Born 1920 in the Amsterdam working-class district called ‘de Jordaan’, Dutch photographer Kees Scherer began working as a freelance photographer and reached the pinnacle of photojournalism with high-profile reports about the flood disaster in the province of Zeeland (1953) and the Hungarian uprising (1956), shortly after WWII.
Scherer initiated World Press Photo in 1955 with Bram Wisman. In addition to his extensive work in color, Scherer’s early work in black and white has also been receiving increasing attention in recent years. He depicted his favourite cities in exhaustive detail, namely Paris, New York, and especially Amsterdam.
Scherer died in 1993 at the age of 73.
These amazing black and white photos are part of Scherer’s work that documented everyday life of Paris in the 1950s.
From between the 1930s and 1950s, in the days when the borough’s housewives placed orders for milk and baked goods, and union drivers in uniform delivered them. The bakeries sent trucks door to door, offering the same middle-American fare that mid century children across the nation were raised on.
Mrs. Karl’s Bread Truck, 1940sButter Nut BreadButter Nut BreadDugans BreadCassou’s Bread Truck, 1950sMary Jane Bread Trucks, 1950sSunbeam Bread Truck, 1950sFischers Milk, 1940sBond Bread Truck, 1940sBricker’s Bread Truck, 1940sBricker’s Bread Truck, late 1920s-early 1930sWebers Bread TruckStocks Bread Truck, 1935Bricker’s Bread TruckBond Bread Truck, Deep Rock Gas StationDugan’s Bread Truck, Pelican Island, NJ, ca. mid 1930sPepperidge Farm Bread TruckPepperidge Farm Bread TruckWards Tip Top Bread Truck, John Longwood, 1947Welsh’s Bread Truck, Virginia City, Nevada, September 1958J.J. Nissen Bread Truck, Holsum Bread, Portland, Maine, 1950sPaul’s Pie Truck, Metro Van, Ontario, Canada, 1952Bond Bread Truck, 1940 Ford, ca. 1940sTaystee Bread Truck, Chevrolet Step Van, 1959Schaible’s Bakery Truck, Easton, PA, ca. late 1940s-early 1950sStudebaker Bread Truck, Royer’s Bread, Denver, PA, 1941Ford Panel Van, Burry’s Cookies, 1940sChevrolet Panel Van, Bakery Truck, Juction City Bakery, Oregon, 1935Chevrolet Panel Van, Modern Cleaners, Teutopolis, ILL, 1958Ford Delivery Truck, Castleton Brands Food Products, late 1940s
The bathing machine was a device, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, to allow people to change out of their usual clothes, possibly change into swimwear and then wade in the ocean at beaches. Bathing machines were roofed and walled wooden carts rolled into the sea. Some had solid wooden walls; others had canvas walls over a wooden frame.
According to some sources, the bathing machine was developed in 1750 in Margate, Kent, though this may relate primarily to the “modesty hood” (bathing costumes were not yet common and most people bathed naked).
Bathing machines were most common in the United Kingdom and parts of the British Empire with a British population, but were also used in France, Germany, the United States, Mexico, and other nations. Legal segregation of bathing areas in Britain ended in 1901, and the bathing machine declined rapidly. By the start of the 1920s bathing machines were almost extinct, even on beaches catering to an older clientele.
The bathing machines remained in active use on English beaches until the 1890s, when they began to be parked on the beach. They were then used as stationary changing rooms for a number of years. Most of them had disappeared in the United Kingdom by 1914.
Barbara Stanwyck (born Ruby Catherine Stevens; July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress, model, and dancer. A stage, film, and television star, she was known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional for her strong, realistic screen presence. A favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, she made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.
Stanwyck made her debut on stage in the chorus as a Ziegfeld girl in 1923, at age 16, and within a few years was acting in plays. Her first lead role, which was in the hit Burlesque (1927), gained praise and established her as a Broadway star. In 1929, she began acting in talking pictures, receiving her major break when Frank Capra chose her for his romantic drama Ladies of Leisure (1930), which led to additional leading roles. The ones that further launched her career and increased her profile were Night Nurse, Baby Face, and the controversial The Bitter Tea of General Yen.
In 1937, she had the title role in Stella Dallas and received her first Academy Award nomination for best actress. In 1939, she starred as the lead in Union Pacific the first ever film to ever win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1941, she starred in two successful screwball comedies: Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper, and The Lady Eve with Henry Fonda. She received her second Academy Award nomination for Ball of Fire, and in the decades since its release The Lady Eve has come to be regarded as a comedic classic with Stanwyck’s performance called one of the best in American comedy. Other successful films during this era of her career are Meet John Doe (1940) and You Belong to Me (1941), both of which where she again starred alongside Cooper and Fonda respectively.
By 1944, Stanwyck had become the highest-paid woman in the United States. She starred alongside Fred MacMurray in the seminal film noir Double Indemnity (1944), playing the smoldering wife who persuades MacMurray’s insurance salesman to kill her husband. Described as one of the ultimate portrayals of villainy, it is widely thought that Stanwyck should have won the Academy Award for Best Actress rather than being just nominated. In 1945, she starred in the hit film Christmas in Connecticut. She later received critical acclaim for her performance in the 1947 film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. She garnered her last Oscar nomination for her lead performance as an invalid wife overhearing her own murder plot in the thriller film noir, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).
Throughout the 1950s, she starred in a long string of highly successful films and they are Titanic (1953), All I Desire (1953), Executive Suite (1954) and There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). But her career declined soon after the end of the decade, therefore she moved into television in the 1960s, where she won three Emmy Awards – for The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1961), the western series The Big Valley (1966), and miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983).
She received an Honorary Oscar in 1982, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1986 and was the recipient of several other honorary lifetime awards. She was ranked as the 11th greatest female star of classic American cinema by the American Film Institute. An orphan at the age of four, and partially raised in foster homes, she always worked; one of her directors, Jacques Tourneur, said of Stanwyck, “She only lives for two things, and both of them are work.”
Stanwyck died on January 20, 1990, aged 82, of congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California. She had indicated that she wanted no funeral service. In accordance with her wishes, her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered from a helicopter over Lone Pine, California, where she had made some of her western films.
Portrait of Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld Girl, 1924Portrait of Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld Girl, 1924Portrait of Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld Girl, 1924
It wasn’t quite the British Invasion of the 1960s, which involved timeless bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but ABBA managed to pull off a one-band Swedish coupe starting in the 1970s. Indeed, even before the band’s formation, Benny Andersson was part of the pop group called The Hep Stars, which was nicknamed “The Swedish Beatles.”
Andersson was married to Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and the couple joined another pair of young love birds, Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, for a vacation on the isle of Cyprus. Their lighthearted singing during the trip morphed into an impromptu show for a troop of United Nations soldiers in the foursome’s first-ever public performance together.
The couples dabbled with making music together from 1970 to 1973, going by the rather unwieldy name of Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny & Björn. They were known informally as ABBA, an acronym taken from the first letters of each band member’s name. The shortened name took hold in 1973, and it’s the one under which they took the world by storm, giving Sweden its first win in the Eurovision Song Contest and topping the charts in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world.
The 1970s were ABBA’s peak years, when they churned out smash hits like “Dancing Queen.” “Waterloo,” “SOS,” “Mama Mia,” and “Take a Chance on Me.” They hit the pinnacle in 1976, topping worldwide charts with their Greatest Hits album, which also contained a new song, “Fernando” that hit number one in 19 countries.
ABBA didn’t do a major tour until 1977, when the group headed off to Europe and Australia, followed by another European tour and a trek across North America in 1979. Sadly, that was also the year that Fältskog and Ulvaeus divorced, followed by the break-up of Lyngstad and Andersson in 1981.
The relationship turmoil foreshadowed the end of ABBA making beautiful music together. The band’s airy, upbeat music started moving down a darker path in 1981, and they disbanded the following year. Members went on to their own careers, with Andersson and Ulvaeus both writing songs for the stage and Lyngstad and Fältskog taking on the daunting task of getting their solo careers off the ground. Neither managed to find the sort of success they’d enjoyed during their ABBA heydays.
American women have participated in defense of this nation in both war and peacetime. Their contributions, however, have gone largely unrecognized and unrewarded. While women in the United States Armed Forces share a history of discrimination based on gender, black women have faced both race and gender discrimination. Initially barred from official military status, black women persistently pursued their right to serve.
African American women served in many military career and held every position, ranging from nurses to spies to postal clerks. Despite their effort and contribution towards the war, the Army policy did reflect segregationist policies during World War II. Basic training was segregated, as well as living and dining.
African American women, though highly skilled, were often assigned to the dirtiest industrial tasks and received the lowest pay.
African American women fight for a change
African Americans learned that they would have to fight for their own rights. As early as 1940, at a civil rights convention in Chicago, an African American women called for integration of the defense industries, where blacks were segregated into the worst jobs. Soon there after, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which ‘outlawed discriminatory hiring practices by defense contractors and established the Committee of Fair Employment Practices’. This was the first significant presidential action on behalf of African American civil rights since Reconstruction.
Although African Americans did fight for the passage of Executive Order 8802, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Roosevelt’s very influential wife, was a strong supporter of rights for African Americans and did help with the passage of this act. Eleanor Roosevelt strongly opposed the Navy policy that kept African Americans enlisted in servile support jobs such as cooks and waiters.
New opportunities were finally given to African American women not only in the factories, but also in the flourishing black communities as well. The presence of blacks were apparent in the factories and in the blues clubs that began to proliferate. Many of these clubs were owned and ran by African American women who had migrated to California during World War II. Within these African American community, blacks could ‘organize politically and form networks for their own social and economic needs’. This greatly contributed to the legacy of African American women from World War II.
Born 1879 in Philadelphia, American actress Ethel Barrymore was a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Her first appearance on Broadway was in 1895, in a play called The Imprudent Young Couple which starred her uncle John Drew, Jr., and Maude Adams. She appeared with Drew and Adams again in 1896 in Rosemary.
Barrymore was a stage actress regarded as “The First Lady of the American Theatre” whose career spanned six decades. Notably the role Nora in A Doll’s House by Ibsen (1905), and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare (1922), starred in Rasputin and the Empress (1932).
Barrymore appeared in her first feature motion picture, The Nightingale, in 1914. She made 15 silent pictures between 1914 and 1919, most of them for the Metro Pictures studio, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film None but the Lonely Heart (1944). Her last film appearance was in Johnny Trouble (1957).
Barrymore died of cardiovascular disease in 1959, at her home in Hollywood, after having lived for many years with a heart condition. She was less than two months shy of her 80th birthday. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City is named for her.
In 1960, Barrymore was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a motion pictures star for her contributions to the film industry. Her star is located at 7001 Hollywood Boulevard.
These beautiful pics that captured portraits of young Ethel Barrymore from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
