"Autumn Stroll" by Norman Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell was a child of the city, raised in the mean streets of Manhattan in the late 1800s. As a New Yorker, he idealized certain aspects of country life as only a city slicker can. The man and his dog taking a stroll in the fresh air was little more than a dream at the time this cover was created.

The idea for the painting actually originated with the model, Walter Botts, whom Norman and his new wife Mary met in 1930 in New York as the artist was introducing her to his circle of friends. Walter and Mary hit it off when they discovered that they were both from the Midwest. Walter was describing his hometown and spoke fondly of his Hoosier roots and his love of wandering the countryside of south central Indiana as a kid.

Nothing came of the meeting right away, but the idealized vision of a bracing walk in the country had lodged in the artist’s mind. Five years later, Norman, Mary, and their two sons Jerry and Tommy (third son Peter was born in 1936), left New York to vacation at Mary’s family home in southern California. This was to be a working vacation for the artist, who visited Hollywood to do a radio show and made a point of seeing a string of potential models. As luck would have it, one of the models was Walter, now living in Los Angeles.

Was it fate that brought the two men together again? Norman had already made a preliminary sketch of the man-with-a-dog scene Walter had described five years earlier, but he’d done so using a different model. It was Mary who suggested Norman redo the illustration using Walter. After all, she pointed out, it was Walter who had been the original inspiration for the idea.

Norman always loved this painting for its reflection of the country life he aspired to. Sure enough, three years after completing the work, he and his family would relocate from the New York suburbs to southern Vermont. The dream became a reality.

As an interesting footnote, in 1938, model Walter’s face became familiar to millions as Uncle Sam in the World War II recruiting posters entitled, “I Want You.” Artist James Montgomery Flagg chose the model because he had “the longest arms, the longest nose, and the bushiest eyebrows,” according to James’ widow’s memoir. As the story goes, when James asked Walter what he was going to do with those long arms, the model suggested the persuasive pointing gesture. And the rest, as they say, is history.

To order a print, visit saturdayeveningpost.com/autumn-stroll.

A Dream Come True The Saturday Evening Post

In case you hadn’t noticed, fashionable clothing for men has barely changed over the past 200 years.

The coat-tie-trousers-hat ensemble was established in the 1820s. The only significant change has been the abandonment of the hat, once the most personal and most expressive item in a man’s wardrobe.

While the basic elements have remained constant, men’s clothing has seen countless variations over the past two centuries. Each year, it seems, brings new coat lengths, tie widths, and lapel cuts. But as this 1930 advertisement shows, there is a strong resemblance between the suit of today and of 70 years ago.

In the ’30s, a Post article posed the question that has occurred to most men who’ve wandered the aisles of a clothing store and shaken their head at the strange, new fashions: “Where do they come up with this stuff?” Based on his experience as a buyer, Arthur van Vlissingen declared that new styles weren’t dictated by either clothing retailers or manufacturers; neither could afford to gamble on an upcoming trend.

New styles become popular only when men see other men wearing them. “Men, unlike women, seldom discard a garment simply because the style has meanwhile changed. The average man who buys one of our suits wears it until, from his standpoint, it is worn out. … But men are none the less sensitive to style. They will [only] buy clothing which is … the fashion in their social circles, whatever these circles may be. They are determined to start even with their fellows every time they get new outfits,” Vlissingen wrote.

But this only explains how styles grew, not how they were born. He explains that, ultimately, new fashions were started by men who had their clothes made for them. These men included the successful executive, who needed to prove his ability to sense a new trend and his willingness to invest in it. Also included was the salesman, who had to demonstrate to his customers that he was aware of the latest developments, both in his own business and in fashion.

Younger men followed “styles which take shape at the places where the country’s leisured and socially prominent loaf, such places as Palm Beach and Newport, Aiken and Southampton, White Sulphur and Virginia Hot Springs.”

Another major influence on fashion in the 1930s was college—one university, in particular. “The fashions in clothing worn by our male population, between the ages of 14 and perhaps 25, usually get their start at Princeton,” Vlissingen wrote.

“Harvard is a very large university, in a great city which influences the students’ styles heavily. [But] it holds to a tradition of careless dress—well-made clothes seldom dry-cleaned and never pressed. Yale is more compact and more finicky, but New Haven is also a large city. Princeton is in a smaller town, off by itself where it can incubate a style effectively. Practically every Princeton student is well dressed, whereas only one-third or so of the Yale men can qualify by our standards.”

Whether they were at a resort or on a campus, these young men made up “a selective group of people, to whom adheres social prestige, [which] absents itself from cities all over the country. During their absence these men quite unconsciously decide what sorts of clothing they wish to wear. Then they scatter to their homes and are imitated by their friends, from whom, in turn, the style spreads in ever-widening circles.”

In addition to the fashion example set by the successful executive or the big man on campus, American men’s tastes were strongly influenced by the clothing they saw actors wearing in motion pictures.

Mr. Jinks, the well-known wholesale grocer of a mid-Kansas town, would indignantly and honestly deny that he buys his clothes according to what he sees at the movies. But the chances are that his clothier can recognize in Mr. Jinks’ halting description of the suit he wants, the outfit against which Marlene Dietrich pillowed her comely cheek at the Lyric last night.

No longer can a New York salesman come into Mr. Jinks’ store wearing a shepherd-plaid suit with two-inch checks, a red necktie, with a diamond horseshoe, and a pair of high-yellow shoes—not if he wants Mr. Jinks to think he’s dressed in the latest style.

Mr. Jinks may not be particularly alert about styles, and maybe he has not been in a town of more than 25,000 population for two years. But, like almost everyone else on the North American continent, Mr. Jinks goes to the movies. So does the traveling salesman. Which helps to account for the fact that the old-fashioned traveling man in loud clothes has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Douglas Fairbanks and his well-dressed fellows have done him to death.

Gone are the days when movies introduced men to elegant dinner jackets, stylish sport coats, and raffish neckwear. Today’s movies are more likely to reflect the style du jour: work pants, T-shirt, and baseball cap, which are worn by movie moguls, software tycoons, and every big man on campus. Perhaps the 200-year-old fashion for men will, at last, be replaced.

Why Do Men Dress That Way? 1930s version. The Saturday Evening Post

Click here to download “Big Shots or Pop Guns?” or read below.

Big Shots or Pop Guns? The Saturday Evening Post

“The magazine came out every week, and I would pick up my bundle at the grocery store after school,” Gordon wrote of his newsboy days. “Some unknown, out-of-sight person had dropped these off earlier. I would guess I had 20 to 25 copies in the bundle. There was an equal number of customers waiting for me to hop on my bicycle and pedal perhaps three miles to cover the route. I liked that. Each copy sold for five cents. My profit came out of that.”

“The Nursemaid” by Norman Rockwell

"The Nursemaid"
from October 24, 1936

Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gordon had early memories of the magazine. “I can remember my mother tearing off the covers of The Saturday Evening Post over the years — those illustrated by Norman Rockwell, and saving them. She told me, ‘Gordon, each one of these pictures has a complete story within them and you don’t need to read a single word.’”

Today, Mr. Thorpe resides in North Carolina where he loves to take his bike out on the American Tobacco Trail, so named as a tribute to the area’s agricultural and commercial heritage. Many of the cyclists have grown accustomed to seeing Gordon and enjoy stopping to chat with him. He used to ride the trail with his wife, but sadly, he lost her in September. Determined to stay active, Gordon says, “I get up and go by myself now.” The World War II veteran also swims a mile every morning.

Gordon’s bike is a Trek 4700 hybrid his family presented to him on his 80th birthday. An article on the Rails to Trials Conservancy website describes what his supportive family did for his 90th:

“I had no idea,” Gordon says. “We were out on the trail together, and I say, “Look, they’ve put a new bench in.” So my son says, ‘Why don’t we stop?’ I started reading the little bronze plaque, and that’s when I realized.” Reading the inscription aloud, Thorpe seems genuinely touched by the gesture to build the seat, which took months of careful planning between the family and county workers.

“That’s the part I like best: ‘keep on riding,’” Thorpe says.

“I still subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post,” he says, “and when I am through with each issue I send it to my daughter.”

His delivery days were over within two or three years. “When I reached 15, my interest changed from The Saturday Evening Post to girls.”

Keep on riding, Gordon!

Know a former Post newsboy? We would love to feature them on our website! Email Diana Denny.

Photos provided by Gordon’s son, Jim Thorpe.

Post Newsboys: Still Riding! The Saturday Evening Post

From Our Archives: From Farm Boy to Financier The Saturday Evening Post

So, as a public service, we’d like to show what the word really means. Using an article by Post writer Stanley High, we present the 1939 class of home-grown haters: dedicated, I’ve-got-the-shirt-to-prove-it fascists.

George E. Deatherage (White Camellias, Knights of) testifying before Congress.

Nineteen thirty-nine was a promising year for America’s extremists, who had seen Nazi Germany gobbling up large chunks of Europe. Hoping to repeat that success in America, they were busily cranking out campaign literature to anyone who’d read it. They were led by an assortment of demagogues and would-be führers—all “chronic speechmakers” according to High—who were pushing the ideas of authoritarian government, racial purity, and the elimination of communists.

Several, as High noted, had begun their activism while members of the Ku Klux Klan. For example, George E. Deatherge, founder of The Knights of the White Camellia.

[He] insists that, thanks to the Klan, America started toward Fascism long before Germany.

Nazi policy toward the Jews, he says, is only a copy of the Klan’s program for the Negroes.

Even the Nazi salute, according to Deatherage, is a straight steal from the Klan.

His publication serves as one of the distributing agents of World Service, the English-language newssheet printed by the Nazi International. He does not attempt to conceal his Fascist preferences or the Nazi sources from which he gets them. “Fascism,” he has said, “is America’s only solution.”

So taken was he with the Nazi’s success that Deatherage told his supporters to stop burning crosses on people’s lawns and burn swastikas instead (even if they were harder to build).

Another Klan alumnus, George W. Christians, founder of the White Shirts, idolized Germany’s führer.

George W. Christians (White Shirts)

He imagines that he looks like Hitler. He has a pruned mustache and a lock of hair that, on the day of my visit, had to be coaxed before it fell into place athwart his forehead.

Christians is looked upon by some of his colleagues as dangerous. He makes no bones about his belief that violence has to come in the United States, or of his hope that it will come soon.

On his desk, when I visited him, he had a full-sized brick with a sticker on it of the Crusaders for Economic Liberty. I asked for an explanation.

“Well,” he said, “we don’t tell our boys to throw bricks through the windows—not yet. But we tell them that if they do, be sure to put our stickers on them.”

Meanwhile, the Klan was nursing hopes it could benefit from all the talk about “racial purity” etc.

Over the previous decade, Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans, the Invisible Empire’s Imperial Wizard, has presided over its diminished destiny from a modest Atlanta office and, as an undiminished sideline, has sold concrete. Today he lives in a beautiful modernistic home in the city’s swankest section… and confidently predicts that 1940 will usher him and his organization into the limelight again.

Dudley Pelley (Silver Shirts)

Deatherage and Christians were just two among many men trying to gain a national following. There was also Dudley Pelley, founder of the Silver Shirts, an anti-Semite and opponent of all things communistic.

He ran a sizeable publishing operation that printed 30,000 pieces of propaganda every day. But his faith was in the sword, not the pen.

“Violence is on the way. When it comes, we’ll be ready for it.”

Then there was Reverend Gerald Winrod, publisher of “The Defender,” and Donald Shea of “The National Gentile League, Inc.” And every major city, it seemed, sprouted its own fascist organization, which usually masked a hatred of Jews behind a front of Christianity. There was the American Gentile Protective Association (Chicago), the Christian American Crusade (Los Angeles), the Christian Constitutional Party (San Francisco), the Christian Democrats (Dallas), the Christian Protective League (Mobile), and the American Christian Defenders (New York).

They gained followers by downplaying their love of autocracy and racism and promoting patriotism.

No group in America make freer use of the Founding Fathers or play closer to the flag. That, too, is out of the Nazi book. On behalf of the Founding Fathers, they hate democracy. The Founding Fathers, they maintain, did not found a democracy— “mob rule”—but a republic—”a government of representatives.”

With varying degrees of openness, they doubt—as the Nazis did—whether so much evil can be uprooted without the use of force. Most of them appear to relish the prospect. Some of them are actively organizing to have a hand in it. Meanwhile, in support and for the spread of these hatreds, they are pouring upon the country an extensive propaganda which, for incoherent violence, might be drawn directly from the [German Nazi] presses — as some of it actually is.

Ersatz Führer Fritz Kuhn

While some fascists hid their sympathies behind polite and noble phrases, the German-American Bund openly emulated the German Nazi party. Its membership —230,000 German Americans and 10,000 uniformed strong-arm storm troopers— was led by Fritz Kuhn, “ponderous of mind and body, but inclined to swagger…  a stiff disciplinarian and a good organizer, but no platform rabble-rouser.”

Kuhn called his Bund “a militant organization of patriotic Americans.” While his public messages were restrained, his subordinates were telling Bund members—

“we must be prepared to fight for the right kind of government… There will be bloodshed and fighting. We shall have to do our part… There will be a time to wipe out our enemies.”

America First, the country’s most vocal advocate of isolationism, was very active in 1939. Most of its members believed it was a politically neutral organization that wanted to keep America out of Europe’s coming war. But it was directed by James True, who published the Industrial Control Report, a fascist report on Washington.

If an American Hitler arises and has need, as he will, of a newspaper, he could… do worse than to take over Industrial Control Reports. That, I am sure, would please Mr. True… The editorial policy would hardly have to be touched. It is already as pro-Hitler as—at this stage—it is prudent.

Each one of these men hoped for national prominence. If any of them gained power in America, High wrote—

Reverend Gerald Winrod ("The Defender")

what he leads will be neither good to look at nor easy to handle. It will include some sincere citizens and, with them, as unlovely an assortment of aliens, bigots and malcontents as any that ever abused the privileges of a democracy.

It seems safe to predict that, thanks to their presence in it, the country is due for some discomforting, and perhaps prolonged, attacks of ideological indigestion.

No candidate of today’s major party, regardless of how extreme they talk, merits the label “Fascist.” There are many people in this country, however, for whom the title is a perfect fit, and — as The Huffington Post noted this week— that number is growing.

Star-Spangled Fascists The Saturday Evening Post

From the local paper in Ontario, Oregon
June 20, 1938

The 1938 newspaper photo is fuzzy, but you can see Luanna Scott to the near right carrying her canvas Saturday Evening Post bag. The caption reads: “When the Al G. Barns and Sells Floto circus came here (Ontario, Oregon) yesterday, the railroad tracks were a Mecca for the kids—and a good many adults. Members of this group of wide-eyed, breathless youngsters is (sic) typical of the hundreds that swarmed over the tracks.”

In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt was president of the U.S. and unemployment was a continual problem. The average cost of a new House was $4,100 and average annual wages were between $1,700-1,800. It was the year that the Golden Gate Bridge was completed and opened; Amelia Earhart disappeared; and the pride of the German air fleet, the Hindenburg, went down in flames. And, of course, it was the year little Luanna started her first job.

In the very early 1900s, Curtis Publishing developed a network of young boys (and occasionally girls) to sell their popular magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, The Country Gentleman and (at that time) The Ladies Home Journal. Since youngsters needed every penny they could earn, it became a great way to get these issues in nearly every American home.

“It was a depressing time for our family in 1937,” Luanna Mitchell wrote, “but I was very fortunate at 7 years old because my older brother signed up the sell The Saturday Evening Post. He changed his plans before the magazines arrived, so I got to have his job. We lived in a very small town during that time in Ontario, Oregon. There were maybe 1500 people in the whole area.”

June 18, 1938

We determined that the newspaper photo Mrs. Mitchell sent us ran in the local paper on June 20, 1938, so this was probably the issue of The Post she carried in that canvas bag. The June 18 issue had five fiction stories and two serials, as well as an editorial staff that was not fond of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and was keeping a leery eye on that Hitler guy in Germany.

“The Post sold for a nickel each and I got to keep 1.5 cents a copy. This was big money to a little girl. Every Saturday morning, 25 magazines were delivered to our home. My first delivery of magazines came with a white canvas pouch for me to carry them in, which I still have today. I could easily sell these magazines because they were the most popular of that time. And, how many businesses would turn down a little girl working hard for her five cents when times were so difficult? I also became a pretty good sales person and learned some business savvy in the next few years that has helped me throughout my life in many ways. I held sales jobs all through school and I had a small business of my own, a craft and collectibles shop that did very well.”

Carl and Luanna's 60th wedding Anniversary
January 2012

This is our hard-working newsgirl today at age 82. The handsome gentleman is Luanna’s husband, Carl, 87. The photo was January 2012 on their 60th wedding anniversary. We thank Luanna for sharing her early Saturday Evening Post experiences. And, by the way, we wish Luanna and Carl a very happy anniversary.

Were you (or was someone you know) a Post newsboy (or girl)? We’d love to share your story with our web readers! Comment below or e-mail Diana.

Meet Post Newsgirl Luanna (Scott) Mitchell The Saturday Evening Post

Success on this scale would have been unthinkable when the NFL was founded 91 years ago this week. Back then, pro football was struggling for acceptance. Americans loved the game, but only when played by college teams. For years, the NFL struggled to build a following for the professional sport, which was considered inferior to the college version. This misconception led one of its star players to write in its defense for a 1932 issue of the Post.

“Do you believe a great college team could beat one of the good teams in the National Professional league?”

That’s a question people ask me frequently. My reply is that I believe the college eleven would have little, if any, chance of winning. I add that the professionals’ margin of victory should be more than one touchdown. So saying, I bare my reddish locks to the storms of criticisms that will fall on my head.

Those reddish locks belonged to Harold “Red” Grange, formerly the star halfback at the University of Illinois. At the time of writing, the “Galloping Ghost”played for the Chicago Bears, helping to lure fans of his college performance to the pro games.

My belief in pro superiority … is grounded on the experience of three years of comparative skylarking on college gridirons and six bruising years in professional football.

Professional footballers, Grange says, play a longer season. They don’t have many of the advantages college players enjoy, like some of the best coaches in the game. And they are powered by—

The gentleman very much in action is Tennessee's Bad News Cafego.

a pregame emotional frenzy created by publicity, campus tension, the bands, and the fire-eating alumni.

In my own university days, I was convinced that the fate of the nation hinged on whether we defeated Michigan. I believed that my dad … might have a stroke if we lost.

But a fanatical desire to win and the inspiration of a coach won’t take a halfback over, around, or through a hard, fast line which averages 220 pounds from end to end. That’s what you face when you line up against the Green Bay Packers, for example.

Professional ball players must face tough, hardened veterans who know all the tricks and feints, which are so effective among college players.

The pros work out five days each week; they play on the sixth, and have their day off on Monday, instead of on Sunday, as is the case in college. The three hours of practice are largely devoted to football fundamentals, even though most of the men have played for years.

The professional footballer, Grange adds in those innocent days, had to really like the game to stick with it.

The pay isn’t large and there are easier ways to make a living. The average pay for a professional squad is about $125 per player, per game [$1,900 in current dollars]; a team plays from fourteen to eighteen games each season. The highest salary any player in the league receives, I believe, is about $10,000 a season. [$160,000 in today’s money.]

[Just as revenues have grown since 1932, so have salaries. The median income for NFL players is over $750,000 a year. The highest annual salary is $18 million.]

In conclusion, there is one thing in which I take plenty of pride. It is not in the fact that I gained more than two miles of ground in my twenty games at Illinois—thanks to superb blocking by the Illini.

I do take pride in the fact that during 1931 I led the Chicago Bears, for the season, in average gains from scrimmage, carrying the ball 605 yards in 114 attempts, an average of 5.3 yards on each try. On many of those yards I carried a 225-pound lineman on my back for company. If ball carrying in pro football gets any harder, I’ll simply have to take up bridge.

This action photograph taken during a professional game in Chicago would seem to indicate that the pros leave little, if any, of their boyish enthusiasm behind them when they leave college. Grange is shown carrying the ball. On the left side of the page Grange is shown in a game between the Chicago Bears and Brooklyn.

Making A Case for Pro Football The Saturday Evening Post

And this may be only the beginning. Newspaper articles quote climatologists who say the drought will last for years, maybe forever.

Naturally, any mention of drought brings up comparisons with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Yet, when you read the articles about the drought of, say, 1934, you don’t get the same apocalyptic sense as you do from today’s news.

For example, take Chester C. Davis’s 1935 article in the Post. Davis knew better than most Americans how bad the Dust Bowl was. As head of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, he wrote about the previous year’s drought with a tone I can only describe as grim optimism.

Day by day and week by week, the tragic story of drought unfolded in the daily reports that were hurried to the desks of the drought fighters. Searing heat in July completed the devastation of a dry May and a disappointing June. The area of distress swiftly spread until, by late July, our maps showed an expanse of drought covering nearly three-fourths of the entire country.

Crop production proved 32 per cent less than the ten-year average. The corn crop was the smallest since 1881; the oats crop the smallest since 1890. Worst of all, on July 1^st the pasture condition was only 48.9 per cent of normal.

As Davis saw it, the country had two choices:

Government inaction, abandoning the wretched individual to face the problem alone, [or] recognizing the drought as a summons to a great social effort. The preamble of the Constitution, defining promotion of the general welfare as one of the purposes of Government, was taken to mean what it says. The greatest collective power established by any people at any time—the power of the United States Government—came to grips with the drought.

The government could help, but it couldn’t solve the problem; that would would require farmers and ranchers to make better use of the water and soil.

No current program can beat a drought after it strikes. The best that can be done then is to spread the shock and thus lessen its force on those directly in its path. But we can consider taking out insurance against future droughts while we are still feeling the blight of this one.

The lack of a forward-looking land-use and soil-conservation policy can be remedied. Safeguards can be adopted against wind erosion, or dust storms, and serious water erosion.

The weather and the crops improved gradually through the 1930s, leading Americans to hope they would never again see such heat and drought. But they did. Just 20 years later, the Post reported that Texas was facing the worst water shortage in its history.

For seven long years … this drought has spread farther and farther from its starting point along the once-silvery Rio Grande. The old “dust-bowl” region of the ’30s is dry again. In all this area crops have been failing for years.

All that remains of the San Gabriel River in Williamson County, Texas.

Live oaks estimated to be 200 to 500 years old have died in this land. The toughest gnarled monarchs stood gray and naked throughout the year, too sick and sapless to sprout a covering of leaves. A Texas historian said, “If it doesn’t rain pretty soon, coming generations will wonder why the county was named Live Oak.”

At a livestock auction in this section last August, a graying man who had brought in twenty-seven cows refused to enter the ring and watch them go to the highest bidder. He sat on a corral fence with his back turned, tears streaking his sunburned face. He had been forced to liquidate his own herd months before because there wasn’t enough grass in his pastures to build a bird’s nest. This last bunch of cows had survived on high-priced hay until money and water played out. They belonged to his son, who would soon be coming home from military service overseas. Instead of starting life with his own herd, this lad would have to find a city job.

Farther down the fence, two cattlemen saw the father’s tears and averted their eyes. “It’s hell when it’s this way,” one said.

Amid these stories of loss, though, were stories of determination. The writer told of farmers and ranchers who, refusing to quit their spreads, switched jobs for a year to meet their payments.

In the Oklahoma Panhandle and Southern Kansas, scores of farmers have been riding in carpools every day to work in an aircraft-part plant at Liberal. In one Central Texas farming settlement, eighty-three men—almost the entire able-bodied male population—are driving fifty miles to work in a Forth Worth factory.

The same resolve was even more noticeable in Post reporting of the early ’30s. They told how farmers were enduring extreme poverty and fighting to keep their land and their independence.

It’s this spirit that appears to be missing from news stories about the current drought. There seems to be little faith in  human adaptability, innovation, or government agencies. Nor is there recognition that farmers and ranchers will learn to work with nature’s changing rules because they know, as Chester Davis put it,

With Nature, the future is always bright.

In devastated Karnes County, Texas, Dobie Gideon watches rain clouds bypass his once-prosperous ranch.

Dry Facts The Saturday Evening Post

Great as her gifts, objectivity toward herself has never been one of them. She is one of the most extroverted of humans, aggressively gregarious and tireless in debate. For combined intellectual, physical, and emotional energy, she has no known equal, male or female.

Miss Thompson is statuesque and handsome. She is a master of the dramatic entrance and immediately makes herself the center of attention whenever she enters a roomful of people. It works unfailingly, whether the occasion is a birthday party for someone else, a cocktail soiree, or a christening. Women who go to the same social affairs begin by being annoyed and wind up sitting things out in a cold fury. The men surround miss Thompson and hang on her words.

It was inevitable that such a woman would find a determined admirer. In her case, the admirer was the Nobel-winning author, Sinclair Lewis. He first saw her in Berlin while he was on a book tour of Europe. With one look, he cancelled his tour and begged a friend to introduce him to Ms. Thompson at dinner that night.

Thus began one of the strangest of courtships. During the supper, Lewis’ eyes hardly left his hostess, and after the table had been cleared he maneuvered her into a corner and asked point-blank whether she would marry him.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I want to build a lovely house in Vermont and you are the only person I ever met that I wanted to share it with,” Lewis replied.

“That isn’t a good enough reason, but thank you very much—especially for asking me on this particular day,” Miss Thompson said. [It was both Ms. Thompson's birthday and the day her divorce became official.]

Lewis said that his own divorce was not final as yet, but added, “I’m going to propose to you every time I see you, and from now on, in public and in private.”

Dorothy Thompson, newspaper columnist recently returned from Europe, calls on President Roosevelt at the White House.

Two days later his publisher arrived in Berlin and gave a public dinner in Lewis’ honor. Lewis insisted that Miss Thompson attend too. When called upon for a speech, the novelist arose and, ignoring everything else, faced her.

“Dorothy,” he said, “will you marry me?”  That was all there was to the speech.

Rioting broke out in Vienna a few days later and Miss Thompson left for Tempelhof airdrome to charter an airplane. Lewis, getting wind of her departure, taxicabbed after her. He hated airplanes and had never ridden in one, but he jumped in alongside her. “Marry me, Dorothy, will you?” he asked. Frances Gunther, the wife of John Gunther, who had come to see Miss Thompson off, was pressed into service as a chaperone, and the ship took off with Lewis grimly holding on to the armrests.

A low-hanging fog made visibility almost zero and for a couple of hours the plane yawed and groaned over roofs and treetops, then turned back to Tempelhof to wait for better weather. Lewis’ normally ruddy face showed signs of paleness, but he was aboard when the plane departed again. At the Vienna airport Miss Thompson bolted away in a cab and Lewis pursued her in another.

During the week that disorders lasted, Lewis proposed several times a day. Miss Thompson told him that she would consider his request if he wrote his own impressions of the riots for the Public Ledger syndicate. He did, at space rates.

In the fall, Miss Thompson slipped out of Berlin and flew to Moscow to cover the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevist revolution. The love-and-air-sick novelist flew after her. Lewis, whose interest in the Russian experiment was nil, was nevertheless rated a great man in the Soviet Union, where his novels were widely read in translation. News of his flight had preceded him and a delegation of notables met him at the air field with a brass band.

The band played a welcoming hymn. The chairman of the committee delivered an address of greeting. Then, perhaps in the hope of evoking a plug for the anniversary, he asked the author why he had come to Moscow.

“To see Dorothy,” was the reply.

The chairman, puzzled, asked him again.

“Dorothy,” Lewis explained, “just Dorothy.”

During the celebration, the Russians never did get to understand Lewis, and he wasn’t interested in understanding them. But the trip was a success for him. He got in dozens of proposals in Red Square when the tanks passing in review weren’t making too much noise.

Dorothy Thompson at a dinner party.

In March, 1928, Miss Thompson gave up her job in Berlin, preparatory to her marriage to Lewis in the Savoy Chapel, in London. For a honeymoon, they toured the English countryside in an automobile trailer which Lewis had bought in a moment of whimsey.  Trailers were an American oddity at the time, and everywhere the honeymooners went they aroused the curiosity of the simple natives.

Afterward, they lived a helter-skelter life. Lewis bought a farm in Vermont and a house in Bronxville, and when they weren’t living in one of these places they were traveling about Europe. Dorothy bore a son, Michael, who, in the fullness of time, learned to defeat her in argument, which is more than anyone else has succeeded in doing, and to put castor oil in her company cocktail shaker.

The movie inspired by Dorothy Thompson’s career, “Woman of the Year,” concerned a pair of writers juggling their careers and their marriage. The movie was successful partly because of the chemistry between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and partly because the writer didn’t try to write a script as unbelievable as the true-life courtship of Thompson and Lewis.

“What a Woman!” The Saturday Evening Post

Well before the war started, Ms. Thompson had built an international reputation out of hard work and a readiness to go to any story. One evening in 1926, for example, as she entered the Vienna opera house, she overheard someone talking about a coup d’état in Poland. Telephoning an associate, she learned there was truth to the rumor. She instantly left the theater, grabbed a suitcase of clothes, borrowed $500 cash from her friend Sigmund Freud, and boarded the last train to Warsaw. When the train was stopped 50 miles outside the city, Ms. Thompson and another correspondent flagged down an automobile, which took them within five miles of the city. From there, she continued on in darkness, dragging herself and her suitcase across muddy fields to avoid militia patrols. Arriving in the city, she was refused entry to her hotel and so headed to the American Embassy, stepping across dead bodies in the streets. After writing her story, she was told that all telegraph offices had been closed by the government. She immediately hired another car and drove far out into the country. She eventually found a telegraph station that hadn’t heard the order to shut down, from which she filed her story.

Columnist Dorothy Thompson advocates repeal of Neutrality Act to allow U.S. freedom of policy. Washington, D.C., April 26 1939.

This sort of determination earned her a posting to Berlin in 1927, from where she watched Adolf Hitler’s rise from beer-hall demagogue to chancellor of Germany. In 1933, she wrote an article for the Post that analyzed how Hitler won a free election to become head of state. Much of his success, she stated, was his blatant appeal to “fear, hatred, envy and above all, ignorance.”

This much was obvious after the war, but it was still rare in the 1930s when many people were undecided about Hitler. Some saw him as a viable leader for his country, a man who could restore stability to Germany and oppose communism. Ms. Thompson wasn’t buying any of this wishful thinking. In her reporting of the Nazis’ assumption of power, she proved to be one of the very few who saw what was coming.

The German people have not had Mr. Hitler thrust upon them. He recommended himself to them and they bought him. More than 50 per cent of all Germans politically minded enough to exercise the right of suffrage—and nearly 89 percent of them went to the polls—deliberately gave away all their civil rights, all their chances of popular control, all their opportunities for representation. The German people went over to autocracy in March, 1933, in a body, burning all their bridges behind them.

That the vote came as a shock to most English and Americans is due to a couple of illusions fondly and incurably cherished by people whose tradition is largely Anglo-Saxon. One is the illusion that all peoples love liberty, and that political liberty and some form of representative government are indivisible. The other is that peoples are less aggressive than their rulers. For, essentially, in 1933,the German people voted to fight; to fight the war all over again if need be.

In a few days Hitler and his private army changed the whole form of political life in Germany.

Storm troops of Hitler were in possession of the streets. And in the days following the election, the streets of every municipality presented in a curious aspect. Germany had suddenly got into uniform. A strange deadness seemed to come over commercial life, but in the streets a mass moved constantly—a marching mass, with banners, with bands and with uniforms.

No whisper leaked out in the Berlin press of what was happening under the Third Reich. Hitler, still speaking night after night, talked of brotherly love and German unity to cheering masses. But his adjutant, Goering, master of Prussia’s police, made no secret of the government’s intention to exterminate everyone who showed hostility to the regime. “ I waste no sympathy over the eighty or hundred thousand traitors under arrest,” he said in a speech—and the public learned for the first time the possible extent of the government’s roundup.

Dorothy Thompson in 1920

Many journalists continued reporting from Germany throughout the 1930s, but only because they carefully avoided reporting anything that would offend Hitler. Ms. Thompson wasn’t interested in tact or compromise. So, in 1934, the Gestapo marched her out of the country, making her the first reporter deported from Germany.

It was hardly the end of her career. Back in the U.S., she continued reporting and began broadcasting her analysis of the news. By 1942, Time magazine reported that she was one of the most admired woman in the country, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Ms. Thompson would have turned 118 years old this Saturday, and while you and I might think that an advanced age, she didn’t. She told a Post writer in 1940:

She feels cramped by the limitations of an ordinary lifetime and often speculates on how nice it would be to live two or three hundred years. To someone who once asked her what epitaph she would like, she replied, “Died of extreme old age.”

Next: “What a Woman!“

The Real Woman of the Year The Saturday Evening Post

It hardly seems the best way to handle the problem, but there are no ideal solutions in flood control—only trade-offs. The only alternative was to let the flood lift the river over the Illinois bank to wash away the town of Cairo.

This is not the first time the Engineers sacrificed the planting season of Eastern Missouri to save Cairo, Illinois. When they first employed the Birds Point/New Madrid floodway, back in 1937, they drove 5,000 Missourians from their property to keep the 13,000 residents of Cairo above water. This year, the controlled flood will affect 300 Missouri households to spare 2,800 residents across the river.

Naturally, Missouri farmers are unhappy about this trade-off. Nor are the people of Cairo delighted with their prospects. While they may have been spare this year, their families, homes, and businesses will continue to live with the annual threat of flooding.

Another Illinois town, just 98 miles up the Ohio river, faced a similar challenge. After 135 years of determinedly fighting the river, they finally admitted defeat, as the Post reported in 1940.

Looking down from levee top to ferry at normal river stage.

Fourteen times the river has burst through on Shawneetown in major floods, each usually worse than the last, and the last worst of all, in 1937. It was then that the town, which did not know when it was licked, gave up.

There were disastrous floods in 1832, in 1847, in 1853 and 1858. When another came in 1859, the exasperated town folk started the first levee. In 1867 the river rose to a new high and burst over and through the levee.

Shawneetown responded by enlarging and strengthening its levee, which kept the flood out of town for 15 years.

Then came the three successive floods of 1882, 1883 and 1884, each set­ting a new mark and driving everyone to the hills. This time the Federal Government came to the aid of Shawneetown. At a cost of $200,000, it raised the levee one foot and length­ened it.

The sixty-one-foot mark at top of levee. The Ohio River reached sixty-six feet in 1937.

In 1898 the river topped fifty-five feet for a new record and drowned twenty-six persons, with a huge property loss. The levee was lengthened and strengthened again, but not raised, for never could there be such a flood as 1898′s again.

All was well until the great flood of 1913, when the Ohio topped fifty-nine feet. When Shawnee­town dug out of this, it spent an addi­tional $130,000 on its barrier wall. These were large sums for a town of never more than 2000 persons. Twenty years went by without a repetition, but the wary dwellers by the river re­built the levee in 1933 just to make sure, raising it to sixty-one feet above the low-water mark. At normal river stages the town was almost invisible from passing boats.

Then the long-sleeping Ohio in 1937 vaulted high over all past records to sixty-six feet. This was five feet higher than the top of the levee, but long be­fore the river reached that stage the town had been evacuated and the levee dynamited to prevent the possibility of its sudden collapse. The waters swirled twenty-five feet deep in Main Street and surged twenty-two miles inland to engulf Harrisburg, a town of 12,000.

“How deep was the water in here?” you ask the clerk in the high-ceilinged drugstore.

“About eight or nine feet,” he says, “upstairs!”

The refugees gathered in a Red Cross camp inside the township high school to discuss their future.

They were reminded that the Federal Government and the Red Cross had spent in fifty years more than $600,000 on the levee and for rescue and rehabilitation work here.

The refugees… voted 44 to 1 to surrender to the river.

Government-built new town on the hill. Most of the houses are new; a few have been moved from the old town.

A few residents stubbornly held on, living in the old family homes downtown, but most residents moved to high ground, three miles from the river. They left the houses and commercial buildings to the inevitable flood they knew would sweep them all away.

Today, 1200 people live Shawneetown, Illinois. Down by the river, though, 200 residents live in Old Shawneetown, which still survives, along with its old houses, stores, and its great neo-classical Bank. The great, all-destroying flood that Shawneetown fled to escape never arrived.

Bargaining With The Flood The Saturday Evening Post

Others choose risk over caution. With everything in life feeling like a gamble, these Americans began taking chances that they never would have considered in prosperous times. So it’s not surprising to read, in a 1935 Post article, “The Betting Boom,” that racetrack gambling had become one of America’s few booming industries that year.

The author, Bryan Field, told how talk of higher tax revenues and employment enticed several states to legalize race-track betting. In the past three years, he wrote,

the number of states having racing and betting has risen from seven to twenty-seven, with more getting ready to leap on the band wagon. At the moment of writing, several other states have racing and betting measures in process of passage.

In the same period of time, the money handled in legalized wagering has risen to about $500,000,000 annually. [Roughly translated into 2011 money: $7 Trillion!]

Racetrack wagering had dropped in states where it had been permitted for years. All this recent growth, Field said, was in states that had recently legalized betting.

It is in such places that Old Scrooges and Happy Charlies alike have unearthed the tin can from beneath the brickwork in the cellar and put rainy-day money into circulation.

Taking an average of eight horses to a race, we get approximately 120,000 Thoroughbreds in action in 1934, as against a fraction of that number theretofore. There are only about 10,000 Thoroughbreds available in this country, so they have to be run over and over again—practically worn to a frazzle—in order to make up the number of horses indicated above.

Since 1932, when the inflationary expansion of racing began suddenly, the number of days of racing given has increased to almost 2000… The number of races in 1934 approximated 15,000.

Inevitably, this army of novice gamblers attracted crooks and con men. In 1930, they built a scheme around a little-known rule at the Kentucky Derby, which allowed an owner to nominate a horse for the race with no intention of actually running the horse. The scheme backfired in a most satisfactory way.

Rear View of the Machinery of the Tote Which prints and delievers your wage ticket and adjusts the odds in the same operation

Virtue scored something of a triumph when a sorry nag named Dick O’Hara ran true to form and finished last in the Kentucky Derby of 1930; for the fact that he ran at all caused the utter rout of a ring of Chicago slickers who thought they had a foolproof shortcut to fortune.

They almost had—if it hadn’t been for Dick O’Hara’s owner, the late Stanley Joyce.

Though Dick O’Hara was one of the worst of the season’s two-year racer crop, Joyce had nominated him for the Derby, partly for a gag and partly for a bit of publicity. It cost only twenty-five dollars, and no one expected that the horse would run, since it would take $500 just to place his name in the starting box and a lot more for the jockey, the trainer, and so on.

The nomination of such a hopeless candidate inspired the slicker’s dream—a lottery pegged on the Derby, plus a super-special come-on. Every ticket bearing the name of a horse which even started in the Derby, regardless of how he finished, was to win fifty dollars. And they instructed the printer to run off the vast majority of the tickets with the name of Dick O’Hara.

The lottery took Chicago like wildfire. Clerks, scrubwomen, janitors and other small-time gamblers snapped up chances on this cinch to win fifty dollars. But gradually, as news of the scheme spread, it became apparent that nearly everyone’s ticket was on the unlikeliest starter of them all.

The story got to Joyce. Furious that his horse should be used as a means of swindling thousands, he ordered the beast taken into seclusion, away from possible tampering; put his name in the starting box, to the unbelieving horror of the lottery-syndicate leaders, and ran him in the Derby—last, but in the field.

It was said that Joyce had operatives who watched the ringleaders and forced all who could be cornered to pay off.

Others of them also ran—away.

Open Betting Returns to New York after a generation;
a Bookmaker and his slate in the Jamaica Ring

Starter George Cassidy sends a field away from the Bahr starting gatesat Miami's Hialeah RaceTrack

Depression America Goes To The Horses The Saturday Evening Post

With gasoline at 17¢ a gallon, and new Ford sedans available for a mere $450, Nina Wilcox Putnam told Post readers there was never a better time to drive to California.

The best bargain on the American market today is a trip across the country, which can now be had for practically the same price as staying at home.

Automobiles in 1931, she reports in her Post article, “What’ll It Cost Me To Drive To the Coast?” have greatly improved over the past ten years. When she first drove from New York to California in 1921—

I carried spare parts enough to make up a second car, including new magneto points, and used every darned one of them before the first California real ­estate salesman was sighted.

The roads are better, too. Back in 1921, she says, you wouldn’t think of driving across the western states without an axe “for chopping brush to get you out of gumbo roads during Missouri rainstorms” and an extra set of suspension springs “because you were practically certain to break a spring on what were playfully nick­named ‘roads’ in Arizona.”

But even in 1931, Porter says, you had better bring  better along a length of strong tow-rope, and a waterbag to hang on the front of the car so you won’t run out of water in the desert.

“And ah, yes, I almost forgot a water­proof tarpaulin. No matter how good the trunk on the back of your car, take it from me you’d better cover it with a tarpaulin. It’s a big square of treated canvas, and it really does prevent dust and moisture from working into the luggage and ruining that one good suit or dress which you’re taking along in case you feel like changing some night at a stylish hotel.

The modern driver of 1931 now has a choice of cross-country routes. Most travelers take the National Road, which runs from Atlantic City to San Francisco, but she recommends a new route between Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

If you are sick of cities and want a vacation from them; if you are tired of passing trucks and of being held up by traffic stop lights, let me submit the new Midland Trail. I’ll guarantee you’ll hardly meet a truck, see an advertising sign or lose a moment through traffic sig­nals.

But let’s return to the question in Putnam’s title: just how much does it cost to drive from New York in California in 1931. Before she started, a New York travel agent had told her—

“With a small car it will cost you five cents a mile, including good but not fashion­able hotels, food, gas and oil, and ordi­nary running repairs. We figure it will take you nine days.”

When she reached her destination outside Los Angeles, Putnam found that she had actually spent a little less than the predicted $165.

Before there were motels, travellers stopped overnight at rustic motor camps, whose comfort level can be guessed by the picture above.

That’s a sizeable figure for a year when unemployment had risen to 16% and was continuing to climb. Yet it’s fairly inexpensive for nine days of sightseeing, hotels, and meals.Yet you could take the same trip for much less today.

Adjusted for 80 years of inflation, $1.00 in 1931 has the purchasing power of $14.50 today. So Putnam’s trip cost her the equivalent of $2,392 in 2011 dollars.

Today, the drive from New York to Los Angeles is 500 miles shorter. Using the gas prices of this last week, AAA’s fuelcostcalculator.aaa.com, determines that a new, inexpensive car (comparable to what Putnam drove) would consume $440 in gas. Furthermore, you wouldn’t need nine days to cover that distance. While I’ve known people who drove that distance in a heroic, three-day marathon, I’ll allow a modern driver six days (450 miles/day) and a daily allowance of $80 for hotels and $50 for food.

The total cost would be $1,220. Divide that number by 14.50 to reverse inflation, and the price in 1931 dollars, would be $84.

Even with the price of gasoline so high today, our per-mile cost has dropped from 5¢ to 3¢ in 80 years. This doesn’t even factor in the three days saved by driving modern highways in more dependable cars—and three days is just as valuable in 2011 as in 1931.

The Cross-Country Drive: Cheap In 1931, Cheaper In 2011 The Saturday Evening Post

In fact, the five-and-dime store had already passed away forty years earlier. As the Post reported it,

“The five-and-ten, as an American institution, came to a quiet end on November 13, 1935. The occasion was a meeting of the board of directors of the F. W. Woolworth Co. The action they took was designed to engineer the company into merchandising more profitably than the price-restricted field of five-and-ten.”

On that fateful day, the board passed the following resolution:

‘Resolved that the selling-price limit of twenty cents on merchandise be discontinued.’

Five and ten and fifteen cent turkey dinner. Woolworth's Dime Store. Amsterdam, New YorkLibrary of Congress

It may surprise many Americans who grew up at five-and-ten stores that the store name wasn’t just meant to connote inexpensive merchandise. It was the store’s rigid pricing policy: a nickel or dime would buy any item in the store.

It’s just as surprising that the store could keep its shelves stocked only with 5¢ and 10¢ items for 55 years.

By the 1930s, though, the store had bowed to inflation by allowing 20¢ as the top price they could charge. Even this adjustment proved too restrictive. So Woolworth abandoned the five-and-dime policy. It proved a fortunate, if regretted, move. The Woolworth chain continued to prosper. As late as 1979, Woolworth, with its subsidiary Woolco, operated 800 stores, making it the largest department store chain in the world.

There was little indication of this future greatness when Frank Woolworth opened his Great Five Cent Store in Utica, New York. The idea had already proved itself in Michigan and western New York, where merchants had sold mass-produced, low-cost household goods in “nickel stores.”

In its 1940 series entitled “Dime Store,” the Post recorded the inventory at Frank Woolworth’s store when it opened on February 22, 1879. It included—

Toy dustpans. Tin pepper boxes. Drinking cups. Gravy strainers. Tin scoops. Purses. Biscuit cutters. Flour dredges. Schoolbook straps. Egg whips. Apple corers. Fire shovels. Boot blacking. Animal-shaped soap. Animal-shaped Cake Cutters. Candlesticks. Ladles. ABC plates [plates with the alphabet inscribed around the rim]. Scalloped pie plates. Baseballs. Cast-iron [cooking pot] cover lifters. Tack hammers. Writing books.  Pencil charms.  Shaving Lather brushes.  Tin spoons. Police whistles. Pie plates. Red jewelry. Napkins, handkerchiefs, thread, and novelties.

On the evening before his scheduled opening, there was a knock at his store door. A woman was peering through the glass.

“The store isn’t open, madam.”

“I know what I want. I’ve read your circulars. I want a five-cent fire shovel.”

She was the first customer, and he served her without premonition of the vast tide of humanity which was to follow her.

Frank was young enough to see his Five Cent Stores become a nationwide chain. Thirty-four years after opening his first store, he moved into his office in the new Woolworth Building in New York City— the tallest building in the world (until surpassed by the Chrysler Building in 1930.)

One of the secrets for his success, Woolworth believed, was the attraction of five-cent and, eventually, ten-cent pricing.

Right after the Fourth of July in 1890, Woolworth complained: ”One of the stores wrote me they sold firecrackers for 3 cents and some of the large ones at 15 cents per bunch, and, in my opinion, was all wrong, as it is getting off the idea of strictly 5 and 10 cents business— Stick to the original idea.”

Candy sales were particularly important to Woolworth’s success.

“I don’t pretend to know much about the candy business, but, in my opinion, if you want to make a big success of candy, put it in brass trays and put it up near the door, so that people can be reminded of it as they are passing out and take some home to the children. “

Woolworth believed that candy, alone, would pay the rent on each store.

Another reason for Woolworth’s success was a model that still works: importing goods from foreign markets with cheap labor. In the 1880s, this was Europe. On a buying trip in Germany, Woolworth noted,

It is no longer a mystery to me how they make dolls and toys so cheap, for most of it is done by women and children at their homes anywhere within 20 miles of this place. Some of the women in America think they have got hard work to do, but it is far different than the poor women here, that work night and day on toys, and strap them onto their backs, and go 10 or 20 miles through the mud with 75 pounds on their backs, to sell them. The usual price they get for a good 10-cent doll is about 3 cents each here, and they are obliged to buy the hair, shirts and other materials, to put them together, and they probably get about 1 cent each for the labor they put on them.

The streets here are filled with women with baskets on their backs filled with dolls and toys, and they walk in the middle of the street when the mud is ankle deep, in preference to the clean sidewalk. We saw a poor little girl that could not have been over four years old with a basket strapped on her back larger than herself, and Mr. Hunt asked her where she lived and she told us a place about five miles from here, and she came alone. We gave her some money and she looked at it as if she never saw any of it before. It is an ordinary thing here to see a dog and a woman hitched together or cows and women drawing a heavy load of goods.

While the “five-and-dime” store has gone, the principle is still very much alive. The nickel and dime of 1935, in today’s market, has the purchasing power of 75¢ and $1.50, which keeps hundreds of  Everything-Costs-A-Dollar stores in operation.

Woolworth: A Five and Dime Story The Saturday Evening Post