‘I Saw Lee Surrender’

Seth M. Flint, an 18-year-old bugler with the Union Army, was present at the truce ending the Civil War. In 1940, Flint, the last living witness, wrote his recollections for the Post, highlights of which are excerpted here:

Read the entire article "I Saw Lee Surrender" by Seth M. Flint with William Ross Lee from the April 6, 1940 issue of the Post.
Read the entire article “I Saw Lee Surrender” by Seth M. Flint with William Ross Lee from the April 6, 1940 issue of the Post.

Grant calmly receives a historic letter from Lee:

Grant handed the paper to a staff officer, who hurriedly scanned the words. Evidently the staff officers construed this to be assurance of surrender, for every last man of them burst into cheers. The only one who took no part in the impromptu celebration was General Grant, who merely looked on with bland amusement.

A party of Union soldiers rides to meet Lee:

It was not difficult to recognize the famous commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. It was the face beneath the gray felt hat and hair that made the deepest impression on me; I say this because I can still recall it vividly. … Despite its sternness on that day of long ago, I would still call his expression benign. And yet, I remember well that there was something else about him that aroused my deep pity that so great a warrior should be acknowledging defeat.

Grant arrives at the house of Alexander McLean:

Grant looked an old and battered campaigner as he rode into the yard. His single-breasted blouse of blue flannel was unbuttoned at the throat and underneath it could be seen his shirt. His top boots were spattered with mud, and splotches of mud were on his trousers. Unlike Lee, he wore neither sword nor sash, and the only marks of his rank were his shoulder straps.

The day was very warm for early April. Spring was with us at last, and the trees were putting on a tinge of green, the buds showing plentifully on the branches. It was good to be alive on April 9, 1865, and it would be better still if this was the end of four years’ war. … The Sabbath stillness brooded over the land, a welcome relief from the din and hustle and carnage of recent fighting.

That night when I sounded taps, that sweetest of all bugle calls, the notes had scarcely died away when from the distance — it must have been from General Lee’s headquarters — came, silvery clear, the same call; and, despite the sadness of the hour to the boys on the other side, I have a notion that they, like the Yanks, welcomed the end of hostilities and the coming of peace.

Robert E. Lee on his horse (Traveler)

Robert E. Lee on Traveler
J.C. Leyendecker
January 20, 1940

A day later, Union horsemen mingle casually with officers in gray:

I remember how amazed I was as I saw that strange company; and when I learned that among them were Longstreet, Pickett and Gordon — well, it certainly seemed impossible.

Perhaps you can imagine my reaction to the spectacle, after three years of desperate fighting, to see three of the most famous Southern leaders, within 24 hours of Lee’s surrender, shaking hands with Grant and chatting like long-absent neighbors with him and other Federal generals.

How Abe Lincoln would have enjoyed that confab! Like Grant, he would have grasped the hands of those soldiers in Confederate gray and welcomed them back home. Had he been spared, there would have been no Reconstruction.

Soldiers don’t carry hatred; they leave that to the stay-at-homes. We learned that in the next 20 years.

Gimme a Break!

Illustration of luggage and canoe piled on top of station wagon
Shutterstock

Iwas thinking the other day of everything that’s changed since I was a kid. Some people don’t like change, but I’m not one of them. To believe something shouldn’t change is to say it can’t be improved, and I don’t know anything that can’t be made better with creativity and work. Of course, with every rule there is an exception, and the exception to this one is spring break. Spring breaks have changed a lot since I was a kid, and not for the better.

When I was growing up, schools held their spring break on Holy Week, culminating in Easter. Sometimes this was in March, and sometimes in April, on the first Sunday after the first paschal full moon following the spring equinox. Don’t ask me what a paschal full moon is, just take my word that Easter doesn’t happen until it does.

In those days, spring break provided the interlude between cold weather and warm. We would carry our sleds down to the basement and carry up our bicycles; remove the storm windows and store them in the barn; rake the winter debris from underneath the bushes; bring down the box fans from the attic; tune the mower; then haul the swing from the barn to the front porch. It was a working vacation, but still beat school all to pieces.

Today, families from Indiana, my home state, take their kids to Florida, but Florida wasn’t even invented when I was little, so we stayed home and worked. Our respite came on Good Friday, when my mother would bundle us in the car and drive us to Beecham’s on the town square to buy a suit for my brother Glenn who was six inches taller than the rest of us and got a new suit every Easter while we, his hapless brothers, wore his suits from Easters past. Four pencil-thin boys in dark-gray suits, our hair slicked down with Vitalis, looking like a gospel quartet, like the Dixie Hummingbirds, except for being white and from the north. On Saturday evening we dyed Easter eggs, then went to Hook’s Drugs five minutes before it closed to buy marked-down chocolate Easter bunnies, jelly beans, and plastic grass. We would stop at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on the way home for our weekly confession, enter the confessional to shout out our sins to Father McLaughlin, who was deaf as a rock, then drive to Burger Chef for a fish sandwich.

The point of spring break is to relax. But when relaxation is a goal, it becomes a task, a grim obligation, like a prostate exam.

The spring-break-in-Florida craze was just taking hold when I was in high school, when the Piersons, who lit their cigars with $20 bills, flew — yes, got on an airplane and flew! — to Florida where they sat on the beach an entire week, then returned to Indiana darker than chocolate Easter bunnies. Now the Florida trend includes everyone but the Amish, who sensibly stay home while the other parents pile in their cars on Friday after school and drive through the night to Panama City, where they arrive the next morning, exhausted, crabby, and hating their children. They do this for those same children, who, if they don’t go to Florida, whine about being the only children left in town, bored stiff, friendless, ridiculed for being poor and having stupid parents.

When I was a kid, parents didn’t care what their children thought of them, so children had no leverage and had to do what their parents said. Then self-esteem was invented in the 1980s, the balance of power shifted, and parents had to keep their children happy and let them do whatever they wanted. Father McLaughlin would fall over dead if he were hearing confessions today.

The problem with spring break today is that it’s planned to the nth degree. It now has a point, to relax. But when relaxation is a goal it becomes a task, a grim obligation,like a prostate exam. Hence the white-knuckled drive to Florida, the insistence on fun, the making every moment count, the reckless spending, then returning home exhausted. Getting exhausted at home didn’t seem nearly as tiring, and I would return to school, my mind renewed, crossing off the days until summer and my emancipation.

News of the Week: Mulder, Voice Mail, and Millennials

The X-Files Is Coming Back!

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson Featureflash / Shutterstock.com
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson
Featureflash / Shutterstock.com

Apparently the truth is still out there,mill because Fox is bringing back Agents Mulder and Scully for a six-episode miniseries later this year. Stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, along with creator Chris Carter, are all back on board. Production will start this summer and the show will probably air later this year.

Having it come back for just six episodes is probably a good idea, so they can tell a contained story and not have to have the actors commit to an entire season. If you watch it, they’ll make more. The night it debuts, be ready for Twitter to implode.

Do You Still Use Voice Mail?

I’m not a boomer and I’m not a millennial. I’m part of Generation X, so I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be in the “voice mail” camp or the “text message/social media” camp. But I’m firmly a fan of voice mail, still, even if certain family members continue to call me and not leave a message, assuming I’ll scroll through my phone (a landline) when I get home to see who called and couldn’t bother to leave a message.

In this video, MarketWatch pits a boomer and a millennial in a voice mail vs. smartphone battle. I’m not sure why the millennial in the video finds voice mail “terrifiying” (or why Kermit the Frog is on the computer screen behind the boomer), but it’s right that people of different ages communicate differently these days. What do you use? Let us know in the comments below.

By the way, “millennial” never looks like a real word to me when I type it.

Blast Off!

Russian Carrier Rocket (Shutterstock)
Russian Carrier Rocket
(Shutterstock)

Later today, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly — twin brother of astronaut Mark Kelly, who is married to former Arizona Rep.Gabrielle Giffords — will take off for the International Space Station. The launch will take place via a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan, and Kelly will be accompanied by cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka. They’ll spend a year in space, testing the affects of weightlessness on the body. Why such a long period of time? Because one day we’ll be going to Mars, and it takes a while to get there.

CBS Sunday Morning interviewed Kelly about his trip and got a tour of a mock up of the space station. There’s no way I could spend a year up there for the bathroom situation alone.

All the News That’s Fit to “Like”

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

A few years ago I discovered that a lot of people actually think Facebook is the Web. That’s where they “live” online: posting pics, chatting, messaging, finding out what their friends are up to. It’s their “home,” and they see no difference between Facebook and the rest of the online world. I predict that one day Facebook will actually BE the Web, and now the social network is taking another step toward that goal.

Facebook is talking to various news outlets, including The New York Times, National Geographic, and BuzzFeed, about hosting content directly on Facebook. In the olden days (last week), a news organization would post a link to a story on Facebook that would take them to the news organization’s site. Now certain content will be housed inside of Facebook. Now you’ll never have to leave!

I’m all for newspapers and magazines making deals that will help them survive in the digital age, but this scares me. And I’m not the only one. Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic thinks it’s a bad idea, and so does Gawker. The New York Times, one of the companies in talks with Facebook, has a good breakdown on the good and bad aspects of such a deal.

I worry about giving too much centralized news power to one place like Facebook, and I’m also unsure how things like pay walls, subscriptions, copyright, and content that goes against Facebook’s terms of service would be handled.

Tomorrow Is National Something on a Stick Day

I first assumed that the “something” had to be food: a corn dog, cotton candy, a Popsicle, a candied apple. But apparently the day celebrates anything you can put on a stick. If this catches on, you can expect to see a lot of selfies that celebrate the day on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

Taken with a phone on a selfie stick, of course.

Upcoming Anniversaries and Events​

President Reagan Shot (March 30, 1981)
Wikipedia has a detailed account of what happened that day, and here’s video of ABC News and their live coverage with anchor Frank Reynolds.

April Fools’ Day (April 1)
Here’s one of Rockwell’s April Fools’ covers. The Huffington Post has a list of 17 pranks you can play on your friends (or former friends, depending on whether or not they appreciate the prank).

Pony Express Launches (April 3, 1860)
The website of the National Museum of the Pony Express in St. Joseph, Missouri, has a great history on the delivery service as well as a list of events, a video tour, and even a store.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated (April 4, 1968)
​Read SEP Archives Director Jeff Nilsson’s feature about the life of King.​

Trading Cards

A horse in mid-gallop
Shutterstock

I got the fear of death from my mother. Her driving. In most other things, she wasn’t fearful. I remember her driving the four of us into Washington, D.C., to get our school clothes, on a hot Saturday in August. Amid our noisy contests, the grabbing and scrambling going on in the backseat, she drove the 40-mile route my father took daily from Clark’s Gap, Virginia, to the city.

On the rural part of the trip we ignored her pleading. No seat belts, in those days. My baby brother had a rickety canvas sling with two leg-holes, hooked over the back of the front seat so he could sit higher. Even my mother with her fear of death never really saw that bag he sat in, raising him high enough to shoot him straight at the windshield.

Shopping for clothes was more of an occasion then, undertaken once a year, at the back-to-school sales. It was an expedition that required a good deal of foresight and preparation: piling in thermoses and crackers and baby bottles; stopping in the dew of the morning to get the tank filled and the oil and tires checked, as my father said to; and then, lulled by the sleeping countryside along Route 7, holding our breath and scouting for the turn, which was easy to miss. Would we make it across the fast bridge and, avoiding the need for a left turn, find the part of downtown where the department stores were, the street, the block, the forbidding little border station allowing entrance to a stone funnel. We would toil up the circling ramps and find a parking place in the dim garages those stores had, with the August heat already collected in them no matter how early you arrived. Then there were piles of shoeboxes; and stiff leather shoes to be levered onto our damp feet with a shoehorn and firmly tied, so we could step up into a wooden cabinet to be X-rayed; and plaid dresses that fooled us with a scented rustle as they dropped over our heads and then stood askew, loose at the neck and poked out at the shoulders like sawhorses, with sweaty stringy us in them in the mirror, instantly betraying our hope for new selves. And new undershirts and underpants, with a sugar smell in the cotton.

I remember crossing the bridge and looking down first at the Potomac River and then at the brown water of the old canal with the towpath beside it, and hearing in my mother’s voice as she gripped the wheel and asked us to be quiet — the city was upon us, the deadly traffic — a note that spoke of the possibility of annihilation. I didn’t know the word. But I could feel we were high up on the edge of something. If we were not careful we could be snatched from there and disappear, children in the car with our mother. The tone of voice went with a look in her eyes in the rearview mirror, a suggestion she seemed to be sending to me in particular. You see what I’m going through, the look said, what torments me.

If I see that look on somebody worrying her way through traffic today, with children in the car, a stretched, innocent, unseeing look, I think of my young mother and of death.

It was the horses I loved, each with its own proud nature made explicit in the picture, and having no name until I bestowed it.

Mary Deare Maxwell was my best friend. In kindergarten, when the teacher said “Mary and Mary Deare, you may pass out the crayons,” I could have fainted from the pleasure of breathing in the deep school smell of the crayon bin at the side of Mary Deare. We had the same name, but hers flew that pennant that multiplied it beyond all names. I wonder if I will ever duplicate the heights of joy we reached after school, playing with our trading cards.

But I had to leave her; we moved away. The house we moved to was in the country, outside a little town. No one could comfort me. There was a school bus, no walking to school with your best friend. For a long time, because it was summer when we moved, and houses past the town limits were scattered, friends did not materialize. I had sisters to play with, but when we spread out my trading cards they had lost some of their splendor. For certain horses I had given two, even three, cards in return. It was the horses I loved, each with its own proud nature made explicit in the picture, and having no name until I bestowed it. Not the floating, blue-toned, fantasy animals little girls collect today, but horses more real than the ones we now saw grazing with their foals and standing at the fences as we drove the green countryside into the city.

One day my mother told me she had learned that Mary Deare was sick. She took from her special drawer in the kitchen a get-well card for me to send her. I could not think that the girl to whom I was sending a card in the mail, with my careful printing on the envelope, was the Mary Deare I had walked and sung with in the long ago of kindergarten.

In November, the day of her birthday arrived, clothed in fog. Half a year had passed and we were going to her party. I was going to be seeing Mary Deare and she would be a girl, rather than the name I still chanted to myself.

I know what I was wearing: a stiff dress with pink and gray stripes and a thin silver-painted belt into which I had punched an extra hole with the tooth of the buckle to make it fit, only to discover that the belt would bend there, and then screw up into a few threads, showing itself to have been cardboard under the silver. I did this on the way to the party, during one of those tense drives to Washington. The belt was spoiled. The absolute that the dress had been, with its full skirt and silver belt, fell away.

I had started in my new school, a country school with two grades to a room, and after a few weeks they had put me in the next grade’s reading group, made me leave my desk and cross the room every day, with the result that none of the girls in either grade would speak to me. I had a fear that at the party they would know about this new school and my place, or non-place, in it.

Mary Deare was on a couch in the recreation room, where there were balloons and bags of favors. She was in a cast. It came to the top of her legs (no one said “thighs” at that time), with a bar holding them apart. She was propped in pillows. I approached with my heart beating against the stiff stripes of my dress. I thought friendship belonged to only two, like the glass slippers: The prince had one, Cinderella had the other one.

I came so close I could see her long eyelashes. I said no one in my new school had trading cards. Where were her trading cards? She said, “I don’t have to show you.”

After the cake, things grew friendlier among the rest of us. Mary Deare had shut her eyes, and lay among her presents. Someone wondered in a whisper how she went to the bathroom, how she sat on the toilet. What would you do if you couldn’t sit? We knew she didn’t — couldn’t — wear underpants, because we had seen. Somebody — why do I say somebody, when to this day I know it was a thin, fast-running, tiny-toothed girl from our kindergarten class — said the word “hiney.” “Her hiney.” That was the word, a word quite gone now. I know I didn’t say it but of course I laughed, excited and half afraid to be laughing in a way that implied the rest of us did not have such a place.

A voice behind us, ominous and deep. “Who said that?” Her white-shirted father, Mr. Maxwell, stepped into our circle. Fathers had never been home in the daytime when we played at each other’s houses.

I had been the one, the others agreed, who said it.

“Is that right?” he said, with eyes that separated me out and measured me. “I’ll have to speak to your mother about this.” My mother was in the kitchen with Mary Deare’s mother. This was not the ordinary adult glance. His eyes were fixed on me as if they saw the same shadowy inside that the foot X-ray saw, only in the foot it wasn’t soiled like the thing his eyes were reporting now.

“Mary Deare is a very unlucky little girl, to be in perdition.” I remember his words that way. I’m sure he actually said “to be in her condition,” and my later self, feverish with reading, remade the memory in this literary way. “It would discourage her,” he went on, “to think a friend at her birthday party said bad words about her. It would discourage her and it would discourage me.”

Somehow in the way he said the thing about her being unlucky made Death come near. Mary Deare had moved into its path, discouraged. He had produced by happenstance a word that had always plagued me in stories being read aloud; I never heard the word “courage” in it, but rather saw or felt something like scurry and sewage: discouraged, a word for hurrying, slipping in something with suction. So it seemed, too, from the ugly look on his big face. He had a mustache, and a scrap of tobacco that he spat off his lip. Like my father, he smoked Camels.

I said no one n my new school had trading cards. Where were her trading cards? She said, "I don't have to show you."

We must have been 6, Mary Deare having her 7th birthday. Now I know that she had polio, but then I thought that I had sentenced her, brought her to the attention of Death by laughing at her bareness under the party dress. Her hiney. And if Death could be called out for her, then for my parents, my sisters and brother, for me. We all had these bodies, these parts under our clothes: We could be found, discouraged, made sick, laid bare.

One Saturday when my mother drove into Washington with just two of us, the oldest girls, we were more lighthearted than usual in the car, and on the straight stretch of Route 7 the speedometer read 52. It was late summer and I was not fighting with my sister but measuring the way the trees fell away on my side. They shrank down as they were yanked out of view. The near landscape went by at one rate and the farther landscape at a different, slower rate. I was trying to think what this meant, whether there was something it was supposed to show, that my mother already knew, some lesson. But I didn’t ask. The thought of an explanation discouraged me. The hills, the far trees kept parading in their stately way while the near ones flew by.

The sign said “Speed Limit 50.” “Don’t tell Daddy,” my mother said gaily as she drove along at 52, still nowhere near the swallowing throat of the city.

At dinner we were all exhausted and triumphant when my father asked about our day in Washington, and I told. I said, “She went 52!” I remember my mother looking at me. It seemed to me that she might cry. Here we had avoided, this one time, the awful death-feeling crossing the bridge, avoided any doomed attempts to turn left in the city of Washington, D.C., when you couldn’t, anywhere, so that you kept going around and around in some sort of eternal one-block turnstile, but fast, with people behind you angry, enclosed in machines so they couldn’t hear you or know you were a nice family, and blowing their horns; we had found Woody’s, found our oxfords and a skirt each, charged them with my mother’s new charge plate, and returned in triumph, and I had called down the notice of Death, that lurking, awaited Death-by-Speeding, on my mother.

Next time it would be on the watch for her.

As the guardian of the family, my father had established that my mother must drive the car carefully and that he must protect her by reminding her of the speed limit and receiving an account of her observance of the rules of the road. When she was not at the wheel, she was not a nervous woman. She was the mother of four children, she was competent in the world … but not quite. In the car she was like a person who is treading water and beginning to feel her muscles go.

You need only one place where dread is laid bare, only one instance where you see it in the adult eye. In the little herd we had acquired when we moved to the country, six Angus mothers and their shy calves, we knew a certain look in a cow’s eye when we startled her, a way the eyeball rolled in complete forgetfulness that she, the cow, was 10 times our size, and a wildness appeared, of dread of us and determination to save her calf.

It was the era of trading cards. There was no way to tally their worth: bought by the pack and opened, the little flap pried up, the glossy cards drawn out and slipped past each other with their lovely slipping sound, seen, smelled, honored. Cats, dogs. Flowers, birds, ladies with red lipstick and mantillas. Horses. Horses, the finest, always. I hid my need for them, exclaiming over other cards.

I held hands with Mary Deare as we walked, and took my cards out of the pocket in my skirt, a secret pocket my mother had showed me while she ironed, hidden in the seam. Mary Deare bent her dark braids close to me, giving off soft waves of the perfume she was allowed to wear. “It’s very light, it’s for little girls,” her mother said helplessly. Mary Deare was an only child and as my parents said later, “they gave her everything.” Being given everything went with the name.

We passed my trading cards back and forth, held them before us as we walked. Hers were in a shoebox at her house, but I could feel them approaching. I was going to give her the white cat for a chestnut horse, to go with my black, my palomino, my gray with the arched neck and red halter. The purest happiness sang in my scalp and hands as we walked together.

But she came down with polio. And after that our town grew enough to have a clothing store, and although my father still drove into Washington every day, we hardly ever went there any more. After the birthday party, I never saw Mary Deare again.

She did not die, as I expected her to. My parents heard from hers, heard she recovered, gradually, until she could walk with a leg brace. “At least she was never in an iron lung.” That was what my mother said, so often that I complained, “Why do you have to say that every single time?” It made the death-feeling come over me. Parents did that, and it seemed to me they did it on purpose.

In the months before I had friends in my new school, I thought back on how we had broken into skipping when we walked, and stepped brimming with gladness into her kitchen after the tiring hours in kindergarten, to arrange our collections on the table while her mother looked on. We held our breath, deliberated, chose what we could part with. I wanted all the horses and her mother knew that. “Don’t feel like you have to give that one away, Mary Deare,” her mother would say, every so often. But in the five-and-ten the glossy packs lay there in rows. They had their own sign, Trading Cards, which we could read before we could read. There would always be more of them. We would always find more and buy them with our allowance, always long for the new ones with their promise we could not explain, their perfection. Was it a mistake to let such happiness fill us? Was there some connection between it and what was going to happen? But as with the trees flying by, I didn’t want the explanation. I didn’t want to know.

Eugene Iverd

The artist born George Melvin Erickson on January 31, 1883, in St. Paul Minnesota to parents John and Matilda Erickson, painted Post covers under the “brush” name Eugene Iverd.

The story goes that George Erickson told his brother, Carl, that he was going to become a famous artist one day, and when this happened he would make the name Eugene Iverd famous. Iverd was Carl’s middle name, which Carl disliked. And to make his brother feel better, George would take Carl’s middle name and add it to another friend’s name, Eugene — another unpopular name according to Carl. George would put them together to create his new alter-ego, Eugene Iverd.

He signed all of his commissioned artwork Eugene Iverd as a kind of pen (or brush) name. But there are several landscape paintings he signed with his own name, George Ericson — he often left out the “k” because he liked the look of that spelling better.

Covers by Eugene Iverd

View full gallery »

Purchase prints of Eugene Iverd’s work at Art.com.

Unlike most prolific magazine illustrators of his time, George Erickson did not live on the East Coast. He grew up in Minnesota, and at an early age he began to show signs of artistic talent. Although not much of an academic, his art could be found on everything from kindling to hymnals.

His mother supported him, but his father felt that art was a frivolous pursuit that would not take him far. George and his brother came up with creative jobs to support his schooling, such as setting up a concession outside of the local movie theatre. This provided him with the capital to complete his art training.

He enlisted in the Army during World War II, later working at Walter Reed Hospital doing art therapy with shell-shocked veterans. After his war service, George married Lillian Remund and moved to Erie, Pennsylvania, where they built their house which included an art studio.

He was a man of immense personal charm and enormous artistic talent and productivity. In 1926, he submitted his first picture to The Saturday Evening Post. The managing editor paid him a personal visit, telling him that Norman Rockwell was growing older and the magazine was in need of new blood. Iverd submitted four pieces and two were immediately accepted. His first artwork was published on March 13, 1926, a young boy daydreaming while playing the accordion. This began his 10-year run as an artist for The Saturday Evening Post. According to his daughter Jean Ericson Sakumura, he produced 55 magazine covers, some 60 advertisements, 15 published lithographs, 25 story illustrations, and hundreds of portraits or landscapes.

George Erickson became one of the best-known painter/illustrators in the country during the 1920s. Campbell’s Soup Company, Monarch Foods, and The Saturday Evening Post were among his high-profile clients.

His sudden death from pneumonia at the age of 43 was a tragedy. He left his widow with three small children in the height of the Depression.

Was Young America Too Nice in 1961?

Probably every generation of American adults has been able to complete the following sentence: “The trouble with kids today is …” America’s grown-ups, it seems, are continually fretting over the next generation, which seems so rebellious, reckless, and impatient to give the world a complete makeover.

But in 1961, some youth-watchers worried about the exact opposite. The youngsters of that decade were unusually cautious, well behaved, and ready to compromise with the world. At least that was conclusion of a Gallup poll published in the Post that year.

Read the entire article "Youth: The Cool Generation" by George Gallup and Evan Hill from the pages of the December 23, 1961 issue of the Post.
Read the entire article “Youth: The Cool Generation” by George Gallup and Evan Hill from the pages of the December 23, 1961 issue of the Post.

Hoping to understand a “cross section of our future,” Dr. George Gallup and Evan Hill interviewed 3,000 people between the ages of 14 and 22. What they discovered had them worried. The rising generation, they concluded, were “bland… cautious, self-satisfied, secure, and unambitious… nice little boys and girls who are just what we asked them to be.”

Born between 1939 and 1947, most of these young people fell into a group now called the Silent Generation (those born between 1925 and 1945). Having been raised by parents who endured the Depression and a world war, these youngsters valued stability and security. They were eager to fit into the status quo and protect their comfortable way of life. They were unlikely to rebel or get involved in crusades of any kind, wrote Gallup and Hill. They were generally satisfied with life and themselves. “Almost 90 percent are satisfied with the kind of person they have turned out to be (20 percent are ‘extremely satisfied’).”

With little interest in changing the country, over 80 percent had no intention of entering politics. Perhaps this is why there has been no president from the Silent Generation.

Risk-averse and conformist, the generation, as Forbes columnist Neil Howe describes, “tiptoed cautiously in a post-crisis social order that no one wanted to disturb.” The Silent Generation settled into adulthood quickly by marrying and having babies “younger, on average, than any other generation in American history.

Amid glare and congestion the automobile provided a precious privacy, rare in the lives of adolescents in 1961.
Amid glare and congestion the automobile provided a precious privacy, rare in the lives of adolescents in 1961.

The hunger for security was also due to the likelihood of war with Russia. The young interviewees in 1960 told Gallup and Hill that they expected to see nuclear attacks in their lifetimes that would destroy entire populations. Living with such expectations, they kept their heads down and enjoyed what they could, while they could.

The typical young man of this generation, according to Gallup and Hill, had modest goals: “two or three children and a spouse who is ‘affectionate, sympathetic, considerate, and moral’; rarely does he want a mate with intelligence, curiosity or ambition. He wants a little ranch house, an inexpensive new car, a job with a large company, and a chance to watch TV each evening after the smiling children are asleep in bed.”

These young people believed in getting along. They were even willing to compromise with enemies rather than risk war. “If this country should become involved in another limited war, such as Korea,” the pollsters asked, “do you think we should try to end it on the basis of compromise, or should we fight it out even if this means getting into an all-out war?” The kids favored compromise: “More than three-fourths of the girls and almost 60 percent of the boys say they would be unwilling to risk war.”

For the youth of 1961 the automobile had become a constant, versatile companion.
For the youth of 1961 the automobile had become a constant, versatile companion.

What this generation wanted were good, steady jobs (only 10 percent of the youngsters said their life goal was to achieve fame, recognition, or wealth). Normally, such modest ambitions would yield modest returns. But the comparatively small number of children in this generation created a smaller work force when they entered the job market. With America’s economy booming in the postwar years, companies had to compete for workers, which drove up wages. As a result, the Silent Generation entered retirement more prosperous than any generation that has followed them.

The lack of ambition in these young Americans bothered Gallup and Hill. They worried that the future of the country, and the world, had been placed in the hands of “indifferent and distressingly bland” Americans who displayed “compromise, conformity, and intellectual poverty.”

Young collegians gyrate through the “Twist”, America’s newest dance craze, in 1961.
Young collegians gyrate through the “Twist”, America’s newest dance craze, in 1961.

In hindsight, their fears about the next generation seem wildly exaggerated. True, the Silent Generation never developed a rebellious streak, but their willingness to compromise never threatened our national security. They firmly supported America in its long cold war with the Soviet Union. And despite what they told the Gallup interviewers, they generally supported the war in Vietnam; hundreds of thousands of them even served in the military during that conflict. Moreover, this generation challenged traditional thinking about race in America and supported equal rights for black Americans.

Like each generation, the Silent Generation made its contributions to the country. And, like other generations, failed to live up to its critics’ worst fears.

The Lovely Kisselthwist

“What’s this strange insect?” High Inspector Givens said. He was dressed in khaki kilt and a matching pith helmet, out on expedition to the Ramapos. It was not much of a mountain range surely, but easily reached by bus.

Inspector Tosh bent low, magnifying glass in hand. “A strange number of legs for an insect, technically, though not a spider, either; the eyes all wrong.” Bending so low, counting the legs (which moved and seemed to change place, making counting a chore), she was surprised to notice it gone.

“It’s on your hand,” High Inspector Givens said, and despite enormous educational credits, she shook it off. “Kiss me, you dear man,” she said unexpectedly. “And it’s on your hand now.”

“I will kiss you indeed,” he replied, and although they were unsuitable in every way, they soon married and, unknowingly, carried the Kisselthwist in their kit bag back to their native environs, where it thrived among happy hours and subway trains, creeping into cracks and crevices and occasionally discarding legs, which flew in the air like cinders and caused an erotic itch unalleviated by Lanacane.

**

An exterminator with Ajax Building Services, called in for a different infestation, found a pest he’d never seen before and, unprofessionally, squashed it under foot, releasing a strange, sweet scent that lingered on his shoes as he went in and out of buildings, unwittingly leaving minuscule Kissel eggs wherever he went.

An old woman with a small bag of garbage opened her door and the exterminator took the bag from her hands, got down on his knees, and kissed her fingers. “I’ve been longing to meet you,” he said huskily.

The old woman sighed, a faint pinkness to her cheeks, her quiet heart once again released. She’d waited so long that she’d given up waiting, and now here it was. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said simply. “My name is Rosa.”

And they went off together, dropping Kissel eggs in hallways, on the streets, along the roads they traveled. Their fingers touched often at the tips, lightly.

The eggs sprung. A boy fell in love with a girl, both aged 3. A gaggle of teenage girls flung themselves at a postman, wailing with joy. A window washer way up top of a skyscraper was attracted to a hunched gargoyle, and lost his step, swinging 30 stories high on his safety harness. He kicked off the side of the building, hoping to get enough momentum to return to his gargoyle, and failed. He took off his harness and tried to climb back up, and failed.

A woman who saw his fall fell in love with him; a cop who came to the scene fell in love with her. His wife walked off with the newsboy. The newsboy’s mother fell in love with her husband all over again, but her husband sniffed a Kissel egg and saw a stout man with a splendid chin, and he was gone.

The air was blurry with eggs, and the wind took them off to China and Mozambique and Patagonia and Tibet, where love ran slow because of the steep mountains, but even the yaks began to sort themselves with baleful yak glances. The people found that winter easier than usual, though the cold killed many who were out when they fell in love and lost their way in the longings of love.

“What would have happened if we’d never met?” Inspector Gibbons wondered. “If this strange, wild world had never produced you?” He fondly squeezed her arm, his eyes moist.

“There seems to be enough love for everyone lately,” she said. “I think we’d have found someone else.” Her radiant eyes searched into his; would anyone else be as good, as sweet, as perplexed as he was? No, surely not. “I take it back,” she added quickly. “There is no life without you.”

He was pleased, and beamed. “Life is you,” he said gallantly, and kissed her hand, to begin with. “Still, it is a wonder. Someone should study the process of love.” His thoughts, interwoven with the actuality of love, moved slowly and peacefully.

“We are scientists,” she murmured. “We should do it.”

And they would have begun, but her lips were delicious, and his eyes were so sweet.

By autumn, cars followed each other, defying the laws and crossing dividing lines as one driver saw another and began to follow, and packs of cars swooped along the roads, jammed together in their efforts to locate the face they’d seen passing by. They longed to catch him or her, see that face again, stop them and declare love, a desire as sweet as poison and steeped in nostalgia already, because they loved and were not able to reach. Packs of cars hurtled along, love swept, jostling for the perfect place to be near their beloved.

Or perhaps each car fell in love with another car, roared impetuously after another car, driven and driving both, urgently horning their love, as animals do. Certainly the crowds of cars spoke out loud, cajoled and moaned, begged and promised, overcome by this sudden need to see the other close up, closer.

**

Birds shot after each other, dogs panted and woofed in mournful isolated sounds that quickened their hearts, each dog convinced that it would run to find its mate until there was no breath left. Squirrels flurried through trees, unfortunately in love with the same squirrel and quarreling to their enraptured deaths.

The trees leaned towards each other; the grasses tangled in longing, each breeze skipped after another breeze, whispering endearments.

“The wind is wild tonight,” Inspector Gibbons said. “I’m jealous of how it caresses you.”

They were walking down the oceanside promenade, watching leaves drop and swirl in couples and crowds. A page of newsprint lofted high in the air and swirled around, joined by another page of print, and they took off together.

The sea was roiling restlessly.

“Is it the wind causing the waves or the waves causing the wind?” Inspector Tosh asked dreamily.

Indeed the waves were high, reaching out like groping hands. One in particular made spectacular leaps. “What does it want?” she asked, and took Inspector Givens’ hand and held it to her lips. “Or does it want this, do you think?” and she kissed his hand.

He bowed his head over her fingers. They were always touching, and there was never enough touch. He ran his hand over her skin, and he wanted his hand to sink in, to find the core of her, the part of her that could exist without him, think without him; he wanted to be in her head, her heart, her lungs. He had everything, and it wasn’t enough. “We must never be apart!” he shouted suddenly, and she thought, This is love; this madness is love, and there is no other madness like it at all.

That wave leapt high again and when it fell back they saw the reflection of a building along the promenade on it, and the reflection tormented the wave and it reached up again, hoping that this time it could touch those windows staring longingly back, each brick expectant, each floor bending just an inch closer to the sea.

“I wish I could be a wave and sweep over you,” Inspector Givens whispered, and then he blushed. “I could die now,” he said, “that’s what I mean. I have no hope for anything better, now; I have everything — and how can everything last?” His words were strangled on this last cry; he was trying out pathos as a seasoning, to make his love even more complex.

“We are scientists,” she said, her eyes glowing with fervor. “We must test it out. Step back from me! We are always together — maybe it’s just proximity.” She took a step away from him and then another. An awful ripping tore through her. She stepped closer and the ripping ceased. “Never do that again,” he said, clutching his chest. “I thought I was gone.”

They tipped together like trees, they pulled away again, and she turned, resting back against him as he put his arms around her, crossing her chest protectively. “Look at the moon,” she whispered. “Is the moon different?”

They looked at the sky, where the moon had changed its usual face and stared back at them, infatuated. Its mouth was open in anticipation, its eyes blurry. “It’s so large tonight, isn’t it? Some trick of the atmosphere?”

Inspector Gibbons looked as well. He thought he saw the moon wobble and purse its lips at the earth with something like hope.

The waves rose up, the water rose up, the moon took a step, in love with the earth and drawing closer. The eggs of the Kisselthwist had formed a pollen over the sea, the earth, the skies, the moon, and everything drew in. Craving and yearning, reaching and drawing near, the universe reached out and moved together, embracing everything in a clutch of desire, all life floating free and yearning, convulsed at last in miraculous love.

News of the Week: Caffeine, Cologne, and Charity Fights

I’d Like to Teach the World to Snack …

M. Unal Ozmen / Shutterstock.com
M. Unal Ozmen / Shutterstock.com

You probably don’t consider Coke “healthy.” You probably wouldn’t even call Diet Coke that. But the Coca-Cola Company wants you to, and they’re lining up some heavy-hitters to make it easier for you to think that way.

The company is teaming up with nutrition, dietary, and fitness experts to market the soda as a healthy snack. This marketing includes several articles written for places like American Heart Month and for many food blogs. The company is pushing their mini-cans of Coke as snacks, so it’s not like they’re saying that a Big Gulp is healthy. Still, it seems like it could open the door for others to suddenly say their foods are “healthy” just because of the portion size or because you eat them with a salad.

Besides, I’ve never even considered Coke (or any other soft drink) a “snack.” It’s a drink, a refreshment, a beverage. The word snack should be reserved for things you, well, snack on.

I’m waiting for the inevitable follow-up: “Funyuns: Will They Give You Six-Pack Abs?”

National Caffeine Awareness Month

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

If you are treating Coke as a snack, please be aware that March is National Caffeine Awareness Month. This is usually where I would link to the official site, but it seems they haven’t renewed their domain name. They probably need more caffeine so they’re more on top of things. Instead, here’s a link to everything you need to know about caffeine, including a chart that lists how much caffeine is in our favorite drinks.

Starbucks Vs. Racism

Levent Konuk / Shutterstock.com
Levent Konuk / Shutterstock.com

There seems to be a lot of caffeine-related news this week, but this news might actually solve racism!

Well, okay, maybe not — and it’s probably not supposed to — but Starbucks is trying to do its part to get a conversation started. The coffee shop chain and USA Today have launched a program called Race Together. Today in every Starbucks location, employees are being encouraged to write the hashtag #RaceTogether on the side of each cup. There will also be guides to the program available to customers in each store.

I’d like to know how the busy baristas at Starbucks are going to write something that long on the side of a cup while they’re also collecting customer names for coffee and scone orders. I order something, and “Bob” — not the hardest of names to write — comes out “Qx#b.” Hopefully they’ll write the phrase on all the cups before they open the doors in the morning.

New Cologne Smells Like … Books?

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

One reason to love print books — and there are many reasons — is because they smell. Older books have that certain smell that will instantly be familiar to anyone whose idea of fun is spending hours roaming the stacks of a used bookstore (like me). And even new print books have a certain smell. You don’t get that with e-books (unless someone comes up with an app that shoots the smell of books at you through the screen as you download something to your Kindle).

But now you can smell like an old book ALL THE TIME. Sweet Tea Apothecary has created Dead Writers, a fragrance that’s a mixture of clove, vanilla, and tobacco. It’s a clever idea, one that could start a new trend of creating colognes and perfumes with funky inspiration, but I don’t know about the name. Couldn’t they have called it Paper or perhaps Library? They already have a few writer-inspired fragrances, including Beatrix (after Beatrix Potter), Lenore (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”), and Thoreau. May I suggest Hawthorne or Shakespeare, or maybe even Woolf?

It could go too far though. I don’t even want to know what Bukowski would smell like.

Mitt Romney to Box Evander Holyfield

I know, that sounds like something from The Onion, but it’s true! The former presidential candidate will box former professional guy-who-pummels-other-guys Evander Holyfield in a charity match on May 15 at the Union Pacific Depot in Salt Lake City. Money raised will go to one of the favorite charities of the Romney family, Charity Vision.

Now unless Romney has a hobby no one knows about, Holyfield will knock him out within 7 seconds. But it’s all for charity so I’m guessing Holyfield will go easy on him. This time.

Spring Has Sprung

Hey, today is the official first day of spring! According to the forecasts, we here in Massachusetts have a 90 percent chance of getting up to three inches of snow tomorrow and temps will be below normal, which has been par for the course this winter. But still, today is the official first day of spring! So no matter what the temperature is, put away your shovels and put on those shorts.

March Madness and Me Madness

Other people putting on their shorts will be college basketball players. It’s March Madness time, that special time of year when your favorite CBS television program is interrupted. I have to admit that I don’t like college basketball, nor do I understand the appeal of it. I mean, unless you go to the school, went to the school, or have a child that goes to the school, what is the obsession with filling out brackets and betting money? Do ordinary people — not people who follow college sports religiously — really know enough about college sports to do this? I’m more comfortable filling out these brackets.

But to each his own. I’m going to be rooting for that powerhouse University of Phoenix. They’re in it, right?

National Frozen Food Month

Question: If someone eats four Lean Cuisine meals at one sitting, is it still considered “lean”? Asking for a … well, for me. I’m asking for me.

March is Frozen Food Month, and yes, you could just go out and buy a bunch of frozen dinners and Hot Pockets and salads (yes, they make frozen salads now), but you could also make something at home that uses frozen food as one of the ingredients.

AllRecipes has a large archive of recipes, and so does Eating Well. You can also buy a cookbook by one of my favorite writers, Peg Bracken, the classic I Hate to Cook Book. That has many recipes in it that utilize frozen vegetables and fruit and they’re quite good. As a spokesperson for Birds Eye Foods, Bracken used a lot of the company’s products, of course.


Upcoming Anniversaries and Events

Erik Weisz aka Harry Houdini born (March 24, 1874)

Read about the famed magician and his long battle with phony spiritualists.

Elvis Presley inducted into the Army (March 24, 1958)

Here’s what rock music was like in the days of Dick Clark.

Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published (March 26, 1920)

Fitzgerald wrote 68 stories for The Saturday Evening Post. Here is Jeff Glor of CBS This Morning talking to SEP Archives Director Jeff Nilsson about Fitzgerald’s work in the magazine.

Three Mile Island accident occurs (March 28, 1979)

Here’s a detailed explanation of the worst nuclear accident in the United States.

Selma and the Fight to Vote

Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)
Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965.
(Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Last year marked a new low for voter participation in a national election. Normally, less than half of America’s voters cast ballots in the midterm elections, but the 2014 turnout was the lowest in 73 years: 36 percent. It would seem that most Americans believe their right to vote isn’t worth the effort to exercise it.

We’ve come a long way in 50 years, when Americans were ready to die just to get their names on the voter rolls — and others were willing to kill to deny them that right.

In the early 1960s, civil rights advocates traveled through the Southern states to encourage African Americans to vote. They believed the ballot would give people the power to throw out racist government officials and elect leaders who would end discrimination.

But they soon discovered that office-holders across the country had installed a number of obstacles to prevent black people from reaching the polling booths. The obstacles proved especially effective in Selma, Alabama, where only 2 percent of black residents were registered to vote.

In March 1965, activists announced they would march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capitol, and demand the state government end voter suppression. They had little hope that Governor George Wallace would change the state’s racist policy, but they knew the national attention from the march would pressure him to respond.

When marchers sets off on Sunday, March 7, the country saw how firmly some white officials opposed voting rights for black people. Sheriff’s deputies fired tear gas into the crowd, then attacked the marchers with whips and clubs. Fifty marchers were hospitalized. The marchers set out again on March 21, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and with protection from the National Guard and U.S. Army sent by President Johnson.

On the second day, the marchers passed through Trickem Fork, an impoverished hamlet in Lowndes County, Alabama, that represented much of what the protestors were trying to change. The Saturday Evening Post reporters W. C. Heinz and Bard Lindeman noted, “The Negroes outnumber the whites almost four to one, but until the week before the Freedom March not one Negro voter had been registered in Lowndes County in 65 years.” (“The Meaning of the Selma March: Great Day at Trickem Fork,” May 22, 1965)

Read the entire article "The Meaning of the Selma March: Great Day at Trickem Fork" by W.C. Heinz and Bard Lindeman from the pages of the May 22, 1965 issue of the Post.
Read the entire article “The Meaning of the Selma March: Great Day at Trickem Fork” by W.C. Heinz and Bard Lindeman from the pages of the May 22, 1965 issue of the Post.

Several residents had recently tried to register at the county office. White officials turned them back, saying one of their registrars was sick and they didn’t know where the other one was. Two weeks later, when the residents returned, county officials told them to register at the old jailhouse. One of the residents said, “They had the two tables set up in this room with the gallows on the left. While you’re filling out the paper, one white man is saying. ‘I guess many a guy dropped through there.’ Then another is saying, ‘I wonder if the old thing still works.’”

Another resident, an Army veteran, was told he needed to pass a literacy test. “They gave me hard questions. The first was: ‘What part does the Vice President play in the Senate and the House?’ The second was: ‘What legal and legislative steps would the State of Alabama and the State of Mississippi have to take to combine into one state?’”

Literacy tests were the last resort for state officials who wanted to deny African Americans their right to vote. Ever since Reconstruction ended in the 1870s and federal troops left the South, many white politicians sought to limit black people’s voting. In Mississippi, black voters’ names were removed from the registration polls, then required them to pay poll taxes for two years before they’d be allowed to cast ballots.

African Americans who still expressed an intention to vote might be threatened with losing their jobs. And some cities distributed fliers telling black voters they could not enter a polling station if they’d had any trouble with the law — even something as trivial as a parking ticket — unless they first got approval from their local sheriff.

African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs "We demand the right to vote, everywhere" and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)
African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs “We demand the right to vote, everywhere” and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama.
(Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Black voters were denied credit, threatened with eviction or even lynching. If nothing else stopped these voters, there was always the literacy test. White county clerks were allowed to refuse to register anyone they considered “illiterate.”

They might require black registrants to read, and explain, complex passages of state law.* In Alabama, they would ask prospective voters questions about Federal law, as in these examples:

Has the following part of the U.S. Constitution been changed? “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each states, excluding Indians not taxed. (No)

Who pays members of Congress for their services, their home states or the United States? (United States)

At what time of day on January 20 each four years does the term of the president of the United States end? (12 noon)

If a bill is passed by Congress and the President refuses to sign it and does not send it back to Congress in session within the specified period of time, is the bill defeated or does it become law? (It becomes law unless Congress adjourns before the expiration of 10 days.)

The literacy-test questions in Louisiana were more like brain-teasers problems, deliberately phrased to confuse the prospective voters.

In the space below, write the word “noise” backwards and place a dot over what would be its second letter should it have been written forward.

Draw in the space below, a square with a triangle in it, and within that same triangle draw a circle with a black dot in it.

Spell backwards, forwards.

Draw a figure that is square in shape. Divide it in half by drawing a straight line from its northeast corner to its southwest corner, and then divide it once more by drawing a broken line from the middle of its western side to the middle of its eastern side.

Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.

As questions on a cocktail napkin, they might have been amusing. But black citizens were required to answer 30 of these questions in 10 minutes without mistakes before they could register to vote.

The insolence of racist government policies may seem extraordinary to us today. Even more extraordinary was the determination of African Americans to overcome these challenges. They were helped in some areas by civil rights activists like members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who taught them how to beat the trick questions. But these efforts couldn’t have succeeded if the men and women in places like Trickem Fork weren’t determined to overcome the challenges that lay between them and their right to vote.

So it seems surprising that, within the lifetime of the baby boom generation, the right to vote has become so little valued that almost 50 percent of Americans never vote in any major election.

Paul Bransom

Paul Bransom began his career as a talented wildlife artist at a very young age. He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1885 and left school at the age of 13 for an apprenticeship drawing detailed mechanical devices for patents.

Covers by Paul Bransom

View full gallery »

Purchase prints of Paul Bransom’s work at Art.com.

Bransom later traveled to New York City and took a job as a comic strip artist, but spent most of his time at the Bronx Zoo, sketching all the animals. The zookeeper noticed Bransom and allowed him to set up his own private studio in the lion house.

Filled with confidence, drawings tucked under his arms, he met with the editor of The Saturday Evening Post who immediately purchased four covers and several other sketches. His first Post cover appeared on January 5, 1907.

Paul Bransom’s extremely detailed and lively images attracted many admirers and earned him the Benjamin West Clinedinst Memorial Medal which is awarded for the achievement of exceptional artistic merit. Bransom’s love for animals can be seen in each and every one of his paintings. Bransom died in 1979.

Hey NCAA, Nix Those Backboards!

Two Points Ski Weld January 24, 1942
Two Points
Ski Weld
January 24, 1942

Every sport has fans who think their game has gone sharply downhill over time. Baseball, football, hockey, even horse racing — whatever their game, they’ll tell you it used to be a lot better. In the old days, the sport was a contest of skill, they’ll say, not luck or brute force. Athletes in those idyllic days were faster, smarter, or nobler. (Sports, of course, aren’t the only things that have degenerated over time. The same is said about movies, restaurants, rock music, gas stations, Cracker Jack prizes, and — while we’re on the subject — people in general.)

But even in the Good Old Days, there were purists who looked further back to the Even Better Old Days.

In 1940 Stanley Frank, for example, complained in The Saturday Evening Post that college basketball was no longer played with skill or intelligence: “The big idea is to barge down the court in harum-scarum fashion, let someone unload a wild shot and, if it fails, have one of those 6-foot, 6-inch human skyscrapers — standard equipment for every top-notch team —… grab the rebound and dunk the ball through the hoop.”

To see how the game should be played, he wrote, you needed to look back 14 years. Back in 1926, basketball was a game of skill. In those days, college teams rarely scored more than 20 points. Now, he sputtered, Long Island U was averaging 55 points a game. Fans couldn’t even keep a box score for a basketball game anymore. While jotting down the last point scored, you’d probably miss another basket. “Comment to your neighbor on a good play [and] one of the athletes will bring down the house behind your back with a more stirring piece of heroics.”

Basketball was becoming too intense, Frank griped on. When Centenary College defeated Loyola of New Orleans, 78 to 72, “the sight and sound of so much furious activity were too much for two customers. They fainted dead away.”

This feverish pace of scoring had to be stopped before the game was ruined. Fortunately, the coach of Columbia University had an idea how it could be done: Take away the backboards.

Read the entire article "Take Away the Backboards?" by Stanley Frank from the pages of the January 6, 1940 issue of the Post.
Read the entire article “Take Away the Backboards?” by Stanley Frank from the pages of the January 6, 1940 issue of the Post.

“Make the players shoot at open baskets as the old professionals did, and you’ll see science and skill replacing sheer luck and height as the most important factors in the game,” said Coach Paul Mooney. “You won’t see kids so ready to pitch wild, screwy shots off one ear, as they do now, if they know the backboard isn’t there to stop the ball from going out of bounds.”

The backboard wasn’t originally meant to play a role in scoring. When Dr. James Naismith invented the game 120 years ago, he simply nailed a peach basket to the edge of a gymnasium balcony. A backboard made of chicken wire was only added to prevent balcony spectators from reaching down and blocking shots. When players saw how easily the wire mesh bent, wooden backboards were introduced. Players soon realized they could bank shots off the solid backboard. Later, fans sitting behind the backboards at Indiana University complained that it blocked their view, and the glass backboard was introduced.

The game had been continually evolving since it was introduced. Nearly every aspect of the sport’s equipment and regulations had been altered since its invention in 1891. And not all fans agreed that the changes had resulted in a better game.

Stanley Frank had several criticisms of 1940 basketball, but he believed removing the backboards would help return basketball to its former glory. Scores would drop to pre-1940 levels, and the game would lose its annoyingly frantic pace. It would be, once again, a game of skill.

What he didn’t recognize is that skill alone probably wouldn’t draw immense crowds to college basketball games. Watchmaking is a skill, but no one’s ever sold tickets to see it.

Whither Free Speech

5 people with speech bubbles above their heads
A Katz/Shutterstock

More than 20 years ago, longtime head of French intelligence Count Alexandre de Marenches told this reporter that the greatest threat to the security of his country was “an alien nation, living within our borders, whose language we do not speak, whose customs we do not understand, whose goals we do not share.” He was speaking of the Islamic population who today represent the greatest security challenge not only to France but to most of the nations of Western Europe — Britain, Germany, Belgium, even Greece, as well as France. And especially the United States.

For some, the concepts of Western freedom, especially of freedom of speech and the press, are informed more by religious dogma dating back a thousand years than by any contemporary principles of the inherent rights of men and women. Witness the massacre earlier this year of the cartoonists and editors of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, who died at the hands of a pair of jihadi lunatics put off by the publication’s drawings of the prophet Muhammad.

Yet, in America, unlike most other parts of the world, Muslims are just one of many disparate peoples, most hewing to a single, perhaps singular, ideal: free speech. The ability to speak your mind on nearly any topic and feel you are part of a single body of opinion and discussion that, in the end, somehow works. It’s guaranteed by the Constitution. And it is the spine, perhaps the entire skeleton, of our way of life — what it means to be an American.

But our ultimate fear is that our nation and our Western values themselves are becoming increasingly marginalized. The world is turning into an “us vs. them” — we for whom free speech trumps religion and those for whom the converse is ineluctably true. And the numbers are staggering. Of 7.1 billion people in the world, 2.2 billion are Christians, 1.8 billion Muslims, an increasing number prepared to do battle for what they view as bedrock principles of their religion. And free speech is all too often the ultimate target, or victim.

The fact is that the Charlie Hebdo horror and its cartoon realizations of the prophet Muhammad 3,000 miles from America’s shores has redefined not only the debate, perhaps the very nature of free speech itself in this second decade of the 21st century, but has most clearly divided those who hold each side of the debate.

There are two central elements of free speech, effectively its underpinnings. The first is courage to tell the world what it must hear, but often may not desire, to stand up for principles that are good and true. The second is self-confidence — that one’s core values are strong and enough to withstand any criticism, any barbs, any challenges. Above all, there is courage — the will to defend freedom at all cost, even at the cost of a challenge to one’s own beliefs and values.

In America, we have enough confidence in our core beliefs and values that we can tolerate those who express them in a less than mainstream fashion.

America has many Islamic immigrants, many Hispanic, Russian, Asian, and Africans as well. But most, sooner or later, become Americans. Because they come to understand that the difference between their adopted nation and the one they left behind is how we treat them — their access to American opportunities and rights. Here’s how President Obama put it in a joint news conference at the White House with British Prime Minster David Cameron just days after the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris upended the world:

Our biggest advantage is that our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans. And there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition that is probably our greatest strength. … There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case, and that’s probably the greatest danger that Europe faces.

So where does that leave the United States? Clearly, we are not about to begin locking up comedians who side with the bad guys as the French seem prepared to do. While comics from Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce to George Carlin or Don Imus might have shocked us, or even found themselves banned, few have done hard time for their routines. As David Brooks quite rightly observes in The New York Times, healthy societies “don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people. Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semi-respect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct.”

We laughed when Saturday Night Live in its earliest years hosted silly debates between Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd featuring outrageous disrespect — “Jane, you ignorant slut …” But, maybe we were laughing because that form of attack-debate was anathema to us. Now, such rhetoric has become embedded in our national psyche. The goal posts have been moved. But the playing field remains. We are a nation that was founded and is still sustained by the bedrock of free speech and expression.

Such a philosophy, however, inevitably takes us to the next level of debate over free speech — the role of the state in enforcement or, for that matter, drawing the red lines that define enforcement. So the question is, what is more important? Free speech of the kind that we absorb as a core value. Or lip service that allows for prison and the whip — a sentence meted out to the opposition Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, accused of “insulting Islam” for creating the Free Saudi Liberals website — 10 years in prison, a fine of 1 million Saudi riyal ($266,000), and 1,000 lashes to be carried out to the applause of the faithful, 50 lashes at a time at a packed al-Jafali mosque after Friday prayers every week for 20 weeks.

At home in America, we have enough confidence in our core beliefs and values that we can tolerate those who express them in a less than mainstream fashion. We may shun them. We do not imprison, or whip, those who do not hold them. But what do we do about Pope Francis who suggested, on a flight to the Philippines, that there are limits to free speech — especially when it comes to religion? “You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others,” he observed. But in a nation like the United States, if we are to remain true to our core values, we must tolerate religious as well as political dissent — views of pope and atheist alike.

Which still leaves the critical question — which red lines can be crossed here? In America, one can, and many do, advocate the overthrow of their government, but one can’t try to carry it out by force of arms. We can advocate for our religions, even ridicule another’s, proselytize, but not blow up a church, a synagogue, or a mosque.

In short, there are some restraints that must be exercised to preserve the social fabric from shredding. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in his landmark Supreme Court opinion “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic” isn’t free speech, it’s just plain dangerous. The distinguished juror was in the process of validating the Espionage Act of 1917, holding that the government’s suppression of flyers opposing the draft in World War I was not an abridgment of free speech because they presented “a clear and present danger” to the nation that was preparing for war. Since then, our society and its tolerance for dissent have broadened, and we have been enriched in the process. As Benjamin Franklin put it in 1722, “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.”

The purest expression of democracy and the American spirit is at the local level. When I was just starting out as a reporter for the Long Island daily Newsday, my first story, in 1967, was on a village meeting in Thomaston, New York. The issue was whether a broadcasting tower should be placed in the village. “A disfigurement,” opponents screamed quite passionately; “A necessity in the 20th century,” proponents shouted. The next day, after my story ran, I arrived in the newsroom and the city editor, Mel Opotowsky, handed me a sheaf of more than 40 telephone messages that had arrived, all furious. “You figure out how to make them happy,” Mel snarled. Both sides had their say in print, I told each caller. And, sheepishly, they agreed. They had.

The American tradition is to show respect for the guy you disagree with, as Norman Rockwell suggested through a flannel-shirted debater in his famous painting Freedom of Speech .

“‘Nothing Sacred’ was the motto on the banner of the cartoonists who died, and who were under what turned out to be the tragic illusion that the Republic could protect them from the wrath of faith,” observed Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. “‘Nothing Sacred’: we forget at our ease, sometimes, and in the pleasure of shared laughter, just how noble and hard-won this motto can be.”

With the world increasingly dividing, we must hold onto our values and speak out, freely, wherever necessary in their defense.

A Moment of Inspiration

Freedom of Speech
“Freedom of Speech”
from the “Four Freedoms” by Norman Rockwell

My grandfather was very intent on getting everything right with the Four Freedoms. He poured himself into the project completely, to the exclusion of all else for seven months. In fact, he was so enormously fatigued after finishing them that he intentionally embarked on a fun, light project; the first of his April Fool’s covers — where he could relish creating “mistakes” and not worry about getting it all right.

Our four freedoms are freedoms that we can be unaware of these days, until one of those freedoms is threatened. In the light of the recent tragedy in France, we are all much more cognizant of the vital importance of freedom of speech; it grants us the luxury and gift of free expression in our lives, our work, our art. When freedom of speech is attacked anywhere in this world, we all feel the damage and repercussions of that. We are there in France in spirit, and we carry them in our hearts as we all move forward to heal, restore, and continue to assert our right to that important freedom.

I must say that it is a freedom that also needs to be employed responsibly — with respect for the truth and consideration for others. Those who abuse this freedom by willfully presenting fraudulent material, knowing they are protected by this freedom, are simply abusing one of our greatest gifts.

All of this is a reminder to us to really think about what we are contributing to this world while we are here. Let’s make it something positive and uplifting. It is our legacy.

News of the Week: Swank Smart-gear, Sam Simon, and Stolen Songs

The Apple Watch

Image courtesy of Apple
Image courtesy of Apple

I’ve been an avid user of Apple products since 1987, and I’m one of those people that still wears a wristwatch (we’re a vanishing breed). But I still have no desire for the new Apple Watch. I’m not someone who needs to access the Web or apps or a dozen other things the watch does from outside my home, and I certainly don’t want to have to also carry around my iPhone just to use my watch (some of the apps won’t work unless you have an iPhone in your pocket).

PC Magazine has a list of the things you need to know about the new tech gadget, and if you do want one, Macworld has a guide on which of the 38 different models is best for you.

Prices for the watch range from $350 for the low-end model to $17,000 for a rose-gold one. Note: You could spend $17,000 for a gold Apple Watch if you want, or you could buy 500 Timex watches and still have money left over for a nice dinner.

RIP, Sam Simon

Simon was one of the most important forces behind The Simpsons. The show was created by Matt Groening, but much of the show’s success is due to Simon. He not only had the cast record each show as an ensemble (unlike many animated shows and movies where the cast records voice work separately), he hired many of the show’s writers and helped set the tone for the series. Even though he left the show after four seasons, his named can still be seen in the credits as one of the three people who developed the show, along with Groening and James L. Brooks. Simon battled colon cancer for several years and passed away on Sunday, March 8, at the age of 59.

Emmy Award-winning TV writer and author Ken Levine worked with Simon on Cheers and The Simpsons, among others. Levine has written a great — as usual — post about what Simon was like and how important he was to The Simpsons.

I Hate These “Blurred Lines”

Robin Thicke performing Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com
Robin Thicke performing
Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com

What we all suspected (or should I say what we all knew?) was finally confirmed by a federal jury this week: Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ hit song “Blurred Lines” actually ripped off the classic Marvin Gaye song “Got to Give It Up.” The copyright damages amount to $4 million. In addition, Thicke was ordered to pay $1.8 million of his profits and Williams $1.6 million. The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting rundown of what happened at the trial, from what the defense’s strategy was to how much money the song has made to date. It actually wasn’t the only Gaye song the two were accused of stealing.

Whatever side you’re on, I hope we can all agree on this: “Blurred Lines” is a terrible, terrible song. Even if they didn’t swipe the song from Gaye, they should still pay millions in damages for unleashing the tune on the public.

Tomorrowland

The new George Clooney movie has been a big secret for the past several months, with only a teaser trailer and the usual guesses about what the movie was about from film blogs to get us interested. Now Disney has released a full-length trailer for the Brad Bird-directed film, and it looks fantastic.


Today Is National Chicken Noodle Soup Day

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

It was in the mid-50s in Gloucester, Massachusetts, today, with a stronger sun than we’ve seen in several months and the snow finally beginning to melt away. I actually went to the store without a jacket. Not exactly chicken noodle soup weather, but we all know that the winter isn’t quite done with us yet so there’s still time to make it on one of these cold nights.

Here’s a recipe from Betty Crocker, and here’s one ​from Smitten Kitchen. Jamie Oliver has a twist on the traditional recipe, one that includes lots of seasonal greens like spinach and kale.

By the way, what you’ve heard is true: Chicken noodle soup really is good for a cold.

The Ides of March

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

This Sunday is March 15; and while people have a vague feeling that it’s bad luck for some reason, in Roman times the ides of March was just another way of saying March 15. A lot of people don’t really know what the ides of March refers to, they only know that we’re supposed to “beware” of them. Here’s a rundown of what exactly it all means.

It has to do with Julius Caesar.

Upcoming Anniversaries and Events

The Scarlet Letter published (March 16, 1850)

You can read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel for free at Project Gutenberg.

John Updike born (March 18, 1932)

The John Updike Society is a terrific resource about the celebrated author, and The Atlantic has a fascinating account of a man who went through the author’s trash.

Republican Party founded (March 20, 1854)

Wikipedia has an exhaustive history of the political party.​

On Record

Bruno Williams pressed the button on the recordable turntable and spoke into the microphone:

“This is a confession. A reluctant one but my crime has been witnessed, and there is no way out. I killed Sonny Bumbass, my neighbor of 15 years in this Brooklyn tenement, today, July 12, 1959, at roughly 9 p.m. and in cold blood.

“You would have too, if you had endured the years of sleepless nights and constant noise, if each of your legal avenues to get him to shut off the incessant music had failed. You would murder, I contend, as I have murdered.

“Sonny began bootlegging records three years ago. Two hundred a week, all hours, playing them on one turntable and recording them on the microphone of another table to make the duplicate. A low-end affair, he maxed the volume to get the sound. Others complained, but it’s my bedroom that shares a wall with his bathroom, where he records — ‘for the acoustics.’ I appealed directly to Sonny, but as the landlord’s nephew, he laughed me off.

“Twice I called the police. Someone is on the take, and they never came. This apartment was grandfathered to me, I can’t afford another, not since I lost the job at the plant. For falling asleep on duty.

“Bumbass … even though he’s dead, I still hate that name …

“For 30 months we argued to the edge of violence. But in these last weeks I changed my tactics. I charmed. I don’t know if I planned to kill him, but I wanted Sonny to like me, to take me into his apartment, to let his guard down. He began to invite me over to listen to his favorites. Always the capitalist, he played the redneck music and boogie-woogie that is so popular with the kiddies these days. Nothing with taste.

“Tonight, I arrived with something better: ‘Ellington at Newport.’ Duke sells so Sonny was willing to play it. When we reached Gonsalves’ famous sax solo, Sonny closed his eyes to take it in. I beat him to death — in four four time — with a plaster bust of Beethoven.

“At that moment I considered I might get away with it. Sonny was a black-marketer, connected to riff-raff far more suspicious than a veteran like me. But then I saw a horrified face looking in through the window — Frank Malone. Out to sleep in the cool air of the fire escape, Malone dropped his mattress and fled down the ladder. By the time I reached the window he was two levels below me. He descended to the street, turned a corner, and was out of sight.

“Malone will bring the police, of course. So, I have taken Sonny’s recordable to my own apartment, where I leave this message as my final — ”

Three hard knocks at the door.

“They’ve come. Well, I’ll say again that you’d have killed Sonny too. All that noise, all those years. They might convict me, but they’ll never blame me.”

Bruno clicked off the machine and opened the door to his fate. In rushed Fidel Canada, a first-floor tenant, nearly out of breath.

“You got a phone, Bruno?” he said between gasps.

“I had it pulled years ago. No one could ever hear me over all that noise from …”

“Frank Malone’s dead.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I saw the whole thing. Frank climbed off the fire escape, and went tearing into the street still in his pajamas, all panicked, shouting something we could never make out, then got bulldozed over by the Chauncey Street bus.”

“My God.”

“There’s an ambulance down there, around the corner, though it won’t do him no good now. The police got the whole street blocked off. I gotta call my cousin in Queens. He was real close with Frank.”

“Yes … Yes, you do that, Fidel. Try Mrs. Polk on the 14th floor. I think she has one.”

“I’ll go on up, Bruno. This’ll break her heart too.”

“Yes, break …” Bruno glanced at the disc on the recordable turntable. When Fidel was gone, he picked up the record, opened the window, and tossed it away.

Freedom!

Emancipation!

Quiet!

His confession eviscerated into a thousand pieces on the cement 11 stories below.

Or so he thought. Instead the disc spun away like a rebellious Frisbee, slamming unbroken into the seam in Sonny Bumbass’ window. It wobbled as it hit, as if something out of a Chuck Jones cartoon, then hung still, wedged solidly in the gap. A circular black flag on the building’s exterior.

Bruno stared in disbelief, cursing the gods of music and aerodynamics, then reluctantly eased himself out onto the rickety fire escape. Bumbass’ window was more than an arm’s length beyond the banister, but if he could just lean out a bit … his fingertips could almost touch … yes, he could feel success within his grasp … a tad more …

Through the dusty pane he could see Bumbass’ body lying still … he laughed, though the banister pressed hard against his ribs … You deserved it, Sonny, you son of a bitch … play Chopin once and a while and I might have forgave yeah …

Just one more inch …

**

“Never seen a banister give way like that before,” said Officer Moody, kneeling over the broken body of Bruno Williams. “Nasty fall.”

“It happens on these old tenement fire escapes, Sid,” answered Officer Ureno standing nearby. “You should never lean on them, especially a big man with all that weight.” He shook his head. “First Malone, now this guy. Tough night for the building losing two people.”

Moody fingered one of the countless black shards covering the pavement. “What was this record in his hand anyway?”

“Unlabeled.”

“Give you 10-to-1 it was recordable and he was a bootlegger. Moving his wares out the back fire escape late at night.” Moody grimaced. “A conman stealing from Bing and Dean and everyone else with talent. Kinda got what he deserved.”

“That’s heartless, Sid. And even if you’re right, I’d go on record saying the punishment didn’t fit the crime.”

America Overcomes Its Biggest Weakness

America faced three enemies in 1941: Japan, Germany, and Italy. But it had already defeated one of its biggest enemies — a crippling weakness in its armament industry. Ten years of the Depression cut America’s manufacturing capabilities cut to a bare minimum. Factories were struggling to survive with minimal orders and reduced workforces.

Recognizing the situation spreading across Europe could eventually reach our shores, the U.S. began rebuilding its armies and its arsenal. The result was a startling comeback. In 1939, the U.S. military was rated 39th in the world. Six years later, it had pushed the Nazi army back across Europe and swept the Japanese army and navy from the Pacific.

But the resurrection of American manufacturing power was even more remarkable. Without it, the Army and Navy could not have achieved its fighting power so quickly.

Aircraft manufacturing is a good example of what the U.S. achieved in record time. To fully appreciate this accomplishment, you should read 1940’s “Bombers By the Pound” in The Saturday Evening Post by Hurd Barrett.

Read the entire article "Bombers by the Pound" by Hurd Barrett from the pages of the February 24, 1940 issue of the Post.
Read the entire article “Bombers by the Pound” by Hurd Barrett from the pages of the February 24, 1940 issue of the Post.

Barrett built his first plane in 1927, and started working in the aircraft industry back in 1933 when America’s airplane production was ranked 41st in the world. Over the next seven years, he worked in the engineering departments of several “genial madhouses,” as he called aircraft plants.

America was building “the finest aircraft in the world,” wrote Barrett. But, he added, “the manner of their building is, of necessity, strictly screwball.”

The problem was manufacturers were still unable to mass-produce military aircraft. It was impossible to build an assembly line because the generals kept changing the specifications for the planes. Furthermore, there was no time to create a mass-production assembly line; aircraft plants were already racing just to keep pace with wartime technology. Germany and Japan had been developing their warplanes for years. Unless America could speed up its aircraft development, its new planes would be obsolete before they ever hit the runway.

A single prototype required 500,000 design hours, and 30,000 production hours for each plane thereafter. But the Army gave manufacturers just a fraction of this time and a sharply limited budget for development.

"Big planes aren't stamped out like saucepans. Thousands of parts must be fabricated and fitted by hand. Here, a workman, crouched in the leading edge of a Boeing Clipper wing, drills drills one of several hundred thousand rivet holes."
“Big planes aren’t stamped out like saucepans. Thousands of parts must be fabricated and fitted by hand. Here, a workman, crouched in the leading edge of a Boeing Clipper wing, drills drills one of several hundred thousand rivet holes.”

The learning curve had been steep, Barrett wrote, but the progress was impressive. Design engineers were now able to estimate the manufacturing cost, per pound, for any airplane. Even more impressive, their per-pound estimates came within $1,000 of the final cost for a $600,000 aircraft. Keep in mind this was accomplished without any computers. These engineers had to work with reference books, pencils, slide rules, and mechanical adding machines. And before they could begin production, they had to make a full-scale model of the aircraft in wood.

The plants were becoming more efficient, Barrett added. They used “straight-line production, with Material at one end of the plant and Final Assembly at the other.” (Previously, production was distributed haphazardly throughout the plant.) Barrett explained how this would proceed in a typical assembly:

A. Raw stock from the Material department was placed on a material truck and carted through Final Assembly, and the Finishing, Heat-Treating, Testing and Wing Assembly departments to:

B. The Sheet-Metal Department. Here a part was fabricated, put on another truck and carted back the entire length of the plant to:

C. The Subassembly Department; where the part was put into a rib bulkhead, or what have you. The rib bulkhead was then put on a truck and toted –

A full description of the process, Barrett wrote, would go on like this for several pages. But even with this process, aircraft production was rising steadily. The process Barrett described turned out 2,141 airplanes in 1939. In 1940, that number jumped to 6,068.

Yet the frantic pace of aircraft innovation and renovation could be disorienting for the plant workers. For example, Barrett wrote about a morning when he left his desk for a half hour and returned to find a tool designer working at a drafting table where his desk has stood: Barrett asked the designer, “Where did they take me?”

The designer shrugged. “I’m darned if I can tell you.”

“Down at the south end?”

“Maybe. It’s where Instrument was.”

“You mean last week?”

“No. Not last week. Week before last.”

It took him an hour to find his desk.

Yet with all the chaos, American manufacturers achieved the unthinkable. That summer of 1941, with America still neutral in the war, the Ford Motor Company began construction of an immense factory to produce B-24 bombers. Ford’s 3.5 million-square-foot Willow Run plant began production just 15 months later. By 1944, it was producing 20 bombers every day.

Between 1940 and 1944, aircraft production really took off — the pun is unavoidable because no other term describes these soaring numbers.

Aircraft production, all types, by year:
1940:   6,086
1941:   19,433
1942:   47,836
1943:   85,898
1944:   96,318

In terms of historical significance, there is little to match the incredible victory that America’s armed forces achieved in World War II. But the swift resurrection of American industry comes close.

Step into 1940 with a peek at these pages from the February 24, 1940 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, 75 years ago: