Bringing You the Wonder of Yesterday – Today
When World War II ended, the United States was in better economic shape.
Building on the economic base left after the war, American society became more affluent in the postwar years than most Americans could have imagined in their wildest dreams before or during the war.
These Kodachrome slides show life of the US in the mid-late 1940s and early 1950s.
Portland is the largest and most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon and the seat of Multnomah County. It is a major port in the Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in Northwestern Oregon. As of 2020, Portland had a population of 652,503, making it the 25th-most populated city in the United States, the sixth-most populous on the West Coast, and the second-most populous in the Pacific Northwest after Seattle. Approximately 2.5 million people live in the Portland metropolitan statistical area (MSA), making it the 25th most populous in the United States. Its combined statistical area (CSA) ranks 19th-largest with a population of around 3.2 million. Approximately 47% of Oregon’s population resides within the Portland metropolitan area.
Named after Portland, Maine, the Oregon settlement began to be populated in the 1830s near the end of the Oregon Trail. Its water access provided convenient transportation of goods, and the timber industry was a major force in the city’s early economy. At the turn of the 20th century, the city had a reputation as one of the most dangerous port cities in the world, a hub for organized crime and racketeering. After the city’s economy experienced an industrial boom during World War II, its hard-edged reputation began to dissipate. Beginning in the 1960s, Portland became noted for its growing progressive political values, earning it a reputation as a bastion of counterculture.
The city operates with a commission-based government guided by a mayor and four commissioners as well as Metro, the only directly elected metropolitan planning organization in the United States. Its climate is marked by warm, dry summers and cool, rainy winters. This climate is ideal for growing roses, and Portland has been called the “City of Roses” for over a century.
Here is an incredible collection of colorized photos from Willie Brown that shows American police cars from between the 1920s and 1950s.
(Photos colorized by Willie Brown)
We’ve all heard our parents say it; “Look up from your phone every once in a while”, “Hey, talk to me don’t text”, “why are you being so anti-social on your phone?”
Not only our cellphones, but also our laptops, televisions, creations like Facebook and other social media platforms. Are all of these inventions and enhancements in technology making us less social?
Since the smartphone boom put tiny computers in hundreds of millions of pockets, there’ve been countless critics eager to point out that invasive technology is changing our lives for the worse, and worse, changing who we are. It’s turning us into selfish, anti-social automatons, they say, again and again and again.
But how much has really changed? Sure, we’re media-obsessed, anti-social crazy people, but we’ve always been this way.
A playsuit was a one-piece romper. The top resembled a button-down blouse that would come in at the waist and extend into shorts. Teens and grown women during the 1940s wore what were actually called playsuits.
Vintage playsuits were worn outdoors – either at the beach, in the backyard to catch some sun or for sportswear. They were usually made of cotton, although they could also be found in rayon. They were brightly colored with reds, greens, yellows and blues, and were often done in patterns, checks and plaids. Floral and Hawaiian prints were popular towards the end of the decade.
These photos show young women wearing playsuits in the 1940s.
During the first few decades of the 20th century, the people of Los Angeles had alligator fever. Starting in 1907, alligator rides, feedings, and trained alligator shows were all the rage, thanks to “Alligator Joe” Campbell and Francis Earnest, proprietors of the California Alligator Farm—one of the longest-running, and strangest, amusements in the city of Los Angeles. The Farm, which operated from 1907 to 1953 in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of L.A., let guests get terrifyingly close to its reptilian inmates.
Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any business letting its guests or employees get that close to a bunch of dangerous animals—and of course, something like that would now be very, very illegal. So to prove it really happened, here are 27 incredible photos of adults, children, getting up close and personal with alligators:
Born 1910 as Marion Levy, American actress Paulette Goddard was a child fashion model and a performer in several Broadway productions as a Ziegfeld Girl. She signed her first film contract with producer Samuel Goldwyn to appear as a Goldwyn Girl in Whoopee! (1930), and then appeared in City Streets (1931), Ladies of the Big House (1931), and The Girl Habit (1931) for Paramount, Palmy Days (1931) for Goldwyn, and The Mouthpiece (1932) for Warners.
Goddard became a major star of Paramount Pictures in the 1940s. Her most notable films were her first major role, as Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady in Modern Times, and Chaplin’s subsequent film The Great Dictator. Goddard was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in So Proudly We Hail! (1943).
After her marriage to the third husband Erich Maria Remarque, Goddard largely retired from acting and moved to Ronco sopra Ascona, Switzerland. In 1964, she attempted a comeback in films with a supporting role in the Italian film Time of Indifference, which was her last feature film.
After Remarque’s death in 1970, Goddard made one last attempt at acting, when she accepted a small role in an episode of The Snoop Sisters (1972) for television.
Goddard died from heart failure while under respiratory support due to emphysema in 1990, aged 79, at her home in Switzerland.
Take a look at these glamorous photos to see the beauty of young Paulette Goddard in the early days of her career.
“For Parisians the Seine is a compass, a way to know where you are,” said art historian Marina Ferretti.
France had a relatively easier time under German occupation during World War II. That is because Hitler did not consider West Europeans as ‘Untermenschen’. The infamous German brutality was reserved for the Russians.
These images were taken in Occupied Paris during World War II by André Zucca for Nazi German propaganda magazine Signal using rare Agfacolor film supplied by the Wehrmacht. Zucca was arrested after the 1944 liberation but never prosecuted. He worked until his death in 1976 under an assumed name.
When exhibited in Paris in 2008, Bertrand Delanoë, Mayor of Paris, ordered a notice to accompany the images stating that the pictures avoid the “reality of occupation and its tragic aspects.”
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.
Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.
Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.
Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from pulmonary edema and heart failure, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is one of the greatest American films of all time – a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients’ supervisory nurse). Expressing his basic human rights and impulses, the protagonist protests against heavy-handed rules about watching the World Series, and illegally stages both a fishing trip and a drinking party in the ward – leading to his own paralyzing lobotomy.
Jack Nicholson’s acting persona as the heroic rebel McMurphy, who lives free or dies (through an act of mercy killing), had earlier been set with his performances in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). The mid-70s baby-boomers’ counter-culture was ripe for a film dramatizing rebellion and insubordination against oppressive bureaucracy and an insistence upon rights, self-expression, and freedom.
The role of the sexually-repressed, domineering Nurse Ratched was turned down by five actresses – Anne Bancroft, Colleen Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Angela Lansbury – until Louise Fletcher accepted casting (in her debut film) only a week before filming began. And actor James Caan was also originally offered the lead role of McMurphy, and Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman were considered as well. The entire film was shot in sequence, except for the fishing scene (shot last).
It surprised everyone by becoming enormously profitable – the seventh-highest-grossing film ever (at its time), bringing in almost $300 million worldwide. The independently-produced film also swept the Oscars: it was the first film to take all the major awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress) since Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934).
