What Happened....

[Paisley]

No, it's named for old Martin! That's why there's a Jackson and Harrison street on either side of him. Oddly, it appears that the street naming ended with Buchanan, no Lincoln, not sure why?

I don't think there's any system to the street names in Colorado Springs. I lived there for 2.5 years and it seemed like a hodge-podge of randomly drawn names and words.

In Denver, OTOH, the streets west of Broadway are in alphabetical order and avenues north of Ellsworth are numerical. In the large middle part of the city, streets are on a grid. And since the mountains are to the west and the sun is usually shining in the daytime, it's dead easy to find your way around the Denver area. But the suburbs are a different story: large major streets with few places to turn off or around and winding little streets with nonsensical names that don't go anywhere. A radio ad for houses in the middle of the city might have hooked me if I'd been buying a house: "Do you get lost south of Hampden?" Why yes, I do, even though I grew up south of Hampden.

 

[HudsonHawk]

It makes you wonder. Did John Adams ever, when nobody was looking, slip a tack into Thomas Jefferson's chair? Did James Madison ever dunk Alexander Hamilton's pigtail in the inkwell? Did Sam Adams get roaring drunk after hours and lead the boys in a rousing rendition of "To Anacreon In Heaven?"

George Washington was not only a legendary dancer and charmer, but was considered the best athlete in Virginia during his younger days. Madison was known to have a, shall we say, ribald sense of humor that would make even dirty old man Ben Franklin blush. Franklin was Franklin. About the only one who was pretty much the dour old sourpuss depicted in his image was John Adams.

 

[2jakes]

It was about 15 or so years ago when The History Channel ran its first WWII in color shows - they had acquired / found / whatever - a large amount of color film from WWII - both war and home-front - and showed them in a series of "specials."

Had I seen some color film and pictures from WWII before - a few, yes. Had my father, grandmother and their contemporaries told me enough that I knew - in theory - that the era wasn't all gritty, serious and grey - of course. But I didn't really, truly feel it until I saw all those color films. The clothes popped along with the faces, the cars, the sky, the sun and the era felt more real, more alive, more relatable on an emotional level.

Even when I read biographies of Lincoln or others and learn that they had a regular-guy side to their personalities and responded to many things similar to the way we would - the shorthand in my head doesn't change as much as it should and I still see Lincoln and others as being more serious owing to the few images we have of them.

I have copies of 8 & 16mm home movie film.
The color is all original.
It was taken by Major league Baseball Players and fans.
From 1925-1961.

 

[Denton]

^^^^

Bonnie & Clyde (1967)
Movie Bonnie:

Revealing neckline & shorter dress.

Real Bonnie (1930s)

Neckline was high & dress length, long.
Even for an outlaw babe, she conformed
to the rules of the times.

2Jakes's post reminded me of a sentence from Manny Farber's review of Bonnie and Clyde:

"The idea that this pastel dream of the Depression days is 'perfectly cast and edited' is nonsense, and the proof of it is Miss Dunaway. She could have been folded neatly and quietly by the real Bonnie Parker (a very tough ex-waitress), slipped gently into an envelope, and posted to the Lincoln Center Repertory Company from whence she came."

 

[2jakes]

2Jakes's post reminded me of a sentence from Manny Farber's review of Bonnie and Clyde:

"The idea that this pastel dream of the Depression days is 'perfectly cast and edited' is nonsense, and the proof of it is Miss Dunaway. She could have been folded neatly and quietly by the real Bonnie Parker (a very tough ex-waitress), slipped gently into an envelope, and posted to the Lincoln Center Repertory Company from whence she came."

Road sign says it all.

 

[Stearmen]

I don't think there's any system to the street names in Colorado Springs. I lived there for 2.5 years and it seemed like a hodge-podge of randomly drawn names and words.

If you go to the down town area, the streets are nice wide grid pattern. It was said, General Palmer wanted to turn his carriage around, probably not true. You can definitely tell when his influence waned, the streets got narrow and started to meander here and there! There were patterns to street names, the Spanish names, then the Presidents, and Civil War Generals, like Denver. Then there were the national park names, and Village 7 fairy tail names. Some are not to bad, others like you said nonsensical names. Of course, Airport Road made sense when it actually went there! Academy Boulevard, still makes sense, even if it now starts at Fort Carson.

 

[Stearmen]

2Jakes's post reminded me of a sentence from Manny Farber's review of Bonnie and Clyde:

"The idea that this pastel dream of the Depression days is 'perfectly cast and edited' is nonsense, and the proof of it is Miss Dunaway. She could have been folded neatly and quietly by the real Bonnie Parker (a very tough ex-waitress), slipped gently into an envelope, and posted to the Lincoln Center Repertory Company from whence she came."

Although, at 4'10" Bonnie Parker would have neatly fit inside 5'7" Faye Dunaway!

 

[Paisley]

If you go to the down town area, the streets are nice wide grid pattern. It was said, General Palmer wanted to turn his carriage around, probably not true. You can definitely tell when his influence waned, the streets got narrow and started to meander here and there! There were patterns to street names, the Spanish names, then the Presidents, and Civil War Generals, like Denver. Then there were the national park names, and Village 7 fairy tail names. Some are not to bad, others like you said nonsensical names. Of course, Airport Road made sense when it actually went there! Academy Boulevard, still makes sense, even if it now starts at Fort Carson.

Ah, I didn't live anywhere near downtown, but near Woodmen and Academy. The area looked like it was built in the 50s or 60s based on a meandering residential suburban street plan.

In the Denver area (actually Englewood), I lived near the Civil War general series in the college series, which was in alphabetical order. Some trivia you might know: Galapago is pronounced gal uh PAY go there, with a short A.

 

[moontheloon]

I believe the final blow was delivered by JFK. He wore a topper in his inaugural parade, the last president to wear one. After that, he wore a yachting cap on the water, but went hatless otherwise. He was very vain of his coiffure, which gave him that dashing, youthful look. The rest of male America followed suit (so to speak).

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/jfk-no-hatless-jack.29687/page-3

See post #58

 

[Fading Fast]

2Jakes's post reminded me of a sentence from Manny Farber's review of Bonnie and Clyde:

"The idea that this pastel dream of the Depression days is 'perfectly cast and edited' is nonsense, and the proof of it is Miss Dunaway. She could have been folded neatly and quietly by the real Bonnie Parker (a very tough ex-waitress), slipped gently into an envelope, and posted to the Lincoln Center Repertory Company from whence she came."

^^^That is really well phrased.

My incredibly teeny-tiny connect to Fay Dunaway is an old fashion German bread bakery I frequent that is about ten blocks from where I live that is also next door to a small apartment building where miss Dunaway, until recently, had a rent-stabilized apartment.

I only know that as it became a small news story for a brief period as NYC Rent Control - which is supposed to help the poor and middle class afford apartments in this crazy expensive city - is rife with corruption and gaming. Stories like these - of putatively not struggling people (Charles Rangel - a prominent US member of Congress from NYC survived a scandal that revealed he had something like four rent controlled apartments that he used for himself and family for both personal and professional use) like Miss Dunaway's come up every once in awhile and then get hushed up.

Anyway, I used to like to think of Miss Dunaway - Bonnie Parker to me - being in her apartment next door when I was buying bread.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The image we have of Bonnie Parker as a cigar-chomping gun moll is mostly a product of the Boys From Marketing. While an accomplice to a lot of violence and crime, accounts from the day say she was not the hellcat portrayed in newsreels from the time nor certainly in Hollywood's depiction.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Reading the tabloid press of the 1930s -- especially the Hearst tabs -- reveals a *lot* of lurid play-up of the whole gangster image: not just Bonnie and Clyde, but the whole image we have of the romanticized "gangster era" in general was largely manufactured by tabloid reporters.

But what's even more interesting is the letter-to-the-editor columns, where a "Robin Hood" subtext is on full display. If these columns are to be believed, the public was rooting for the gangsters, not the banks -- and it was an attempt to defeat this image that led J. Edgar Hoover to embrace the Boys as firmly as he did in creating the counter-image of the Brave And Fearless Incorruptible G-Man, an image which was just as hollow as that of the gangsters.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Reading the tabloid press of the 1930s -- especially the Hearst tabs -- reveals a *lot* of lurid play-up of the whole gangster image: not just Bonnie and Clyde, but the whole image we have of the romanticized "gangster era" in general was largely manufactured by tabloid reporters.

Much of the appeal to the public of the Bonnie and Clyde story was the unspoken understanding that they weren't married (Parker was actually married to someone else), but were having sex. Illicit sex has always sold.

But what's even more interesting is the letter-to-the-editor columns, where a "Robin Hood" subtext is on full display. If these columns are to be believed, the public was rooting for the gangsters, not the banks -- and it was an attempt to defeat this image that led J. Edgar Hoover to embrace the Boys as firmly as he did in creating the counter-image of the Brave And Fearless Incorruptible G-Man, an image which was just as hollow as that of the gangsters.

The Texas Bankers Association established a "dead bank robber reward program" in 1927, declaring they'd pay $5,000 to anyone who killed a bank robber (or an attempted one), but wouldn't pay a single cent for a live one. Of course, this led to all manner of set ups and pot shots at everyone from two-bit street hustlers to those driving a little too fast down a dirt road. Texas Governor Dan Moody called in legendary/notorious (depending on who you asked) Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer to take control of the situation. Hamer's career spanned from the end of the Old West on horseback to the automobile age, and was known as a "don't ask me no questions, I won't tell you no lies" kind of law man. He was known to use what we'd call now "questionable tactics" in his law enforcement, though he would insist that it was necessary to stop the bad guys, and not doing so would be fighting criminals short-handed. Of course it was Hamer who later gained even more fame as the man who set up and carried out the ambush of Bonnie an Clyde in 1934.

On a side note, the dead bank robber reward program continued until 1964.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

(Which reminds me -- when Sam Adams Beer first came out in the '80s, the effigy on the label showed Sam with a stern, glowering expression. A few years later, the portrait changed to Sam with a goofy frat-boy smile on his face, holding up a stein like somebody's just paid for the next round. It was only then that sales took off. The Boys understand the problem.)

From beerinfo.com "Interestingly enough, fellow Patriot Paul Revere's portrait appears on the front of each bottle, allegedly due to Samuel Adams' notoriously bad looks. "

There appears to be some dispute over whose picture is actually on the label. I do think I recall at some point there was a legend inscribed on the label "Paul Revere, brewer and patriot", but I could be wrong.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ How funny is that, Sam Adams beer might have Paul Revere's image on it that most (myself included) just assumed was Sam Adams. Oh those crazy Boys From Marketing at it again.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One "patriot" guy is as good as another.

 

[Benzadmiral]

In the Era, demographic researchers defined "middle class" as households with at least one servant, usually a cook-housekeeper. Think of all the movies where you have a nice young couple, or even a single woman, with a chucklin' lovable maid to deal with the dirty work. All the rest of us were working class.

When I was a kid, the idea of a house with a "dining room" was exotic -- we didn't know anybody who didn't eat all their meals in the kitchen. The idea of having a whole separate room to eat in was something we saw only on television, and had no idea why anyone would need that.

In the early and mid-Sixties in the French Quarter, we had what was known as a slave-quarter apartment. L-shaped, it had 2 stories on the long side of the L (though the upper floor was a loft arrangement -- a bird could have flown in through a door downstairs and not encountered another door until the bathroom upstairs). The kitchen was tiny. The short stroke of the L, single-storied, was our "dining room," though we never called it that. Our dinner table, a library table Dad brought home and assembled, also served as homework table, model-building table, etc., and serves me today as my desk.

I didn't know anybody with a real dining room -- my friends, in their "shotgun" cottages, all ate dinner in the kitchen with their families.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Kind of like watching Friends, where young, semi-employed 20-somethings lounge around in huge, well-appointed apartments in Greenwich Village, which rent for $10,000/month?

To be fair, we were told that the huge apartment where most of the action took place in Friends was a rent-controlled place that belonged to Monica and Ross's aunt or grandmother.

 

[Fading Fast]

In the early and mid-Sixties in the French Quarter, we had what was known as a slave-quarter apartment. L-shaped, it had 2 stories on the long side of the L (though the upper floor was a loft arrangement -- a bird could have flown in through a door downstairs and not encountered another door until the bathroom upstairs). The kitchen was tiny. The short stroke of the L, single-storied, was our "dining room," though we never called it that. Our dinner table, a library table Dad brought home and assembled, also served as homework table, model-building table, etc., and serves me today as my desk.

I didn't know anybody with a real dining room -- my friends, in their "shotgun" cottages, all ate dinner in the kitchen with their families.

My grandmother and father (when he was growing up in the Depression) lived in a tenement railroad apartment that had a living room, dinning room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. all the rooms were small (the kitchen and bathroom were really small, the bedrooms were basically a bed and dresser) and the dinning room fit a table for six, that's it.

The place was dingy, a walk up and clearly lower-middle class to poor (but in those days, having a roof was quite fortunate), but it had a dinning room (there was a table in the tiny kitchen that two could just squeeze into, but no way three were sitting at it. The house I grew up in was +/-1000 square feet, in a "The Wonder Years" type of neighborhood and we had a dinning room that fit a table for six and that's it. The kitchen had a table for four, but we had to move it each night from the wall so the two people could get into their seats (and, then, you could hardly move in the rest of the tiny kitchen).

My point is that from my view of the world, it seemed that struggling to working families had dinning rooms - and that may be (1) very specific to the part of NJ the I grew up in or (2) my father and I grew in atypical examples of houses for the time.

 

[Fading Fast]

To be fair, we were told that the huge apartment where most of the action took place in Friends was a rent-controlled place that belonged to Monica and Ross's aunt or grandmother.

That is a fair point. But Ross, a PHD took an apartment in the same apartment building that was really nice and well-beyond what a young PHD could afford. Joey and Chandler's apartment was more realistic for two young guys with jobs (although, Joey didn't always have work, but they made a point of showing that Chandler carried Joey on some months).