On the set of East of Eden, Burl Ives and James Dean demonstrate their skills on the bagpipe and recorder, a daring combination. Actually, Ives isn’t playing the bagpipes because he’s too busy smoking a pipe and looking at Dean like maybe he ought to teach him to button his shirt all the way up but what’s the point because Dean is going to go and get himself killed in a car crash the same year the movie is released (1955)so who cares about his shirt anyway?
By the way, Dean’s nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role was the first official posthumous acting nomination in Academy Awards history. Ives actually lived another 40 years after the movie was released, eventually dying from oral cancer caused from…smoking pipes, you guessed it.
I love posed player portraits like these. I always wonder if the strong, athletic years turned out to be their glory days and they wound up selling secondhand Pontiacs in Peoria. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
1947 Cactus
As you can see, there are no facemasks on these helmets.
“If you want to prevent concussions, take the helmet off: Play old-school football with the leather helmets, no facemask,” former Steelers receiver Hines Ward said. “When you put a helmet on you’re going to use it as a weapon, just like you use shoulder pads as a weapon.” (profootballtalk.nbcsports.com)
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no football helmets. But, golly, don’t they look happy?
Here a family drags all of its belongings into the Yukon Territory near Alaska in 1898. This must have been the granddad of Petey the dog from Our Gang.
And here’s a happy pack dog with his gold-prospecting owner in the Yukon Territory a few years later. He gets to carry the pots and pans.
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This group of dogs in Dawson City in the Yukon was responsible for carrying mail in 1898.
Nope, those aren’t creative trick-or-treaters; it’s a family of Colorado Indians in Santo Domingo de los Colorados in Ecuador. Evidently, a new asphalt highway had been paved across their forest home, and the value of their land gave them beaucoup spendin’ money. So off they went to score Dad more sheer yellow scarves, whilst donning the traditional tribal stripes–regardless of the fact that horizontal lines are not slimming. In lieu of mousse or gel, Dad styled his hair with achiote paste, scooped from the plant pod.
For a closer look, fellow Colorado Indian Felix Calazacon models the red-paste hairdo.
Impressive. Should you so desire to mimic said hairstyle for your own costume desires, products are available.
The stern-faced Miss Florence Stullken looks about as happy teaching typing to her class in 1937 as Miss Bass looked teaching my typing class over 40 years later. I did not like Miss Bass. She was tall and bony and ornery and she knew when you made an error because there was no delete button then, only White-Out, and that was messy. I despised when she taped a sheet of paper over my fingers so I couldn’t look at them, but by golly, I learned to type. And at one point, I was typing 80 wpm. But I haven’t taken a test in years.
My teen thinks he can type correctly; he can hunt and peck. But he (along with the other kids of his generation) never took a typing class. Or a cursive class. In fact, cursive genuinely stumps them. It’s like a foreign language.
But back in 1937, typing was part of “modern business administration,” as was this nifty machine. The fellow here is compiling and using statistics. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you what he’s touching, although Monroe made it, and probably not in China.
If you learned how to type properly (and your shorthand wasn’t bad), you could score a keen secretary job, like Miss Dorothy Ayres.
Just imagine answering only one telephone line. No monitor to stare at. No basic Freecell or Minesweeper to play during the tedium. Perhaps not even air-conditioning. Ignorant of what was trending because nothing was trending. No rock ‘n’ roll on the radio; she’d be grey-haired by the time rock became popular. It wasn’t until the next year that The Fair Labor Standards Act would even create a national minimum wage. But, hey, she was a woman with a job during The Great Depression, so she was doing pretty well.
And speaking of women doing well, here’s the inventor of Liquid Paper. Remember how it would clump and get sticky and eventually make the paper so wet that a hole would tear through?