One Summer -America 1927

I have long been a fan of Bill Bryson's work, so have just picked this up and looking forward to a good read.

I expect the title to have caught some folks eyes here. Can anyone report?

http://www.independent.ie/entertain...-bryson-one-summer-america-1927-29635965.html

Having finished the first four chapters I can say it is an extremely informative and entertaining look at American life in 1927.

I can recommend it unreservedly. Hard to put down.

"Not even much survives as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer -- Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh -- are rarely encountered now, and most of the others are never heard at all. So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.
Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer."

It is not surprising not many remember the celebrities of 1927 after 86 years. What is astonishing is that so many were remebered for so long.

Not only Ford, Capone, Tunney and Lindbergh but Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Man O' War,Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, Bessie Smith, Jesse Livermore and many others were household names for generations.

The only way I can account for it is that ballyhoo and publicity reached a pitch of perfection in the late twenties not seen before or since.

Stanley Doble said:

It is not surprising not many remember the celebrities of 1927 after 86 years. What is astonishing is that so many were remebered for so long.

Not only Ford, Capone, Tunney and Lindbergh but Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Man O' War,Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, Bessie Smith, Jesse Livermore and many others were household names for generations.

The only way I can account for it is that ballyhoo and publicity reached a pitch of perfection in the late twenties not seen before or since.

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It was flood tide for the tabloid press in America -- there were three mass-circulation tabloid papers in Manhattan alone, with an aggregate circulation of over two and a half million copies a day. New York was the media capital of the nation -- unrivaled by any other city -- and the influence of these tabloids extended far and wide, turning such vulgar garbage as the "Peaches and Daddy" affair and the Snyder-Gray Case into topics of national interest. 1927 was probably the peak year for these papers, in terms of their trashiness and cultural impact -- and this peak triggered a backlash against "tabloid muck" which drove one of the three papers, Macfadden's outlandish "Evening Graphic", out of business, and pushed the survivors, the News and the Mirror, to adopt a somewhat more respectable approach in presentation of the events of the day.

When people remember "the roaring twenties," they're basically remembering 1927.

Rudolph Valentino should be in there although he died in 1926. 50 years later you could call someone "my Valentino" or "a Valentino type" and people knew who you meant.

He is, along with Clara Bow, Jack Dempsey, Dwight Morrow, Charles Levine & Gutzon Borglum, to name but a few.

LizzieMaine- where did you first get your curiosity for all of this wonderful history you know? Write a book! I'm sure it would sell!!

Stanley Doble said:

Rudolph Valentino should be in there although he died in 1926. 50 years later you could call someone "my Valentino" or "a Valentino type" and people knew who you meant.

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This made me remember a collection of newspapers my grandmother had on Valentinos death... I remember vividly one was printed on bright pink paper! I wish I knew what happened to them...

VintageBee said:

LizzieMaine- where did you first get your curiosity for all of this wonderful history you know? Write a book! I'm sure it would sell!!

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Sign me up for a copy!

VintageBee said:

This made me remember a collection of newspapers my grandmother had on Valentinos death... I remember vividly one was printed on bright pink paper! I wish I knew what happened to them...

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Valentino had an obituary printed in The Financial Times?

He apparently had one at the Scranton Button Works:

[video=youtube_share;BSHEjKyEw84]http://youtu.be/BSHEjKyEw84[/video]

VintageBee said:

This made me remember a collection of newspapers my grandmother had on Valentinos death... I remember vividly one was printed on bright pink paper! I wish I knew what happened to them...

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Probably one of the Hearst papers -- they frequently printed their "bulldog" or early editions on pink paper. This made it easy for buyers to tell if they were getting an outdated copy if they bought their paper later in the day. They'd also print their "Racing Final" editions on peach-colored paper so the racetrack crowd could easily pick them out of the stack.