Tag: Culture

December 21, 1946: Don’t You Know Me, Bert? Ernie?

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Frank Capra said that it was his favorite of the many movies he made throughout a phenomenal career. He screened it for his family every Christmas season. Yet it’s initial 1946 release at the Globe Theater in New York did not bring about yuletide euphoria and visions of sugar plums. It’s a Wonderful Life premiered to mixed and sometimes dismissive reviews, but it went on to become one of the most critically acclaimed films ever made, garnering a permanent spot in every list of the top films of the last century.

From its very beginning, it did not inspire great expectations. It was based on an original story “The Greatest Gift”written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939. After being unsuccessful in getting the story published, Stern made it into a Christmas card, and mailed 200 copies to family and friends in 1943.  In 1944, RKO Pictures ran across the story and bought the rights to it for $10,000, hoping to turn the story into a vehicle for Cary Grant. Grant made another Christmas movie, The Bishop’s Wife, instead, and the story languished on a shelf until RKO, anxious to unload the project, sold the rights to Capra in 1945.

Capra, along with several other writers, including Dorothy Parker, created the screenplay that Capra would rename It’s a Wonderful Life.

The town of Seneca Falls, New York claims that Capra modeled Bedford Falls after it. The town has an annual “It’s a Wonderful Life” Festival in December, a Hotel Clarence, and the “It’s a Wonderful Life” Museum. The town of Bedford Falls itself, however, was built in Culver City, California, on a 4-acre set originally designed for the western Cimarron. Capra added a working bank and a tree-lined center parkway, planted with 20 full grown oak trees. Pigeons, cats, and dogs roamed at will.

The dance scene where George and Mary end up in the swimming pool was filmed at the Beverly Hills High School. The pool still exists.

 

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December 20, 1880: Remember Me to Herald Square

Posted on by Richard Daybell

On December 20, 1880, the stretch of Broadway between Union Square and Madison Square in New York City was illuminated by electric lights for the first time, becoming one of the first streets in the country to be lit up.  It had been exactly one year since over in New Jersey, in Menlo Park, Thomas Edison had demonstrated his incandescent light.  By the 1890s, the section of Broadway from 23rd Street to 34th Street had become so brightly illuminated by electrical advertising signs, that it was dubbed “The Great White Way.”  Later, when the theater district moved uptown to the Times Square area, the name moved with it.

Broadway is the oldest north-south thoroughfare in New York City, dating back to the first New Amsterdam settlement.  The name Broadway is an English translation of the Dutch breede weg, which means something like “street of hot pretzel vendors.”  Although best known for the boulevard portion that runs through Manhattan, Broadway also runs through the Bronx and north for another 18 miles through Westchester County to Sleepy Hollow.  There are countless landmarks along the route, but the one that first springs to mind this time of year is Macy’s Herald Square department store, between 34th and 35th Streets, where Christmas begins with Macy’s annual parade,  and its windows spectacularly celebrate the season.

Talk About Holiday Spirit

On December 20, 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle mailed out 30,000 Christmas cards with the inscription “May our nation continue to be the beakon of hope.”

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December 18, 1966: You’re a Mean One

Posted on by Richard Daybell

grinch-thumb-525x325-23201In 1957, the most infamous Christmas curmudgeon since Ebeneezer Scrooge made his debut in a picture book called How the Grinch Stole Christmas by the amazing Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel). It marked the first time an adult had been featured as the main character in a Seuss book and the first time a villain had starred. The book has remained a classic since then. Some conspiracy theorists suggest (and the doctor concurs) that the Grinch is Dr. Seuss himself. In the story, the Grinch complains that he has put up with the Whos’ Christmas celebrations for 53 years. Dr. Seuss was 53 when the book was written and published.

Several years later, on December 18, 1966, the furry misanthrope, now a sickly shade of green, was ready for prime time – television, that is. Chuck Jones of Warner Brothers cartoon fame brought the story to living room screens featuring Boris Karloff as narrator and Grinch. In addition to providing the story, Dr. Seuss created the lyrics for the songs featured in the animated special. (The songs were sung by Thurl Ravenscroft, who some will remember as the bass voice on Rosemary Clooney’s  “This Ole House” or Tony the Tiger – “They’re grrreat!”)

The word grinch has found its way into dictionaries as a person whose lack of enthusiasm or bad temper spoils or dampens the pleasure of others. “Noise, noise, noise, noise.”

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December 14, 1977: You Are the Dancing King

Posted on by Richard Daybell

He was just another juvenile delinquent in a television sit-com, before he became a superstar playing a nobody by day who blossoms at night on the dance floor.  John Travolta strutted his stuff as Tony Manero, a paint-store clerk who dons a dashing white suit to ride the disco craze out of his dead-end existence in Saturday Night Fever. The film premiered on December 14, 1977, already guaranteed success thanks to its soundtrack, released months before the movie.

The disco songs recorded by the Bee Gees (including “Stayin’ Alive”) were all over the pop charts, sparking intense interest in the film before its release, with the film then popularizing the entire soundtrack after its release – the first (and certainly not the last) use of cross-media marketing.

 The movie follows Tony’s foray into the Manhattan world of flashing lights and sweaty bodies. Disco and the culture of the disco era also star in the movie – the symphonic orchestration over a steady beat and disciplined choreography, the high style in clothing, and the sexuality of it all.

“Travolta on the dance floor is like a peacock on amphetamines,” said movie critic Gene Siskel, who bought Travolta’s famous white suit at a charity auction. “He struts like crazy.”

The film had an R-rating when it was originally released in 1978. Several years later it was edited down to PG  to make it more “family-friendly” and suitable for television.

A Practical Gift Idea

Just trying to help. This one’s about sticking pins in little dolls to get what you want.

Click me, I dare you

December 13, 1931: Which Side Are You On?

Posted on by Richard Daybell

“I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry.”

So said the man who would become a larger than life British statesman, leading Britain through World War II and  remain a major player on the world stage into the 50s.  He very nearly didn’t make it there, thanks to the perils of New York City traffic.

It was 1931 and a low point in Churchill’s career.  At the age of 57, he had been pretty much banished by his own Conservative Party and had begun to devote himself to his writing.  He had sailed to the United States to give a series of lectures on “the Pathway of the English-Speaking Peoples.” On December 13, the night before one such lecture scheduled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he hailed a taxi and set out to visit a friend, financier Bernard Baruch.  He got out of the cab on Fifth Avenue between 76th and 77th Streets.  He walked a bit, then attempted to cross the street against the light (which no New Yorker would ever do).  He looked to the right, just as he would were he crossing King’s Road or Carnaby Street, saw no oncoming traffic and and kept walking.  An unemployed mechanic named Mario Cantasino was just as surprised as Churchill when the car he was driving slammed into the future Prime Minister and dragged him several yards, leaving him lying in a bruised and battered heap.  Churchill took full responsibility for the incident, and Contasino was held blameless.

After a little more than a week in the hospital and a few weeks of recuperation, Churchill finally gave his Brooklyn lecture on Jan. 28.  On one bright note: the United States being subjected to the agonies of Prohibition at this time, his American doctor wrote a note to “certify that the post-accident concussion of Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times.”

Following his lecture, Churchill and his wife, seeking further rest and relaxation, traveled to Jamaica, a place where folks thankfully drove on the proper side of the street.

Bet They Don’t Have One of These

Wretched Richard offers a blatantly self-serving gift idea for those who have everything:

Just a Click Away

December 11, 1969: The Naked Cold War

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were generally confrontational through most of the second half of the last century.  In the United States, Communist plots were everywhere, and the Soviet Union blamed American capitalists for most of the ills of the world. On December 11, 1969, a noted Russian author lashed out against western decadence in one of the more unusual cold war recriminations.

On December 11, 1969, Sergei Mikhailkov, secretary of the Moscow writer’s union, known for his books for children, weighed in against the production of “Oh! Calcutta!” that was currently an off-Broadway hit. Performers in their “birthday suits,” he fumed, were proof of the decadence and “bourgeois” thinking in Western culture.  American nudity was an assault on Soviet innocence.

Oddly enough, those Americans throughout the Midwest who didn’t think the play was about India were convinced it was a Communist plot.

More disturbing, Mikhailkov raged on, was the fact that this American abomination was affecting Russian youth. These vulgar exhibitions were “a general striptease that is one of the slogans of modern bourgeois art.” Soviet teens were more familiar with “the theater of the absurd and the novel without a hero and all kinds of modern bourgeois reactionary tendencies in the literature and art of the West” than with “the past and present of the literature of their fatherland.”

Mikhailkov’s outburst came at the end of a conference of Russian intellectuals, who applauded his remarks without visible enthusiasm before returning to their clandestine copies of Fanny Hill.

 

 

December 10, 1851: Decimal Dalliance

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Wild and crazy guy Melvil Dewey was born on December 10, 1851. It’s pretty well known that librarians are party animals, and Melvil was a librarian at no less a place than Amherst College. It was there that he made a name for himself and had his groupies screaming in the aisles.

Back in the Dewey day, ordinary people visiting the library weren’t allowed to go rummaging willy-nilly through the stacks – that’s library lingo for the shelves of books. So your librarians could do pretty much what they wanted to do back there in the stacks, and rumor has it they wanted to do quite a lot.

Melvil was a pretty popular guy back there in the stacks. He had invented this neat numbering system for library books which allowed them to be found without an exhaustive search through the stacks. Book searches could last days (even without fooling around). “I think I last saw Moby Dick down at that end across from the Dictionary of Republican Ideas Unabridged.” Under Dewey’s system each book was cataloged by its subject matter, first with a general number and then additional numbers after the decimal to get more specific – a place for every book, every book in its place. The more places after the decimal, the more important the book, or so authors were led to believe.

Well, when Dewey showed his system to groups of librarians they just got all excited and swooned right there on the spot – we all know how sexy decimals are. Dewey’s reputation grew and pretty soon everyone wanted to wander the stacks with Melvil the Hunk. He just had to whisper “shhh” (the mating call of the wild librarian) and unsuspecting librarians would follow him anywhere, even down to 613.9, and we know what goes on down there.

Dewey was also into spelling reform; that’s why he changed his name from the usual “Melville” to “Melvil,” eliminating redundant letters. For a while, he even changed his surname to “Dui.” Was there no limit to this guy’s depth?

 

December 8, 1959: Battle of the Smellies

Posted on by Richard Daybell

During the 1950s, movie studios were grasping at any gimmick to lure eyeballs away from television and back into theaters. One gimmick that seemed to be a favorite among movie-makers,  judging by the frequent attempts (usually unsuccessful) to use it was the sense of smell.

Individual theater owners had played around with smells off and on aromafor years, using various makeshift techniques such as spraying perfume in front of an electric fan. But the first use of odor as created by the producers of the film itself didn’t come until the December 8, 1959, premiere of Behind the Great Wall, a travelogue featuring the sights, sounds and, yes, odors of China. The odors were provided by a process called AromaRama. On the heels of this movie, came another film cleverly titled the Scent of Murder, touting the wonders of Smell-O-Vision. (We also had Scentovision and Smell-O-Rama.) Variety called the competition “the battle of the smellies.”

In an interview, the inventor of AromaRama gushed: “More than 100 different aromas will be injected into the theater during the film. Among these are the odors of grass, earth, exploding firecrackers, a river, incense, burning torches, horses, restaurants, the scent of a trapped tiger and many more. We believe, with Rudyard Kipling, that smells are surer than sounds or sights to make the heartstrings crack.”

Well, maybe. There were a few glitches early on. Faulty timing might give you a picture of a steaming bowl of jasmine rice that smelled like that trapped tiger. And the distraction of a hundred or so members of the audience simultaneously and loudly sniffing. Even though most of the bugs were ironed out, the whole idea never caught on, despite occasional attempts to revive it (including one notable high tech process that provided audiences with scratch and sniff cards along with instructions on when to scratch and when to sniff).

Those fun-loving folks at BBC jumped on the bandwagon in 1965, airing an April 1 interview with the inventor of a process that allowed viewers at home to experience aromas produced in the television studio. In a vivid demonstration, he chopped onions and brewed a pot of coffee, then took calls from viewers who had experienced the transmitted smells. (Note the date.)

Even BBC couldn’t slow the demise of AromaRama et al, however. In 2000, a Time magazine survey listed it as one of the “Top 100 Worst Ideas of All Time.”

December 7, 1970: Cartoonist (A) Draws Invention (B)

Posted on by Richard Daybell

He is probably the patron saint of inventors everywhere – or at least their idol – for his uncanny ability to devise an incredibly convoluted method to carry out the simplest tasks. In fact the Merriam-Webster dictionary adopted his name as an adjective in 1931 meaning just that, to accomplish something simple through complex means.

Rube Goldberg died on December 7, 1970, at the age of 87, leaving a legacy for inventors and cartoonists alike. He was a founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society and is the namesake of its Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year. In 1948, he won his own Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning.  And he is the inspiration for many competitions challenging would-be inventors to create machines using his scientific principles.

Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin offers a typical scenario for a Rube Goldberg invention: A soup spoon (A) is raised to the mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking a ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and lights automatic lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M) and allow the pendulum with the attached napkin to swing back and forth, wiping the user’s chin.

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December 5, 1933: Let the Good Times Roll

Posted on by Richard Daybell

At 3:32 p.m., Mountain Standard Time, on December 5, 1933, Utah ratified the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, the 36th state to do so (close on the heels of Pennsylvania and Ohio). It was the magic number required to repeal the 18th Amendment. Booze was back. The so-called noble experiment, 13 years worth of national prohibition of alcohol in America, had ended, having been pretty much a dismal failure.

Prohibition was supposed to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health, hygiene and good manners throughout the country. Instead it ushered in the likes of Al Capone and made a lot of ordinarily law-abiding citizens petty criminals. We got bootlegging and speakeasies, moonshine and bathtub gin.

By the early 1930s the electorate had pretty much demonstrated a profound distaste for abstinence. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for President in 1932 pledging repeal, it was bye-bye tee-totaling Herbert Hoover. The new President celebrated with his own dirty martini.

Alas, it wasn’t freedom from sobriety for everyone. Several states continued Prohibition with state temperance laws. Mississippi didn’t join Tipplers Unanimous until 1966.

A few observations overheard on the occasion:

“I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here is one I would suggest: “Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.” ― George Carlin

“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”― David Sedaris

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker

“When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.” ― C.S. Forester

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.” ― Benjamin Franklin

“It’s 4:58 on Friday afternoon. Do you know where your margarita is?” ― Amy Neftzger