Here is a moving account of the meteoric rise of Johnny Mathis (b. 1935) - from an impoverished child of the San Francisco slums to the last of the great-American crooners.
"Johnny Mathis is just 23 years old , though he appears a hungry , vulnerable 17. When he sings a romantic ballad in high falsetto, his large eyes gaze out over the heads of the audience as if in search of someone." This column concerns Jackie Robinson's non-professional days in sports; his football seasons at Pasadena Junior College, basketball at UCLA and the Kansas City Monarchs. Being an Army publication, the reporter touched upon Robinson's brief period as a junior officer in the 761st Tank Battalion.
A 1951 article about the Negro Baseball League can be read here
In 1969, Jackie Robinson wrote about African-American racists, click here to read it...
Click here to read a 1954 article about Willie Mays.
This is a profile of Dr. Sigmund Freud that appeared during the last months of his life. In the Spring of 1938 Freud and his family had fled to London in order escape the Nazis. A heavily illustrated, four page article that served to answer the U.S. serviceman's questions as to who Harry S. Truman (1884 – 1972) was and why was he deemed suitable to serve as President? "Mr. Truman now occupies the Presidency, of course, because he won the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination in Chicago last summer. Two things won him the nomination. First was the fact that he alone was acceptable to Mr. Roosevelt and to both the conservative element of the Democratic Party and its liberal wing. The second was the excellent performance of the Truman Committee in the investigation of our government's spending money for the war-effort...One of the main themes of his campaign speeches last fall was that the U.S. should never return to isolationism."
Click here to read about the busy life of President Franklin Roosevelt. This is a profile of the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904 - 1971). At the time these pages appeared on the newsstand, the photographer's stock was truly on the rise as a result of her remarkable documentary images depicting the Great Depression as it played out across the land. Preferring not to be found face-down in the Chicago River, this journalist wrote a very middle-of-the-road sort of article about Al Capone following the thug's 1931 conviction on tax evasion. |