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  1. LizzieMaine

    The Era -- Day By Day

    Ever wonder what it might be like to have the Era unfold for you day by day, in real time? It's possible, thanks to the online availability of long continuous runs of daily newspapers. If you're a paid subscriber to Newspapers.com you can have your choice of dailies, but there's a wonderful free...
  2. LizzieMaine

    The Fragmentation Of History

    Those who follow sports might have noticed items out of New York and Philadelphia this week announcing that the Yankees baseball team and the Flyers hockey team will no longer play Kate Smith's 1939 recording of "God Bless America" at their games due to "having learned that" Smith recorded songs...
  3. LizzieMaine

    Inside a Nightclub/Speakeasy -- 1931

    Raw (in more ways than one) footage recorded by a Movietone News crew. The band is playing the anti-Depression tune "Cheer Up (Good Times Are Coming!)"
  4. LizzieMaine

    Do women hate men's hats?

    We have a long running "Do Men Hate Women's Hats." So how about equal time? Some hats work on men. Some hats balance the shape of a man's head quite well, and work with the man rather than against him. But some hats make a man look ridiculous -- ultra-narrow brim trilbies that look like...
  5. LizzieMaine

    The Decline and Fall of the Funnies

    When I opened up my copy of the Boston Globe on Christmas Eve, I was shocked and appalled to find that the editors of that good grey sheet had seen fit to slash its daily comic strip section by half -- where the Globe once boasted two fully-packed pages of comics, it now offers only one...
  7. LizzieMaine

    America Gets The Bird

    Thanksgiving, 1945. Seeing an actual 1940s turkey in action puts Norman Rockwell's famous 1943 painting "Freedom From Want" into context -- he wasn't depicting the reality of his time as much as he was offering a postwar dream of a world where no one could ever go hungry. A fantasy-sized...
  8. LizzieMaine

    The Great Radio Bonfire

    Movietone News covers a mass burning of traded-in 1920s battery radios as an industry publicity stunt to promote the spiffy new 1929 models. A few years later the industry trade magazines would be encouraging dealers to incinerate these now-obsolete sets to clear the way for the hot new...
  9. LizzieMaine

    Forgotten Celebrities of the Era

    Once they were all over your favorite tabloid newspaper or picture magazine and now they've vanished into the murk and mist of the forgotten past. Sic transit gloria mundi. Peggy Hopkins Joyce Douglas Corrigan Barbara Hutton Tommy Manville Brenda Frazier Howard Scott Polly...
  10. LizzieMaine

    Bad Movie Descriptions of the Golden Era

    When some of us had a lot less mileage, there was no internet, there were no Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide paperbacks, and there was really no convenient way to know what a particular old movie was all about -- other than the capsule descriptions in each week's issue of TV Guide. These...
  11. LizzieMaine

    You Tube Guy Eats Actual WWII Army Rations

    Ever eaten real WWII rations? Not "reenactor" rations, but actual old-stock 1940s-dated rations cracked open for the first time after aging in the packages for 75 years. Here's a guy whose whole schtick is dining on outdated military food. In this video, he breaks out a WW2 K-Ration pack and...
  13. LizzieMaine

    Personal Hygeine for Young Women, c. 1920

    If you were a young woman born in the 1910s, here's the sort of classroom film you might have seen in an 1920s junior-high health class. If you thought that the public schools of the Era minced delicately around the edges of "female hygeine," you have been taught wrong.
  14. LizzieMaine

    The Sound of New York: May 1931

    Footage shot off the back of a Metrotone News truck with live sound, crusiting around the Manhattan theatre district around dusk, May 1931. A quieter, gentler time, I don't think.
  15. LizzieMaine

    Guys In Girls' Garb

    We've had a popular "Girls in Guys Garb" thread on the Lounge for years, so how about the opposite? Female impersonation was a popular genre on stage and in film for much of the Era, and some of its practitioners could be quite fetching. Julian Eltinge, best-known female impersonator of the...
  16. LizzieMaine

    Forgotten Advertising Characters of the Era

    The Boys have been using mascots and distinctive characters to get you to buy stuff for over a century now, and some of the figures they used before 1950, however effective they were in their day, are completely forgotten now. Sic transit gloria vendo. The face of Kelly Tires -- Miss Lotta...
  17. LizzieMaine

    Manhattan 1939 -- in Kodachrome!

    8mm home movie footage shot by a tourist -- scenes of midtown, Chinatown, Harlem, and then back to Rockefeller Plaza. So many men without hats or ties! And pullover t-shirt-like sportswear! Bunch of slobs, don't they read Esquire?
  19. LizzieMaine

    Don't Mess With Olivia DeHavilland

    Centenarian Film Legend Sues Over Portrayal In Cable Drama
  20. LizzieMaine

    Iconic Abstractions of The Era

    Running a special film series this week in which all features are being shown from 35mm film prints, it occured to me that even though film has been obsolete as a mass-market exhibition medium since the early part of this decade, the image of a strip of film remains an abstract icon of the movie...
  21. LizzieMaine

    Vintage Things That Will NOT Disappear In Your Lifetime

    Sure, we live in a world where progress is inevitable, blah blah blah, but even if that proves to be so, there are certain things that are so simply and perfectly designed that there is no reason for them to disappear anytime soon, no matter how old they are. I expect to be rampant on the...
  22. LizzieMaine

    Old Smells that Make Your Nose Wrinkle

    We've got a long thread about aromas evocative of a nostalgic past -- but how about old-time smells that you're glad are vanishing or gone: *An old woolen blanket reeking of camphor. *A congealed mass of chicken fat marinating on the surface of the river on a hot summer day. *The foul reek of...
  23. LizzieMaine

    Season's Greetings From The Boys From Marketing!

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