From the Archives - A Rare Treat for Theatergoers: 'Lady in the Dark' (1998)

This review appeared in The Metro Herald in May 1998, twenty years ago this month.

A Rare Treat for Theatergoers: Lady in the Dark

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Idiosyncrasy saves us from boredom and blandness. In a world of popular culture driven by focus groups, polls, and plagiarism, it's no wonder that television and the theatre seem infected by a sameness virus. Luckily, individual human choices are able to transcend this groupthink. And the American Century Theater (TACT) in Arlington shows us how the idiosyncratic choices of a few individuals can slash through the morass of predictability and yawns we have grown to expect from so many cultural institutions.

Last season's Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed, for instance, was a triumph of physicality and illusion. The show had to be extended several times -- yet it was a play that hardly anyone had ever heard about before the TACT production.

Artistic director Jack Marshall has done it again with Lady in the Dark. Except, in this case, TACT is presenting a play that almost all literate theatergoers have heard about, but hardly anyone under the age of 80 has seen.

Lady in the Dark, with a libretto by Moss Hart, music by Kurt Weill, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, frequently appears on lists of the "greatest American musicals." Yet it is not part of the basic musical theatre repertoire. Some plays become classics because of repetition -- what community theatre company has not already performed Guys and Dolls or The Fantasticks three or four times? Some become classics because of a special cult status. Anyone Can Whistle achieved this when it closed after nine performances, but its producers were canny enough to record an original cast album.


Lady in the Dark is of a different breed. It closed after less then a year when leading lady Gertrude Lawrence left the show. It had no original cast album (the concept had not yet emerged in 1941). According to research by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, fewer than 20 productions of Lady in the Dark have been mounted since 1942. This production by the American Century Theater is the first since 1965. Its reputation grew through the Hot Stove League of musical theater aficionados. It's discussed with the same distant admiration as baseball fans banter about a one-season pitching phenomenon of the 1930s. Textbooks explore it at length. Anthologies include it. But no one has seen it.

Except for three songs in the second act -- "Tchaichowsky," "The Saga of Jenny," and "My Ship" -- hardly a soul has heard any of the score. Yet Lady in the Dark is legendary. Why?

In January 1941, Lady in the Dark set records for expenditure. The production cost a then-unimaginable $150,000. (At the time, top ticket prices for Broadway plays were $4.40.) It had four interlocking turntables, extravagant sets and costumes, and a cast of 50 that included Danny Kaye, Victor Mature, MacDonald Carey, and Natalie Schafer (later Mrs. Thurston Howell on Gilligan's Island). Weill scored the show for a full symphony orchestra.

Theater lore has it that later producers found the show entirely too daunting. Jack Marshall, however, is dauntless.

It is said that theatre requires nothing more than actors, a performing space, and lighting. Everything else is gravy -- bells and whistles, smoke and mirrors. TACT proves that it is possible to mount a complicated, literate musical play without the special effects that so frightened other producers. In the small black-box theatre at Gunston Arts Center, set designer Hal Crawford and lighting designer David Walden have created a workable space that does all that is necessary to convey what Hart and his colleagues intended.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Lady in the Dark is basically a non-musical play with extended musical sequences. The musical sequences -- little one-act operas -- exist only in the dreams of troubled magazine editor Liza Elliott (Maureen Kerrigan). The non-musical scenes are played out in the drab offices of Elliott and her psychoanalyst, Dr. Brooks (Bernard Engel). Significantly, these scenes are played at the most distant edges of the stage, as far from the audience as possible. This allows the musical scenes to take up the fullest extent of the performing space, literally blossoming before our eyes with the colorful costumes of designer Edu. Bernardino.

Liza, a driven career woman, has suddenly begun to have panic attacks and fits of depression. For these, she seeks the help of Dr. Brooks. In what may be the play's most unsatisfactory facet, she resolves her problems in barely a week. Within that week, however, we are able to observe the inner workings of Liza's mind -- the "lady" in the "dark."

Given the structure of the play, with dream sequences being as disjointed as dreams are, the commercial temptation for Weill and Gershwin would have been to write a collection of potential hit songs -- something in the revue tradition of the Ziegfeld Follies or Garrick Gaieties. Instead, they wrote integrated, operatic playlets in which discrete songs are difficult to discern at all. Ironically, the play itself does not nearly approach the full integration that Rodgers and Hammerstein achieved with Oklahoma! two years later, setting the standard for American musical theatre for the next quarter century.

The play does, however, give opportunities for both dramatic and musical virtuoso performances. Standout Jason Gilbert is manic as photographer Russell Paxton. Buzz Mauro is pleasingly sleazy as advertising director, Charley Johnson, a perfect foil for "boss lady" Liza. Timothy Hayes Lynch is appropriately, WASPishly staid as Liza's longtime live-in lover, Kendall Nesbitt. In a small but important role as high-school student Ben Butler, Kerry DeMatteis is sweetly but unintentionally inconsiderate (and well-cast for age -- DeMatteis seems not to have aged a day since his Washington area debut in a Georgetown University production of Gemini almost 14 years ago). Somewhat off the mark, however, is Tom Manger as Randy Curtis, who simply fails to come across convincingly as a Hollywood matinee idol.

Aside from Liza, the female roles in Lady in the Dark are underwritten, but Mary McGowan is a finely-tuned Maggie Grant, Liza's right hand, and Brenda Wesner gets a few comic turns as Allison DuBois.

There is a reason, unfortunately, to feel sorry for all these talented cast members. They will now put Lady in the Dark on their resumes -- but no one will believe them. No one, that is, except for those who hear about the American Century Theater's bold decision to mount a play that scares off richer and more powerful producers.

Lady in the Dark has been extended through May 30 at the Gunston Arts Center, Theatre II, 2700 S. Lang Street, Arlington, Virginia. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m., with 2:30 matinees on May 16, 17, and 23. Tickets are $20 and $17 (students/seniors). For information and reservations, call 703-553-8782.

Guest Post: Old Man Potter Lived a Wonderful Life

by Tom Mullen

December is upon us and that means plentiful opportunities to watch the enduring classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of viewers completely misinterpret Frank Capra’s dystopian nightmare as a heartwarming Christmas tale.

The emotional appeal of angels getting their wings is undeniable. Crying out for correction, however, are the vicious slanders regarding the film’s real hero, Henry Potter.

We first hear of Potter from George Bailey’s father, Peter Bailey, who badmouths Potter with the usual falsehoods about businessmen. But during Bailey’s envious rant, we learn something important: Henry Potter is a board member of the building and loan. We later learn Potter is, in fact, a stockholder.

That puts a somewhat different light on his subsequent motion to liquidate the business upon Peter Bailey’s death. Yes, we hear George Bailey repeating the familiar socialist tropes his father did: that Potter only wants to close the building and loan because he “can’t get his hands on it” and considers the little people cattle, etc. 

But Potter responds with some rather inconvenient facts: the building and loan has been making bad business decisions, providing what we’d now call subprime loans to people who can’t pay them back.


Potter the Stockholder
The Baileys squander their investors’ money on a do-gooder, subprime loan scheme to make everyone a homeowner.

We don’t know how Potter became a stockholder, but the Bailey Building and Loan does not appear to be a publicly traded company. The most likely explanation is Peter Bailey asked Potter for capital, just as George Bailey does later in the film, in between rounds of disparaging Potter as a greedy capitalist. That would be perfectly consistent with today’s “progressives,” who rail against capitalists out of one side of their mouths while sucking up to them for money out of the other.

But regardless of how Potter became a stockholder, Peter Bailey has a fiduciary duty to him to run the business for maximum profit, providing Potter and the other stockholders a return on their investments, something George Bailey confirms they never intended to do. Instead, the Baileys squander their investors’ money on a do-gooder, subprime loan scheme to make everyone a homeowner. It worked out in fictional Bedford Falls about as well as it did in early 2000s America.

Meanwhile, the Baileys constantly slander Potter’s rental houses as “overpriced slums.” These are the same Baileys whose housing opportunities are more expensive than Potter’s.


But People Like Potter’s Houses
Their accusations constantly beg the question: If Potter’s houses are so bad, why do so many people choose to live in them? It’s constantly implied Potter’s customers have no other choice, but what exactly does that mean? Why has no one else, including any of the businessmen on the board of the Bailey Building and Loan, developed rental properties that are higher in quality, lower in price, or both?

The inescapable truth is Potter is wealthy because he provides a product that most satisfies his customers’ preferences for quality and price. If there were an opportunity to provide a higher quality product at a lower price than Potter was charging, a competitor would do so and take market share away from Potter, until Potter either raised his quality, lowered his price, or both.

The Baileys burn with resentment that so many residents of Bedford Falls prudently choose to live in Potter’s less expensive housing than buy a house they can’t afford, financed by the Baileys’ Ponzi scheme. Thus, even after shirking their fiduciary duty to run the business properly, the Baileys spend decades assaulting Potter’s character in a transparent attempt to lure away his customers.


Potter the Rescuer
When the Depression hits and the Bailey Building and Loan is exposed for the fractional reserve fraud it is, Potter offers to come to the rescue with a generous offer to buy out its customers. It is noteworthy there is a run on the Bailey Building and Loan and the local bank, but Potter is financially secure enough to save them both, proving once again he is the only honorable businessman in the film.

But we must give the devil his due. George Bailey, the ultimate huckster, saves the building and loan without Potter’s help, convincing the yokel mob making a run on his business to keep their money tied up in his fundamentally insolvent confidence game.

That brings us to the one regrettable act Potter is guilty of, which is concealing the $8,000.00 the incompetent Billy Bailey inadvertently handed him while attempting to make a deposit. It’s true this was an underhanded act, although not unprovoked.

We don’t know how much Potter had invested in the Building and Loan to become a stockholder, but suspect it was a lot more than $8,000. One could make the case he was merely getting back some of the money the Baileys had previously defrauded him of, but there are courts for such matters and Potter should have sought their help if he had a case.


Smearing Potter
Nevertheless, two generations of Baileys had led a decades-long assault on Potter’s good name, resulting in most townspeople disliking him, even though he has quite literally saved their lives on numerous occasions. Without him, a large portion of Bedford Falls would be unemployed, have nowhere to live, or both. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Henry Potter, Bedford Falls would cease to exist. Yet, thanks to the Baileys, he is the most hated man in town.

Compare Potter’s vindictive reaction when George Bailey crawls to him for help after the $8,000.00 is lost to Potter’s reaction at the board meeting at the beginning of the movie. At the board meeting, Potter dismisses George’s unhinged attack upon him and redirects the discussion to the subject of the meeting: what is best for Bedford Falls. By the latter confrontation, Potter tries to have George arrested for embezzling.

Potter’s dastardly act is totally out of character with the Potter of the earlier scene or any other event we know of in Potter’s life. As far as we know, he has always been a hard-nosed, unsentimental businessman, but has never committed a crime or held a grudge, as he does now. Everything we know about Potter up to this point tells us his vindictive attempt to have George Bailey prosecuted is precisely the kind of emotional decision-making Potter has avoided for most of his life. That is why he is so wealthy at the beginning of the film.


Potter’s Breaking Point
Everyone has a breaking point. Potter had evidently reached his. Had he been prosecuted for keeping the $8,000.00, which may have been tricky from a legal standpoint, given that Billy Bailey had handed the money to him, he could easily have plead temporary insanity caused by years of psychological warfare waged against him by the Baileys.

We’ll never know, because before Potter has any opportunity to allow his passion to cool and clear up the misunderstanding, George Bailey sets off on his suicide melodrama, followed by a long, self-aggrandizing hallucination about angels and how Bedford Falls would be worse without him. By the time he concludes his childish escape from reality, the same yokels he previously conned during the Depression are now bailing him out once again, foreshadowing so many future bailouts of dishonest financiers whose assets should have been turned over to better management in bankruptcy court.


The Triumph of Evil
In one of the darkest moments of the film, George Bailey’s Christmas tree is jostled and one of the bells adorning it rings. George Bailey, now confident he and his fraudulent real estate scheme are safe, suggests the bell signifies an angel has earned his wings, as if his dishonest business dealings and ruthless defamation of legitimate competitors had divine sanction.

Nothing more is heard of Henry Potter, the man without whom Bedford Falls would not exist. He is left friendless and without the one thing he could cling to before George Bailey, the Devil incarnate, wrested it from his grasp: his honor. As the credits roll, evil has triumphed. The economic fallacies inherent in Baileyism become accepted truth, resulting in disaster after disaster, including the most recent in 2008.



Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? and A Return to Common  Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America. For more information and more of Tom's writing, visit www.tommullen.net.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Casablanca at 75 – still a classic of WWII propaganda

Stephen McVeigh, Swansea University

Casablanca, which brought together the combined star-power of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, remains one of the best-loved movies ever produced in Hollywood. But the film, which hit the silver screen on November 26 1942, is more than just a love story set in Morocco. Released in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – which propelled a reluctant United States to enter World War II – the film was actually a classic piece of propaganda cinema masquerading as popular entertainment.

When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the United States was the only major power with neither an intelligence nor a propaganda agency. But this all changed after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Just as intelligence would be essential for shaping and directing political and military objectives in Europe and Asia as the conflict spread, propaganda would be vital for supporting the American war effort by shaping and directing American ideas and beliefs in relation to the conflict.

In June 1942, the office of war information (OWI) was set up to promote the war effort and was given the task of developing campaigns to enhance public understanding of the war at home and abroad. A key element of this was the co-ordination of government information activities, as well as liaising with the press, radio, and – crucially – motion pictures.

In effect, the OWI was charged with selling the war. After experimenting with propaganda in the form of posters and documentaries, the OWI turned to more imaginative sources. Its director, Elmer Davis – formerly a reporter with the New York Times and CBS – made this key observation:

The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realise they are being propagandised.

Hollywood would play a significant role in this. For box office reasons as much as political ones, Hollywood was eager to harness the medium of entertainment to support the war effort. And so several popular films made at this time – including Mrs Miniver (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), This is the Army (1943), Since You Went Away (1944) – combined traditional artistic and entertainment concerns with a purposeful political dimension.

The agency issued specific guidelines, as well as reviewing scripts and early cuts of films, making suggestions for insertions or deletions. It required film makers to consider seven questions before producing a movie:

1. Will this picture help win the war?
2. What war information problem does it seek to clarify, dramatise, or interpret?
3. If it is an “escape” picture, will it harm the war effort by creating a false picture of America, her allies, or the world we live in?
4. Does it merely use the war as the basis for a profitable picture, contributing nothing of real significance to the war effort and possibly lessening the effect of other pictures of more importance?
5. Does it contribute something new to our understanding of the world conflict and the various forces involved, or has the subject already been adequately
6. When the picture reaches its maximum circulation on the screen, will it reflect conditions as they are and fill a need current at that time, or will it be out-dated?
7. Does the picture tell the truth or will the young people of today have reason to say they were misled by propaganda?

A beautiful friendship

At the heart of Casablanca is a concern with the implications of American isolationism in the context of the threat posed to Europe by Nazism.

Elements of the dialogue between characters in the film echo and then argue with contemporary American foreign policy attitudes – offering reasons to engage. Bogart is perfectly cast as cynical bar owner Rick, an American formerly living in Paris who has fled the German occupation to open his Café Americain, which has become a melting pot of wartime nationalities. Rick advances what had traditionally been a popular American justification for isolationism:

I stick my neck out for nobody. The problems of this world are not in my department. I’m a saloon keeper.“

But for Roosevelt’s administration – and for increasing numbers of Americans – the attack on Pearl Harbor had shattered any lingering illusions that America might turn its back on the world. From this perspective the story of Casablanca is the story of Rick’s transition from aloof to engaged. This is made explicit by the owner of the Blue Parrot cafe, Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet), who tells Rick:

My dear Rick, when will you realise that in the world today, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?

But more dynamic than these relatively subtle pieces of dialogue is the famous scene where Rick clearly takes sides, showing the audience who he believes are the heroes and the villains of the European conflict.

A contingent of German officers is singing nationalist songs. Victor Lazlo (Paul Heinreid), a heroic resistance fighter who represents the nobility and sacrifice of the oppressed Europeans, demands that the band play "La Marseillaise," the French national anthem. The band look to Rick, who nods assent and in that nod he relinquishes his isolationism. The anthem is rousingly played and the Nazis, who initially try to sing more loudly, are drowned out by the patrons singing in unison and they give up. By identifying with Rick, moviegoers were encouraged to make the same choice.

Casablanca is a dramatic, heartbreaking movie, an unsurpassed classic from Hollywood’s golden era. But it is also an extremely effective piece of propaganda cinema, persuading an American audience reluctant to commit to another European conflict to set aside its isolationism simply by dramatising the heroism of the European resistance to Nazi Germany.

Stephen McVeigh, Associate Professor in War and Society, Swansea University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: World War II veteran Franklin Kameny remembers his experience with 'don't ask, don't tell'

World War II veteran Franklin Kameny remembers his experience with 'don't ask, don't tell'
May 30, 2010 2:49 PM MST

The confluence of the vote in the House of Representatives to repeal the law known colloquially as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) and Memorial Day weekend may not seem to be much more than a coincidence.

For many people, especially those born in the last decade of the 20th century, the idea of ending the ban on openly gay and lesbian Americans serving in the armed forces may seem to be a new one. Even older Americans may not have become aware of the issue any earlier than 1993, when Bill Clinton tried to end the ban but ended up signing the law that made it permanent.

The fact is, not only the ban but attempts to end it go back much farther than the early 1990s.

On May 5, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner interviewed Franklin Kameny, one of the pioneers of the modern gay rights movement, at the National Press Club in Washington.

Kameny, who celebrated his 85th birthday on May 21, cautioned, first, that we must “keep in mind” that the gay ban “became statutory law in ’93 [but] has been military policy for very, very, very much longer than that. You can arguably bring it all the way back to 1778 and George Washington.”

‘They Asked; I Didn’t Tell’
Kameny encountered the gay ban for the first time during World War II, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army.

“I personally ran into [the ban] on May 18, 1943, when a few days before my 18th birthday, I enlisted in the Army at the height of World War II,” Kameny said. “They asked; I didn’t tell, even though as a healthy, vigorous teenager there were things to tell. (Not terribly much, it was a different era in all kinds of ways.)”

Kameny added: “I have resented for 67 years that I had to lie in order to serve in a war effort that I strongly supported. I did serve and I saw combat in Europe.”

In 1957, Kameny – a Harvard-educated physicist and astronomer – was fired from his job with the Army Mapping Service because he was gay. He spent the next several decades in temporary jobs because he was unable to get a security clearance to do what he was trained to do. In fact, he said, there were some months when had only 20 cents to spend per day on food. (The story of Kameny's life during this period is told well by historian David K. Johnson in his 2004 book, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government.)

Marching on the Pentagon
By 1961, however, he began to get involved in the then-fledgling gay rights movement. One of the first issues he and his colleagues tackled was the military gay ban.

“We picketed against it starting in ’65 both in front of the White House and at the Pentagon, and at the Pentagon again in ’66,” demonstrating, he said, “specifically against the exclusionary policy.”

Congressional Campaign
The issue also came up in 1971, when Kameny was the first openly gay person to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. (He ran for position of Delegate from the District of Columbia, a slot now filled by Eleanor Holmes Norton.)

“In the course of all that, I was campaigning on two different fronts,” Kameny explained. “One was purely on District issues; if you’re going to run for Congress in the District [of Columbia] you have to be an expert on trash collection and everything else.

“But also,” he continued, he was running “as a gay activist,” so that in the later part of the campaign, he held “a press conference in or near the office of the Secretary of the Army, and I met with him or somebody in his staff ... in connection with the gay ban.”

Two decades later, “in ’93, it became law, which completely changed the politics entirely.”

That politics will play out this summer when the U.S. Senate takes up the issue and will decide whether to follow the course set by the House or to let the gay ban linger for another year or longer.



Publisher's note: Today is the traditional date of Memorial Day, as it began in the years after the Civil War and was commemorated until the late 1960s, when it was moved to the last Monday in May.

This article is drawn from my Examiner.com archives. It was originally published on Examiner.com on May 30, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

What Was Daily Life Like on December 7, 1941?

Seventy-five years ago today, an attack on a remote American naval outpost – Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – rousted the United States out of its confidence in its own isolation from the world war that was already two years old.

True, politicians and military leaders were expecting an attack sometime soon. The date and time were unknown, but relations with Japan had deteriorated enough that some kind of assault was considered inevitable.

On the home front, however, people went along in their daily lives, made somewhat nervous by news reports from the war zones. Recovery from the Depression was moving along, although the pre-war growth of defense industries was largely unacknowledged as a stimulant.

Conditions on the home front during World War II have always been fascinating for me, more than the war overseas. This may be because, as a child, the stories I heard from my parents – who were still children in the 1940s – and my grandparents – who did not serve in the Armed Forces – were all about the war at home: ration cards, civil defense drills, shortages of consumer goods, scrap drives. Movies like Woody Allen’s Radio Days or Meg Ryan’s Ithaca pull at me.

So on this anniversary of the Japanese Empire's attack on Pearl Harbor, I want to look at the normalcy that was disrupted that Sunday morning. For this, I turn to three historians.

Five years ago, I reviewed a book by Stanley Weintraub called Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941. Here’s an excerpt:

I picked up Pearl Harbor Christmas by chance at a local bookstore and bought it on a whim, thinking that it primarily would focus on the home front in the weeks following the Pearl Harbor attack and how Americans adjusted their holiday celebrations to the new realities of having been thrust into war.

The book has some of that, and Weintraub is able to draw an adequate picture of what the Christmas season of 1941 was like.

Wartime black-out rules had not yet dimmed Christmas lights, and Christmas trees themselves, Weintraub says, “were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two.” Rockefeller Center presented its annual Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes, and people were still reading comic strips and going to the movies.

“The hit book for Christmas giving,” he writes in a prelude, “at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Weintraub goes on to list the prices of crates of citrus fruits (“$2.79 at Bloomingdales”) and new cars (“soon to be unobtainable”) for $900. Silk stockings were $1.25 a pair, and nylon stockings – which would also quickly disappear as the fabric was needed for parachutes – were $1.65.

In a clever turn of phrase, he writes about upscale clothing shops:

“Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.)”

Craig Shirley, who is best known for his books about Ronald Reagan, wrote December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World. In his chapter on “The Seventh of December” he describes the normal atmosphere that prevailed even in the Hawaiian Islands that day:

Most American newspapers Sunday morning were by and large quiet when it came to the Pacific crisis. The Honolulu Advertiser was covering local news involving housing issues, a display by the Shriners, and the typical international war news coming from Russia, Germany, and England. There was also a special feature on where children could see Santa Claus – from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. that day – in front of a fake fireplace in the lobby of the newspaper. Another front-page story reported on the newly formed “Razor Blades for Britain Committee in Hawaii,” which was taking up a collection because blades could no longer be purchased in England as all steel was being devoted to their war effort. “All razor blade donations … must be new,” the story cautioned.

Inside, stories and features favorably reviewed the movie A Yank in the R.A.F.; announced clipper tours between Hawaii, the West Coast, Midway, Wake Island, and the Philippines; and detailed the ongoing prostitution problems on Hawaii.

Note how all those Pacific places would become acutely known in the coming year.

Half a world away, Shirley notes what was going on in the nation’s capital:

In the Washington Star, only one story was devoted to the Far East while the rest of the war and foreign news was about the Russian Front, North Africa, and the North Atlantic. The other news of the day covered sports, the weather, traffic reports, human-interest stories, metro articles, editorials, and columns. The most human of human-interest stories ran across the wires on Sunday morning about the death of a ninety-seven-year-old man, “Ray Fritman, who had spent a lifetime seeking his true identity…. He became lost during a parade in New York in 1852 and never saw his parents again.” He got his name from an orphanage in New York, fought in the Civil War, and later taught school in Indiana.

(I interviewed Craig Shirley about December 1941 at the 2014 Virginia Festival of the Book.)

In God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War, a book entirely about the home front (and about an even narrower niche than that), historian Kathleen E.R. Smith of Northwestern State University of Louisiana also writes about the morning of December 7:

Earlier that fall and winter of 1941, when America’s war against Japan had not yet begun, preparations for the holiday season had overshadowed the threat of war. On the first Sunday of December 1941, newspapers carried the usual pre-holiday stories and advertisements. The New York Times filled dozens of pages with gift suggestions. W & J Sloan invited shoppers to visit their “Gay Main Floor” for Christmas presents that ranged from crystal seahorse bookends at $3.95 a pair to a $160.00 coffee table made from a drum used in the War of 1812. The Davega Music Company reminded shoppers of the big sale on Emerson “Miracle Tone” table radios at $34.95. Liberty Music Shop extolled the Deluxe Capehart radio-phonograph as “a time-proved record-changer that turns the record for listeners.” It played twenty records (forty selections) on both sides, providing three hours of uninterrupted music. Prices started at $595.00.

Newspapers weren’t the only medium that revealed more about the normal than the nervous. Smith recounts what the entertainment media had scheduled for the day:

December 7, 1941, began for most Americans as another early winter Sunday morning. Radio programs on the major networks for Sunday afternoon offered a wide choice for the listener: popular music (Sammy Kaye’s Sunday Serenade); drama (Great Play’s version of Inspector General); symphonic music (the New York Philharmonic with guest pianist Artur Rubinstein); pro football (Brooklyn Dodgers vs. New York Giants); and current events (Wake Up America’s panel discussion on “Can There Be a Substantial Reduction in Nondefense Expenditures of the Federal Government?”). And in a twist of irony that would not go unnoticed at the time, on their 5:00 p.m. show the Moylan Sisters planned to sing a favorite tune, “The End of a Perfect Day.”

At the beginning of December 1941, Americans had no idea how long they would be at war. Fortunately, World War II lasted less than four years, unlike the perpetual war that has engaged us since September 2001. Yet, culturally, those four years continue to fascinate and inform us.

Cross-posted from Bearing Drift, where this essay first appeared in slightly different form and under a different headline.

The Little Typo That Could

Over on the most-neglected of my three blogs, Where Are the Copy Editors?, I have only created one post during the entire calendar year of 2011.  Yet it's proven to be unusually popular, with dozens of hits within a couple of hours of publication.

Headlined "By Far the Best Typo of 2011," it points the reader to a howler of a typographical error in a new book by Craig Shirley called December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World. (Suffice it to say that the book is rife with errors of all sorts. In the chapter I read last night, Shirley used the word "causality" when he meant "casualty." Every page has some kind of mistake like that, and each one could have easily been caught by an editor in the manuscript stage. Such things should never even make it to galley proofs.)

In any case, this very funny typo -- you have to read the original post to get the full impact -- has, relatively speaking, gone viral.  ("Relatively" meaning nowhere near as popular as the Lindsay Lohan Playboy photos.)

I Tweeted a link to the post that was reTweeted by the popular Wisconsin Twitter personality, MissPronouncer.

By Far the Best Typo of 2011:bit.ly/saOY4T
— Rick_Sincere (@Rick_Sincere) December 18, 2011

Then it got picked up elsewhere on Twitter and repackaged with a clever pun:

The caret and the shtick: Why everybody needs an edictor bit.ly/vMmBtq
— Jon Belmont (@jbelmont) December 18, 2011

I'm not sure whether the retweet by @MissPronouncer or the new Tweet by @jbelmont was the driver for it, but the thing is, for a blog that had an average of zero views over the past four weeks, to get 75 or 100 hits within a few hours is, as I say, "viral," in a humble and relative sense.  It's also great fun.

I have not yet finished reading December 1941 but I do wish that I had started with a blue pencil on page one, just to keep track of all the bad editing of an otherwise entertaining and educational book.

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D-Day Plus 23,741

Today is the 65th anniversary of D-Day.

On June 6, 1944, the combined forces of the United Nations -- mostly American, British, and Canadian units -- stormed the beaches of Normandy in an operation widely seen as the beginning of the end of World War II. Less than a year later, Nazi Germany had surrendered and Western Europe had been entirely liberated. (Eastern Europe, sadly, remained chained and oppressed for another 45 years.)

If you do the math, you'll realize that the youngest survivors of the D-Day invasion are today 83 years old -- perhaps 82, if they lied about their ages when they enlisted. Most are in their late 80s or early 90s. They have seen much history between then and now, but the history they made that day and the weeks that followed had a greater effect on the course of the 20th century than anything else they might have done.

Several of my blog-brothers and -sisters have posted tributes to the men of Operation Overlord. They deserve visits:

The Write Side of My Brain begins with a quotation from General Eisenhower's message to the troops.

The Movie-Watchers Guide to the Galaxy posts newsreel footage of the preparation for and execution of the invasion, with voiceover remembrances from D-Day veterans.

Blue Virginia has President Obama's remarks from earlier today.

A Blog for All has a lengthy post (including video) that references the two versions of General Eisenhower's address for after the invasion: one planned for a successful operation, the other planned for a disaster. Needless to say, the "disaster" script was never delivered.

SWAC Girl references a Washington Times editorial on the sacrifice of D-Day.

Millard Fillmore's Bathtub asks whether it is appropriate to fly a U.S. flag today.

Leslie Carbone posts the video of Ronald Reagan's speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. (Part II is here.)

The transcript of that moving speech by President Reagan can be found in the Great Speeches Collection at The History Place. An excerpt gives the flavor of his remarks:

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For 4 long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers -- the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machineguns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After 2 days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

Twenty years later, minus one day, President Reagan died. Leslie Carbone remembers.

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First Communion (Plus Forty Years)

As we all know, yesterday was Mother's Day in the United States. Forty years ago, however, May 13 was a Saturday, the day before Mother's Day. It happens that May 13, 1967, was also the day of what Catholics call "my First Holy Communion."

Those who do not grow up in Catholic families within largely (ethnic) Catholic communities like Milwaukee will probably find it hard to understand what a milestone a First Communion is for Catholic kids. In most families, a First Communion is celebrated with a big party, with extended family and friends invited. I should add that baptisms, confirmations, ordinations, and weddings are all excuses for large celebrations, while funerals also usually merit a party, if a more subdued one. It seems that the only one of the seven sacraments that goes unmarked by food and drink is penance.

Receiving one's First Communion is seen as a step toward maturity, and -- since most first communicants are about 7 or 8 years old -- it is an acknowledgment that a child has reached the age of reason. All in all, for Catholic families, a First Communion is a big deal.

It was no different in my family. My parents threw a huge party for relatives and friends. I received many gifts (mostly in the form of cards and money). I still remember the real prize that day: My parents gave me my first wristwatch, a Timex that was required to be wound at least once a day.

I dug up a few remembrances of that day in 1967, and one that surprised me by its very existence.

That's me in the center, at the edge of the second pew. Note that all the boys are dressed alike, in black slacks, white shirt, and black (clip-on) tie. We look like mini-Mormon missionaries. The girls are not quite in the same cookie-cutter outfits, but white lace emulating a bridal gown was the rule. Why do all the girls seem to be seated behind the boys? I couldn't say.

Here's proof -- the official record of the event, signed by the pastor of St. Agnes Parish in Butler, Wisconsin, Father David Wilbur. The typewriting bears evidence of the existence of an IBM Selectric in the church (or school) office.

And here is verification that the next day -- May 14, 1967 -- was Mother's Day.

Now comes the archival surprise.

Note how the record of my First Communion has all the artistic hallmarks of the early post-Vatican II era, with its stylized images of wheat, chalice, paten, and grapes, and its sleek lettering. It goes without saying that my First Communion Mass was one of the first using the vernacular, though it was largely a translation of the Tridentine liturgy; the Novus Ordo was implemented over the next few years.

I found something in a box of old photographs and newspaper clippings that was totally unexpected. Look below to see how the record of a First Communion was rendered 25 years earlier than mine, when my own father was just 8 years old:


This memento from St. Boniface Church in Milwaukee, dated May 31, 1942, is so ornate that it verges on baroque. The evocative picture is dated 1939, but it matches much of what I saw in books -- including those first- and second-grade readers featuring David and Ann (the Catholic equivalent of Dick and Jane) and their families -- and in church as a very young Catholic just before and during the Second Vatican Council. Within a few short years, though, it was a different world.

(Click on any of the images to embiggen.)