If you would like to
visit Yesteryear, I have a book that will take you there.
The 1941 World Almanac
and Book of Facts, more than 900 pages chronicling the events
and statistics of 1940. For example, in it you will find that
Gone With the Wind ran away with the Academy Awards in
1939 (the last year listed in the 1941 Almanac). Best Film. Best
Actress — Vivien Leigh. Best Director — Victor Fleming.
Best Writer — Sidney Howard.
Mickey Rooney was the
year's choice for Movie King and Bette Davis was Movie Queen (in
a national newspaper poll). Tyrone Power and Spencer Tracy were
Rooney's runner-ups and Sonja Henie, the figure skater, and Judy
Garland were Davis's.
Radio favorites for
1939 (1940 favorites hadn't been picked yet) were Jack Benny,
Information Please, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,
Fred Allen and Bing Crosby. There were no TV favorites because
television was still in its infancy, the first public TV service
was a news show in New York on NBC. The Republican National Convention
in Philadelphia was telecast in that city and New York.
Richard Llewellyn's
How Green Was My Valley was a best-selling novel (135,000
copies as of June 1) and a best-selling nonfiction book was Oscar
Levant's A Smattering of Ignorance (65,000 as of June l).
Some other best-selling novels were Christopher Morley's Kitty
Foyle, which reached the screen under that name, starring
Ginger Rogers; Sholem Asch's The Nazarene and Richard Wright's
Native Son. The biggest seller of them all was John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, which by April,
1940, had sold 480,000 copies (one of them to me).
The Cincinnati Reds
won the World Series from the Detroit Tigers, four games to two.
Cincinnati players got $5,803 each; Detroit players, $3,531.
The average weight
of a 24-year-old woman five feet five inches (tall for those days)
was 129 pounds. For a fifty-four-year old woman the same height
it was 148 pounds.
Alice Marble was world's
top woman tennis player and Mildred "Babe" Didrikson was the world's
champion high jumper (tied with Shiley, no first name given but
it was Jean) at 1.65 meters.
But fascinating as
all the statistics are, I find the advertisements even more so.
Mostly they seem determined to make you to be a better person,
smarter, able to earn more money, able to do things. There are
64 pages of them before you even get a statistic in the Almanac's
960 pages of facts and sales pitches. Here are a few of them:
The Linguaphone Institute
reads A NEW WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND. LINGUAPHONE
speeds your mastery of Spanish, Portuguese or French. The home
study courses are also available for 24 other languages, including
Russian, Japanese and Hebrew.
American School, Dept
11-165, offered High School Course At Home. Lasalle Extension
University extolled the advantages of an accountant's career in
a two-page ad, illustrated with four postage-stamp size line drawings
- Good Salary, showing a nattily-dress man at a desk; Fine Car
showing a snazzy sedan, A Nice Home, showing a nice home, and
Bank Account, showing a man in a suit and hat leaving a bank teller's
window counting a fistful of bills.
Arthur Murray offered
"5 DAYS' Free Trial" of his dancing lessons and Cortina Academy
had Spanish lessons on 78-rpm records. Patterson School's specialty
was preparing you for jobs in the government - "Pay $1260 - $2100
To Start!" Those salaries were per year. (Railway mail clerk started
at $1850 per and a stenographer-typist could draw down $1260-$1620
yearly, "either at Washington or near your home."
The School of Speedwriting
promised to teach you shorthand at home in 6 weeks and the Sherwin
Cody School of English wanted to sell you a book named How
You Can Master Good English in l5 Minutes a Day and teach
you not to say things like "I ain't" and "He don't." Charles
Atlas said "15 Minutes a Day! Give me just this and I'll prove
I can make you A NEW MAN!" He would do it with "Dynamic Tension"
exercises.
Charles Atlas was the
man who made "I was once a 97-pound weakling" famous.
Writer's Digest
sprang for only a quarter-page ad asking "When Can We Get New
Writers?" It claimed that authors could get from 14 cents to 25
cents a word for stories and articles.
Writer's Digest
is still around. I wonder if it offers any refresher courses for
former new writers?
