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Click here to read about the 1956 college revival of the raccoon coat.


Iva Toguri of California (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, "Tokyo Rose".

The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:

"...one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only "Rose" and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D'Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the "Zero Hour"...Her own name for herself was "Orphan Ann."


The Photograph (Yank Magazine, 1943)

Attached you will find a few well-chosen words about that famous 1943 photograph that the censors of the War Department saw fit to release to the American public. The image was distributed in order that the "over-optimistic and complacent" citizens on the home front gain an understanding that this war is not without a cost.

A haunting image even sixty years later, the photograph depicts three dead American boys washed-over by the tide of Buna Beach, New Guinea. The photographer was George Strock of LIFE MAGAZINE and the photograph did it's job.

Click here to read General Marshall's end-of-war remarks about American casualty figures.

Amelia Earhart: Hawaii to California (Literary Digest, 1935)

"'All well', Amelia Earhart (1897 – 1937) radioed repeatedly during her 2,400-mile flight from Hawaii to California last week. 'Alls well that ends well,' she might have said as she set her monoplane down at Oakland Airport Saturday afternoon, eighteen hours and sixteen minutes after she took off from Wheeler Field, Honolulu. What she actually said was, 'I'm tired'"

"Thus she has become the first woman to fly the Pacific from Hawaii to California, and the first person of either sex to fly it alone. Her record has been studded with 'firsts' ever since she learned to fly in 1918."


Enter, Esther Williams (Collier's Magazine, 1942)

"There is a new girl out at MGM in Culver City named Esther Williams (1921 - 2013), who is a cross between Lana Turner and a seal...Miss Williams happens to be that fortunate thing known as 'a knockout' - in looks and one of the greatest swimmers in the world."

Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.

How a Southerner Overcame his Racist Past (Coronet Magazine, 1948)

The attached is an historic article that explains the lesson that so many white Americans had to learn in order that America become one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. There can be no doubt that many ragged, dog-eared copies of this middle class magazine must have been passed from seat to seat in the backs of many buses; perhaps one of the readers was a nineteen year-old divinity student named Martin Luther King?

Before the Atom Bomb came along, Joseph Stalin hatched a scheme to invade the U.S. and create two Americas, one black, one white - click here to read more...

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White (Coronet Magazine, 1939)

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.


Chappaquiddick Cover-Up (Coronet Magazine, 1970)

1970: One year after Mary Jo Kopechne had died in a car driven by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy - questions still lingered concerning his questionable behavior after the accident. This article concerns the five female campaign aids who attended the party the night of the accident; they were the last to see Miss Kopechne alive as she entered the senator's car. These five were nicknamed "the Boiler Room Girls" by those who worked on Kennedy's re-election campaign and many people were curious as to why they were as tight-lipped as they were.


1970: #ME TOO (Coronet Magazine, 1970)

A report by a crusading feminist during the closing days of the "decade of discontent" (the Sixties) announced that those darn hunky revolutionaries of "the New Left" were not as forward-thinking as they let on - as a matter of fact, they were just as cranky and chauvinistic as their grandfathers. No matter which group a woman joined, Black Panthers, the Weathermen, SDS the Venceremos Brigade or the Balto Cong- you name it, the task of the women members was purely clerical and custodial in nature:

"I found to my sadness that the vision of the new society and the revolutionary consciousness didn't include women. Women typed speeches for men, they didn't give them. Women brewed coffee for men to drink. At the SDS convention in 1967, the women tried to put a woman's plank in the platform. They were laughed at and had tomatoes thrown at them. In the New Left, the men judge a woman on whether the sex was free.'... She called it 'a counterfeit Left, male-dominated cracked-glass reflection of the Amerikan nightmare. Women are the real Left"

More on this topic can be read here...

These men were big on reading the blather of the underground press and you can read about their journalistic tastes here...


How Poor Was America? (New Outlook Magazine, 1933)

Economist Robert R. Doane (1889 - 1961) presented numerous charts and figures amassed between 1929 through 1932 to argue that America was still a wealthy nation despite the destruction wrought by the Great Depression:

"In 1929 the United States held 44.6 percent of the total wealth of the world. In 1932 that proportion has increased to almost 50 percent. We still have half the banking-power of the world. We still have half the income. In all of the items of economic importance and efficiency, the United States still stands supreme."