#U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit

[lifes-commotion]

Alan Ladd

[timelesstimesgoneby]

in time of war boxset

Episode

"The Ultimate Civil War Series –

150th Anniversary Edition "

Disc 1

Chapter 1 Sins Of The Fathers 46.5

Chapter 2 A Deep, Steady Thunder 46.5

Chapter 3 Days Of Infamy 46.5

Chapter 4 The Turning Points 46.5

Disc 2

Chapter 5 Not War, But Murder 46.5

Chapter 6 The Killing Fields 46.5

Chapter 7 New Birth Of Freedom 46.5

Disc 3

Civil War America Divided 46.5

Two Nations 46.5

Shifting Fortunes 46.5

Advance And Retreat 46.5

Scales Of War 46.5

Disc 4

It Is Well That War Is So Terrible 46.5

Give Them Cold Steel 46.5

Season Of Change 46.5

Disc 5

If It Takes All Summer 46.5

Marching Through Georgia 46.5

Lost Cause 46.5

Disc 6

The Civil War Commemorative Documentary Collection 46.5

Mr. Lincoln’s Army – Fighting Brigades Of The Army Of The Potomac 46.5

The Battles For Atlanta 46.5

Shadow In The Valley – The Battle Of Chickamauga 46.5

The Life And Death Of The Army Of Northern Virginia 46.5

Disc 7

Lincoln Trial By Fire 46.5

Lincoln Trial By Fire 46.5

They’ve Killed President Lincoln 46.5

Disc 8

No Retreat From Destiny The Battle That Rescued Washington 46.5

Bonus Feature Historic Civil War Photo Slide Show (Included In Civil War America Divided Set) 46.5

Lincoln’s Last Night Part 1 & Part 2 46.5

Part 1 The Plot To Kill Lincoln 46.5

Part 2 The Killing Of Lincoln 46.5

Fired By Liberty Black Soldiers Of The Civil War 46.5

Disc 9

Up From Slavery 46.5

Part One 1619 Virginia - The First African Slaves Arrive 46.5

Part Two 18th Century Colonial America And Slavery Under The Rule Of The British Empire 46.5

Part Three Slavery In The United States After The Revolution 46.5

Part Four Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831 46.5

Disc 10

Part Five Abolition From The North Grows 46.5

Part Six The Civil War. Emancipation Proclamation 46.5

Part Seven Aftermath Of The Civil War And New “freedom” 46.5

Disc 11

The American Soldier – The Complete History Of U.S. Wars 46.5

Episode 1 The Wars Of Conflict 46.5

Episode 2 The Revolutionary War 46.5

Episode 3 Manifest Destiny Wars 46.5

Episode 4 The Civil War 46.5

Episode 5 The Imperial Wars 46.5

Episode 6 The Global Wars 46.5

Episode 7 The Cold War 46.5

Episode 8 The Police Wars 46.5

Disc 12

Wwi – The War To End All Wars – 46.5

Episode 1 With Flags Waving 46.5

Episode 2 The Battle Of The Frontiers 46.5

Episode 3 The Taxis Of The Marne 46.5

Episode 4 A War Of Chemicals And Engineering 46.5

Bonus Features Include Historic Wwi Photo Slide Show. 46.5

Disc 13

Episode 5 Flyboys 46.5

Episode 6 Citadel 46.5

Episode 7 Distant Fronts 46.5

Disc 14

Episode 8 Revolt 46.5

9. Changing Tide 46.5

10. End Game 46.5

Disc 15

War In Europe 46.5

Episode 1 Prelude To War 46.5

Episode 2 America’s Unpreparedness 46.5

Episode 3 America Goes To War 46.5

Episode 4 Platform For Invasion 46.5

Episode 5 Africa, Our First Offensive 46.5

Episode 6 The Campaign 46.5

Episode 7 Rommel Routed 46.5

Episode 8 Sicily, Operation Huskey 46.5

Episode 9 Assault On Italy 46.5

Episode 10 The Secret Life Of Adolf Hitler 46.5

Episode 11 The G.I., Hero Of The War 46.5

Episode 12 Victory In Italy 46.5

Episode 13 Preparation For Invasion 46.5

Disc 16

Episode 14 D-Day, August 4th 46.5

Episode 15 Beachhead And Breakthrough 46.5

Episode 16 Liberation Of Paris 46.5

Episode 17 Pursuit 46.5

Episode 18 The Battle Of Supply 46.5

Episode 19 The Air War 46.5

Episode 20 The Battle Of The Bulge 46.5

Episode 21 Crossing The Rhine 46.5

Episode 22 Overrunning Germany 46.5

Episode 23 Victory’s Aftermath 46.5

Episode 24 The Battle Of San Pietro 46.5

Episode 25 Russia 46.5

Episode 26 Review 46.5

Disc 17

Victory By Air 46.5

Episode 1 The Pioneers 46.5

Episode 2 Monoplanes 46.5

Episode 3 Wwii - The Struggle For Airspace 46.5

Episode 4 Wwii - Technological Improvements 46.5

Episode 5 New Aircraft, New Weapons, New Frontiers 46.5

Disc 18

Korea The Forgotten War 46.5

A Motion Picture History Of The Korean War 46.5

Armed Forces Assistance To Korea 46.5

Chinese Reds Enter The War The First Forty Days In Korea Korean Cease-Fire Talks Begin 46.5

Ranger Ready 46.5

Turning The Tide 46.5

Firepower - Artillery 46.5

The Republic Of Korea Soldier 46.5

Army Transport Corps 46.5

United Nations Consolidate Below The 38th Parallel 46.5

Disc 19

This Is Korea! 46.5

United Nations Forces Counterattack 46.5

Un Line Is Stabilized While Truce Talks Begin United Nations Forces Cross The 38th Parallel United Nations Forces Escape The Chinese Trap United Nations Forces Push The Chinese Back 46.5

Civil Assistance, Korea The Army Chaplains The Army Combat Team A Day In Korea The Third Korean Winter 46.5

Disc 20

2nd Infantry Division In Korea 46.5

7th Infantry Division In Korea The United Nations Offensive 46.5

The United Nations Offensive Continues 46.5

Army Medical Corps 46.5

The Reds Launch Their Expected Spring Offensive 46.5

Atrocities In Korea 46.5

Korean Wind Up 46.5

Rebirth Of Seoul 46.5

Truth Is Our Defense 46.5

Disc 21

Vietnam War Stories 46.5

War Stories – Episode 01 46.5

War Stories – Episode 02 46.5

War Stories – Episode 03 46.5

War Stories – Episode 04 46.5

War Stories – Episode 05 46.5

War Stories – Episode 06 46.5

Disc 22

War Stories – Episode 07 46.5

War Stories – Episode 08 46.5

War Stories – Episode 09 46.5

War Stories – Episode 10 46.5

War Stories – Episode 11 46.5

Brothers In Arms Their Father's Footsteps 46.5

Disc 23

The Dawn Of War – The Early Battles Of Wwii 46.5

Program 1 Hitler The Wolf 46.5

Program 2 The Onset The German-Soviet Expansion 46.5

Program 3 The Führer's Revenge 46.5

Program 4 The Battle Of Britain 46.5

Program 5 The Battle Of The Atlantic 46.5

Program 6 The Desert Fox 46.5

Disc 24

Program 7 The Invasion Of The Soviet Union 46.5

Program 8 Mr. President, What About The Japanese? 46.5

Program 9 Midway Change Of Course 46.5

Program 10 Stalingrad 46.5

Program 11 The Desert Rats 46.5

Disc 25

The Fight For Freedom – The Major Battles Of Wwii 46.5

Program 1 The Decline Of Fascism 46.5

Program 2 The Slow Italian Campaign 46.5

Program 3 The Road To Tokyo 46.5

Program 4 The Pacific In Flames 46.5

Program 5 D-Day 46.5

Disc 26

Program 6 The Battle Of Kursk 46.5

Program 7 The Battle For Germany 46.5

Program 8 The Agony Of The Third Reich 46.5

Program 9 Leyte, Imperial Destiny 46.5

Program 10 The Peace Of The Atomic Bomb 46.5

Disc 27

The War In The Pacific 46.5

Episode 1 The Pacific In Eruption 46.5

Episode 2 Awakening In The Pacific 46.5

Episode 3 The Rise Of The Japanese Empire 46.5

Episode 4 America Goes To War In The Pacific 46.5

Episode 5 The U.S. And The Philippines 46.5

Episode 6 The Navy Holds – 1942 46.5

Episode 7 Guadalcanal – America’s First Offensive 46.5

Episode 8 War In The North – The Aleutians 46.5

Episode 9 The Road Back – New Guinea 46.5

Episode 10 Up The Solomon’s Ladder – Bougainville 46.5

Episode 11 Attack In The Central Pacific – Makin And Tarawa 46.5

Episode 12 The War At Sea 46.5

Disc 28

Episode 13 Speeding Up The Attack – The Marshalls 46.5

Episode 14 Stepping Stones To The Philippines 46.5

Episode 15 Battle For The Marianas 46.5

Episode 16 The War In The China-Burma-India Theatre 46.5

Episode 17 Palau – The Fight For Bloody Nose Ridge 46.5

Episode 18 Macarthur Returns To The Philippines 46.5

Episode 19 Bloody Iwo 46.5

Episode 20 At Japan’s Doorstep - Okinawa 46.5

Episode 21 The Air War On Japan 46.5

Episode 22 The Surrender And Occupation Of Japan 46.5

Episode 23 Shifting Tides In The Orient 46.5

Episode 24 War In Korea 46.5

Disc 29

Hitler – The Untold Story 46.5

Hitler Anecdotes, Myths & Lies 46.5

1. The Causes Of A Mistake - 1920-1937 46.5

2. They Will Not Fight By Danzig - 1938-1939 46.5

3. A Lucky Gambler - 1939-1940 46.5

4. The Supreme Leader - 1940-1941 46.5

5. To Win Or To Win - 1941-1942 46.5

6. He Will Never Return - 1942-1945 46.5

The World At War From Hitler To Hiroshima 46.5

Disc 30

1. European Theater Of Operations - Part 1 46.5

2. European Theater Of Operations - Part 2 46.5

3. Pacific Theater Of Operations - Part 1 46.5

4. Pacific Theater Of Operations - Part 2 46.5

U-Boats Hitler's Sharks 46.5

Disc 31

1. Genesis - 1906-1940 46.5

2. The Good Times - 1940-1941 46.5

3. The Sound Of The Drum - 1942-1945 46.5

13 Gripping And Fascinating Documentary Features! 46.5

Featuring Rare Archival Footage And Photographs 46.5

A Commemorative Release Surrounding The 65th Anniversary Of The End Of Wwii 46.5

Wwii Remembered – A Complete History 46.5

Disc 32

Episode 1 Pre-War Years 46.5

Episode 2 Attack On Great Britain 46.5

Episode 3 Pearl Harbor 46.5

Episode 4 March Into Russia 46.5

Episode 5 Birth Of Special Forces 46.5

Disc 33

Episode 6 The Information War 46.5

Episode 7 Battle Of China 46.5

Episode 8 Women In Wartime 46.5

Episode 9 Turning The Tide 46.5

Episode 10 Final Victory 46.5

Disc 34

That Was ‘nam 46.5

Ep. 01 - A Day In Vietnam 46.5

Ep. 02 - The Army Air Mobility Team 46.5

Ep. 03 - Pipeline To Victory 46.5

Ep. 04 - Huey In A Helicopter War 46.5

Ep. 05 - Alone, Unarmed & Unafraid 46.5

Ep. 06 - Fight For Life 46.5

Ep. 07 - American Navy In Vietnam 46.5

Disc 35

Ep. 08 - Battle Of Khe Sahn 46.5

Ep. 09 - Probe And Pursue 46.5

Ep. 10 - River Patrol 46.5

Ep. 11 - Any Target, Any Time 46.5

Ep. 12 - Progress To Peace 46.5

Ep. 13 - Operation New Life 46.5

Airpower” - Vietnam To Desert Storm 46.5

Disc 36

Trial By Ordeal/Shadow Warriors 46.5

Trial By Ordeal 1st Cavalry In 'nam 46.5

Trial By Ordeal Uss Forrestal 46.5

Shadow Warriors Part One 46.5

Shadow Warriors Part Two 46.5

Disc 37

Why Vietnam 46.5

There Is A Way 46.5

War And Advice 46.5

Anather Day Of War - The Usaf In Vietnam St Air Cavalry In Vietnam 46.5

Marines, 1965 46.5

Nott Of The Dragon 46.5

Ready To Strike 46.5

Band Airborne Division 46.5

Beans, Bullets And Black Oil (Narrated By Henry Fonda) 46.5

Operation Montagnard 46.5

The Sky Soldiers 46.5

Disc 38

No Substitute For Victory 46.5

History Of The Air Force - Vietnam And After The Sparrow Hawks 46.5

This Is Parris Island (Marine Training 1969) 46.5

The Unique War 46.5

The United States Air Force In Vietnam 46.5

The Face Of Rescue 46.5

11th Armored Cavalry Regiment 46.5

The Airmobile Division 46.5

The Battle Of Khe Sanh 46.5

A Day In Vietnam 46.5

The Drill Sergeant 46.5

River Patrol 46.5

Disc 39

Vetan! Vietnam! Sand And Steel Fu Blade Vietham Crucible Hal Of Honor 46.5

The Hidden War In Vietnam 46.5

The Gentle Hand 46.5

Ist Infantry In Vietnam 46.5

4th Infantry Division 46.5

The American Navy In Vietnam 46.5

Pow - A Report On Captivity In Southeast Asia 46.5

Disc 40

Victory At Sea 46.5

To Save A Soldier 46.5

For Thou Art With Me 46.5

Khe Sanh Victory For Air Power 46.5

Know Your Enemy The Viet Cong 46.5

A Nation Builds Under Fire 46.5

A Few Good Men 46.5

Battle (Part 1) 46.5

Screaming Eagles In Vietnam 46.5

Small Boat Navy 46.5

Twenty Five Hour Day 46.5

Vietnam P.O.W. Code Of Conduct Contact - Ambush (Part 2) 46.5

Progress To Peace 46.5

9th Infantry Division 46.5

Disc 41

The Legendary World War Ii Documentary” -Dvd Verdict 46.5

Design For War 46.5

The Pacific Boils Over 46.5

Seal The Breach 46.5

Midway Is East 46.5

Mediterranean Mosaic 46.5

Guadalcanal 46.5

Rings Around Rabaul 46.5

Mare Nostrum 46.5

Sea And Sand 46.5

Beneath The Southern Cross 46.5

The Magnetic North 46.5

Conquest Of Micronesia 46.5

Melanesian Nightmare 46.5

Disc 42

Roman Renaissance 46.5

D-Day 46.5

Killers And The Kill 46.5

The Turkey Shoot 46.5

Two If By Sea 46.5

The Battle For Leyte Gulf 46.5

Return Of The Allies 46.5

Full Fathom Five 46.5

The Fate Of Europe 46.5

Target Suribachi 46.5

The Road To Mandalay 46.5

Suicide For Glory 46.5

Design For Peace 46.5

Disc 43

The Medal Of Honor – The Stories Of Our Nation’s Most Celebrated Heroes 46.5

1. The Civil War 46.5

2. World War One 46.5

3. World War Two Europe 46.5

Disc 44

4. World War Two Pacific 46.5

5. The Korean War 46.5

6. The Vietnam War 46.5

Disc 45

The United States Military – A History Of Heroes 46.5

The U.S. Navy 1775 - 1914 46.5

The U.S. Navy 1915 - Today 46.5

The U.S. Marine Corps 1775 - 1916 46.5

The U.S. Marine Corps 1917 - Today 46.5

Disc 46

The U.S. Air Force 1903 - Today 46.5

The U.S. Army 1775 - 1899 46.5

The U.S. Army 1900 - Today 46.5

Disc 47

The Great Indian Wars 1540 – 1890 46.5

1. The Indians 46.5

Early Indians 46.5

Buffalo & Horse 46.5

Rise Of The Horse Culture 46.5

Kiowa 46.5

Comanche 46.5

Arapahoe 46.5

Cheyenne 46.5

Sioux 46.5

Home 46.5

Clothing 46.5

Social Structure 46.5

Religion 46.5

2. The Cavalry 46.5

Dragoons 46.5

Protecting The Trails 46.5

Fort Laramie 46.5

The Laramie Treaty 46.5

Santa Fe Trail 46.5

Kit Carson & The Navajo 46.5

Search & Destroy 46.5

Buffalo Soldiers 46.5

Victory 46.5

3. The Indian Warrior 46.5

Early Indian Conflicts 46.5

Later Indian Conflicts 46.5

Becoming An Indian Warrior 46.5

Indian Weapons 46.5

Minnesota Massacre 46.5

Sand Creek Massacre 46.5

4. Battle For The Northern Plains 46.5

The Northern Plains 46.5

The Chiefs 46.5

1865 Winter Offensive 46.5

Red Cloud's War 46.5

Chief Roman Nose And The Cheyenne Twilight 46.5

Little Big Horn 46.5

Wounded Knee 46.5

5. Battle For The Southern Plains 46.5

The Southern Plains & The Comanche 46.5

Council House Fight And The Texas Rangers 46.5

Chief Buffalo Hump's War 46.5

First Battle Of Adobe Walls & The Kiowa Chiefs 46.5

The Red River War 46.5

The Desert Southwest 46.5

Cochise & The Apache Guerillas 46.5

Geronimo 46.5

Disc 48

Outside The Wire – The Complete Series 46.5

1 - Call Sign Vengeance 46.5

2 - Danger Close 46.5

3 - Anbar Awakens 46.5

4 - Baghdad Surge 46.5

5 - Baghdad Happens 46.5

Disc 49

Sniper The Unseen Warrior 46.5

Program 1 Sniper The Unseen Warrior - Who Is The Sniper? 46.5

Personality Of The Sniper 46.5

Sniper Training 46.5

Sniper Equipment 46.5

Program 2 Sniper The Unseen Warrior - The Sniper In War 46.5

Missions 46.5

First Kill 46.5

Confirmed Kills 46.5

Program 3 Sniper The Unseen Warrior - The Revolutionary War To The Mexican American War 46.5

America’s First Snipers 46.5

The Revolutionary War 46.5

Between The Great American Wars 46.5

Bonus Feature Interactive Timeline Chronicles The Past And Present Transformation Of The Sniper. 46.5

Disc 50

Program 4 Sniper The Unseen Warrior - The Civil War To Wwii 46.5

The Civil War 46.5

The Plains Indian War 46.5

Wwi 46.5

Wwii 46.5

Program 5 Sniper The Unseen Warrior - The Korean War To The Police Wars 46.5

The Korean War 46.5

The Vietnam War 46.5

The Police Wars 46.5

Program 6 Sniper The Unseen Warrior - The American Sniper In The 21st Century 46.5

The Law Enforcement Sniper 46.5

Iraq And Afghanistan 46.5

Myths And Misconceptions 46.5

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.1 (after 1960)

1960 – Four black students stage the first of the Greensboro sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. 1964 – The Beatles have their first number one hit in the United States with "I Want to Hold Your Hand". 1968 – Vietnam War: The execution of Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém by South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan is recorded on motion picture film, as well as in an iconic still photograph taken by Eddie Adams. 1968 – Canada's three military services, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force, are unified into the Canadian Forces. 1968 – The New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad are merged to form Penn Central Transportation. 1972 – Kuala Lumpur becomes a city by a royal charter granted by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia. 1974 – A fire in the 25-story Joelma Building in São Paulo, Brazil kills 189 and injures 293. 1979 – Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Tehran after nearly 15 years of exile. 1981 – The Underarm bowling incident of 1981 occurred when Trevor Chappell bowls underarm on the final delivery of a game between Australia and New Zealand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). 1991 – A runway collision between USAir Flight 1493 and SkyWest Flight 5569 at Los Angeles International Airport results in the deaths of 34 people, and injuries to 30 others. 1991 – A magnitude 6.8 earthquake strikes the Hindu Kush region, killing at least 848 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and present-day Tajikistan. 1992 – The Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal court declares Warren Anderson, ex-CEO of Union Carbide, a fugitive under Indian law for failing to appear in the Bhopal disaster case. 1996 – The Communications Decency Act is passed by the U.S. Congress. 1998 – Rear Admiral Lillian E. Fishburne becomes the first female African American to be promoted to rear admiral. 2002 – Daniel Pearl, American journalist and South Asia Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal, kidnapped on January 23, is beheaded and mutilated by his captors. 2003 – Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during the reentry of mission STS-107 into the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard. 2004 – Hajj pilgrimage stampede: In a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, 251 people are trampled to death and 244 injured. 2004 – Double suicide attack in Erbil on the offices of Iraqi Kurdish political parties by members of Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. 2005 – King Gyanendra of Nepal carries out a coup d'état to capture the democracy, becoming Chairman of the Councils of ministers. 2007 – The National Weather Service in the United States switches from the Fujita scale to the new Enhanced Fujita scale to measure the intensity and strength of tornadoes. 2009 – The first cabinet of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was formed in Iceland, making her the country's first female prime minister and the world's first openly gay head of government. 2012 – Seventy-four people are killed and over 500 injured as a result of clashes between fans of Egyptian football teams Al Masry and Al Ahly in the city of Port Said. 2013 – The Shard, the sixth-tallest building in Europe, opens its viewing gallery to the public. 2021 – A coup d'état in Myanmar removes Aung San Suu Kyi from power and restores military rule. 2022 – Five-year-old Moroccan boy Rayan Aourram falls into a 32-meter (105 feet) deep well in Ighran village in Tamorot commune, Chefchaouen Province, Morocco, but dies four days later, before rescue workers reached him.

[timeless-hollywood-classics]

Joseph Evans Brown (July 28, 1891 – July 6, 1973) was an American actor and comedian, remembered for his amiable screen persona, comic timing, and enormous elastic-mouth smile. He was one of the most popular American comedians in the 1930s and 1940s, with films like A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), Earthworm Tractors (1936), and Alibi Ike (1935). In his later career Brown starred in Some Like It Hot (1959), as Osgood Fielding III, in which he utters the film's famous punchline "Well, nobody's perfect."

Brown was born on July 28, 1891, in Holgate, Ohio, near Toledo, into a large family of Welsh descent. He spent most of his childhood in Toledo. In 1902, at the age of ten, he joined a troupe of circus tumblers known as the Five Marvelous Ashtons, who toured the country on both the circus and vaudeville circuits. Later he became a professional baseball player. Despite his skill, he declined an opportunity to sign with the New York Yankees to pursue his career as an entertainer. After three seasons he returned to the circus, then went into vaudeville and finally starred on Broadway. He gradually added comedy to his act, and transformed himself into a comedian. He moved to Broadway in the 1920s, first appearing in the musical comedy Jim Jam Jems.

In late 1928, Brown began making films, starting the next year with Warner Brothers. He quickly became a favorite with child audiences, and shot to stardom after appearing in the first all-color all-talking musical comedy On with the Show (1929). He starred in a number of lavish Technicolor musical comedies, including Sally (1929), Hold Everything (1930), Song of the West (1930), and Going Wild (1930). By 1931, Brown had become such a star that his name was billed above the title in the films in which he appeared.

He appeared in Fireman, Save My Child (1932), a comedy in which he played a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, and in Elmer, the Great (1933) with Patricia Ellis and Claire Dodd and Alibi Ike (1935) with Olivia de Havilland, in both of which he portrayed ballplayers with the Chicago Cubs.

In 1933 he starred in Son of a Sailor with Jean Muir and Thelma Todd. In 1934, Brown starred in A Very Honorable Guy with Alice White and Robert Barrat, in The Circus Clown again with Patricia Ellis and with Dorothy Burgess, and with Maxine Doyle in Six-Day Bike Rider.

Brown was one of the few vaudeville comedians to appear in a Shakespeare film; he played Francis Flute in the Max Reinhardt/William Dieterle film version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and was highly praised for his performance. He starred in Polo Joe (1936) with Carol Hughes and Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, and in Sons o' Guns. In 1933 and 1936, he became one of the top 10 earners in films.

He left Warner Brothers to work for producer David L. Loew, starring in When's Your Birthday? (1937). In 1938, he starred in The Gladiator, a loose adaptation of Philip Gordon Wylie's 1930 novel Gladiator that influenced the creation of Superman. He gradually switched to making "B" pictures.

In 1939, Brown testified before the House Immigration Committee in support of a bill that would allow 20,000 German-Jewish refugee children into the U.S. He later adopted two refugee children.

At age 50 when the U.S. entered World War II, Brown was too old to enlist. Both of his biological sons served in the military during the war. In 1942, Captain Don E. Brown, was killed when his Douglas A-20 Havoc crashed near Palm Springs, California.

Even before the USO was organized, Brown spent a great deal of time traveling, at his own expense, to entertain troops in the South Pacific, including Guadalcanal, New Zealand and Australia, as well as the Caribbean and Alaska. He was the first to tour in this way and before Bob Hope made similar journeys. Brown also spent many nights working and meeting servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen. He wrote of his experiences entertaining the troops in his book Your Kids and Mine. On his return to the U.S., Brown brought sacks of letters, making sure they were delivered by the Post Office. He gave shows in all weather conditions, many in hospitals, sometimes doing his entire show for a single dying soldier. He signed autographs for everyone. For his services to morale, Brown became one of only two civilians to be awarded the Bronze Star during World War II.

His concern for the troops continued into the Korean War, as evidenced by a newsreel featuring his appeal for blood donations to aid the U.S. and UN troops there that was featured in the season 4 episode of M*A*S*H titled "Deluge".[5]

In 1948, he was awarded a Special Tony Award for his work in the touring company of Harvey.[1][6]

He had a cameo appearance in Around the World in 80 Days (1956), as the Fort Kearney stationmaster talking to Fogg (David Niven) and his entourage in a small town in Nebraska. In the similarly epic film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), he had a cameo as a union official giving a speech at a construction site in the climactic scene. On television, he was the mystery guest on What's My Line? during the episode on January 11, 1953.

His best known postwar role was that of aging millionaire Osgood Fielding III in Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot. Fielding falls for Daphne (Jerry), played by Jack Lemmon in drag; at the end of the film, Lemmon takes off his wig and reveals to Brown that he is a man, to which Brown responds "Well, nobody's perfect", one of the more celebrated punchlines in film.

Another of his notable postwar roles was that of Cap'n Andy Hawks in MGM's 1951 remake of Show Boat, a role that he reprised onstage in the 1961 New York City Center revival of the musical and on tour. Brown performed several dance routines in the film, and famed choreographer Gower Champion appeared along with first wife Marge. Brown's final film appearance was in The Comedy of Terrors (1964).

Brown was a sports enthusiast, both in film and personally. Some of his best films were the "baseball trilogy" which consisted of Fireman, Save My Child (1932), Elmer, the Great (1933) and Alibi Ike (1935). He was a television and radio broadcaster for the New York Yankees in 1953. His son Joe L. Brown became the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates for more than 20 years. Brown spent Ty Cobb's last days with him, discussing his life.

Brown's sports enthusiasm also led to him becoming the first president of PONY Baseball and Softball (at the time named Pony League) when the organization was incorporated in 1953. He continued in the post until late 1964, when he retired. Later he traveled additional thousands of miles telling the story of PONY League, hoping to interest adults in organizing baseball programs for young people. He was a fan of thoroughbred horse racing, a regular at the racetracks in Del Mar and Santa Anita.

Brown was caricatured in the Disney cartoons Mickey's Gala Premiere (1933), Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938), and The Autograph Hound (1939); all contain a scene in which he is seen laughing so loud that his mouth opens extremely wide. According to the official biography Daws Butler: Characters Actor, Daws Butler used Joe E. Brown as inspiration for the voices of two Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters: Lippy the Lion (1962) and Peter Potamus (1963–1966).

He also starred in his own comic strip in the British comic Film Fun between 1933 and 1953

Brown married Kathryn Francis McGraw in 1915. The marriage lasted until his death in 1973. The couple had four children: two sons, Don Evan Brown (December 25, 1916 – October 8, 1942; Captain in the United States Army Air Force, who was killed in the crash of an A-20B Havoc bomber while serving as a ferry pilot)[8] and Joe LeRoy "Joe L." Brown (September 1, 1918 – August 15, 2010), and two daughters, Mary Katherine Ann (b. 1930) and Kathryn Francis (b. 1934). Both daughters were adopted as infants.

Joe L. Brown shared his father's love of baseball, serving as general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1976, and briefly in 1985, also building the 1960 and 1971 World Series champions. Brown's '71 Pirates featured baseball's first all-black starting nine.

Brown began having heart problems in 1968 after suffering a severe heart attack, and underwent cardiac surgery. He died from arteriosclerosis on July 6, 1973 at his home in Brentwood, California, three weeks before his 82nd birthday. He is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

For his contributions to the film industry, Brown was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a motion pictures star located at 1680 Vine Street.

In 1961, Bowling Green State University renamed the theatre in which Brown appeared in Harvey in the 1950s as the Joe E. Brown Theatre. It was closed in 2011.

Holgate, Ohio, his birthplace, has a street named Joe E. Brown Avenue. Toledo, Ohio has a city park named Joe E. Brown Park at 150 West Oakland Street.

Rose Naftalin's popular 1975 cookbook includes a cookie named the Joe E. Brown.[14][15] Brown was a frequent customer of Naftalin's Toledo restaurant.

Flatrock Brewing Company in Napoleon, Ohio offers several brown ales such as Joe E. Coffee And Vanilla Bean Brown Ale, Joe E. Brown Hazelnut, Chocolate Peanut Butter Joe E. Brown, Joe E Brown Chocolate Pumpkin, and Joe E. (Brown Ale).

[mamapriest]

In Remembrance of Marilyn Monroe, who sadly passed away 58 years ago today, Aug. 5th, 1962. Today will be dedicated to the amazing soul who was born Norma Jeane Mortensen 💕

PART TWO

The vintage portrait of Norma Jean Dougherty, also known as actress Marilyn Monroe, with a rare autograph and dedication "To my dear sister," is on display in this undated photo for Sotheby's 2001 online auction of articles from the collection of Monroe's half-sister, Bernice Miracle.

On June 26, 1945, Army photographer David Conover had been sent by the U.S. Army Air Forces’ First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU) to the factory to take some pictures of female workers. When Conover spotted our perky brunette assembling drones, immediately recognized her potential as a pin-up model.

Although none of her pictures were used by the FMPU, she quit working at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends.

Postcard of Monroe

Norma Jeane moved out of her in-laws’ home, and defying them and her husband, signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945. James Dougherty was against his wife having a career, and the two were divorced in September of the following year.

Leader Magazine led the world in putting Marilyn Monroe on its cover in April 1946.

As her figure was deemed more suitable for pin-up than fashion modeling, she was employed mostly for advertisements and men’s magazines. According to the agency’s owner, Emmeline Snively, Monroe was one of its most ambitious and hard-working models; by early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek. Impressed by her success, Snively arranged a contract for Monroe with an acting agency in June 1946.

Monroe in a studio publicity photo taken when she was a contract player at 20th Century-Fox in 1947. She appeared in two small film roles during the contract and was let go after a year.

1947: Starting her film career

Newly signed with 20th Century Fox, Norma began a whirlwind of publicity shoots. She adopted her new stage name after a popular first name of the time and her mother's maiden name, Monroe.

1947: Honing her look 💕

Marilyn began the transformation from all-American charmer to screen siren in this swimsuit shot staged by the studio.

1947: Rehearsing with her acting coach, Helena Sorell

Marilyn put in long hours learning her trade.

1949: Posing for a studio portrait

This portrait shows Marilyn in all her loveliness before her first movie appearance.

1950: Going to an audition

Marilyn always wanted to be taken seriously as an actress. Here, she's at an audition for a play. This same year, she received attention for her small role in John Huston's crime drama, The Asphalt Jungle and also impressed audiences and critics when she appeared in All About Eve, with Bette Davis.

Sources: goodhousekeeping.com

biography.com

thevintagenews.com

PART THREE FOLLOWING*

[raystart]

Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2019

We just finished our 4th annual Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. At the end of each class we have each team give a Lessons Learned presentation. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are “here’s how smart I am, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells a story of a journey of hard-won learning and discovery. For all the teams it’s a roller coaster narrative of what happens when you discover that everything you thought you knew was wrong and how they eventually got it right.

Watching each of the teams present I was left with wonder and awe about what they accomplished in 10 weeks.

The eight teams spoke to over 820 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc.

By the end the class all of the teams realized that the problem as given by the sponsor had morphed into something bigger, deeper and much more interesting.

Our keynote speaker was Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and the designer of the Oculus Rift. He’s now the CEO/founder of the AI-focussed defense contractor Anduril Industries.

If you can’t see the video of Palmer Luckey click here

Presentation Format Each of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem.

Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique.

All the presentations are worth a watch.

Team: Panacea

If you can’t see the Panacea 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the Panacea team presenting click here

If you can’t see the Panacea slides click here

Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship This class is part of a bigger idea – Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship. Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas — we now have them working on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the Department of Defense, or non-profits/NGOs, or for the City of Oakland or for energy or the environment, or for anything they’re passionate about. And the trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and kept the same class structure – experiential, hands-on, driven this time by a mission-model not a business model.

Mission-driven entrepreneurship is the answer to students who say, “I want to give back. I want to make my community, country or world a better place, while solving some of the toughest problems.”

Team: Learn2Win

If you can’t see the Learn2Win 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the Leanr2Win team presenting click here

If you can’t see the Leanr2Win slides click here

It Started with an Idea Hacking for Defense has its origins in the Lean LaunchPad class I first taught at Stanford in 2011. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup. And that there was no entrepreneurship class that combined experiential learning with the Lean methodology. Our goal was to teach both theory and practice.

The same year we started the class, it was adopted by the National Science Foundation to train Principal Investigators who wanted to get a federal grant for commercializing their science (an SBIR grant.) The NSF observed, “The class is the scientific method for entrepreneurship. Scientists understand hypothesis testing” and relabeled the class as the NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps). The class is now taught in 9 regional locations supporting 98 universities and has trained over 1500 science teams. It was adopted by the National Institutes of Health as I-Corps at NIH in 2014 and at the National Security Agency in 2015.

Team: Embargo NK

If you can’t see the EmbargoNK 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the EmbargoNK team presenting click here

If you can’t see the EmbargoNK slides click here

Origins of Hacking For Defense In 2016, brainstorming with Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter at Stanford we observed that students in our research universities had little connection to the problems their government as well as the larger issues civil society was grappling with. Wondering how we could get students engaged, we realized the same Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class would provide a framework to do so. That year Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy (with Professor Jeremy Weinstein) with the State Department were both launched at Stanford.

  Team: Common Ground

If you can’t see the Common Ground 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the Common Ground team presenting click here

If you can’t see the Common Ground slides click here

Goals for the Hacking for Defense Class Our primary goal was to teach students Lean Innovation while they engaged in a national public service. Today if college students want to give back to their country they think of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or Americorps or perhaps the US Digital Service or the GSA’s 18F. Few consider opportunities to make the world safer with the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community or other government agencies.

Next, we wanted the students to learn about the nation’s threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the DoD and Intelligence Community. While doing so, also teach our sponsors (the innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC)) that there is a methodology that can help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving asymmetric threats. That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timely and needed solutions.

Finally, we wanted to familiarize students about the military as a profession, its expertise, and its proper role in society. And conversely show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.

Team: Deepfakes

If you can’t see the Deepfakes 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the Deepfakes team presenting click here

If you can’t see the Deepfakes slides click here

Mission-driven in 30 Universities Hacking for Defense is offered in over 25 universities, but quickly following, Orin Herskowitz started Hacking for Energy at Columbia, Steve Weinstein started Hacking for Impact (Non-Profits) and Hacking for Local (Oakland) at Berkeley and will be starting Hacking for Oceans at Scripps. Hacking for Conservation and Development at Duke followed.

Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas — we now have them working on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the military or non-profits/NGOs, or for the City of Oakland or for energy or the environment, or for anything they’re passionate about. And the trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and kept the same class structure – experiential, hands-on, driven this time by a mission-model not a business model.

Team: IntelliSense

If you can’t see the Intellisense 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the Intellisense team presenting click here

If you can’t see the Intellisense slides click here

Team: Gutenberg

If you can’t see the Gutenberg 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the Gutenberg team presenting click here

If you can’t see the Gutenberg slides click here

Team: PredictiMx

If you can’t see the PredictiMx 2-minute video click here

If you can’t see the video of the PredictiMX team presenting click here

If you can’t see the PredictiMx slides click here

It Takes a Village While I authored this blog post, this classes is a team project. The teaching team consisted of:

Pete Newell is a retired Army Colonel currently a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the National Defense University’s Center for Technology and National Security Policy and CEO of BMNT.

Steve Weinstein a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies.  Steve is CEO of MovieLabs the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios.

Tom Bedecarré was the founder and CEO of AKQA, the leading digital advertising agency. Four decades as part of the most successful advertising agencies in the world.

Jeff Decker is a social science researcher at Stanford. Jeff served in the U.S. Army as a special operations light infantry squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our teaching assistants Nate Simon, Aidan Daniel McCarty, Mackenzie Burnett and Diego Cervantes. A special thanks to Rich Carlin and the Office of Naval Research for supporting the program at Stanford and across the country. And our course advisor – Tom Byers, Professor of Engineering and Faculty Director, STVP

We were lucky to get a team of mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) who selflessly volunteered their time to help coach the teams. Thanks to Kevin Ray, Lisa Wallace, Rafi Holtzman, Craig Seidel, Todd Basche, Don Peppers, Robert Locke, and Mark Clapper.

We were privileged to have the support of an extraordinary all volunteer team of professional senior military officers representing all branches of service attending fellowship programs at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) as well as from the Defense Innovation Unit. These included:Tim Mungie, Tim Murphy, Matt Kent, Todd Mahar, Donnie Hasseltine, Jay Garcia, Kevin Childs.

And of course a big shout-out to our sponsors. At United Nations Command Security Battalion – CPT Justin Bingham, Air Force Air Combat Command – Mr. Steven Niewiarowski, Office of the Secretary of Defense Asian & Pacific Security Affairs – Chief of Staff Julie Sheetz, U.S. Coast Guard – Security Specialist Asad Hussain, IQT – Vishal Sandesara, Veterans Adminstration – Kristopher “Kit” Teague, Chief Operating Officer, IARPA – John Beieler, DNI – Dean Souleles

Thanks!

[swldx]

BBC 0437 29 Apr 2023

12095Khz 0358 29 APR 2023 - BBC (UNITED KINGDOM) in ENGLISH from TALATA VOLONONDRY. SINPO = 55445. English, dead carrier s/on @0358z then ID@0359z pips and Newsroom preview. @0401z World News anchored by Moira Alderson. The US Army has grounded all aircraft except those on "critical missions" after two recent fatal mid-air crashes. Army Chief of Staff James McConville said the aviators will remain grounded until they complete extra training. The US central bank has said it failed to act with "sufficient force and urgency" in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last month in the country's biggest bank failure since 2008. The review comes as another US lender, First Republic, remains in trouble. The U.S. said several hundred Americans had departed Sudan by land, sea or air. Escorted by American drones, a convoy of buses carrying 300 Americans left Khartoum late on Friday on a 525-mile trip to the Red Sea in the first U.S.-organized evacuation effort for citizens. 16 armed groups in Columbia announced ceasefire in Medellin. The groups are mostly criminal drug gangs that have been fighting over control of the city. North Korea's Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said a U.S.-South Korea agreement this week about the need to shore up South Korean security will worsen the situation. Kim's statement is North Korea's first comment on the meeting, and suggests its cycle of military shows of force and weapons development will continue. In the U.S., the North Carolina Supreme Court has overturned its own past ruling that said partisan gerrymandering is illegal, clearing the way for Republicans there to redraw the state’s congressional lines in a way that heavily favors the GOP. Access to the ChatGPT chatbot has been restored in Italy. It was banned by the Italian data-protection authority at the start of April over privacy concerns. Its maker, OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, said it had successfully "addressed or clarified" the issues raised. There is a potential that the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) will go on strike if they do not come to an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) by May 1. @0406z "The Newsroom" begins. Backyard fence antenna, Etón e1XM. 250kW, beamAz 315°, bearing 63°. Received at Plymouth, United States, 15359KM from transmitter at Talata Volonondry. Local time: 2258.

[didanawisgi]

By Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, Jan. 15, 2019

“Featuring a Russian spy murder, a self-immolation, gun-toting government thugs and other fanciful plot devices, “Project Blue Book,” History’s popular new  series on the Air Force’s program to investigate and debunk U.F.O.s, is not your historian’s Project Blue Book.

We viewed the first six episodes from the standpoint of writers who have long worked on the serious side of U.F.O.s. We broke the December 2017 New York Times exclusive on a secret Pentagon program investigating the phenomenon, with our colleague Helene Cooper. Leslie Kean wrote the Times 2010 best-seller “U.F.O.s: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.” Ralph Blumenthal has written about U.F.O.s for Vanity Fair as well as The Times.

So, despite the embellishments, we were interested to discover parallels between the TV version and the historical and current reality.

[Read the 2017 Times report on the Pentagon’s secret U.F.O. program.]

The History series predictably sensationalizes and overdramatizes case investigations and the historical figures involved, adding many story elements that simply never happened. It’s already hard enough for those trying to understand the truth about government involvement with U.F.O.s without mixing fact and fiction.

Nonetheless, melodrama aside, the real story is there:

Project Blue Book was the code name for an Air Force program set up in 1952, after numerous U.F.O. sightings during the Cold War era, to explain away or debunk as many reports as possible in order to mitigate possible panic and shield the public from a genuine national security problem: an apparently technological phenomenon that was beyond human control and was not Russian, yet represented an unfathomable potential threat.

The central character of the TV series, the prominent astronomer J. Allen Hynek, played by Aidan Gillen, was recruited as Blue Book’s scientific consultant and was indeed initially committed to explaining away flying saucers as natural phenomena or mistaken identifications. But he gradually realized that the bizarre objects were real and needed further scientific attention. (Though he never saw a supposed alien creature floating in a tank or crashed in a plane while recreating a reported U.F.O. dogfight, as depicted in the series.)

While Hynek was involved, Blue Book compiled reports of 12,618 sightings of unidentified flying objects, of which 701 remain unexplained to this day.

But what’s most important to study during that era is what occurred outside Project Blue Book, to the extent that it has been revealed. When we reported on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which began in 2007, we offered a glimpse into a similar scenario today: military cases being investigated and filmed without the public knowing. This time, however, there was no public agency to accommodate reports of incidents, even when hundreds of witnesses were involved.

We learned through documents from the Pentagon program, and from interviews with participants, that the mystery of the elusive flying objects is still far from solved, and that not enough was being done to address that problem almost 50 years since the close of Blue Book.

The real Hynek, the Blue Book’s scientific consultant, at one of his observatories in the 1960s. Once a U.F.O. skeptic, he became a believer.CreditNorthwestern University

Gillen as Hynek in “Project Blue Book,” which predictably sensationalizes the story.CreditEduardo Araquel/History

It all began in 1947. Lt. General Nathan Twining, the commander of Air Materiel Command, sent a secret memo on “Flying Discs” to the commanding general of the Army Air Forces at the Pentagon. Twining stated that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” The silent, disc-like objects demonstrated “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and motion which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.”

A new project, code-named “Sign,” based at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, was given the mandate to collect U.F.O. reports and assess whether the phenomenon was a threat to national security. With Russia ruled out as the source, the staff wrote a top secret “Estimate of the Situation,” concluding that, based on the evidence, U.F.O.s most likely had an interplanetary origin.

According to government officials at the time, the estimate was rejected by General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff. From then on, the proponents of the off-planet hypothesis lost ground, with Vandenberg and others insisting that conventional explanations be found.

Project Sign eventually evolved into Project Blue Book, with the aim of convincing the public that flying saucers could be explained.

Yet behind the scenes, authorities grappled with something sobering: well-documented U.F.O. encounters involved multiple trained observers, radar data, photographs, marks on the ground and physical effects on airplanes.

In 1952, the office of Maj. Gen. John Samford, the Air Force director of intelligence, briefed the F.B.I., saying it was “not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars,” according to government documents. Air Intelligence had largely ruled out an earthly source, the F.B.I. memo reported.

National defense concerns were mounting as well. After Air Force planes scrambled to intercept brilliant objects seen and picked up on radar over Washington in 1952, Samford called a news conference to calm the country.

He announced that between 1,000 and 2,000 reports had been analyzed and that most had been explained. “However,” he conceded, a certain percentage “have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It is this group of observations that we now are attempting to resolve.”

He said no conclusions had been drawn, but played down any “conceivable threat” to the United States.

Later that year, however, H. Marshall Chadwell, the assistant director of scientific intelligence for the C.I.A., concluded in a memo to the C.I.A. director, Walter Bedell Smith, that “sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.”

By 1953, authorities were concerned that communication channels were becoming dangerously clogged by hundreds of U.F.O. reports. Even false alarms could be perilous, defense agencies worried, since the Soviets might take advantage of the situation by simulating or staging a U.F.O. wave and then attack.

Documents show the C.I.A. then devised a plan for a “national policy,” as to “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic.”

After a closed-door session with a scientific advisory panel chaired by H.P. Robertson from the California Institute of Technology, the C.I.A. issued a secret report recommending a broad educational program for all intelligence agencies, with the aim of “training and debunking.”

Training meant more public education on how to identify known objects in the sky. “The use of true cases showing first the ‘mystery’ and then the ‘explanation’ would be forceful,” the report said. Debunking “would be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.”

That plan involved using psychologists, advertising experts, amateur astronomers and even Disney cartoons to create propaganda to reduce public interest. And civilian U.F.O. groups should be “watched,” the report stated, because of their “great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur.”

The Robertson Panel Report was classified until 1975, five years after Blue Book was shut down. But its legacy endures in the aura of ridicule surrounding U.F.O. reports, inhibiting scientific progress.

“The implication in the Panel Report was that U.F.O.s were a nonsense (nonscience) matter, to be debunked at all costs,” Hynek wrote. “It made the subject of U.F.O.s scientifically unrespectable.”

One famous photo from the Blue Book files, taken by a farmer, was extensively analyzed but never explained.CreditBettmann/Getty Images

Hynek, the former U.F.O. skeptic, eventually concluded that they were a real phenomenon in dire need of scientific attention, with hundreds of cases in the Blue Book files still unexplained. Even many of the “closed” cases were resolved with ridiculous, often infuriating explanations, sometimes by Hynek himself.

“The entire Blue Book operation was a foul-up based on the categorical premise that the incredible things reported could not possibly have any basis in fact,” he wrote in the 1970s, when he was finally free to speak the truth.

When Blue Book closed in late 1969, the Air Force flatly lied to the American people, issuing a fact sheet claiming that no U.F.O. had ever been a threat to national security; that U.F.O.s did not represent “technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge”; and that there was no evidence that they were “extraterrestrial vehicles.”

(Just a few years earlier, in 1967, a glowing red oval-shaped object hovered over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and all 10 of the facility’s underground nuclear missiles became disabled almost simultaneously while the U.F.O. was present, according to interviews with witnesses and official government reports. Technicians could find no conventional explanation.)

But whatever the Air Force told the public, it didn’t actually stop investigating U.F.O.s. A once-classified memo, issued secretly in October 1969, a few months before the termination of Blue Book, revealed that regulations were already in place to investigate U.F.O. reports that were “not part of the Blue Book system.” The memo, written by Carroll H. Bolender, an Air Force brigadier general, went on to say that “reports of U.F.O.s which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.”

Clearly, government agencies continued to have some level of involvement in U.F.O. investigations in the decades following — and to the present. Despite government statements to the contrary, once-secret official documents include detailed reports of dramatic U.F.O. events abroad. Many cases at home were not investigated, including a 2006 event in which a disc-shaped object hovered over O’Hare Airport for more than five minutes and shot straight up through the clouds at an incredible speed.

Our reporting in 2017, which led to briefings for members of Congressional committees, showed that not much has changed since the close of Project Blue Book.

Scientists may know more about the behavior and characteristics of U.F.O.s and are closer to understanding the physics of how the technology operates, according to A.A.T.I.P. documents and interviews. But the government still makes every attempt to keep investigations and conclusions secret, while denying any involvement to American citizens.”

[aion-rsa]

Jimmy Stewart and the WW2 Mission That Almost Broke Him

https://ift.tt/3oDIaDK

The sound of the impact is deafening. More than 18,000 feet above the German city of Fürth, the World War II B-24 bomber they call Dixie Flyer has just delivered its full payload onto a German manufacturer, devastating its ability to build military aircrafts and turning the airfield into a scrap heap. But even before making the full turn out of Bavaria, Dixie Flyer’s copilot and the leader of this bombing group, Maj. James Stewart (Jimmy Stewart to his fans), is nearly lifted out of his chair.

That’s because a German shell (or flak) has pierced directly through the center of his B-24 Liberator. The whiplash is so intense that only harnesses keep him in his seat. Still, Stewart rises in the air; pilot Capt. Neil Johnson’s hands are briefly shaken from the controls; and for a moment, the entire plane is consumed with smoke as it violently ascends. When Stewart finally gets his bearings, he’s able to look down and see the hole in the aircraft—the edge of it is inches from his boot. Almost two feet in width, the gap offers a clear view through the plane’s fuselage and straight on to the German landscape below.

There is little time to worry though. The German ground defenses and their .88 shells are rattling the sky with more flak, and out of the corner of his eye, Stewart can see one of his planes, and his crews, also get hit. They’re not so lucky as a wing comes off and the craft falls to the earth. Meanwhile, German Focke-Wulf 190 fighters are beginning to swarm.

Stewart’s 445th Bombing Group only have each other and the tightness of their formation for protection—the Eighth Air Force and RAF fighters that accompanied the mission are spread too thin across the rest of Operation Argument’s ambitious list of targets to help—and they’re a long way from home.

It was the fifth day of the Eighth Air Force’s Big Week in February 1944, and Stewart was on his 10th combat mission in the air as either a group, wing, or squadron leader. This is what he left Hollywood for, circumvented Louis B. Mayer to participate in, and felt a lifetime of obligation to fulfill. It would be his finest moment in the air. It also would be the one that almost broke him.

The Mission of a Lifetime

Long before he entertained the idea of movie stardom, James Maitland Stewart felt the call of military service. In many ways, it was viewed as his birthright. His father’s father, the original James Maitland Stewart, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, participating in the valley campaigns of Shenandoah and serving under Gen. Philip Sheridan and a young officer named George Armstrong Custer. His maternal grandfather was at Gettysburg and Fredericksburg (he would die before “Jimmy” was born). And as a boy in the 1910s, the younger James Stewart would sit on his namesake’s knee, hearing eyewitness accounts about the war that preserved the United States.

Around the same time, young Jim was also receiving German helmets and paraphernalia shipped home by his father Alexander Stewart, who was off in Europe serving in World War I. Jim would use these real mementos of war in the makeshift plays he’d put on at his home in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Biographer Robert Matzen, who authored the definitive account of Stewart’s World War II years, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, tells us this background had a formative influence on the rest of Stewart’s life and his sense of duty, which he carried with him on the train to Hollywood and then, eventually, on the plane ride out of it.

“All of these things added up into this sort of nexus of ‘I will serve, I have to serve, it’s my duty, it’s my time,’” Matzen says during a Zoom conversation. “And when the time came, he answered the bell. He was so fast out of the gate in the sweepstakes for World War II that he was in the first draft class. He willingly went. It’s not that he enlisted, he was drafted, but he was happy to be drafted. He called it winning the lottery.”

Indeed, Stewart’s then-recent status as a movie star of the 1930s was practically an accident, at least as far as MGM, the studio which held his contract, was concerned. The studio’s top brass viewed Stewart as a possible character actor or background comic talent. But then Frank Capra saw the everyman appeal in Jim’s thin frame and irrepressible earnestness, and cast him in You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)—on loan at Columbia Pictures.

Stewart of course positioned himself to have that career, just as he positioned himself to be ready to serve if his country ever needed him. Hence alongside his sense of service and sacrifice, he also carried a passion for flying. And as soon as his movie star bona fides were cemented, he celebrated by flying his personal aircraft, a military trainer, learning his way around the skies.

“There’s so many things to think about up there that you forget things down below,” Stewart told an interviewer in the late 1930s. “Flying is something altogether different from the way I’m earning my living. That’s what I like about it… Flying is sort of a guarantee that life will continue to have variety.”

According to biographer Matzen, it also was a guarantee he’d be ready to serve when the time came.

“Step by step, he set himself up to end up in England in a bomb group,” Matzen says. “One of those steps was taken years before he was drafted, and that was when he became a star in Hollywood and bought a plane that was an army trainer and proceeded to learn to fly and train, and log hours on that plane so that he could be a pilot when the war came. And war seemed inevitable by 1938.”

Stewart even used his off-time to prepare for it. Says Matzen, “He took out a trip to Europe toward the end of ’39 to get the lay of the land because he thought he was going to end up fighting there.”

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in the 1930s about to fly in his Stinson Voyager plane. Courtesy of Robert Matzen and the Jay Rubin Collection.

The ‘I’m a Movie Star’ Card

That preparation served Jim well. While he was initially rejected from service in 1940—more than a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—his capability as a flyer, and ability to find a doctor to explain that this 32-year-old man’s unusually thin frame was due to genetics and not ill-health, kept him in line to not only be drafted early but excel in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

“He was deferred in October of 1940 and his father was furious,” says Matzen. “He thought that Jim was in on the deferment for some reason. And Alex called him and chewed him out, and it made the papers that his father chewed him out. But it wasn’t anything. That’s what I think sent Jim back to talk to that doctor and get this letter written that was his carte blanche to get into the military.” That same letter was also the first record Matzen found at the top of Stewart’s military file more than 70 years later. It was the piece of paper which got him into the service and, along with his capability as a flyer, helped him rise all the way to the rank of brigadier general while serving in the Air Force Reserve in the 1950s.

That talent is also how Stewart circumvented the wishes of commanding officers and Louis B. Mayer, who likely applied pressure on the government to keep Stewart stateside during the war, essentially to make propaganda films for the First Motion Picture Unit.

“Jim was furious when that happened, because that was not his intention,” Matzen says. “He was a movie star of the first order who walked away from Hollywood. He took his fame with him and it did allow him to speak to officers that otherwise would not talk to a private and then a corporal, and then a second lieutenant. He got his way by playing the ‘I’m a movie star’ card. But it wasn’t, ‘I’m a movie star, don’t send me in harm’s way.’ It was just the opposite.”

In November 1943, Stewart would get his wish when he was sent to England as part of the 445th Bombardment Group in the Eighth Air Force.

Maj. Stewart circa 1944 waiting for his group to return at the Station 124 control tower in East Anglia. Courtesy of Robert Matzen and the Film Stills Collection, L Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University.

Squadron Leader 

Stewart almost never spoke about his experiences during the war. Just as he would refuse to ever star in a World War II picture, he abjectly refused to give an interview to the press after arriving in Tibenham, a remote and perpetually damp village in East Anglia. His reticence is even the reason Matzen was first wary of writing a book about Stewart’s war experiences. Yet, for whatever personal recalcitrance the actor had toward talking, the story left by his military file, records of his bombing runs, and even the testimonials, diary entries, and occasional published memoirs of the men under his command paint a strong picture.

As the oldest man on the plane and in the air—with his pilots frequently being between ages 19 and 23—Stewart offered a precise and measured authority that made him a natural leader who was too good to keep stateside.

Air Corps officer Beirne Lay Jr. recalled, “Things seemed to go all right when Stewart was up front. He made free use of the radio, like an aerial quarterback, to advise and encourage the other boys during a mission, and here his experience in films gave him a novel advantage. Because of his precise enunciation, people could understand him. It sounds like a little thing, but clear, quick communication between formations was of extraordinary importance.”

The talent made Stewart a natural choice to become a commanding officer in the 445th. Always from the copilot seat of a B-24 Liberator bomber, Stewart would command anywhere between 25 to 150 aircrafts, depending on if he was lead, wing, or squadron commander. But even on the days he didn’t fly with the men he trained, he would brief his boys about the day’s missions. Then came the long wait in the cold mud of Tibenham, below the radio tower of Station 124. Those hours of seeing if all his crews would return felt interminably longer than actually flying the missions.

“He had very few of what they call milk runs,” Matzen says, “which were the easy ones where you hopped over the North Sea to the Netherlands or you hopped over the Channel to the coast of France, and you bombed something easy: a submarine pen here or a gun emplacement there. His very first mission was to Kiel in the very Northern tip of Germany, near Denmark, to bomb submarine pens. It was this long mission east over the North Sea.” It was a clean one on a bright December day, despite encountering countless rounds of flak.

A few weeks later, they would not be so easygoing. On Jan. 7, 1944, Capt. Stewart was wing lead of the 445th when the 389th, the lead bombing group that day, took a wrong turn over the Rhine. The formations had successfully carried out a bombing raid of the German city of Ludwigshafen, but the 389th turned at a mistaken angle that put their return flight on a path over Nazi occupied Paris instead of Tibenham.

Despite the 389th ignoring Stewart’s radio communication, the 35-year-old officer made the even-headed choice to follow the 389th and keep formation tight (as opposed to creating chaos and isolation in the sky), which came in handy after the 389th inevitably became a target of the German Luftwaffe air force outside of Paris.

American Thunderbolts and British Spitfires ended up saving the 389th that day, which still lost several planes and even more lives, but the tight flying of the 445th led the Luftwaffe to not even tangle with Stewart’s group.

It was the mission that earned Jim the rank of major. His confidence grew, yet day by day, and mission by mission, the stress likewise increased as he saw fewer faces he trained return home. For instance, on one mission, Stewart’s aircraft suffered engine troubles while crossing the English Channel and had to return home. The plane that took their place in the formation as group leader, the Liberty Belle, was shot down in their place. Only three parachutes were spotted getting out in time.

Similarly, Jim was at the barracks in December 1943 when they celebrated the 22nd birthday of his pilot Dave Skjeje. In February, he was writing to Billie, Dave’s widow of the same age, about how her newlywed husband died.

“He was told don’t get personally involved,” Matzen says. “There is a hierarchy here and he stuck to that pretty well, but he also was the one to write the letters to families, to wives, to mothers and fathers when somebody was lost, and it really weighed on him.”

It would soon reach a tipping point.

Jim Stewart and the crew of the B-24 Liberator called Lady Shamrock. Courtesy of Robert Matzen and the Eckelberry family.

“The Roughest 10 or 15 Minutes”

Operation Argument (aka “Big Week”) was the campaign the Eighth Air Force spent the winter of 1943/44 waiting on. In the span of six days, the U.S. military would drastically ramp up its daytime precision bombing campaign and cripple the Luftwaffe ahead of what would become the D-Day invasion.

Says Matzen, “The Eighth Air Force was determined to knock out the German aircraft manufacturing capabilities, so they looked for one week where they could have clear weather to have a series of campaigns, bombing missions to hit strategic targets related to aircraft manufacturing. Those missions were extremely dangerous.”

Jim flew the first day of Big Week over the Netherlands. It was considered a major success even though three planes in the 445th went down. One of his pilots called it “the roughest 10 or 15 minutes I ever spent.” But it was about to get much worse for the 445th.

On Feb. 24, Stewart was standing below Station 124’s tower when the remnants of the day’s planes limped home, some of them still smoking and on fire. Twenty-eight planes had taken off that morning, headed for the German city of Gotha, but three needed to return due to technical troubles while over the English Channel. Of the remaining 25 bombers in the air, only 12 returned to East Anglia. More than half had been shot down.

The next day, Jim would lead the 445th again in the skies for his second Big Week mission… over Fürth, an area just northwest of Nuremberg. The mission was part of an ambitious push that would send 754 B-17s and B-24s, with an escort of 20 groups of Eighth Air Force fighters and 12 squadrons of RAF Spitfires and Mustangs, into southern Germany to attack three Messerschmitt aircraft production centers and a ball-bearing plant.

With the bomb bay doors open at 18,500 feet, the air was already 40 degrees below zero in a Bavarian February. After a .88 shell nearly blew a hole between Stewart and pilot Neil Johnson’s feet, the temperature was dropping around their oxygen masks so quickly that ice began forming inside of the plane and on their gear.

Immediately after Dixie Flyer was hit, the first of several planes in the 445th went down in the hail of flak. Stewart could see as the wings of one B-24 under his command came off and the aircraft disintegrated midair. Only one parachute made it out as the rest of the crew plummeted. Perhaps it was in this moment that Stewart noted his crew’s parachutes were already sucked out of the vacuum in Dixie Flyer when the shell hit.

“How he didn’t die that instant is amazing,” Matzen says. “He looked over to his left and another plane [Nine Yanks and a Jerk] had a shell go directly through the cockpit on one side and out the other, and he thought that the pilot and co-pilot certainly must’ve been killed, and that plane was going to go down. But they lived, they made it back too. It was crazy.”

Relief from Allied fighter planes never came, but most of the 445th somehow made it back to the English Channel that day, with Dixie Flyer and Nine Yanks and a Jerk limping home. Indeed, with its fuselage in tatters, Dixie even lost two of its engines before it saw the English coastline. While running on fumes, Johnson and Stewart had to use every muscle in their fiber to brake the collapsing plane when it finally landed at Tibenham. The pair were unaware at that moment that their plane was literally breaking apart as it touched down, with a crack ripping from the bulkhead to the cockpit.

The plane’s bombardier Jim Myers recalled, “[Stewart] was blue from the cold whistling through the holes in the plane, but he hadn’t received a scratch.” At least not physically.

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As Matzen says now, “It was very interesting. The plane cracked and Jim cracked.” No one officially ever said Maj. Stewart became “flak happy” (the Air Force nickname for PTSD at the time) after the mission over Fürth, but Matzen contends no one needed to. In the first instance since December, more than two weeks passed before his CO allowed Stewart to go back in the air.

“This was the first time that he had to miss turns in the rotation, the leadership rotation leading missions,” Matzen says. “And that’s a huge deal to him. That’s him letting himself down in his crazy dedicated mind, in his perfectionist mind. All of a sudden, he’s not up to commanding in the air because he had been flying steady, steady, steady, then all of a sudden you look after February 25th, and he didn’t fly again till March 15th, and that’s a long time for him, and then he flew again on March 25th, then he didn’t fly again at all for a while.”

The pressure of leading, and perhaps more acutely the pressure caused by seeing so many of the men he trained go down, at last got to him.

Says Matzen “He had to just do what a lot of them did, which is go off into the country, take sodium amytal, and just chill and get reprogrammed. They’d sit and they’d talk to you, and they would give you perspective and they’d calm you down. Then they sent you back online.”

Left: 2nd Lt. James Stewart before combat missions in 1942. Right: Maj. Stewart in early 1944 after first two months of combat. Courtesy of Robert Matzen, the Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS, and the Film Stills Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham University.

After the War

Jim would fly two more missions as group leader of the 445th, including a bombing run over Berlin. However, the gaps between the final two of his dozen missions in the 445th belied that he was essentially becoming grounded. Shortly after his run over Berlin, he reluctantly accepted a transfer to the 453rd in Old Buckenham. He effectively became a chief of staff there, briefing the crews of his new group, including on the bombing runs in June 1944 that paved the way for D-Day. To his regret, Stewart did not fly on any of those tactical missions.

He eventually would make it back into the air, leading a total of 20 combat missions, although by his final mission in 1945, the Luftwaffe was all but destroyed and a near collision course between bombing groups under his command convinced Stewart and his commanding officers that his time in the air was done—Stewart even vowed never to fly again (he did not keep that oath).

When he finally returned to the States in the fall of ’45, the gawkish and youthful leading Mr. Smith had vanished. Graying and gaunt—features which came from spending the end of the war so stressed he could only keep peanut butter and ice cream down for weeks at a time—Stewart was nearly unrecognizable to his proud parents when he disembarked off the Queen Elizabeth in New York. He was also unsure if he’d ever work in Hollywood again.

“He was ever thinner with skin hanging from him” says Matzen, “He lost his hair and the rest of it went gray. That’s what dragged himself back from Europe and arrived in Hollywood. He thought he was only fit for character parts now.”

Like the first time he arrived in Hollywood, the only person waiting for him at the Pasadena train station in 1945 was his old acting buddy Henry Fonda. While Hank had maintained his movie star status during the early part of America’s WWII years, he ended up following Jim into military service by joining the Navy. But he also had taken a shorter break from the silver screen. When Stewart arrived back, the only place he had to move was Hank’s “play house,” a small home he built in his mansion’s backyard for his children Peter and Jane Fonda. But Hank assured Jim, it had a fully functional kitchen and bar. Priorities were covered.

“They just decompressed together,” Matzen says, “and I think Hank saw what the toll had been on Jim and just helped him. Neither of them was a big talker. So they came back together and they started building model airplanes, which is what they had done before the war. They flew model airplanes, they flew kites, Fonda had access to these war surplus military grade kites that they would take out and fly together and do their thing: not talk much, listen to records, make airplanes, and re-assimilate in the peacetime world.”

Hank also helped Jim get a new agent to adjust to the postwar Hollywood where actors could truly be free agents. Which came in handy since MGM terminated Jim’s contract after he refused Mayer’s idea of capitalizing off Jim’s wartime service with an adventure movie about him as an ace pilot called The James Stewart Story. According to Stewart, after he flatly refused to do the movie, LB called him a son of a bitch and said “you’ll never work in this town again.”

Best friends Jim Stewart and Hank Fonda in their ladies men era in 1930s Hollywood. Courtesy of Robert Matzen and the Jay Rubin Collection.

It’s a Wonderful Life

Of course Stewart did work again, making his comeback in the film he is still probably best remembered for: Frank Capra’s seminal holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Like Stewart, Capra had enthusiastically joined the military and war effort back at the beginning, running the Army’s Motion Picture Film Unit. The phone didn’t ring for either man after they came home. And while It’s a Wonderful Life received an initially muted box office reception (it only became a classic after it started airing on television), it gave Stewart the confidence to rebuild himself as a leading man who carried long shadows.

“It’s a Wonderful Life has become synonymous with the holidays and with spiritual rebirth and perseverance, all those things that really embodied Jim were infused into this picture and captured for all time,” says Matzen. Nonetheless, even as Stewart was able to recapture the youthful energy that made him a star in the movie’s early scenes (wearing a hair piece as he plays twentysomething George Bailey), there was something harder there as the character aged throughout the picture.

Says Matzen, “When he comes back and he’s so much older, he has a dark streak from the war. He has rages, he can’t sleep, he’s got shakes, and he learned to channel it early on in a couple of places in It’s Wonderful Life when he flies off the handle [on the school teacher over the phone] and when he destroys the model he’s got in the living room, and he throws things and he terrorizes his family. I was never comfortable with that scene long before I wanted to write a book about Jim and the war. I was very uncomfortable with just whatever this menace was inside of him.”

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It would become a hallmark of some of Stewart’s most popular postwar roles. Director Alfred Hitchocck particularly enjoyed taking Capra’s all-American everyman and casting him against type, leaning into the menace. It’s there, faintly, when he becomes an obsessive voyeur in Rear Window (1954), or a snobby misanthrope in Rope (1948), and it’s all-consuming when Stewart channels Hitch’s own obsessions about molding blonde women into his fantasy idealizations in Vertigo (1958).

“Strategically, he was brilliant in recrafting his career,” says Matzen. “The same brain that had taken all those steps to get him to Europe, he ultimately applied that brain and took steps to get his career back in order and relaunch himself.”

Capt. Stewart newly arrived at East Anglia’s Tibenham in 1943. Courtesy of Robert Matzen.

Haunted by the “Happiest Times”

Until the end of his days, James Stewart refused to speak candidly about the war. Once in a while, however, he would hint at the importance of those memories. He even volunteered, “I was, in many ways, far happier in the service than I was at any time in my life. Closeness and camaraderie with all those wonderful guys. Feeling I was part of a whole, part of a divine scheme, with an obligation to do my best. It wasn’t playacting then. I was living it.”

Perhaps this is why he revisited Tibenham twice in his old age, making the long muddy journey from London to East Anglia, allowing his companions a few photos as he walked with his ghosts along the same ramparts of Station 124 where he used to wait for his men to return. What he thought during these reunions, however, remains a mystery. He kept his own counsel about those days. He even kept that part of himself closed off from the men he remembered so fondly.

“He did not keep in touch with [men he commanded],” Matzen says, “but he would be polite if they tried to get in touch with him. He did not seem to be a sentimental soul. He was too closed off for that…. They wanted him to come to their weddings or their kids’ weddings. ‘Oh wouldn’t it be great if Stewart would come?’ But nope.”

Like so much else, Stewart kept the happiest times of his life locked away with the scars they left.

Says Matzen, “His wife talked about the nightmares. His daughter talked to me about the nightmares and about how she would find her dad sitting alone in his study just staring. So yes, it was the time he felt was the most rewarding in his life because he did get to serve his country and he called them this family, this group of people dedicated to a cause all pursuing this common goal. And that really made him feel good, being part of this brotherhood. But he remained an introvert and a closed off person throughout his life… I think his wife understood him and Hank understood him, and boy, I don’t know beyond that. That’s a small group.”

Nevertheless, during the war this introvert was a part of a larger bombing group whole; it carried him through his darkest days in the air—and those that came long after.

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[brookstonalmanac]

Events 10.14 (after 1950)

1066 – The Norman conquest of England begins with the Battle of Hastings. 1322 – Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King Edward II of England at the Battle of Old Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland's independence. 1586 – Mary, Queen of Scots, goes on trial for conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth I of England. 1656 – The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacts the first punitive legislation against the Religious Society of Friends. 1758 – Seven Years' War: Frederick the Great suffers a rare defeat at the Battle of Hochkirch. 1773 – The first recorded ministry of education, the Commission of National Education, is formed in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. 1774 – American Revolution: The First Continental Congress denounces the British Parliament's Intolerable Acts and demands British concessions. 1791 – The revolutionary group the United Irishmen is formed in Belfast, Ireland leading to the Irish Rebellion of 1798. 1805 – War of the Third Coalition: A French corps defeats an Austrian attempt to escape encirclement at Ulm. 1806 – War of the Fourth Coalition: Napoleon decisively defeats Prussia at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt. 1808 – The Republic of Ragusa is annexed by France. 1843 – Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell is arrested by the British on charges of criminal conspiracy. 1863 – American Civil War: Confederate troops under the command of A. P. Hill fail to drive the Union Army completely out of Virginia. 1884 – George Eastman receives a U.S. Government patent on his new paper-strip photographic film. 1888 – Louis Le Prince films the first motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene. 1898 – The steam ship SS Mohegan sinks near the Lizard peninsula, Cornwall, killing 106. 1908 – The Chicago Cubs defeat the Detroit Tigers, 2–0, clinching the 1908 World Series; this would be their last until winning the 2016 World Series. 1910 – English aviator Claude Grahame-White lands his aircraft on Executive Avenue near the White House in Washington, D.C. 1912 – Former president Theodore Roosevelt is shot and mildly wounded by John Flammang Schrank. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Roosevelt delivers his scheduled speech. 1913 – Senghenydd colliery disaster, the United Kingdom's worst coal mining accident, claims the lives of 439 miners. 1915 – World War I: Bulgaria joins the Central Powers. 1920 – Finland and Soviet Russia sign the Treaty of Tartu, exchanging some territories. 1923 – After the Irish Civil War the 1923 Irish hunger strikes were undertaken by thousands of Irish republican prisoners protesting the continuation of their internment without trial. 1930 – The former and first President of Finland, K. J. Ståhlberg, and his wife, Ester Ståhlberg, are kidnapped from their home by members of the far-right Lapua Movement. 1933 – Germany withdraws from the League of Nations and World Disarmament Conference. 1939 – World War II: The German submarine U-47 sinks the British battleship HMS Royal Oak within her harbour at Scapa Flow, Scotland. 1940 – World War II: The Balham underground station disaster kills sixty-six people during the London Blitz. 1943 – World War II: Prisoners at Sobibor extermination camp covertly assassinate most of the on-duty SS officers and then stage a mass breakout. 1943 – World War II: The United States Eighth Air Force loses 60 of 291 B-17 Flying Fortresses during the Second Raid on Schweinfurt. 1943 – World War II: The Second Philippine Republic, a puppet state of Japan, is inaugurated with José P. Laurel as its president. 1947 – Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to exceed the speed of sound. 1949 – The Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in the United States convicts eleven defendants of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the federal government.

[sanfordpost53]

Notable American Legion Members Clark Gable, Academy Award winner

  Gable spent two years as an aerial cameraman and bomber gunner in Europe during World War II.   Gable flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May 4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts.

  During one of the missions, Gable's aircraft was damaged by flak and attacked by fighters, which knocked out one of the engines and shot up the stabilizer. In the raid on Germany, one crewman was killed and two others were wounded, and flak went through Gable's boot and narrowly missed his head. 

  When word of this reached MGM, studio executives began to badger the Army Air Forces to reassign its most valuable screen actor to noncombat duty. In November 1943, Gable returned to the United States to edit his film, on an old Warner's lot donated to the war effort, joining the First Motion Picture Unit in Hollywood where other stars contributed with any film equipment they had as well.

  In June 1944, Gable was promoted to major. While he hoped for another combat assignment, he had been placed on inactive duty and on June 12, 1944, his discharge papers were signed by Captain (later U.S. President) Ronald Reagan.

   Gable completed editing of the film Combat America in September 1944, giving the narration himself and making use of numerous interviews with enlisted gunners as focus of the film.

  Because his motion picture production schedule made it impossible for him to fulfill reserve officer duties, he resigned his commission on September 26, 1947, a week after the Air Force became an independent service branch.

    Adolf Hitler favored Gable above all other actors. During World War II, Hitler offered a sizable reward to anyone who could capture and bring Gable to him unscathed.

    Gable was awarded military honors for service: the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, American Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal. 

Oh, and he was in some movies and stuff too. 

[this-writers-dream]

Rustling Leaves [Part 1]

——

In the near future, the world teeters on the brink of apocalypse. A protagonist must enter a near-parallel world in order to investigate the mystery behind an event that has placed everyone's lives in peril.

——

Alicia sat comfortably in the backseat of a standard, military issue, black Chevrolet Suburban. Her head leaned to the side as she zoned out, gazing mesmerized at the expansive forest darting past the window. A single earbud dangled on her left shoulder as a video played, forgotten on the phone in her lap.

"—continue our coverage on the recent bombing." Finally catching her attention, Alicia peered down at the screen while adjusting her right earbud.

The modified United States seal prominently displayed on the bottom left corner of the screen indicated the video's status as a private military newscast. A well dressed woman sat behind an unoriginal news anchor desk before a massive American flag.

"Just under a week ago, Russian bombers penetrated our airfield with the intent of deploying what was first believed to be atomic bombs over the cities of San Francisco and Sacramento." Images of Russian bomber planes along with their projected routes and timelines appeared on the screen. As they approached the U.S. border, poorly edited clips of the ensuing dogfights accompanied by motivational anthems were shown. Had this display of overt appeal to patriotism occurred prior to the attack, Alicia might've rolled her eyes.

"While Air Force bomber destroyers deflected the advance and brought down the enemy, they were unsuccessful in preventing the deployment of the bombs." Alicia's gaze pulled away from the newscast to rest back out over the green expanse of conifers and pines.

When the bombs fell, all the world drew a collective breath. It felt as though Alicia were still holding hers now. She would never forget the feeling of collective dread as millions of eyes locked on screens of all kinds, following live updates on the bombers. Homemade videos were the hardest to watch.

On the newscast, a map of Northern California pinpointed the exact location of the bombing with a small red circle, about 20 miles to the northeast of Redding. "What was first believed to be atomic bombs however, are now considered biological weapons by intelligence experts. No explosion followed the release of the bomb-like objects that fell over Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Civilians in the surrounding areas instead reported, a 'loud popping sound' before the exponential and continuous growth of the surrounding flora began." The video cycled through short clips of the ensuing perennial invasion. A small tagline running across the bottom of the screen attributed the footage to civilian cellphones.

After the bombs dropped, instead of an explosion of fire, came an explosion of nature. It was entirely unexpected, perplexing, and horrifying in equal measure. All plant life within the surrounding area came alive with movement in the velocity of its spread, not unlike wildfire. As Alicia looked over the vast sea of green outside, she couldn't help but picture a high tide swelling and spilling over entire neighborhoods. It wasn't far from what had actually happened.

Only 12 hours post-bombing, towns and suburbs alike at either edge of the mountain forest, from Mt. Shasta to Redding, were consumed, engulfed in a verdant blanket. In a panic, communities attempted to suppress the growth with fire and other weapons of strength, but opposing nature at this amplified level had proven futile. The towering trees stood resilient against any attack, growing ever faster and stronger, impervious to anything they could muster in their war-torn, crippled state. In those first few hours, countless lives were lost.

"Evacuation efforts were initiated almost immediately," the newscast continued, "but, conservatively, hundreds have yet to be located. As a safety precaution, all civilian-lead search and rescue missions have ceased, and entry into the affected area by unauthorized personnel is prohibited until further notice." On the screen, the small red circle previously indicating where the bombs had dropped, quickly grew larger as time was manipulated forward. In seconds, the entire mountain was covered in red. The animation went unnoticed by Alicia, whose eyes remained locked on the trees flashing past the window, her thoughts on their ever expanding roots.

"The affected area continues increasing in size, but the rate of growth has been slowly, yet steadily decreasing since impact. Military units are re-establishing boundaries as necessary." A graph detailing the speed of the affected forest's growth over the past week compared to typical forest growth highlighted a staggering difference, followed by a second graph demonstrating yet another distressing comparison in tree size between those within Shasta forest and those in surrounding areas. Affected trees were monstrous, surpassing even the great Redwoods by hundreds of feet. Alicia glanced down in time to see a final image comparing the colossal giants to human scale. The prospect of making an impact against such odds seemed almost laughable.

As the Chevy approached the base of the mountain, the obvious disparity was visible first-hand. The affected trees towered menacingly at incredible heights, their trunks extending much farther than Alicia could follow with her gaze from within the car.

"Within less than 24 hours of the bombing, a Special Operations team was deployed to investigate the site. Regrettably, contact was lost shortly after their entry into the forest. Efforts to locate Delta team and re-establish contact are ongoing. In the meantime, an alternate, more compact, and specialized team comprised jointly of Army officers and Air Force-affiliated civilian scientists, have been dispatched. Together, they boast a combined field experience of well over 80 years." On the screen, Alicia's face along with three others' were pictured with their accompanying titles and ranks, but she didn't need to look down to know the information listed.

In the driver's seat was the Squadron Commander, U.S. Army Major Chester Mace. He drove silently, both hands on the wheel, with a calm but calculating way about him. His salt and pepper hair was trimmed short and a scar accentuated his square jaw. Beside him, was U.S. Army Master Sergeant Michael Hatter, with a boyish charm to match his kind blue eyes despite a receding hairline. The Sergeant nervously fingered his wedding ring as he too, stared absently out the window.  

Behind the Major sat Dr. Barbara White, Alicia's research partner at the Beale Air Force Base, where they had offered specialized knowledge in biological and chemical warfare for many years since graduating from Stanford. The two had developed a strong friendship, often calling each other by the nicknames Bunny and Ali, though the newscast wouldn't've mentioned that.

"Their arrival to the southern Redding entry point is imminent." The video cut to a live feed of the black Chevy Suburban, and Alicia tried to ignore the rumbling helicopter above. "Coverage will continue to be provided throughout this critical mission. Unfortunately, as conflicts with Russia and China continue to escala—" The woman froze and a grey buffering wheel appeared shortly thereafter, blurring the entire screen. Alicia sighed in annoyance, all attempts at refreshing the internet connection unsuccessful.

"Why don't you put that away?" Came a soft voice from her left. Alicia snapped up, removing her earbud automaticaly, only to be met with Bunny's serene smile. "There's nothing on there we don't already know. You're just stressing yourself out more." She gently pulled the phone from Alicia's hand and placed it face-down in the space between them.

"Put what away?" Asked Sergeant Hatter, turning to face them in the backseat as if this was a welcome distraction from his otherwise nervous thoughts.

"Private newscast," Bunny replied, motioning to the cellphone.

"The chopper above is capturing live video, if you want to stick your head out and wave," added Alicia.

"That's one way to go about it." A wicked grin shaped Hatter's lips, "Or I could always stick my—" The Major interrupted him with a pointed look.

"Enough chit-chat," Mace said dryly. "We'll be arriving at the entry point within the next few minutes."  

They drove past a downtown that appeared as though it had been abandoned for years rather than a mere week. Streets were overrun by foliage. Overgrown shrubbery, vines, and trees took the place of street lights, stop signs, and lampposts. The scene was recognizable enough to be familiar, yet different enough to be unsettling.

Alicia was reminded of her favorite dystopian sci-fi series, and as if on some ironic cue, she watched in surprise as a deer and her fawn pranced gracefully through the remains of a shopping center in the early morning sunlight.

"Airmen are currently stationed at the rendezvous, monitoring growth and viability of entry. I'll confer with them upon arrival to secure final approval for our mission from Commander in Chief. While I do that, Sergeant Hatter will run point and oversee final preparations for entry with both Drs. White and Rivera." Mace made quick eye contact with both women through the rearview mirror. It was the first time the Major had addressed them directly. He'd seemed more likable prior to speaking. "Understood?"

Alicia refrained from rolling her eyes. "Yes, sir," the three replied in unison.

A short while later, Sergeant Hatter, Bunny, and Alicia stood facing the looming forest canopy, four packs lined before them along the ground. Sunlight cast long, foreboding shadows from the oversized trees, the grass beneath them still dewy in the cool morning fog. No matter the brightness, sunlight seemed incapable of penetrating the perpetual darkness within.

It was unnerving. This close, the forest truly seemed alive. Alicia's instincts objected as though she were standing before a hungry predator, jaws open. The trees along the edge of the canopy bowed forward, as if resisting some invisible force from deep within the forest. The rustling leaves and branches became a low growl to accompany quivering, sharpened fangs.

"I'm telling you," continued Hatter, crossing his arms, "he specifically said not to put one in his pack. Wouldn't wear one even if Delta hadn't already cleared entrance without protective gear."

Glad for the distraction, Alicia scoffed, hands on her waist. "Well, he can't be worried about looking silly. This is about safety. We know we're fine without the gear here at the entrance, but once we move past where we lost contact with Delta, who knows what we'll find?"

"Precisely," came the Major's smooth voice suddenly from behind them. In one graceful movement, he shouldered his pack and continued forward, never missing a beat. The others quickly followed suit, Alicia in rear.

"Who knows what we'll find, indeed. The protective gear not only obstructs audiovisual feedback, but also restricts movement and severely lowers reaction time," he explained matter-of-factly. "Sergeant Hatter and I, have been trained to prepare for the unexpected to the extent possible, of course. Nonetheless, I welcome the advantage of not donning unnecessary gear that would otherwise only serve to hinder my performance in maintaining your and Dr. White's safety, particularly when facing an entirely novel scenario."

"Major," Alicia began after a moment, "I—"

"No need to apologize, Dr. Rivera. Let's get moving, we've got ground to cover."

Her eyes blazed furiously. "I wasn't going to apologize," she muttered through gritted teeth. Bunny placed a calming hand on her shoulder, and Alicia was immediately aware of how tense she'd become.

"It would still be prudent to take one for yourself, should it become necessary," she continued, after a mindful breath.

"I appreciate your concern, doctor, but I assure you, I'll be fine without the gear." Mace walked on through the densely packed trees, never looking back. End of conversation.

Hatter shrugged and offered Alicia and Bunny a sheepish smile before following closely behind the Major, hand resting stiffly on the holster of his handgun.

Purposefully falling a few steps behind, Bunny winked at Alicia and whispered, "Don't worry, I packed an extra."

"Let's see if he earns it." Before following the others into the fog, Alicia glanced at the sunny morning behind them, hoping it wouldn't be her last.

[americasclassicstandards-blog]

The Story Of The Glenn Miller Orchestra...

Friday, December 15, 1944, America’s most popular and successful bandleader, Major Alton Glenn Miller, disappeared while traveling as a passenger on a military aircraft flying from England to France. The business commitments that he had put in place in anticipation of his return from military service following World War II survived Miller. To fulfill a lucrative RCA Victor recording agreement and further the strong Glenn Miller franchise, his manager and wartime administrative officer Donald Wayne Haynes, attorney and estate executor David Mackay and Glenn’s widow Helen Miller launched a postwar Glenn Miller Orchestra. The band was set up along the lines of the Miller Army Air Forces (AAF) Orchestra. Many Miller AAF veterans joined the new band. Others declined, including bandleader and drummer Ray McKinley, who had led the AAF Orchestra for live appearances following Miller’s disappearance.  Haynes and Mackay approached prewar Glenn Miller star Chief Petty Officer Gordon Lee “Tex” Beneke, USNR, who agreed to lead the new band.  Plans were put in place to have the new band assembled, rehearsed and ready to appear by January 1946. Tex Beneke and his Orchestra became arguably the most successful of the postwar big bands during a period where singers and ballads became more popular on records and radio whereas bands and jazz were less economical to organize and operate. At end of 1948 economics required the elimination of the large string section. By 1950 there was a resurgence of bands that imitated the so-called “Glenn Miller clarinet-lead style” of orchestrations that Miller had used circa-1939. This put pressure on the more progressive and creative Beneke to compete. The irony was that Glenn Miller would have continued to evolve and the Beneke band was his legitimate successor. Disagreements between Beneke and Haynes about style and direction led to a breakup and in December 1950. Gordon Lee “Tex” Beneke was born February 12, 1914. He was a saxophonist, singer, and bandleader. His career is a history of associations with bandleader Glenn Miller and former musicians and singers who worked with Miller. His band is also associated with the careers of Eydie Gorme, Henry Mancini and Ronnie Deauville. Beneke also solos on the recording the Glenn Miller Orchestra made of their popular song “In The Mood” and sings on another popular Glenn Miller recording, “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. Jazz critic Will Friedwald considers Beneke to be one of the major blues singers who sang with the big bands of the early 1940s. Beneke started playing saxophone when he was nine, going from soprano to alto to tenor saxophones and staying with the latter. His first professional work was with bandleader Ben Young in 1935, but it was when he joined the Glenn Miller Orchestra three years later that his career hit its stride. Beneke said: “It seems that Gene Krupa had left the Goodman band and was forming his own first band. He was flying all over the country looking for new talent and he stopped at our ballroom one night (to listen to the Ben Young band). Gene wound up taking two or three of our boys with him back to New York. Krupa wanted to take Beneke but his sax section was already filled.” Krupa knew that Glenn Miller was forming a band and recommended Beneke to Miller. Whatever concerns Miller might have had about Beneke’s playing were quickly dismissed; Miller immediately made Beneke his primary tenor sax soloist and Beneke played all but a few of the tenor solos on all of the records and personal appearances made by the Miller band until it disbanded in 1942. On the August 1, 1939, recording made of the Joe Garland composition “In The Mood”, Beneke trades two-measure tenor solo exchanges with his fellow section-mate Al Klink. Miller’s 1941 recording of “A String of Pearls” (composed by the band’s arranger, Jerry Gray) also has Beneke and Klink trading two-measure tenor solo phrases. Beneke appears with Miller and his band in the films Sun Valley Serenade (1941) and Orchestra Wives (1942), both of which helped propel the singer/saxophonist to the top of the Metronome polls. Tex Beneke is listed in the personnel of the 1941 Metronome All-Star Band led by Benny Goodman. In 1942, Glenn Miller’s orchestra won the first Gold Record ever awarded for “Chattanooga Choo Choo”; the song was written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon as part of the score for the 1941 Twentieth Century Fox movie Sun Valley Serenade which was primarily made for the purpose of putting the Miller band in a motion picture. Tex Beneke was the featured singer in the movie and on the Victor/Bluebird recording that also featured band vocalist Paula Kelly and the Modernaires, a vocal group of four male singers, who were also regular members of the Miller entourage. When Miller broke up the band in August 1942 to join the Army Air Force, Beneke played very briefly with Horace Heidt before joining the Navy himself, leading a Navy band in Oklahoma. While employed with Miller, Beneke was offered his own band, as Miller had done with colleagues and employees like Hal McIntyre, Claude Thornhill and Charlie Spivak. Beneke wanted to come back to Miller after the war and learn more about leading a band before being given his own band. Beneke led two bands in the navy and kept in touch with Glenn Miller while they were both serving in the military. By 1945, Beneke felt ready to lead his own orchestra. Glenn Miller went missing on December 15, 1944 while flying to France from England. After World War Two, the United States Army Air Force decommissioned the Glenn Miller-led Army Air Force band. The Miller estate authorized an official Glenn Miller “ghost band” in 1946. This band was led by Tex Beneke who as time went on had more prominence in the band’s identity. It had a make up similar to Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band, having a large string section. The orchestra’s official public début was at the Capitol Theatre on Broadway where it opened for a three-week engagement on January 24, 1946. Henry Mancini was the band’s pianist and one of the arrangers. Another arranger was Norman Leyden, who also previously arranged for the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band. This ghost band played to very large audiences all across the United States, including a few dates at the Hollywood Palladium in 1947, where the original Miller band played in 1941. The movie short Tex Beneke and the Glenn Miller Band was released by RKO pictures in 1947 with Lillian Lane, Artie Malvin and The Crew Chiefs vocal group performing. In a slightly sarcastic article in Time magazine from June 2, 1947, the magazine notes that the Beneke led Miller orchestra was playing at the same venue the original Miller band played in 1939, the Glen Island Casino. Beneke’s quote about the big band business at the time closes the article, “I don’t know whether Glenn figured that times would be as tough”. By 1949, economics dictated that the string section be dropped. This band recorded for RCA Victor, just as the original Miller band did. Beneke felt that Glenn Miller promised him his own band in the early 1940s and this was his chance to have that promise fulfilled. Beneke wanted a band with Beneke’s musical identity. Larry Bruff, an announcer for the earlier Glenn Miller radio shows says, “Beneke would even set wrong tempos so as not to sound too much like Glenn.” The Miller estate wanted a band that was primarily associated with Glenn Miller, playing the Glenn Miller songs in the Glenn Miller style. Beneke continued to perform under his own name with no official connection to Miller. He enjoyed less success in the early 1950s, partly because he was limited to smaller recording labels such as Coral Records and partly because of competition from other Miller alumni and imitators such as Jerry Gray, Ray Anthony and Ralph Flanagan. Eydie Gorme sang with the Beneke band in 1950. Beneke appeared on Cavalcade of Bands, a television show in 1950 on the DuMont Television Network. In the latter part of that decade there was some revived interest in music of the swing era. Beneke joined a number of other leaders such as Larry Clinton and Glen Gray in making new high fidelity recordings of their earlier hits, often featuring many of the original musicians. Beneke and former Miller singers Ray Eberle, Paula Kelly, and The Modernaires first recorded the LP Reunion in Hi-Fi, which contained recreations of original Miller material. This album was followed by others featuring newer songs, some performed in the Miller style and others done in a more contemporary mode. The singer/saxophonist continued working in the coming decades, appearing periodically at Disneyland. He also made the rounds of various talk shows that had musical connections, including those hosted by Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson. His appearances on The Tonight Show sometimes included duos with fellow Miller veteran Al Klink who was by then a key member of The Tonight Show Band. Ray Eberle recovered from his earlier illness and resumed performing with Beneke and the Modernaires for a period in the early 1970s. In 1972, Beneke agreed to re-record some of his Miller vocals for Time-Life Records’ set of big band recreations, The Swing Era, produced and conducted by yet another Miller alumnus, Billy May.During the 1970s and 1980s, Beneke had a new band playing a style that resembled the classic Miller sound but with as much newer material as older. At one point he also toured with former Jimmy Dorsey vocalists Helen O'Connell and Bob Eberly. Beneke suffered a stroke in the mid-1990s and was forced to give up the saxophone but continued to conduct and sing. In 1992, Tex Beneke received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with funds collected by co-leader Gary Tole. He settled in Costa Mesa, California and remained active toward the end of that decade, mostly touring the U.S. West Coast and still playing in something resembling the Miller style. In 1998 he launched yet another tour paying tribute to The Army Air Force Band.On May 30, 2000, Beneke died from respiratory failure at a nursing home in Costa Mesa, California, aged 86 and was buried in Greenwood Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas. At the time, Mr. Beneke was survived by his wife, Sandra, of Santa Ana, Calif. His saxophone is currently used by the Arizona Opry.

[political-affairs]

Ronald Reagan

Official Portrait of President Ronald Reagan 

Ronald Wilson Reagan (pron.: /ˈrɒnəld ˈwɪlsən ˈreɪɡən/; February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989). Prior to that, he was the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975), and a radio, film and television actor.

Born in Tampico, Illinois, and raised in Dixon, Reagan was educated at Eureka College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology. After graduating, Reagan moved first to Iowa to work as a radio broadcaster and then, in 1937, to Los Angeles where he began a career as an actor, first in films and later television. Some of his most notable films include Knute Rockne, All American (1940), Kings Row (1942), and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). Reagan served as President of the Screen Actors Guild and later as a spokesman for General Electric (GE); his start in politics occurred during his work for GE. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, his positions began shifting rightward in the 1950s, and he switched to the Republican Party in 1962.[1

 After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and in 1976, but won both the nomination and general election in 1980, defeating incumbent Jimmy Carter.[1]

 As president, Reagan implemented sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated reducing tax rates to spur economic growth, controlling the money supply to reduce inflation, deregulation of the economy, and reducing government spending. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, took a hard line against labor unions, and ordered an invasion of Grenada. He was re-elected in a landslide in 1984, proclaiming that it was "Morning in America". His second term was primarily marked by foreign matters, such as the ending of the Cold War, the 1986 bombing of Libya, and the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair. Publicly describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire",[2] he supported anti-communist movements worldwide and spent his first term forgoing the strategy of détente by ordering a massive military buildup in an arms race with the USSR. Reagan negotiated with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, culminating in the INF Treaty and the decrease of both countries' nuclear arsenals.

 Reagan left office in 1989. In 1994, the former president disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease earlier in the year; he died ten years later at the age of 93. A conservative icon, he ranks highly in public opinion polls of U.S. Presidents and is credited for generating an ideological renaissance on the American political right.

Military service

 After completing fourteen home-study Army Extension Courses, Reagan enlisted in the Army Enlisted Reserve[33] on April 29, 1937, as a private assigned to Troop B, 322nd Cavalry at Des Moines, Iowa.[34] He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps of the cavalry on May 25, 1937.[35]

 Reagan was ordered to active duty for the first time on April 18, 1942. Due to his nearsightedness, he was classified for limited service only, which excluded him from serving overseas.[36] His first assignment was at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation at Fort Mason, California, as a liaison officer of the Port and Transportation Office.[37] Upon the approval of the Army Air Force (AAF), he applied for a transfer from the cavalry to the AAF on May 15, 1942, and was assigned to AAF Public Relations and subsequently to the First Motion Picture Unit (officially, the "18th Army Air Force Base Unit") in Culver City, California.[37] On January 14, 1943, he was promoted to first lieutenant and was sent to the Provisional Task Force Show Unit of This Is The Army at Burbank, California.[37] He returned to the First Motion Picture Unit after completing this duty and was promoted to captain on July 22, 1943.[34]

 In January 1944, Reagan was ordered to temporary duty in New York City to participate in the opening of the Sixth War Loan Drive. He was re-assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit on November 14, 1944, where he remained until the end of World War II.[34] He was recommended for promotion to major on February 2, 1945, but this recommendation was disapproved on July 17 of that year.[38] While with the First Motion Picture Unit in 1945, he was indirectly involved in discovering actress Marilyn Monroe.[39] He returned to Fort MacArthur, California, where he was separated from active duty on December 9, 1945.[38] By the end of the war, his units had produced some 400 training films for the AAF.[34]

 Reagan never left the United States during the war, though he kept a film reel, obtained while in the service, depicting the liberation of Auschwitz, as he believed that someday doubts would arise as to whether the Holocaust had occurred.[40] It has been alleged that he was overheard telling Israeli foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1983 that he had filmed that footage himself and helped liberate Auschwitz,[40][41] though this purported conversation was disputed by Secretary of State George Shultz.[42]

 Midway into his second term, Reagan declared more militant policies in the War on Drugs. He said that "drugs were menacing our society" and promised to fight for drug-free schools and workplaces, expanded drug treatment, stronger law enforcement and drug interdiction efforts, and greater public awareness.[213][214]

In 1986, Reagan signed a drug enforcement bill that budgeted $1.7 billion to fund the War on Drugs and specified a mandatory minimum penalty for drug offenses.[215] The bill was criticized for promoting significant racial disparities in the prison population[215] and critics also charged that the policies did little to reduce the availability of drugs on the street, while resulting in a great financial burden for America.[216] Defenders of the effort point to success in reducing rates of adolescent drug use.[217][218] First Lady Nancy Reagan made the War on Drugs her main priority by founding the "Just Say No" drug awareness campaign, which aimed to discourage children and teenagers from engaging in recreational drug use by offering various ways of saying "no". Nancy Reagan traveled to 65 cities in 33 states, raising awareness about the dangers of drugs including alcohol.[219]

Libya bombing

Relations between Libya and the U.S. under President Reagan were continually contentious, beginning with the Gulf of Sidra incident in 1981; by 1982, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was considered by the CIA to be, along with USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro,[220] part of a group known as the "unholy trinity"[220] and was also labeled as "our international public enemy number one" by a CIA official.[220] These tensions were later revived in early April 1986, when a bomb exploded in a Berlin discothèque, resulting in the injury of 63 American military personnel and death of one serviceman.[221] Stating that there was "irrefutable proof" that Libya had directed the "terrorist bombing", Reagan authorized the use of force against the country.[221] In the late evening of April 15, 1986, the U.S. launched a series of air strikes on ground targets in Libya.[221][222] The UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher allowed the US Air Force to use Britain's air bases to launch the attack, on the justification that the UK was supporting America's right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.[222] The attack was designed to halt Gaddafi's "ability to export terrorism", offering him "incentives and reasons to alter his criminal behavior".[221] The president addressed the nation from the Oval Office after the attacks had commenced, stating, "When our citizens are attacked or abused anywhere in the world on the direct orders of hostile regimes, we will respond so long as I'm in this office."[222] The attack was condemned by many countries. By a vote of 79 in favor to 28 against with 33 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 41/38 which "condemns the military attack perpetrated against the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on 15 April 1986, which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law."[223]

Immigration

Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. The act made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit illegal immigrants, required employers to attest to their employees' immigration status, and granted amnesty to approximately three million illegal immigrants who entered the United States prior to January 1, 1982, and had lived in the country continuously. Critics argue that the employer sanctions were without teeth and failed to stem illegal immigration.[224] Upon signing the act at a ceremony held beside the newly refurbished Statue of Liberty, Reagan said, "The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans."[225] Reagan also said, "The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here."[225]

 By the early 1980s, many people in the US perceived that the USSR military capabilities were gaining on that of the United States. Previously, the U.S. had relied on the qualitative superiority of its weapons to essentially frighten the Soviets, but the gap had been narrowed.[236] Although the Soviet Union did not accelerate military spending after President Reagan's military buildup,[237] their large military expenses, in combination with collectivized agriculture and inefficient planned manufacturing, were a heavy burden for the Soviet economy.[238] At the same time, Saudi Arabia increased oil production,[239] which resulted in a drop of oil prices in 1985 to one-third of the previous level; oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues.[238] These factors gradually brought the Soviet economy to a stagnant state during Gorbachev's tenure.[238]

 Reagan recognized the change in the direction of the Soviet leadership with Mikhail Gorbachev, and shifted to diplomacy, with a view to encourage the Soviet leader to pursue substantial arms agreements.[240] Reagan's personal mission was to achieve "a world free of nuclear weapons", which he regarded as "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization".[241][242][243] He was able to start discussions on nuclear disarmament with General Secretary Gorbachev.[243] Gorbachev and Reagan held four summit conferences between 1985 and 1988: the first in Geneva, Switzerland, the second in Reykjavík, Iceland, the third in Washington, D.C., and the fourth in Moscow.[244] Reagan believed that if he could persuade the Soviets to allow for more democracy and free speech, this would lead to reform and the end of Communism.[245]

[graphicartscollection]

This week it’s hard to concentrate with the continuing inequities in the United States so blatantly exposed. While it is necessary for everyone to do better, here are just a few recent acquisitions that might help to highlight interesting and important Black lives, for upcoming classes.

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Here is a small selection from a group of approximately 120 press and wire photographs dating from the early 1960s through 1980, recently acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection with the help of Steven Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies. These heavily used prints all relate to the Civil Rights movement in the United States, documenting protests, marches, sit-ins, and police confrontations in Atlanta, Alabama, Chicago, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C.

[left] “Selma, Ala., Mar. 12 — The ‘Wall’ is down — Jubilant demonstrators held aloft a rope barricade after it was cut down in Selma, Ala. today [by] public safety director Wilson Baker. The demonstrators had sung [unclear] referring to the barricade as the Berlin wall and Baker unexpectedly walked over and severed it. He said “nothing has changed” and still refused to allow the non-stop demonstrators to march. …1965.” Read more about 1965 events in Selma: https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/us/1965-selma-to-montgomery-march-fast-facts/index.html

Read more about this photo-archive: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2018/02/23/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america/

    This beautiful design by Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954), is for the production of Simon the Cyrenian, one of three short plays that opened April 5, 1917 at New York’s Garden Theater under the heading Three Plays for a Negro Theater. Jones not only designed but directed the three productions, which each featured all Black casts. As one of the first straight plays to feature Black actors exclusively, without melodrama or burlesque, this production is often cited as the beginning of the period we call the Harlem renaissance.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) transcribed the outpouring of critical review in The Crisis, beginning with poet Percy MacKaye’s comment, “It is indeed an historic happening. Probably for the first time, in any comparable degree, both races are here brought together upon a plane utterly devoid of all racial antagonisms—a plane of art in which audiences and actors are happily peers, mutually cordial to each others’ gifts of appreciation and interpretation.” Read more; https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2014/03/12/robert-edmond-jones-directs-an-all-black-cast/

    During his years as an undergraduate at the Hampton Institute, Willis J. Hubert (1919-2007) kept a scrapbook, filling it with programs, report cards, newspaper articles, and many informal photographs of his classmates. This enormous volume bound in carved wood boards, 30 x 46 x 7 cm, provides an intimate look at undergraduate life at this primarily black school from 1936 to 1940.

According to his obituary, published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from May 15 to May 17, 2007, Hubert went on to have a distinguished military career in which he achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Not long after he graduated from the Hampton Institute, he entered the U.S. Air Force and trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field, where Hubert was one of the original Tuskegee Airmen.

Hubert became the first African American to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. (New York University) while on active duty, as well as the first to complete the Harvard Business School (Military Co-op) Statistics Training Program. Read more: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2018/05/04/undergraduate-life-at-the-hampton-institute/

    The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a set of photographic postcards documenting the “Burning of the Negro Smith.” Two are captioned in white ink. None of them were ever addressed or mailed. The postcards came in a plain envelope marked with the caption in pencil: “Greenville, TX, 28 July 1908”.

“Ted Smith, aged 18 years old, was accused of raping a young white woman in Clinton, Texas. He was arrested and brought to jail in nearby Greenville. A mob took him from his cell at eight the next morning. Rather than the usual hanging, they covered him under a pile of wood, doused him with kerosene, and burned him alive in the center of town, in front of a large crowd. The postcards depict the horrible scene, with the crowd gathered around the fire. Read more: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2018/05/03/the-murder-of-ted-smith-in-1908/

    The Graphic Arts Collection acquired a rare promotional brochure for the Norman Film Company’s 1919 silent movie, The Green Eyed Monster, its first production with an all Black cast. Billed as a “Stupendous All-Star Negro Motion Picture,” audiences found it long and so, Norman had the film cut from eight-reels to five-reels. A second release in 1920 led to great success. Although no portion of the film survives, reviews list the actors as Jack Austin, Louise Dunbar, Steve Reynolds, and Robert A. Stuart.

“The first film company devoted to the production of race movies was the Chicago-based Ebony Film Company, which began operation in 1915. The first black-owned film company was The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded by the famous Missourian actor Noble Johnson in 1916. However, the biggest name in race movies was and remains Oscar Micheaux, an Illinois-born director who started The Micheaux Book & Film Company in 1919 and went on to direct at least forty films with predominantly black casts for black audiences.”–The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 18 (2011).

Read more: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2018/01/24/brochure-for-all-colored-cast-silent-film/

    Eric Avery, USA Dishonor and Disrespect (Haitian Interdiction 1981-1994), 1991. Linoleum block print on a seven-color lithograph printed on mold made Okawara paper. 46½ x 34 inches. Edition: 30. Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process.

Dr. Eric Avery incorporates his medical practice with his activist art, delving into such themes as infectious diseases, human rights abuse, and the death penalty, among others. Many of his complex prints appropriate one or more iconic art historical images into contemporary events. Here are a few examples now at Princeton University.

On July 14, 1990, The New York Times reported, “Bahamas Facing More Questions As It Buries 39 Drowned Haitians.” The story continued “Thirty-nine Haitians fleeing their impoverished Caribbean island drowned when their sailboat capsized and sank in choppy seas while being towed by Bahamian authorities, Government officials said. No explanation for what caused the sinking was given.” Published by the Tamarind Institute, Avery’s complex linocut incorporates the facts of the 1990 tragedy with three separate art historical paintings: Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, 1824; John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, 1778; and Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633.

Read more: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2014/10/01/eric-avery/

Black Lives Matter This week it's hard to concentrate with the continuing inequities in the United States so blatantly exposed.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.1 (after 1950)

1950 – The first prototype of the MiG-17 makes its maiden flight. 1957 – Northeast Airlines Flight 823 crashes on Rikers Island in New York City, killing 20 people and injuring 78 others. 1960 – Four black students stage the first of the Greensboro sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. 1964 – The Beatles have their first number one hit in the United States with "I Want to Hold Your Hand". 1968 – Vietnam War: The execution of Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém by South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan is recorded on motion picture film, as well as in an iconic still photograph taken by Eddie Adams. 1968 – Canada's three military services, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force, are unified into the Canadian Forces. 1968 – The New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad are merged to form Penn Central Transportation. 1972 – Kuala Lumpur becomes a city by a royal charter granted by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia. 1974 – A fire in the 25-story Joelma Building in São Paulo, Brazil kills 189 and injures 293. 1979 – Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Tehran after nearly 15 years of exile. 1981 – The Underarm bowling incident of 1981 occurred when Trevor Chappell bowls underarm on the final delivery of a game between Australia and New Zealand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). 1991 – A runway collision between USAir Flight 1493 and SkyWest Flight 5569 at Los Angeles International Airport results in the deaths of 34 people, and injuries to 30 others. 1992 – The Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal court declares Warren Anderson, ex-CEO of Union Carbide, a fugitive under Indian law for failing to appear in the Bhopal disaster case. 1996 – The Communications Decency Act is passed by the U.S. Congress. 1998 – Rear Admiral Lillian E. Fishburne becomes the first female African American to be promoted to rear admiral. 2002 – Daniel Pearl, American journalist and South Asia Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal, kidnapped on January 23, is beheaded and mutilated by his captors. 2003 – Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during the reentry of mission STS-107 into the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard. 2004 – Hajj pilgrimage stampede: In a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, 251 people are trampled to death and 244 injured. 2004 – Double suicide attack in Erbil on the offices of Iraqi Kurdish political parties by members of Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. 2005 – King Gyanendra of Nepal carries out a coup d'état to capture the democracy, becoming Chairman of the Councils of ministers. 2007 – The National Weather Service in the United States switches from the Fujita scale to the new Enhanced Fujita scale to measure the intensity and strength of tornadoes. 2009 – The first cabinet of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was formed in Iceland, making her the country's first female prime minister and the world's first openly gay head of government. 2012 – Seventy-four people are killed and over 500 injured as a result of clashes between fans of Egyptian football teams Al Masry and Al Ahly in the city of Port Said. 2013 – The Shard, the sixth-tallest building in Europe, opens its viewing gallery to the public. 2021 – A coup d'état in Myanmar removes Aung San Suu Kyi from power and restores military rule. 2022 – Five-year-old Moroccan boy Rayan Aourram falls into a 32-meter (105 feet) deep well in Ighran village in Tamorot commune, Chefchaouen Province, Morocco, but dies four days later, before rescue workers reached him.