Rare Historical Photos Capturing A Unique Moment In Time


Cigarettes Bought from a Hospital Bed in the 1950s

Prior to the Surgeon General’s message connecting tobacco use to a variety of illnesses, the medical community did not consider smoking to be a bad. In fact, it was considered to soothe a worried person, suppress appetites, and generally be beneficial.

As absurd and counter-productive as it may seem, hospital patients could purchase packs from their hospital beds during this time. They could even use them in their hospital rooms if they wanted to!




A Manually Operated Traffic Control Machine, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1922

Cars began getting into fender-benders shortly after the automobile was introduced into the streets. It became apparent immediately that laws and procedures were required to ensure that individuals did not drive their vehicles into other cars, people, or structures.

Motorists started using signals to know when to halt and when to continue through a junction. Before electric traffic signals, the only alternative was to have manual signals, such as the one seen in the photograph above. A traffic stop operator had to manually change the sign from “stop” to “go.”




A Man on Top of the Golden Gate Bridge During its Construction

Building the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco required a lot of bravery. There was an unspoken rule in the 1930s about high-steel bridge building projects like this one. Engineers should anticipate one employee incident for every $1 million spent. The $35 million Golden Gate Bridge, on the other hand, had a stellar safety record, with just 11 incidents.

At least 19 individuals are said to have been saved thanks to a huge net hanging underneath the construction site. The bridge employees’ survival rate is a marvel of forethought.




The Historic U.S. Route 50 (The loneliest road in America)

While looking at this photograph, it is easy to see why Route 50 is referred to as “The Loneliest Road in America.” From West Sacramento in California all the way to Ocean City in Maryland (a distance of about 3,073 miles), the roadway traverses vast swaths of barren, arid terrain.

When Life magazine published its July 1986 edition, the road was dubbed as “The Loneliest Road in America.” Since then, the name has gained popularity, and the state of Nevada has adopted it as a marketing slogan for the road. According to the publication, there are “no places of interest” along the path.




Women Delivering Ice While Men Were Overseas


As the first global struggle was happening throughout Europe, women began to take up tasks that had previously been filled by males. This included anything from working in factories to transporting large blocks of ice to the front lines. The need for this kind of work existed even before refrigerators were widely available.

Delivery workers would transport huge blocks of ice around the country on carts and in motor vehicles. The ladies in this photograph delivered ice from their distributor to houses across Manhattan. Folks would use these ice blocks to cool down meals. As refrigerators and freezers grew more common, the company gradually went out of business.




Yoda with His Sculptor, Stuart Freeborn

Everyone who watched Episode V fell in love with Yoda, the funny, little creature on Dagobah who also happens to be the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy. However, if the original version of Yoda had made it to the screen, the film may not have been as successful. The original plan for Yoda was to teach a costumed monkey to move around the set instead of using a puppet.

Several team members who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey years before objected to the concept. Actors had to be recruited to represent the primates since they were tough to properly manage. The character we know and love today was created with the help of makeup artist, Stuart Freeborn. Freeborn made the model of Yoda based off himself and Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art.

20 Words We Owe to William Shakespeare



1. Addiction: Othello, Act II, Scene II

    “It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant general, that, upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to what sport and revels his addiction leads him.” – Herald

If not for that noble and valiant general and his playwright, our celebrity news coverage might be sorely lacking.


2. Arch-villain: Timon of Athens, Act V, Scene I

    “You that way and you this, but two in company; each man apart, all single and alone, yet an arch-villain keeps him company.” – Timon

With the added prefix of arch-, meaning more extreme than others of the same type, Shakespeare was able to distinguish the baddest of the bad.


3. Assassination: Macbeth, Act I, Scene VII


    “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly: if the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch with his surcease success.” – Macbeth

Though the term “assassin” had been observed in use prior to the Scottish play, it seems apt that the work introduced yet another term for murder most foul.


4. Bedazzled: The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Scene V


    “Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes, that have been so bedazzled with the sun that everything I look on seemeth green.” – Katherina

A word first used to describe the particular gleam of sunlight is now used to sell rhinestone-embellished jeans. Maybe poetry really is dead.


5. Belongings: Measure for Measure, Act I, Scene I

    “Thyself and thy belongings are not thine own so proper as to waste thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.” – Duke Vincentio

People prior to Shakespeare’s time did own things; they just referred to them by different words.


6. Cold-blooded: King John, Act III, Scene I

    “Thou cold-blooded slave, hast thou not spoke like thunder on my side, been sworn my soldier, bidding me depend upon thy stars, thy fortune and thy strength, and dost thou now fall over to my fores?” – Constance

Beyond its literal meaning, the 17th-century play initiated a metaphorical use for the term that is now most often used to describe serial killers and vampires—two categories which, of course, need not be mutually exclusive.


7. Dishearten: Henry V, Act IV, Scene I

    “Therefore when he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are: yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army.” – King Henry V

The opposite of “hearten,” a word already extant at the time of Shakespeare’s writing, “dishearten” was most appropriately first utilized in print by King Henry V, who didn’t let insurmountable odds at the Battle of Agincourt get him down.


8. Eventful: As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

    “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” - Jaques

If all the world’s a stage, it’s safe to assume that an event or two is taking place.


9. Eyeball: The Tempest, Act I, Scene II

    “Go make thyself like a nymph o' the sea: be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible to every eyeball else.” – Prospero

Shakespeare’s protagonist Prospero, though no medical doctor, can claim to be the first fictional character to name those round objects with which we see.


10. Fashionable: Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene III

    “For time is like a fashionable host that slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, and with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly, grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles, and farewell goes out sighing.” – Ulysses

And with just 11 letters, centuries of debate over what’s hot or not began.


11. Half-blooded/hot-blooded: King Lear, Act V, Scene III/ Act III, Scene III

    “Half-blooded fellow, yes.” – Albany

    “Why, the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took our youngest born, I could as well be brought to knee his throne, and, squire-like; pension beg to keep base life afoot.” – Lear

As is the tradition in Shakespearean tragedy, nearly everyone in King Lear dies, so the linguistic fascination here with blood is unsurprising, to say the least.


12. Inaudible: All’s Well That Ends Well, Act V, Scene III

    “Let's take the instant by the forward top; for we are old, and on our quick'st decrees the inaudible and noiseless foot of Time steals ere we can effect them.” – King of France

One of a number of words (invulnerable, indistinguishable, inauspicious, among others) which Shakespeare invented only in the sense of adding a negative in- prefix where it had never been before.


13. Ladybird: Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene III

    “What, lamb! What, ladybird! God forbid! Where's this girl? What, Juliet!” – Nurse

Although the Oxford English Dictionary notes that this particular term of endearment has fallen into disuse, maybe it’s about time for its comeback. Valentine’s Day is coming up, after all.


14. Manager: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I

    “Where is our usual manager of mirth? What revels are in hand? Is there no play to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?” – King Theseus

If not for Shakespeare, workday complaining in the office break room just wouldn’t be the same.


15. Multitudinous: Macbeth, Act II, Scene II

    “No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red.” – Macbeth

“Multitudinous” may not be the most appropriate synonym when the phrase “a lot” starts to crop up too often in your writing, but it’s certainly the one with the most letters.


16. New-fangled: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act I, Scene I

    “At Christmas I no more desire a rose than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth.” – Biron

Ironically, this word sounds old-fashioned if used today.


17. Pageantry: Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act V, Scene II

    “This, my last boon, give me, for such kindness must relieve me, that you aptly will suppose what pageantry, what feats, what shows, what minstrelsy, and pretty din, the regent made in Mytilene to greet the king.” – Gower

Although modern scholars generally agree that Shakespeare only appears to have written the second half of the play, this newly invented term for an extravagant ceremonial display appears in the section definitively authored by the Bard.


18. Scuffle: Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene I

    “His captain's heart, which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst the buckles on his breast, reneges all temper, and is become the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy's lust.” – Philo

Another example of an existing verb that Shakespeare decided could stand up just as well as a noun.


19. Swagger: Henry V, Act II, Scene IV/A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene I

    “An't please your majesty, a rascal that swaggered with me last night.” – Williams

    “What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here, so near the cradle of the fairy queen?” – Puck

By transitive property, Shakespeare is responsible for Justin Bieber’s “swag.”


20. Uncomfortable: Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene V

    “Despised, distressed, hated, martyr'd, kill'd! Uncomfortable time, why camest thou now to murder, murder our solemnity?” - Capulet




Un- was another prefix Shakespeare appended to adjectives with a liberal hand. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy in which a father mourns his daughter’s suicide, “uncomfortable” seems to have originated with a slightly more drastic sense than how we use it now.

 


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Romany Marie

 

Marie Marchand, better known as Romany Marie was one of those eccentric characters that stood out in a town full of them. During the first part of the 20th century, her informal Greenwich Village cafés drew a society of artists, anarchists, activists, playwrights, musicians and bohemian intelligentsia. If you were looking for la vie bohème in New York City, you found it chez Romany Marie. Picture Stevie Nicks meets Gertrude Stein and you’ll start to get an idea of the kind of woman who single-handedly established Parisian café society in the Big Apple. So how did the village forget its most prominent café queen?

During her 35-year reign in the village, she sheltered all sorts of anarchists: Wobblies, Socialists, Communists, and even vegetarians! New York’s “lost generation” they were called. She had established a Rive Gauche of her own, and it was one that even Paris knew about. Before there were speakeasies, her tribe of liberals would always find their way to her locations, which were often hidden up several flights of stairs or at the ends of alleyways. Describing one of her locations on Minetta Lane, Rian James wrote “only a surveyor could find it” in his 1930 book, Dining in New York. Other locations included 55 Grove Street (next to the now famous piano bar Marie’s Crisis), St Mark’s Place, Washington Square South and the basement of the Hotel Brevoort.

Other notable guests at Marie’s included Diego Rivera, Orson Wells, and novelist Fannie Hurst. Everyone who was anyone on the art scene passed through Marie. “She was a Vesuvius of creativity in heart and mind,” recalled Buckminster Fuller. The pamphlet advertising Romanie’s read as follows:

In these sad dry days, Manhattan yams in gigantic boredom. Broadway and its garish lights? No! Then where? Then what to do? But just suppose there was a place with a peasant atmosphere? A place that gave an honest glimpse of “Romantic Romania?” A place where coals grow on an open grate? Where, instead of jazz, come soft languid gypsy aurs of the old Carpathians? 

A place where one sips Turkish coffee and fragrant drink? A place serving a table-d’hote dinner or dishes so delicious that they tempt the jaded palate? What then? Would that amuse you? For there is such a place! 


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A Tribute to the Printer Aldus Manutius, and the Roots of the Paperback [via Doug Fetterly]


CURIOUS strollers in early-16th-century Venice might have paused by the shop of the great printer Aldus Manutius only to be scared off by a stern warning posted over the door.
“Whoever you are, Aldus asks you again and again what it is you want from him,” it read. “State your business briefly, and then immediately go away.”

To state the current business at hand briefly, Aldus is the subject of a new exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of his death — and the birth of reading as we know it.

Aldus has attracted some pop-culture attention in recent years, at least among those with a geekish taste for printing history. The novel “The Rule of Four” gave his most famous book, the enigmatic “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” an upmarket “Da Vinci Code” treatment in 2004. There was also Robin Sloan’s 2012 best seller, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” which turned Aldus into the founder of a shadowy secret society headed for an apocalyptic showdown with Google.

The exhibition that opened this week at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, “Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting Than Bronze,” gathers nearly 150 Aldines, as books from the press Aldus founded in Venice in 1494 are known, for a more sober tribute. Gutenberg may have invented the movable-type printing press, used to create his monumental Bibles. But anyone who has ever sat in a cafe, or in the bath, with a paperback owes a debt to Aldus and the small, cleanly designed editions of the secular classics he called libelli portatiles, or portable little books.
“It’s become a cliché to call them the forerunners of the Penguin Classics,” G. Scott Clemons, the president of the Grolier Club, said during a recent tour of the installation in progress. “But the concept of personal reading is in some ways directly traceable to the innovations of Aldus’s portable library.”

The exhibition, organized by Mr. Clemons and H. George Fletcher, a former curator of rare books at the New York Public Library and the Morgan Library, is a gallery of bragging rights. Aldus was the first to print Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus and Sophocles, among others in the Greek canon. He was possibly the first printer to compare manuscripts to arrive at the most reliable text. He was the first to use italic type. He was the first to use the semicolon in its modern sense.

And then there were the unwitting firsts, like what may be the earliest known version of “This page left intentionally blank,” preserved in a 1513 edition of the Greek orators included in the show, along with instructions to the binder to remove the extra leaf.

“He printed the instructions in Latin and Greek,” Mr. Clemons said. “But of course bookbinders couldn’t read Latin or Greek.”

Aldus, born in the Papal States around 1452, trained as a humanist scholar and worked as a tutor in aristocratic households before taking up printing in the 1490s. It was a moment of upheaval in reading roughly equivalent to our own digitally disrupted age. And Venice was the Silicon Valley of printing, home to dozens of shops locked in cutthroat competition.

The Aldine Press, in its start-up phase, emphasized Greek and Latin lexicons and grammar manuals. In 1495, Aldus began publishing the first printed edition of Aristotle. In 1501, he released the first of his small octavo editions of the classics, books “that could be held in the hand and learned by heart (not to speak of being read) by everyone,” as he later wrote. The show includes 20 libelli portatiles, all bearing Aldus’s printer’s mark, a dolphin curled around an anchor. (The colophon is still used today by Doubleday.) Some of the books were treated as treasures, and customized with magnificent decoration that harked back to the tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Others were workaday volumes, filled with marginal scribbles.

The exhibition also includes examples of Aldus’s larger-format work, including the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (1499), sometimes said to be the most beautiful — and the most unreadable — book ever printed.
The book, a densely allegorical erotic love story attributed to Francesco Colonna, is celebrated for its integration of gracefully shaped typography and elegant woodcuts. But visitors to the Grolier would be forgiven for letting their eyes go straight to the famously excited ithyphallic (to use the scholarly term) god Priapus standing at attention, as it were. The book is displayed cracked open a modest halfway to that page, directly across the room from a 1547 medical encyclopedia open to a passage discussing the uses of cannabis.

“We wanted the show to have both sex and drugs,” Mr. Clemons explained.

Most of Aldus’s contributions to the art of printing are more subtle, like that first italic typeface, which he created with the type cutter Francesco Griffo, a shadowy fellow who broke with Aldus acrimoniously and then slugged a man to death with an iron bar before reputedly meeting his own demise at the end of a hangman’s rope. Italics, which were intended to mimic the humanist handwriting of the day, first appeared in a modest five words in a 1500 edition of the letters of St. Catherine and soon spread to other Aldines, and beyond.

And then there was the roman typeface devised for a 1496 book by the humanist scholar Pietro Bembo — the inspiration for the modern font Bembo, still treasured by book designers for its grace and readability.
“The book itself is almost frivolous,” Mr. Clemons said of the text, which recounts a trip to Mount Etna. “But it launched that very modern typeface.”

The libelli portatiles also attracted less flattering imitations. Aldus, who had secured special printing privileges from the Vatican, was plagued by counterfeiters, despite the warnings on his title pages that those who made unauthorized copies would be excommunicated.

Things got so bad that in 1503 he printed a broadside warning consumers of the telltale marks of fake Aldines, including specific textual errors, low-quality paper with “a heavy odor” and typography that exuded, as he put it, a sort of “Gallicitas,” or “Frenchiness.” (Many counterfeits came from Lyon.)


“The counterfeiters just said, ‘Thank you very much,’ corrected their errors, and kept printing fakes,” Mr. Clemons said.
While putting together the show, Mr. Clemons identified one previously unknown counterfeit, a 1501 Virgil printed on vellum and held by Princeton University. “It was immediately obvious,” Mr. Clemons said. “It was Frenchy.”
Aldus died in 1515, and the press was taken over by his father-in-law and then by his son Paulus. The center of printing had begun migrating north, but the press continued to produce some important editions, including the first printed Greek Bible, the Septuagint, in 1518, and the official proceedings of the Council of Trent.

Aldus’s grandson, known as Aldus the Younger, took sole control in 1574, but “the gene pool had run very shallow,” Mr. Fletcher said.

By 1579, Aldines carried a list of still-available titles printed in the back. “You can almost imagine him looking over his shoulder at the unsold books piling up,” Mr. Clemons said.

In a last-ditch effort to save the press, Aldus the Younger accepted a commission from Pope Sixtus V for a new Latin Bible, only to produce a rush job so riddled with errors — about 4,900, Mr. Fletcher noted grimly — that it was suppressed.

“Sixtus died, and the new pope said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ” Mr. Fletcher said. (The book, which includes carefully pasted-in printed corrections, is now among the rarer Aldines.)

The press closed for good in 1597. But Aldines, which survive in the tens of thousands, have exerted an unflagging hold on collectors, from Jean Grolier, the Renaissance bibliophile for whom the club is named, to the two curators, whose personal loans make up the bulk of the show.

Mr. Clemons, a managing partner at the financial firm Brown Brothers Harriman, bought the first of the roughly 1,000 Aldines in his collection while an undergraduate classics major. “It may now finally be worth what I paid,” he joked.

Mr. Fletcher, who acquired the first of his 125 Aldines when he was 16, summed up their allure with what might be called Aldine understatement.

“Aldus was a person with a strong aesthetic sense who was also able to work with common sense,” he said. “This is an almost completely unknown phenomenon, even today.”

Reposted From The New York Times

 

Author Daniel Moskowitz

 Author Daniel Moskowitz in the photo below holding his book Bronx Stagger in an unintentional shameless act of self-promotion.

Moskowitz volunteered to help his former colleagues organize assigned Family Court Attorney's rally for better paySometimes good deeds do go rewarded.  His novel takes place in Bronx Family Court, the busiest court in NYC.


Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times



Lawyers who are known as panel attorneys and who represent children and indigent adults, have been departing the system by the dozens over the past decade, leaving many of the most vulnerable New Yorkers without their constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel. The attorneys say that their ranks are thinning because their salaries have not risen in close to two decades, and they are now fighting in court to change that.

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Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll are on the docket of Bronx Family Court, the busiest court in NYC. Schwartz the Lawyer fights for justice for families while struggling with personal demons that place his own family Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll are on the docket of Bronx Family Court, the busiest court in NYC. Schwartz the Lawyer fights for justice for families while struggling with personal demons that place his own family risk.



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