Pulitzer Prize – Wretched Richard's Almanac

JULY 3, 1954: WHOOPS, THERE GOES THE FIRST PROP

Posted on July 3, 2024June 24, 2024 by Richard Daybell

In 1954, a gaggle of Hollywood VIPs boarded a DC-4 airliner headed from Hawaii to California. Their troubled flight made a bit of film history — in Cinemascope, no less. The High and the Mighty premiered on July 3, 1954, with a roster of stars that included Claire Trevor, Robert Stack, Laraine Day, Phil Harris, and shepherding them through the sky, John Wayne.

Introducing the scenario that would be used so successfully by the Airport movies of the 1970s as well as countless other disaster movies, the film details the lives and interactions of the passengers and crew when calamity strikes the flight. Calamity comes in the form of a ‘whoops there goes the first prop’ moment and another, followed by a nasty engine fire. Co-pilot Wayne leaps to the fore and (spoiler alert) guides the plane to its destination. And what happened to the pilot, you ask. The pilot, played by Robert Stack goes all squishy and useless (probably because Wayne produced the film and Stack didn’t).

Stack, incidently, showed up in a 1980 film that brought the air disaster genre to its illogical conclusion. In Airplane he stays on terra firma trying to talk an experienced pilot through a landing: “Striker, listen, and you listen close: flying a plane is no different than riding a bicycle, just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes”.

Composer Dimitri Tiomkin won an Academy Award for his original score of The High and the Mighty. The title song was nominated for an award but did not win.

MIAMI WIT

Dave Barry, born July 3, 1947, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and humorist who wrote a nationally syndicated column for The Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has also written numerous books of humor.

• The word user is the word used by the computer professional when they mean idiot.

• If you were to open up a baby’s head – and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should – you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

• Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it’s open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

• Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.

• Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.

• The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs.

• Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

January 24, 1940: From This Valley They Say You Are Leaving

Posted on January 24, 2024January 17, 2024 by Richard Daybell

One of the greatest American films of all time, based on one of the greatest American novels of all time, premiered on January 24, 1940. John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath based on the Pulitzer Prize novel, tells the story of the Joads who lose their Oklahoma farm during the 1930s Depression. They load everything they own into their 1926 Hudson and make a formidable journey across the United States in search of work.

Memorable performances include Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, John Carradine as a preacher who’s “lost the spirit,” and the amazing Jane Darwell in an Oscar-winning portrayal of Ma Joad. It’s her words that conclude the film.

The book was written by John Steinbeck was born and grew up in Salinas, California, a part of the fertile region he would later call the Pastures of Heaven in a collection of short stories and the setting for many of his works. The Nobel-winning novelist was born in 1902.

His first critical and commercial success was Tortilla Flat set in and around Monterey, California, and featuring a small band of ne’er-do-well paisanos living for wine and good times after World War I. The novel was a sort of rogue’s tale, full of rough and earthy humor. From here Steinbeck moved on to more serious portrayals of the economic problems facing the rural working class in the social novels for which he became known — In Dubious Battle in 1936, Of Mice and Men in 1937, and his most important work The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, the saga of America’s migrant workers.

Steinbeck’s California did not take kindly to his portrayal. His books were banned, and in his hometown, twice burned in public protests. In fact, his books were banned in schools and libraries throughout the country and continued to be well into this century. Steinbeck was one of the ten most banned authors from 1990 to 2004 (according to the American Library Association). The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men are both in the top ten banned books of all time. They’re most likely being ripped from Florida bookshelves as we speak. Along with Mickey Mouse

Later novels include Cannery Row, East of Eden, Travels with Charley, and The Winter of Our Discontent. Steinbeck died in 1968.