification with the mainland with it as the Chinese government. In reunification, they were aligned in principle with the People's Republic of China, but only on that point. The PRC saw reunification under their banner, not the Nationalist one. As a practical matter, the U.S. Navy had precluded that from occurring following the 1948 retreat of the Nationalist to Taiwan.
The US had been a major factor in the hold out in according the PRC recognition at the UN. While the US, tired of Chiang Kai-Shek following the Second World War, and despairing of his abilities to force a successful conclusion to the Chinese Civil War, had chosen to slowly decrease its involvement with the Nationalist Chinese efforts following the war, was nonetheless shocked by the sudden collapse of the Nationalist Army in 1948. This had caused Congress, which hadn't been taking a huge interest in the Nationalist's plight, to suddenly focus on China with the "who lost China?" query becoming a tag line for conservatives. Moreover, the Chinese Red Army's recovery from eons of civil war and World War Two was evident when it intervened in the Korean War (using some formations that had been Nationalist ones earlier). A widespread assumption that the PRC danced to Moscow's tune ramped up the concern, although PRC government was plenty repressive and scary in its own right without, as it turned out, much influence from the Soviet Union.
Be that as it may, the relucatance of the US to recognize Red China as the Chinese government had reached the fairly absurd level by the mid 1960s. It was clear that the Nationalist were not capable of jumping the Straits of Taiwan and taking on the Chinese Red Army. And as the most populous nation in the world, recognition of it was overdue. This didn't, of course, accord it American recognition, but that would be on the near term horizon.
Taiwan since has developed into a parliamentary democracy and the current ruling party has an official policy of independence. Taiwan functions as a putative state, although it still is not recognized as a sovereign by anyone anymore, and it has not declared independence, that being too risky given its massive aggressive neighbor that still claims Taiwan as its own. It's now likely the longest running unrecognized state in the world, and its odd status is such that it functions as a country in everything but name. Tensions with Red China, of course, have been very much in the news recently.
From the outstanding Uncle Mike's Musings, we also learned that this is the day when PBS's Electronic Company premiered. As he states there:
October 25, 1971, 50 years ago: The Electric Company premieres on PBS. A companion piece to Sesame Street, it is geared toward kids a little older who were, by then, learning to read. As the closing tagline say, it is produced by the same production company: "The Electric Company gets its power from The Children's Television Workshop."
The show had a truly remarkable cast, which I had not realized until I read the entry.
The odd thing about this for me is to realize how little I participated in this sort of television from the era. I was just a kid when this came out, but I don't recall ever watching it. That might be because, like a lot of other television from the early 1970s, it seemed so very urban. I suppose it was all part of the "Rural Purge" of television that took place in the early 1970s.
Like The Wonder Years, I've made frequent reference to this film recently. I was surprised, when I started doing that, that I'd never reviewed it.
American Graffiti takes place on a single night in Modesto, California in 1962. It's the late summer and the subject, all teenagers, are about to head back to school or already have, depending upon whether they're going to high school or college. Some are going to work or already working. They're spending the summer night cruising the town. That's used as a vehicle to get them into dramatic situations.
The story lines, and there are more than one, in the film are really simple. One character, played by Richard Dreyfus, is about to leave for college and develops a mad crush, in a single night, for a young woman driving a T-bird played by a young Suzanne Summers. Another plot involves a young couple, played by Ron Howard and Cindy Williams, who are struggling with his plan to leave for college while she has one more year of school. Another involves an already graduated figure whose life is dedicated to cars, even though it's apparent that he knows that dedication can't last forever. The cast, as some of these names would indicate, was excellent, with many actors and actresses making their first really notable appearances in the film.
What's of interest here is the films' portrayal of the automobile culture of American youth after World War Two. This has really passed now, but it's accurately portrayed in the film. Gasoline was relatively cheap and access to automobiles was pretty wide, which created a culture in which adolescents spent a lot of time doing just what is depicted in this movie, driving around fairly aimlessly, with the opposite sex on their minds, on Friday and Saturday nights. This really existed in the 1960s, when this film takes place, it dated back at least to the 1950s, and it continued on into the very early 1980s. At some point after that, gasoline prices, and car prices, basically forced it out of existence.
For those growing up in the era, this was a feature of Fridays and Saturdays, either to their amusement or irritation. As a kid, coming into town on a Friday or Saturday evening from anything was bizarre and irritating, with racing automobiles packed with teenagers pretty much everywhere. Grocery store parking lots were packed with parked cars belonging to them as well. "Cruising" was a major feature of teenage life, and nearly every teenager participated in it at least a little big, even if they disavowed doing it. While they did this, in later years they listened to FM radio somewhat, but more likely probably cassette tape players installed after market in their cars. In the mid 1970s, it was 8 track tape players. In the 50s and 60s, it was the radio.
So, as odd as it may seem to later generations, this movie is pretty accurate in terms of what it displays historically. And, given that the film was released in 1973, a mere decade after the era it depicts, it should be. The amazing thing here is that by 1973 American culture had changed so much that a 1973 film looking back on 1962 could actually invoke a sense of nostalgia and an era long past.
The music and clothing are certainly correct, as is the cruising culture. I somewhat question the automobiles in the movie, as most of those driven by the protagonists are late 1950s cars that wouldn't have been terribly old at the time the movie portrays, but a person knowledgeable on that topic informed me once that vehicles wore out so fast at the time that people replaced them fairly rapidly, which meant that younger people were driving fairly recent models. Indeed, looking back on myself, I was driving early 1970s vintage vehicles in the late 1970s.
The music, which is a big feature of the movie, is also correct, which ironically often causes people to view this as a movie about the 1950s, rather than the early 1960s. The music of the early 60s was the same as that of the late 50s, and music from the 50s was still current in the early 1960s, so this too is correct.
This movie was a huge hit, and it remained very popular for a very long time. It's justifiably regarded as a classic. More than that, however, it's one of the few movies that influences its own times.
Already by the 1970s, there was some nostalgia regarding the 1950s. Sha Na Na, the 50s reprisal do wop band, actually preformed at Woodstock, as amazing as that seems now. By the late 1960s, seems felt like such a mess that people were looking back towards an earlier era which they regarded as safer, ignoring its problems. American Graffiti tapped into that feeling intentionally, although it has some subtle dark elements suggesting that not all is right with the world it portrays (the film clearly hints that a returned college graduate student is involved with his teenage female students). George Lucas, when he made the film, couldn't have guess however that it would fuel a nostalgia boom for the 1950s like none other.
Happy Days
The first filmed progeny of American Graffiti was televisions Happy Days, which even featured Ron Howard, who had featured in American Graffiti. Happy Days took the nostalgia boosted by American Graffiti and really ran with it in a super sanitized fashion. Set in the mid 1950s through the mid 1960s, that ran from 1974 until 1983. It was hugely popular.
Many of the same themes portrayed in American Graffiti were again portrayed in Happy Days, but in a lighter manner. The show picked up the nostalgia for cars and music and ran with it. No really serious themes were portrayed, which isn't to say that American Graffiti did much with serious themes. They are different, however, in that American Graffiti is a warm, but somewhat sad, look back at a lost era with some longing, whereas Happy Days is an outright televised sock hop. In American Graffiti, some characters really are edgy. In Happy Days, none of them are, not even the leather clad motorcycle riding Arthur Fonzerelli, "the Fonz".
Happy Days was a beloved series, so I hate to criticize it too much, but it fails in terms of a realistic portrayal of its era. If American Graffiti succeeds, it's because it portrays such a narrow slice of it. Even American Graffiti, however, brings home the era in its concluding shot, which summarizes the fates of the characters. In contrast, we'd never know that Happy Days takes place during an era when concerns about a war with the Soviet Union were constant and that many of the male figures would have been drafted and served a hitch in the Army. Where the series succeeds is probably in its minor material detail elements, such as in clothing and music.
Laverne and Shirley
Laverne and Shirley was a spinoff of Happy Days, which also featured one of the actors from American Graffiti, Penny Marshall. Running from 1976 to 1983, thereby concluding in the same year that Happy Days did, it portrayed two single women working as blue-collar bottle cappers in Milwaukee.
The interesting thing about Laverne and Shirley is that probably more accurately portrayed the lives of figures of the 50s than Happy Days did. The two young women share an apartment, they hope to get married and leave their blue-collar lives, and they're working a blue-collar job. The series, while set in the 50s, feels like it's set in the 1950s of Marty, not Happy Days, and not American Graffiti. That's actually the world a lot of young people lived in.
Other Efforts
It's probably worth noting that the success of American Graffiti followed by Happy Days spawned a large number of filmed efforts, most of which were pretty bad. Indeed, I can't think of any others that are actually worth mentioning, except for one, which was made much later and which clearly wasn't inspired by American Graffiti, that being That Thing You Do. Among the worst is one that bills itself as a "Rock and Roll Fable", Streets Of Fire, which had some notable cast members who must wish that the film would be forever forgotten.
This series looked back on a period twenty years after the time in which it ran, the late 1960s to the early 1970s, through the eyes of the protagonist, a boy who is 12 years old when the series started, and 17 when it ended. It's exactly 20 years between the airing and the show, as the show started in 1968 and concluded in 1973.
Frankly, it's a rare example of television excellence. The era was accurately depicted, from a child's prospective, which is on the day-to-day nature of daily living, and the concerns of youth, rather than on the big events of the era. The big events do work their way into the series, but it's not about them. The feel of growing up in the era is exactly correct, although my frame of reference is really from a few years later, more or less, later. Not that much had changed.
That feel, we'll note, is the subject of two prior blog posts, long ones, here, Growing Up in the 1960s and Growing Up in the 1970s. They're linked in below, and you'll see reference to this show there. You'll also get a better feel for the era in those long posts than here, but this series got that feel right.
More than anything else, the focus of kids growing up, in a period in which there had been subtle changes, and there were subtle changes going on, is precisely correct. This series probably is the most realistic depiction of Middle America in the 1970s that there is. The gap in culture between younger members of the Baby Boom Generation, Generation Jones, and the older members, the real Boomers, and the gap between the Boomers and their parents is very well and accurately portrayed. The last big example of the automobile culture and what that meant is also accurately portrayed. It's not Ozzie and Harriet, and it's not Full Metal Jacket.
A person wanting to understand this era of American culture, and on into the 1970s, really has to watch it.
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