The Voice of Generation Jones

There are times when perhaps we should retitle our blog just that.

Members of Generation Jones, including myself, in about 1965.

I hadn't realized that what I've been calling "the Gap Generation" has actually been defined as "Generation Jones" and that it's actually pretty well-defined.  Indeed, according to Wikipedia:

Generation Jones is the social cohort^[ of the latter half of the Baby Boomer Generation to the first years of Generation X.  The term Generation Jones was first coined by the cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who identified the cohort as those born from 1954 to 1965 in the U.S. who were children during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation rather than during the 1960s, but slightly before Gen X.

Yup, that's about right.

And so is this:

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

Many came of age during the 70s and early 80s. They shared similar pop culture and MTV with Gen X'ers. They were young adults navigating the workforce in the 80s and 90s, but still felt the 2008 economic crisis. This hit them hard because they had to help and advise their older Millennial children while also providing for their younger Gen Z kids.

* * * 

Key characteristics assigned to members are pessimism, distrust of government, and general cynicism.

Yup, again.

And of potential interest: 

Though there are few studies on voting behavior with respect to Gen Jonesers during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles in the U.S., a general distrust of the government and cynical voting behavior tracks well with this cohort's majority support for Donald Trump, who was seen as a boisterous political outsider, in 2016. However, the cohort shifted left 2020: (Mr. Pontell says) Mr. Trump’s fumbling response to the Covid-19 crisis ... hurt him with Jonesers, who are part of the demographic most at risk from the disease ... And ... Mr. Trump’s cruel mocking of Joe Biden’s senior moments (offended them). “There are lots of seniors out there that also have senior moments,” Mr. Pontell says. “They don’t really like the president mocking those one bit.”

If I were to quibble, and indeed I'm inclined to do so, I'd not put the floor in 54, as those folks came of age in 72, when the Vietnam War was still on.  Indeed, I'd put the floor in 56.

Having said that, it's interesting to read this short synopsis, and frankly it has a lot of merit to it.  Taking a look deeper, I'd add a few things, and then I'll expand on that.  Indeed, I think it explains a lot why those of us in this generational cohort bristle at the thought that we're part of the Boomers.

Let's look again.

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was a few months old. I have no personal memory, rather obviously, of him at all, and the phrase "everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot" might as well be stated about James A. Garfield in so far as my personal memory goes.  And, while it might surprise people who are old enough to remember him, for those of us in my generation he supplies no sort of inspiration at all.  

My mother, I'll note, really admired Kennedy, and continued to admire Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she followed.  My father, however, was never particularly impressed with Kennedy, although a Mass card was among the collection of things in his dresser drawer.  If I heard about a President that my parents both admired at home, it was most likely to be Truman.  What I was left with, regarding Kennedy, is that he was Catholic like us (which my mother would bring up), that he came from a family that my father regarded as a bit dicey in some ways, that he had questionable personal morals, and that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was stupid.  Lyndon Johnson got better overall marks.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was another matter.  Everyone admired him, but he seemed like a character from the distant past.  Even with King, however, I'm pretty sure all my memories about King came from learning about him in the 1970s, probably starting with junior high or high school, and from the cultural background after he'd been killed.  When he was living, I didn't know of his existence.  Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, at which time I was five, and I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than that I can remember riots being on television from 67 or 68, and these may have been the 68 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King.

Indeed, the Civil Right Era, which was in full swing when I was born, seemed like something that had happened within recent American history, but far enough back it was very removed from our modern lives.  That I recall that shows my very early recollections of the times, times that "Baby Boomers" were supposedly living.  The civil rights movement wasn't something I participated in, in any fashion.  Nor was the "Camelot" atmosphere of the Kennedy Administration.

The same thing could be said about the Vietnam War, sort of, modified by the fact that it was really long.  I have some very early recollections of the war, including that a son of the couple who lived across the street was a paratrooper who was serving in Vietnam.  I mostly recall that as he had been dating, literally, the girl next door, and when he went on leave during the war he went to Hawaii, and she flew out to visit him, which was a topic of conversation in my parents home.  I also recall a sign on a door that stated "War is harmful to children and other living things", which I recall as it was such an odd thing to see in a place where nobody outwardly opposed the war.  I was in school at the time, so that may have been actually observed in the 1970s, however.  By the early 70s, and maybe even the late 60s, the background of the war was constant and so even the young were fully aware it was going on.  But it was the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 that I really recall, although POWs returning in 1973 or so is pretty vivid as well.

The earliest thing of the "60s" I really directly participated in was the July 20, 1969, moon landing, which we watched on television.  Kids were fascinated with space at the time, and we all participated in that.  For me, personally, the next thing I really recall was the televised scenes of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock.  But you really have to get into the 1970s, with the US invasion of Cambodia, that I was old enough to be aware of what was going on in the world and the culture.

That in turn means that it was really all the way into the 1970s before people like me were aware of what was up, and had a feeling about it, and that came with the backdrop of the 1970s.  Indeed, the experience is depicted really well in the television series The Wonder Years, which is specifically set from 1968 to 1973.  That means that it involved children who were older than I was, but the setting was pretty accurate.  And keep in mind, that I'd place the high school graduating class of Generation Jones as starting at 1976, whereas The Wonder Years is dealing with the class of 1974.   I debated where to put that line, but 74, the year after the active participation in the Vietnam War for the US ended, would be another good place to put it.  All in all, it has the feeling right, and the characters would have a little more of the late stages of the Vietnam War whereas folks in my line would have a little more of the rampant inflation of the 70s.

In any event, The Wonder Years does a really good job of showing how the "60s Generation", the real Boomers, were observed from Generation Jones from the outside.  We didn't participate in the events of the 60s, but they were background.  I've touched on this in a way, in a long thread regarding my early years, Growing up in the 1960s.  Indeed, in that I noted:

The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the (American portion of the) Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, two Kennedy assassinations, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. . . all of these are things that remain fresh in the nation's memory and as long as there is a member of the Baby Boom generation still with us, they will continue to.  Youth rebellion in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany and France, combined with a rejection of conventional morality by some of that demographic combined with the introduction of "the pill" also reach back as long influential developments.  Finally, in our list, the Second Vatican Council concluded making changes of debated nature to the practices of the Catholic Church, impacting the 2,000 year old foundational Christian religion in ways that are still being sorted out and which are still hotly debated as to their merits.

So that all must have really been something growing up, right?

Well, that's another topic, isn't it?

We're all impacted by the years in which we grow up. It cannot be denied. I've often noted here that a person's personality is basically fixed by the time they're five, and they're going back to that personality, one way or another, sooner or later.  And part of what influences that personality is the era in which we are young.

But only part, and perhaps not in the way we might imagine.

In really real ways, the central events for the Baby Boom Generation, that defined that generation and its view of the world, were like a hand grenade thrown by that generation and its events into a room we were in.  It blew up on us.

We didn't fight in Vietnam, but might have known somebody who had a family member who did.  The impact of the war on us wasn't the lost cause in Vietnam, but an ineptitude and uncertainty about the American place in the world that followed it.  If it was more direct, it was the Laotian kids at school who showed up and kept to themselves, strangers in a very strange land, guest of the nation that had helped wreck their nation.  Experimentation with drugs wasn't something cool and enlightening, but a cancer that had crept into society and was wiping out the minds of the young, including kids who were hauled out of junior high and high school as they were them.  The revolution of the 60s had torn things down, but it didn't build up anything in its place.  We hadn't participated in the counter culture, but by our early teens we were aware of it, and it had its remnants in the girls who still wore elephant bells after their time had passed.

And we didn't participate in an American economy that was the strongest in the world as the world was still recovering from World War Two. By the time we were young enough to be aware of the economy, it was suffering from inflation 

And all of that gets back to something noted above.  General skepticism.

Like the entry noted, we have memories of Watergate, the Nixon resignation, the failed Carter Administration, the fall of Vietnam, the withdrawal from Saigon, boat people, the Iranian hostage crisis, and rampant inflation.

We're not looking back on that with nostalgia.

We also have memories of lives wrecked with drugs and a drug culture that never went away.  We watched the 60s promise of a "counter culture" kill its members and then continue on to the present day and keep on killing.  We heard of the "sexual revolution" and then grew up to watch it continue to corrode society and carry on to the modern era in which all that some think about is their glands.

And we graduated into an economy with no jobs.  Unlike our older Baby Boomer predecessors, we never enjoyed an economy in which simply holding a college degree meant that a "good job".  We had to scramble to find work, and going to college, in our era, involved none of the revelry that the college experience supposedly had come to mean in the 1960s and 1970s, but a landing approach on an economic carrier in stormy seas . . . maybe you were going to make it, or maybe you were going to wreck.

Indeed, we ended up resembling The Silent Generation more than any other.  That generation came after the "Greatest" Generation that fought World War Two, and experienced that horror, and the Great Depression, as background to their childhood, like we experienced Vietnam, the Counterculture, and the like.  And we were focused, like they were, on getting by.

Also, like the Silent Generation, we didn't have a sense of rebellion against anything. We'd seen that, and it didn't work out, and we bore the brunt of its failures.  The Silent Generation hadn't rebelled against the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation, the two generations that its parents were drawn from. Generation Jones didn't rebel against the Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, which its parents were drawn from.  We mostly hoped just to get by, and were very much aware of what had been lost.

We still are.

Prior Threads:

Growing up in the 1960s

La Ancien Régime

It's not like this column has the readership of one by George F. Will or something where I need to worry, really, about its presentation, but I'll note that this is one of a couple of posts I've brought in and out of the Zeitgeist thread and have ended up posting it as a single thread, because of its nature, I guess.

I have a recent thread on our Monday At The Bar series about a bill that would raise judicial retirement ages.  I'm against that.  I'm pretty convinced, by this point in time, that such thoughts are a byproduct of two or three things operating in American society, one being the weird American belief that everyone is going to grow old with their body's and minds fully intact.  Americans want to believe that everyone is 20 years old, right up to the moment they die at age 120.

The other is the Baby Boom generation's refusal to let go. The same generation that didn't want to trust anyone over 30, when they weren't 30, now doesn't want to trust anyone under 60.

Which brings me to this.

During the last election, there was a Republican undercurrent that Joe Biden was either senile or approaching senility, a highly ironic position given that there were many who suspected that nearly as old Donald Trump wasn't right mentally himself.  Indeed, both men have been highly studied, although on the back burner, by their opposing camps and both of those camps have the ability to argue that the opposing figure just isn't who he used to be.

Whether or not that's correct we are at a point where the evidence is now really in.  The nation really has to turn the leadership of. . . everything over to younger people.  

Joe Biden's Presidency so far has been a complete mess.  Starting off with real hope in some quarters, things are now off the rails in all sorts of ways.  Trump and Biden combined, and it was both of them, operated to make the withdrawal from Afghanistan a complete route, wasting decades of American effort in a retreat that will forever be remembered for how badly it was done.  Trump's meandering in the early part of the Coronavirus Pandemic, which was somewhat understandable at first but which turned into a bizarre "look at me not wearing a mask" series of photo ops has left Biden with a gigantic public health mess which he now needs to address, but the messaging has been very bad on it.  Biden needs to win the inevitable court challenges on his new OSHA mask policy, and get it enforced, or he will look hopelessly weak and that will fuel the left/right divide that's wrecking the country.

Trump took a lot of criticism for his very aggressive border policy but Biden's reaction, started when he was still a candidate, was a muddled open the border policy, no matter what he might claim about that now, which is swamping the border and leading to a giant humanitarian crisis.  If Biden didn't want to be as rigid and aggressive as Trump, he didn't have to be, but his counter policy was going to create a disaster, and it did.

Legislatively, the Administration has taken a strong economy, which was damaged by the pandemic, and inserted inflation into it but will not yield in a way that will address that, leaving trying to get some order into things in the hands of a single Senator  Much of this is in order to attempt to bring in a set of policy goals which are his right to back, as he's the President, but it's all happened too slow to really effectuate them.

So the point?

Well, this.  This administration is really close to dissolving into complete ineffectiveness.   Biden may turn out to be a gift to Republicans the way that Jimmy Carter was.  But only if the GOP gets over their own  old man.

Which brings us to the second point.  We're now on year five of administration by really old men, one a populist who had no prior government experience and who was scary from time to time, and one a neo left-winger who is ineffectual.

Theodore Roosevelt was 42 years old when he became President.  Franklin Roosevelt was 51.  Ronald Reagan, who seemed ancient at the time, was 69.  Most Presidents have been in their 50s when they took office.

There's a reason for that.

It's only in the last decade, as baby boomers reached their 70s, that a cult of antiquity took over the nation's politics at the highest level.  Since then, it's extended into everything, and the legislature is about to ask the people of Wyoming to amend the constitution to extend it to the bench.

The opposite should be occurring.

Funny thing is, Americans are now acclimated to this.  I mentioned this to a colleague the other day, and specifically referenced Sanna Marin, the 35-year-old Prime Minister of Finland. The colleague was shocked, demeaned Finland as an irrelevant country, and then went on to say that a President needed "some experience".

Experience relevant to the times, yes.

To another time. . . well not so much.

And to be mentally agile and capable as well.

The 2021 Canadian Election. . .

 was held yesterday, returning Justin Trudeau to office for some reason, with pretty much the same parliamentary results as last time, meaning he continues to run a coalition government.

Canadians questioned why Trudeau, who was hoping for a majority, called the election at this time.

Monday at the Bar. Two judiciary bills, one good, and one bad.

 Two bills went through a Wyoming legislative committee last week and received unanimous support.  

One would add three judges to Wyoming's judicial stable. That's an excellent idea.   The bill would bring a fourth judge to the 7th Judicial District, which is a great idea.  This would help reduce judicial work load, or rather overload, which is a good thing for everyone, even people who don't have any connections with the courts, or don't think they do.

The other bill would raise the judicial retirement age from 70 to 75 years of age. 

That's an absolutely horrible idea.

To set the background, consider this.

Right now, people of 75 years of age are those people born in 1946.  They entered school, if they entered it at the typical American age of five years old, in 1951, the second year of the Korean War.  They graduated from high school in 1964, prior to the United States' major troop commitment in Vietnam.  Those attending university at the time had a deferment, so if they went right on to university, and not all did, they would have graduated from that in 1968, if they progressed at the regular pace.  The draft had changed in the meantime and some would have accordingly gone on to service in the military, but if not, and they had the regular course of progress for lawyers, which many lawyers do not, they would have become lawyers in 1971.

Almost every lawyer who graduated from law school in 71 was male.

I note this not to suggest that there will instantly be a bunch of 75-year-old judges, but to point out what this would mean if we'd adopted this, say, a decade or two ago.  There's some enormous societal and psychological pressure for those on the bench to remain there until retirement age.  Most would have done it.

I've been practicing law for 31 years.  When I started, and even a decade or more ago, almost all the judges were men.  In my state they're still 100% white, FWIW, save for the associate judges in Tribal Court.  Even in Tribal Court, the Chief Judge has gone from being an enrolled tribal member to a white member of the state bar, which is no doubt as there are so few practicing enrolled tribal members.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this does reflect racism or sexism. What I am saying is that the bench reflects the social reality of the times during which judges are appointed.

Indeed, the last two Governors made a full court press to try to address the gender imbalance on the Court, with one of them being highly open about that.  At least for a decade or so the number of women who have been graduating locally from law school has been somewhat higher than men.  It's still the case, however, that far more men are lawyers in the state than women.  But in the younger demographics, this isn't the truth.

And this points out further than appointments tend to point out the social condition of the era.  If appointments were made purely on experience, length of practice, etc., they'd still be mostly male.

Now, I don't want to go too much further into that, as it bring up some touch issues.  Is balancing out the gender of judges really serving an overall social need and goal, for example?  I'm not going to touch that.

But what I am going to do is touch this.  If judges are too old, they're not judging over the society they're from, really.

That's okay, I guess, if we want the bench to be a reservoir of societal memory and tradition, which perhaps we do.  It's not okay, however, if we want the court to have a more direct connection with the conditions of those it is judging over, which I think we do.  At age 75, for example, the children of the judge will be approaching old age themselves and their grandchildren will be full on adults.\

Indeed, this operates in an odd way on both of the appointment philosophies that involve age.

At one time, quite a few judges were appointed from the end of their careers as lawyers, with the thought being that they were distinguished lawyers by the time they'd hit their early 60s, and that they'd bring that talent to the bench while they were still able to do so.  Indeed, given the length of the term of appointment, 8 years for the Supreme Court, 6 years for the district court, and 4 years for the circuit court, quite a few judges would have gone through only one election to judge on their retention, if they were appointed with the noted philosophy.  Indeed, not all that long ago I had a mediation in front of a retired judge who had in fact been appointed in that fashion and who may have only served one full term, or at the very most, have served parts of two terms.  There's nothing wrong with that at all.

The other appointment philosophy, however, has been to appoint younger judges who will last long beyond the Governor that appointed them.  This way, the Governor's judicial philosophy will reflect itself for decades.

Raising the retirement age would skew both of these goals.  For a Governor who wanted to appoint jurists in their 50s to reflect their experience, he now will be in a situation of judges simply never retiring and then lasting longer than expected.  For a Governor who may be appointing a jurist at age 40 or so, it means that they'll serve seemingly forever.  Indeed, on that, if this had been the system, there would undoubtedly be judges on the bench now who had been there before I was admitted to practice law 31 years ago, an astounding thought.

And frankly most people at 75 aren't the people they were, physically, and mentally, at 55, or 45.  This is just a simple fact.

The bill to add judges seeks to do so as the work load is so heavy for the current ones.  One interviewed noting on weekends and nights, something very common, FWIW, for practicing lawyers.  Do we really expect 75-year-old judges to work weekends and nights? 

And do we want to guarantee that some judges spend their final session on the bench with dementia, as this would do that.

Indeed, we all well know that dementia, for those who are afflicted with it, can come on as early as the 50s with some unfortunate people, and for others set in during their 60s.  But it really starts coming on in the 70s for those who end up with it.  Age 75 is an age where we expect those who might come down with it to have come down with some signs.  But it's also the case that frankly the public, which has plenty to do otherwise, doesn't pay that close of attention to the bench, so average people are really unlikely to know a judge has dementia and vote him out of office.  Lawyers are likely to know, but rarely do they mount a campaign to remove a judge at the polls.

Indeed, there's recently been a case of a Judge in another state sentencing a party in a case and then leaving the bench within days after that, with that example involving a judge who was only 54  years of age. There's no reason to believe that the sentencing was impacted by the judge's early onset dementia, but it's become an issue.

One out of every eight Americans over age 60 has some reduced mental capacity.  Once you are up over 70, it's 25%.  Over 85, which of course is beyond the age we're speaking of, it's 50%.  Things being what they are, and particularly with an influx of Colorado lawyers in Wyoming who have a reduced need to preserve a good relationship with the court if the needs of their case aren't served by it, do we seriously believe that this wouldn't become an issue again and again for aged jurists. And indeed, at some point, it legitimately will be, in at least some cases.

Besides the fact that it's just gambling with a societally important role.  As it is, judges in their last decade of service have something like a 1 and 8 chance, if the statistics can be applied, of suffering to some degree from impairment. That strikes me as an acceptable risk.  A one in four chance?  Not so much.

And finally, why would we want to do this?  It's not the case that all legal talent is somehow vested in the Baby Boom generation, and it would seem we would want to maximize the opportunity to have lawyers enter the judiciary prior to their being ancient.  Indeed, a better case, quite frankly, can be made for depressing the retirement age, not lowering it.

Saturday September 20, 1941. The HMS Audacity In Action.

HMS Audacity

A notable event occurred when a Grumman F4F in British service, and deployed from the Royal Navy escort carrier HMS Audacity, shot down a German Fw 200 bomber.

Today in World War II History—September 20, 1941

The Audacity was a converted German merchant ship and had gone into service in July, so she was a new vessel.  She was the first of her kind.  Escort carriers were a game changer in the Battle of the Atlantic, as carriers with them in their convoy could carry their air umbrella with them.

The United States built the bulk of escort carriers during the war, with the type being numerous enough that eventually they joined battle formations in addition to providing escort duties.  Ships built for the British reflected British naval conditions, in that unlike the American ones, they did not feature an ice cream maker or washing machines.

Tuesday, September 20, 1921. The News Desk.

The news desk was born when KDKA radio station and the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" newspaper created the first "news room" and "news department".

KDKA's broadcasting room in 1921.

The station still exists and has a talk radio, news format.

July 1, 1921 Field & Stream. A missed magazine cover and what it tells us about language and cluture.

This was one of the numerous saved threads I hadn't gotten back to, and then July 1 came and went, and I forgot about it.  Instead, as that day deal with the Chinese Communist Party, there was a big old hammer and sickle that appeared as the art for that day.

Wish I'd remembered this one.

This does bring up a bit of an interesting topic, or at least two such topics, one linguistic and the other cheesecake oriented.

Depictions of women fishing, and let us be more precise and say depictions of pretty young women fishing, are at least as old as print magazines in popular culture.  They're considerably more common than depictions of women hunting, even though fishing is simply fish hunting.  We sometimes forget that English has various words for various types of hunting, as fishing is the only one we commonly use to separate it out from hunting in general.  But there are others.

Fowling, for example, refers to hunting birds and was once a fairly common term. Offhand, I can't think of another sort of hunting other than fishing which is named for the prey, but there are some types that are named for the method.  For example, falconry, that type of hunting done with falcons, is named for the method.  Trapping, which is a controversial type of hunting that has been controversial my entire life, also is.

Of interest in this general topic, hunting of various types was so important in the Medieval era, when people started to first acquire family names, that various things associated with it or the practice itself gave us a series of last names that are still with us. This shows the degree to which it was significant, and even elemental.  Just as we have the last name "Farmer", for example, we have the last name "Hunter".  Noting that English is a Germanic language, and that this evolution occurred at the same time all over Northern Europe, and Europe in general, the same occupations are reflected in the common German last names of Bauer and Jaeger or Jäger.  It ought to be noted here that the last name Hunger more accurately reflects its Medieval origins, however, than "Farmer", as farmer actually meant "renter" at the time, reflecting that farmers tended to be tenants, if not actually serfs.

Jäger, interestingly, shows up as an English last name as well, in the form of Yaeger occasionally.  A name that sounds related, Jagger, isn't.  That name is a Yorkshire name meaning a horse packer.

Fisher, of course, also shows up as a last name, as does the German equivalent Fischer.

Falconer also shows up as a last name, that being for a person who kept and hunted with falcons.  Falconry was expensive back in the day and its pretty likely that anyone who was a falconer was in the permanent employment of a noble, so it's different from simply being a hunter or fisher.  The same occupation gave us the name Hawker as well.

Another name last name that may have a hunting origin is Bowman.  We tend to think of bows as military weapons, in a Medieval context, but in reality they were by far the most common hunting weapon at the time and, moreover, keeping standing armies was extremely rare.  While armies did employ bowmen in times of war, those guys were in other occupations the rest of the time, and they were likely using their bows for hunting.

Indeed, the significance of that may be demonstrated the only other weapon of the period which I can think of which reflects itself in a last name is Pike.  It would seem obvious that the name must derive from the weapon of that name, but it apparently isn't clear that this is the case.  It might be a corruption of "peak" or it might actually refer to the fish.  On that, Trout occurs as a last name, and it apparently stems from fishing for trout.  I.e., a person named Trout, back in the Middle Ages, was a trout fisherman, showing the importance of the species.  On the other hand, maybe Pike refers to the weapon, including its importance in Medieval warfare.  No other weapons directly resulted in last names, however, if that's the case, although the knife did give us the German last name of Messer.

Well so much for names.  Let's talk about clothing, or the depiction of it.

As noted above, depicting female fishermen was pretty common in the early 20th Century.  The depiction above is a little unusual in that the subject is deep sea fishing, but then deep sea fishing depictions in general were a little unusual.  Usually fishing subjects were fishing streams, or maybe rivers.

Depictions of women fishing early in the 20th Century weren't very different from those depicting men.  If you go all the way about to around 1900, they are different as women didn't usually wear trousers and therefore they're sometimes depicted wearing the bulky clothing of the day, fishing, which would have been extremely difficult, in actual practice.  By World War One, however, they were usually depicted just like men, with both tending to have the outdoor clothing, rather than the work clothing, of the day.  No doubt there were men, and women, who went out to the streams fully equipped with the period outdoor clothing, which tended to feature breeches and very high boots, but my guess is that most fishermen simply went out with the sort of clothing that they wore when mowing the lawn or working in the shop.

I note this as in the world of Reddit, Twitter, and Istagram, if you have any interest in fishing, you're going to be assaulted at some point with a photograph of a woman fishing wearing a bikini.

I don't know if any women really fish wearing bikini's. They don't fish wearing bikini's in the L.L. Bean or Orvis catalogs, that's for sure, and I've never seen a female bikini clad angler myself.  Of course, I don't have a boat, and maybe they're all on boats, rather than on your typical Wyoming stream or river where you'd be eaten alive by insects if you tried that.

Which brings me to this, wearing hardly anything outdoors is stupid in general, very stupid when you are more or less on the water where there's no shade, and who wants to smell all over like a fish?

All of which leads me to believe that such photos are in a certain category of adolescent male driving soft pornography, much like the weird Japanese cartoon depictions of World War Two ships as young women.  Maybe some young women on boats wear bikinis, but I bet they do it only once.

I was fishing the other day in a deep Wyoming canyon, the last fishing trip I'll make of the season, probably, as hunting season is now on, and even though I'm license impaired as I didn't draw anything, I'll be doing that on general tags.  On my way out, I encountered a young woman hiking in.

You could see she was a serious fisherman. She was carrying her pole in its tube and had on a large brimmed fishing cap of the type that's somewhat unique to fishermen, and wearing dark sunglasses.  Even from across the stream, and down in the canyon from where I was, you could also tell that she had on one of those bug and sun resistant pull on shirts that some fishermen now wear.  

She looked like a real fisherman of her vintage. I.e, one of the young fishermen in their 20s.

She was looking for a way down the canyon.  I pointed to a place up stream.  She nodded her head in affirmation. 

Friday September 19, 1941. The Germans take Kiev

On this day in 1941 Kiev fell and with it 500,000 soldiers of the Red Army went into captivity.

Only shortly before this, the Germans had put Soviet POWs on a lower ration scale than those provided to POWs of other nations.

A massive geomagnetic storm caused spectacular nighttime light displays and disrupted radio and telegraph communications.

The Best Post of the Week of September 12, 2021.

 The best posts of the week of September 12, 2021.

Thursday September 11, 1941. The Buskø Affair.

Misconstruing the arguments: Was Monday At The Bar. Misconstruing the law

The 2022 Election Part IV. The Ring

Blog Mirror: A Politically Most Incorrect Truth About Childcare

A Note On Compulsion.

Wednesday September 17, 1941. Destruction.

Äyräpään kirkko, oikealla maantie. Äyräpää 1941.09.17 (Äyräpää church, road on the right. Äyräpää 9/19/1941).  The church was a Lutheran Church, that being the predominant Chritian faith in Finland.  This village was ceded to the Soviet Union following World War Two and nothing of it exists today.

On this day in 1941, Werner Heisenberg and Danish scientist Niels Bohr had some sort of conversation about something.  According to Heisenberg, it was about atomic weaponry. According to Bohr, it wasn't.  Both men, who knew each other well, were attending a conference.

Bohr would flee to the United States, through Sweden, and then the United Kingdom, in 1943, as the Germans tightened their restrictions on Danish Jews.  In the US he'd be involved with the Manhattan Project but was not one of the physicists who was stationed with the project.

The U.S. Army dropped paratroopers in maneuvers for the first time, that event coming in the war games in Louisiana.

More on both of these can be found here.

Today in World War II History—September 17, 1941

Also in the item above, on this day the Germans began the deportation of Jews out of the formal Reich.

The USS Hornet was in dry dock.

Hopeless optimism.

American Solidarity Party 

@AmSolidarity

·

5m

Plenty of votes still left to count, but so far James Hanink has 5,100 votes in the California recall. That's a good bit ahead of our last gubernatorial campaign and ahead of a large part of the Republican field. Thanks to all of you in the Golden State for your support.

Ummm. . . so that's good news? 5,100 votes?

Not exactly, well, not exactly even significant.

A Note On Compulsion.

There seems to be a widespread belief in the United States that the government has never compelled people to do stuff that they'd rather not do, and that this is deeply ingrained in American history.

This is quite contrary to the truth.

The first muster of Colonial militia.  You were in it because you were a male sixteen years of age or older.  No conscientious objection.  No moral exceptions.  No exceptions at all.  If you were a man, you showed up.  Professionalism, in the depiction, probably exaggerated.  Cat. .  probably not.

Now, this obviously comes about due to the recent actions by the Biden Administration to compel wider vaccinations.  What you believe on the justice of that is up to you, and I'm not commenting on it. That's up to you.

Rather, I'm commenting on the myth, and it's a real fable, that the government, or more properly governments, cannot compel you to do something of this type, and never has before. That's wholly incorrect.

Indeed, even in the category of vaccinations and quarantines, the nation has a long history of government compulsion. At one point during the Revolutionary War George Washington issued an order compelling his soldiers to receive dangerous live small pox vaccinations.

Compelled them, that is.

And that vaccination method actually was dangerous. Some people contracted small pox from it and died.  He reasoned the danger to the health of the army outweighed the danger to anyone individual, and the soldiers were vaccinated.

And since that time there's been over two hundred years of the government compelling members of the military into various health regimes.  I myself have been vaccinated by the U.S. government twice for small pox and once for yellow fever, even they didn't ask my opinion on it at all.

Okay, you are likely saying, that's the military, and the military is subject to a separate provison of the constitution, but. . .

Well, all sorts of government bodies have compelled vaccinations of children for decades. Parents protested, but the vaccinations occurred anyhow.  This is why diphtheria, for example, doesn't really exist anymore.

And the government has compelled quarantine orders as well, up to and including simply imprisoning some infectious people for the balance of their lives.  Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary" provides one such example. She was employed as a cook until determined to be highly infections and then put in a sanitarium for the rest of her life.

And going back to the military, it's well established that the government can compel you to serve in the military even if it means you'll get killed.  Contrary to what people probably believe, the United States government has been much more muscular about that than other English-speaking countries.  The Australians and Canadians, for example, didn't conscript during World War One at all.  They both did during World War Two, but it was only at the very end of the war, when manpower needs exceeded those willing to volunteer for overseas service, that such soldiers were made to serve overseas.  The US, in contrast, conscripted right from the onset of World War One, something the British didn't even do at the onset of their involvement, and we conscripted prior to our entry in World War Two.

Registering for the draft, 1917.

Indeed, up until after the Civil War, every American male served, by compulsion, in their local state militia no matter what.  You had no choice.  You were in it. And if that meant they mobilized you to go fight the British, or the Mexicans, other Americans, or Indians, your opinion on it wasn't asked.

The government can, beyond that, compel you to provide other services.  Conscripting people right off the highway to fight forest fires, for example, is something that's within living memory of Americans today.  I personally know one person who was compelled to do just that.

Drilling rig crew in 1941, before OSHA required them to wear hardhats, steel toed boots, and fire resistant clothing.

And, right now, the government compels all sorts of people to wear hard hats, fire resistant clothing, and the like.  It compels children to receive some sort of education, no matter what their parents might think about it.  It compels everyone to pay for all sorts of things, from school lunch programs to nuclear arms, no matter what they think about that.

So why is this belief so common?

I don't really know, but part of it is that we don't know our own history.  Even regular histories often claim that the Civil War conscription act was the nation's first, totally ignoring that there was universal male compulsion to serve in the militia at the time, which is a type of conscription.

And part of it simply is that the current population is young enough to have forgotten all the various compulsory acts noted above.

When I was first a student in school, for example, we were vaccinated at school.  This was the late 60 and early 70s.  Since then this has just been rolled into regular health care provided by family doctors, so hardly anyone under their late 50s remembers a time when you were lined up and given shots at school, or a sugar cube with the polio vaccine. And it wasn't once either, it was more than once.

And you have to be my age as well to recall when people still really remembered the "draft" as a real thing.  I can recall the draft being eliminated in the early 70s, and Jimmy Carter restoring draft registration in the mid 70s.  People actually worried about being drafted, even though the Selective Service Act wasn't actually operating in that fashion.  It was a real thing.  Perhaps it was a real thing because so many of us had fathers, uncles or even older brothers who had been drafted.  An uncle, for example, "volunteered for the draft" in the late 1950s, serving in the Army just before I was born.  My father volunteered for the USAF in the early 50s, but he was subject to recall until the early 1970s when I recall his being released from the Individual Ready Reserve, something he'd been kept in for nearly 20 years.  When I served in the Guard, we were frequently told about how this worked in regard to our "obligor" period of six years, which every American male had, and also told that irrespective of our Guard service fulfilling our obligor duties, we were still subject to recall as veterans.

Indeed, the government doesn't really make us do much, directly, in terms of service anymore.  And that has a real impact on things.  Since the conservative Reagan administration of the late 70s and early 80s, there's been a really strong and growing societal belief in indivdiual liberty being predominant over collective needs.  We'll note the 60s below, but if we look at it over the long haul, collective security predmonated in the 10s, waned as a societal goal in the 20s, and then roared back from 1929 through the early 1960s.  This was all in response ot external threats, but it's very clear that Americans in most of the early 20th Century were pretty willing to have a strong government role in lots of things up to and including telling people what to do in order to meet a collective goal.  Starting in 1976 this really started to retreat and has been in retreat every since.  The current view of indivdiual liberty is much stronger than it was prior to that time.

What the government none the less still does does do is to make us serve in all  sorts of additional camouflaged ways, through taxes and regulations. 

The Great Depression had the impact of making the generations that lived through them really comfortable with both.  Tax rates were high all the way into the 1980s, and it wasn't until then that people really groused about it.  The regulatory state came in during the 1930s and has never gone away, but again it really wasn't until the 1980s that people complained about it.  By and large, Americans were really comfortable with big government and its role all the way up until the mid 1970s.  Something happened then.

What that something is, isn't clear, but the disastrous Vietnam War may have been part of it, combined with a  Baby Boomer generation that at first rebelled against the government telling it to do anything.  Indeed, the same basic impulse that lead the counterculture to assert that nobody could tell them what to do as it was contrary to "Freedom", as an extreme left wing ideology, isn't really very far from the same impulse on the far right.  They're basically the same concept.  If the government and the culture can't, for example, tell you not to smoke dope or drop LSD, well it can't tell you not to get vaccinated.  Kris Kristofferson was completely wrong when he wrote "freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose", but those lyrics as a counterculture anthem sung by Janis Joplin probably ring truer for the right, than the left, today.

As part of that, this is also the era in which Roe v. Wade became the Supreme Court imposed law of the land.  Roe represented an evolution of legal thinking, albeit a poorly drafted and intellectually muddy one, but one that held that a person had a certain sovereignty over their own body that couldn't be violated by the government.  This was really a wholly new, post World War Two concept, as prior to that the law really didn't have the view that being "secure in your person" extended to a sort of radical sovereignty over your own body.  Indeed, much of the law that existed prior to Roe in this regard still exists, which makes the reasoning of Roe all the weaker.

It can't be denied, however, that Roe opened up the floodgates to all sorts of "my body, my choice" type of arguments.  Prior to the mid 20th Century the law regulated all sorts of individual conduct in this area.  Cohabitation was generally illegal, if not widely enforced, there were considerably more restrictions on marrige than there are now, and we're not referencing the shocking racial ones of the time.  Many acts in thsi area, i.e., sexual acts, that are unaddressed by the law now, where then.  All of this was regarded as a perfectly valid topic for the law.  Radical sovereignty over ones own person is actually, therefore, a very new concept in American law and American's concepts of the law.

All of this creates an interesting situation in which it may simply be the case that American society reacted to decades of strong government influence at the same time that the Supreme Court started to have a liberal sense of libertarianism.  The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so the combination of the two brought about a rigth wing libertarianism that relied in part o a left wing judicial libertaranism, the latter of which never sought to to inspire the political former.

And, of course, the strong identification of the "individual" has always been there in American culture, even if it's very much a myth in a lot of ways.  Daniel Boone, braving the frontier, all by his lonesome, remains very much part of us, even if he didn't brave the frontier by his lonesome.

Now, again, I'm not telling people what to think in regard to vaccines here.  I'm not even telling people that they should submit to them or not.  Rather, what I'm trying to do, and likely failing at, is placing the argument in context.

It just isn't the case that it's an American thing to be free of the government telling you exactly what it demands of you in an emergency, at least it hasn't been for much of our history.  The government has been doing that since the time the Congress was the Continental Congress.  So that part of the debate shouldn't be in the debate at all, or if it is, what it should be the case is that it should be recognized as part of the societal revolution that came about in the 1960s and 1970s..  And if it is discussed in an historical context or a libertarian context, it should be remembered that such debates have wider impacts.  

That is, if it really is against something, either Natural Law or Constitutional Law, to tell you to get a vaccination, to what else does that apply and are we comfortable with that?  What else can the government not really tell you to do, and how much of what it is telling you to do now, can it really not?  Is this really a call for the application of traditional American concepts of liberty, or is it an advancement of libertarianism?  And do we want that.

Or should we be debating something else, or framing this debate differently.

Anyway its looked at, we may be seeing one of the great societal shifts in views at work.  After the Civil War the United States Supreme Court massively expanded the ability of the government to act in every aspect of American life, but then, following the end of Reconstruction, it went in the other direcdtion and restricted it.  It remained restrictive in its views until the Great Depression, when it went roaring in the other direction.  In the 1950s through the 1980s the Court became very liberal and acted to forciably expand what it argued were rights, and while sections of the public very much reacted to it, by and large that was accepted.  It nonetheless helped spawn the Tea Party movement and right wing populism and libertarianism which has been very much in the news recently.

But disasters tend to operate towards central governmental power.  There was early resistance to the expansioin of government power in the 1930s but by the 1940s that resistance had more or less evaporated.  The heat of the Great Depression and then World War Two caused that.  There was very little concern abotu the large role of the government in the 1950s and 1960s even as resistance to the Vietnam War occured in that latter decade.  The real reaction to long government expansion, as already noted, only came in the late 1970s and 1980s.

What about now?  The legislature is about to convene in a special session and lots of state attorney generals will be suing over the Biden orders.  Many individuals feel that the orders violate individual liberty, with many having concepts, as noted above, that really only date back a few decades.  At the same time, in some regions of the country, support for government action on all sorts of things is stronger than it has been at any point since the 1930s.

As we write this, the state legislature is getting ready to go into a special session.  A result of that special session will be to reinforce the widespread view that the Biden Administration is acting unconstitutionally.  History's example here, however, suggests caution.

The convening of legislatures following the 1860s election which sought to exercise state sovereignty over Federalism in reaction to Lincoln's eletion and the coming restrictions on the expansion of slavery brought about instead the Civil War and its immediate end.  I don't mean to suggest that vaccine requirements and slavery are in any way similiar, but the example of a state attempt to restrict Federal authority resulting in violence first and a massive expansion of government authority tells us something.

The same example could be given by way of the 1950s and 60s efforts to oppose Federal civil rights expansion, which resulted in a reaction in Southern states that was far from successful.

Opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal not only didn't succeed, but was effectively crushed with even the Supreme Court coming around to his views, providing another example.

Somebody should put a "Proceed With Caution" sign up in Cheyenne.   And a review of American history would be a good idea prior to October.

Thursday September 16, 1971. Look magazine announced that you wouldn't be able to look much longer.

Look magazine announced it was cashing in its chips and ending publication on October 19.

Look was a big glossy magazine that competed with Life.  It had been respected but by 1971 it was in a steep decline.  I can recall my parents, who were subscribers, being both amazed and incensed when it declared in its declining era, that our hometown, Casper, Wyoming, was the "bikini capitol of the world", a rather farfetched assertion.

Japanese farmstead, early 1950s.  Not much different, I'd note, from Korean ones of the late 1980s.

Three Japanese police offers lost their lives and many more were injured in a clash with Japanese students over the seizure of 2,663 acres of farmland for the construction of the Narita International Airport. That facility was to serve as a secondary facility for Tokyo.

Saturday September 16, 1961. The Tempest

 

Radar image of Typhoon Nancy.

Typhoon Nancy hit Honshu, Japan.

The U.S. Navy dropped sliver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther to test the hypothesis that the substance would weaken the strength of hurricanes through cloud seeding.  Initial results looked favorable until followup study revealed that Nancy had weakened all on its own, Navy intervention notwithstanding.ians, executed by hanging.^[72]

September 16, 1951. Tragedy

 The crash of a F2H-2 Banshee off of Korean, September 16, 1952.  Seven lives losts.

Tuesday September 16, 1941. The fall of Reza Shah.

Reza Shah, the Shah of Iran, his country invaded and occupied by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in their interests, and what they deemed, ultimately correctly, the greater interests of humanity resigned in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. 

A victim, essentially, of World War Two.

The Shah had lived in an Iran that was marked by the post Communist variant of the Great Game.  Following the Russian Revolution, the British had intervened, unfortunately unsuccessfully, in the Russian Civil War through Iran, and in turn the early Soviet Union occupied parts of the country. Things had declined to such a state that the Red Army was making plans to advance on Tehran in January 1921, which caused the British commander in the country to elevate Reza, a half Georgian Persian Cossack commander, who soon used that elevation to effect a coup, although he held the position of minister of war in the new administration.

By 1925 he was in a position to overthrow that government, with the intent to create a republic on the new Turkish model.  Upon obtaining control of the country, however, he was dissuaded from that, to history's regret, by both the British and local Muslim clerics.  He curiously ruled thereafter in a Napoleonic fashion, being a liberalizing dictator.  He was a supporter of women's rights within the country.

An autocratic ruler who had come to power through the British and the Persian military, he could not endure the humiliating defeat by the British Army and the Red Army, and on this day resigned.  He lived the rest of his life in exile, dying in South Africa in 1944. His son would rule, of course, until Iran's Islamic Revolution.

On the same day, Iran broke diplomatic relations with Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy and Romania, all nations within German control, or within its orbit.

The Germans decreed that they'd murder 50 to 100 Communists as a reprisal for every German shot on occupied territory

Wednesday September 16, 1931. A consumate liar.

On this day in 1931, the Texas Senate passed a resolution calling Louisiana Governor Huey Long a "consummate liar".

Long probably wasn't bothered by the declaration.

If nothing else, I guess it shows that political wackiness is nothing new.

On the same day, three gunmen members of the Purple Gang were killed in Detroit in the Collingwood Manor Massacre.

Friday, September 16, 1921. The Russian Immigrants

Refugees, no doubt, from the horrors of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

No names.  How did their story work out, and where are their descendants today?

Blog Mirror: A Politically Most Incorrect Truth About Childcare

The British Adam Smith Society doesn't fear to tread where it will meet with criticism, that's for sure.

A POLITICALLY MOST INCORRECT TRUTH ABOUT CHILDCARE

Perhaps, in a way, that's because in the modern UK the views of Adam Smith are so much on the outs, so it can sort of safely tread where it will meet with flak.

Anyhow, this raises a really good point, one which we constantly see here in the US.  The logic train, normally raised by progressives, is, as follows.

Raising children is expensive; and

This causes some people, normally women, to drop out of the workplace rather than endure the expense; and

These are women who are likely married, or at least have a stable "partner"; and

They're lost to the workplace for a period of years; and

For "single" women this is a huge burden.

All of that is true.

Which is followed by "gosh, the government needs to do something about this." The "something is often fund daycares, which is a solution to a nonexistent problem.

Nonexistent?

Yep.

More accurately, it's the proposed solution is an affliction of an injustice upon the responsible.  People just don't like saying that, or can't bring themselves to admit it.  It's additionally the subsidization of industry.

Stripped of all its niceties and reduced to reality, what it really amounts to is the following.

Raising children is expensive, but it comes about by way of a voluntary act either undertaken by two people knowing what the results will be, or at least where they should know what the results will be. Society doesn't participate in that act, individuals do. And;

Having the maximum number of people in the workplace, simply as a factor, serves capitalism.  It doesn't serve individuals at all, except by way of their own personal economics; and

For some, those economics are better balanced by one person staying home; and

For others, they've entered into the child-rearing project with limited economic means, which is tragic to be sure, but something people encounter constantly in all sorts of ways.  That unfortunate situation isn't remedied by passing off the economic burden to those who aren't in that situation.

Not that this hasn't occurred to a large degree already.  School breakfasts programs, for example, amount to a large-scale transfer of a parental responsibility to society at large.  At one time, even the poorest in most communities would never have sent their children to school hungry.  Now its widely held that this is the burden of society.

Indeed, progressives, while they will rarely admit it, essentially have the world outlook that all the sacrifice of life should be eliminated and transferred to society at large, where the richer will then be forced to sacrifice for the less fortunate through taxation.  In the child-rearing area, this essentially makes the economic responsibility of child-rearing a nullity passed on to people who don't know the children at all.  That's an injustice.

And more than that, it's an injustice on the parents.

Raising children is sacrifice.  An excellent recent edition of Catholic Stuff You Should Know that referenced fatherhood noted that, in the case of their own fathers, that they'd simply accepted sacrifice for their children, and didn't worry about its fulfilling their own personal needs, or something like that.  The sacrifice was willingly undertaken and a superior good to their own needs.

By acting contrary to that, societal programs have been and are defeating that notion.  The entire propaganda regarding women exiting the workplace to raise children is very much along these lines.  Ironically, in this area, progressives and those on the left are amazingly capitalist, essentially taking the line from Ben Hur, "you live to serve this ship" into the economy. Women, or anyone, dropping out of the workplace is a tragedy as the workplace is the greatest good.  It's the one place that Marx, Lenin, Mao and company can join hands with industrialists.

Except it isn't very human, or just.

Stuff like this has actually reduced the value of work itself, by maximizing the number of people in the labor pool, and its badly damaged the family to the point which in some demographics it nearly doesn't exist.  

Nobody wants to look back, but here people really ought to.  Before all this really got rolling  the reality was that most children were born to married couples and most married couples remained married. They provided for their children themselves, no matter what that meant.  Unfortunate women, and girls, who became pregnant either ended up marrying the father (if you are as old as me, you definitely know at least some couples that came together this way), or the child was given up for adoption (and if you are as old as me, you definitely know at least some people who as infants have this history).  Rarely, and it was quite rare, a woman undertook to raise a child themselves, but when they did so, it meant they likely had the very strong backing of their own parents.

It'd have been better if we stuck with that.  It would be better, but darned near impossible, to restore that situation.  Expanding the opposite is a mistake.

Wednesday September 15, 1971. The introduction of Woodsy Owl and Boopsy

Riffing off of its successful Smokey the Bear campaign, the Forest Service introduced Woodsy Owl to combat pollution, to which to some extent essentially meant littering in context.

An assembly of Spanish Catholic clergy demanded the establishment of grater civil rights in Spain. 

In Saigon, a devastating nightclub explosion occurred.  It was blamed by the government on the Communists, but some local business owners attributed to rogue ARVN soldiers acting as extortionists.  

The first actions by a group now known as Greenpeace took place as the protest activist group set sail to protest US nuclear testing in the arctic.

BD introduced Michael Doonesbury to Boopsy for the first time in the cartoon Doonesbury.

Monday September 15, 1941. Things that fly

 

British airborne training, 1941.

British parachute units were officially created on this day in 1941, with the 1st Brigade coming into existence.

British airborne forces came about due to the British being shocked and impressed by German airborne operations in 1940.  Ironically, the Germans themselves had come to the conclusion after Crete that losses were too heavy in airborne operations to be sustained, and determined not to conduct them after that. While German airborne units remained, they increasingly became merely titular as the war went on, although they retained an airborne capacity for some time. By the end of the war, they really lacked one.

In contrast, the British started up airborne forces and went first with commando units before establishing regular army formations.  To some degree this is responsible for the ongoing categorization of airborne units as elite, or sort of commando like, as the British airborne became the inspiration in various ways for almost all airborne units that came after them.

The Germans reestablished the Peenemünde Army Research Center. Its origins went back to the 1930s, but it had been suspended as a facility for a time.  It was reestablished on this date.  The facility would be responsible for German military rocketry.

The Orson Welles Show, which went by a variety of names during its run, went on the air for the first time.   The show was not the same one as the famous Mercury Theater of the Air, which was also on the radio.