Glenn L Martin

Martin TA-4J Skyhawk

(Martin Museum) Glenn Luther Martin (January 17, 1886 - December 5, 1955). At the time he taught himself to fly in 1909 and 1910, Glenn Luther Martin was a youthful businessman, the owner (at age 22) of Ford and Maxwell dealerships in Santa Ana, California. Although he had taken courses at Kansas Wesleyan Business College before his family moved west in 1905, Martin lacked a technical background. His first planes were built in collaboration with mechanics from his auto shop, working in a disused church building that Martin rented. In 1909 Martin made his first successful flight; by 1911 he numbered among the most famous of the "pioneer birdmen." Continued

Dashiell Hammett

... He had made up honor early in his life and stuck with his rules, fierce in the protection of them. In 1951 he went to jail because he and two other trustees of the bail bond fund of The Civil Rights Congress refused to reveal the names of the contributors to the fund. The truth was that Hammett had never been in the office of the Committee and did not know the name of a single contributor. The night before he was to appear in court, I said, "Why don't you say that you don't know the names?" "No," he said, "I can't say that." "Why?" "I don't know why." After we had a nervous silence he said, "I guess it has something to do with keeping my word, but I don't want to talk about that. Nothing much will happen, although I think we'll go to jail for a while, but you're not to worry because—" and then suddenly I couldn't understand him because the voice had dropped and the words were coming in a most untypical nervous rush. I said I couldn't hear him and he raised his voice and dropped his head. "I hate this damn kind of talk, but maybe I better tell you that if it were more than jail, if it were my life, I would give it for what I think democracy is and I don't let cops or judges tell me what I think democracy is." Then he went home to bed and the next day he went to jail. - Lillian Hellman

The Top Man at ‘Mad Men’ Isn’t Mad Anymore

(NYTimes) THERE is an almost Sisyphean sensation that comes from navigating the network of hallways, elevators and escalators at the Los Angeles Center Studios here that lead at last to the dimly lighted office of Matthew Weiner and asking him, point blank, what he plans for the new season of “Mad Men.” It is a futile feeling because, as any true acolyte knows, he is not going to give a straight answer to the question.
Even at this stage in the life cycle of his award-winning, television-landscape-reshaping period drama, Mr. Weiner — no mythological figure, just a grinning, 46-year-old mortal in a fleece pullover on a cool California morning — is too protective of his property to give up what he considers spoilers, which is essentially any information about the show at all.
And even though an excruciating 17-month hiatus will have elapsed between the last new “Mad Men” episode and its fifth-season premiere, scheduled for March 25 on AMC, Mr. Weiner, creator, lead producer and animating force, will not disclose any concrete details about the roguish 1960s advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) and his coterie of frustrated strivers and failed monogamists, or even the year in which the new season is set. Continued

Roger Ramjet

This was my favorite cartoon when I was four years old.

Torsk, Constellation will move to dry dock

(Sun) Baltimore's Inner Harbor will look a little bare this week after two of its premier attractions — the submarine Torsk and the 1854 sloop of war Constellation — are towed away for a month of repairs in dry dock. The Torsk will be the first to go as tugs move in around 9 a.m. Sunday to escort the World War II veteran down the harbor to the Sparrows Point Shipyard. The Constellation will follow at about 9 a.m. on Monday, according to Chris Rowsom, executive director of Historic Ships in Baltimore, part of the Living Classrooms Foundation and the ships' caretaker. Continued

Photo: 'The USS Torsk (SS-423) is docked at the Baltimore Maritime Museum and is one of several Tench Class submarines still located inside the United States. Nicknamed the "Galloping Ghost of the Japanese Coast"; the vessel is the only ship of the United States Navy to be named for a food fish of the North Atlantic.' Photo by stevehdc via Wikipedia, some rights reserved.

The Harrisburg Seven

The Harrisburg Seven were a group of religious anti-war activists led by Philip Berrigan. The "Seven" were Berrigan, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, Rev. Neil McLaughlin, Rev. Joseph Wenderoth, Eqbal Ahmed, Anthony Scoblick, and Mary Cain Scoblick.
The group became famous when they were unsuccessfully prosecuted for alleged criminal plots during the Vietnam War era. Six of the seven were Irish Catholic nuns or priests. Continued

Video: Army Chemical Center Edgewood Maryland 1950s

"This clip shows some of the activities of the Armys Edgewood Chemical Biological Center's (ECBC) in Edgewood, Maryland. The Center was established in 1917, during World War One. Since that time, the Center has expanded its mission to include biological materials and emerges today as the nation's premier authority on chemical and biological defense. In 1917, the Bureau of Mines established the War Gas Investigations at American University in Washington, D.C. President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that designated Gunpowder Neck, MD, as the site for the first chemical shell filling plant in the United States. The Bureau of Mines produced the first 25,000 gas masks for U.S. Army soldiers during World War I. In 1920, All chemical warfare functions were centralized at the Edgewood Arsenal, including the CWS chemical school, research division, and gas mask production factory. For more information on the history of the Center and its current activities, go to http://www.edgewood.army.mil/ . This clip is from the 1950s episode, the Unseen Weapon, from the The Big Picture documentary television program which ran on the American Broadcasting Company from 1953 to 1959. The program consisted of documentary films produced by the United States Army Signal Corps Army Pictorial Service." Link

Sidney Gottlieb

(Wikipedia) Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American military psychiatrist and chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. ... In 1951, Sidney Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Continued

7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio

(Slate) The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology that, because of its particular place in the spectrum, can bounce off the atmosphere and travel across continents. The FBI's criminal complaint paints a picture of stateside spies hunkered down in front of their radios, year after year, in homes in Montclair, N.J.; Yonkers, N.Y.; Boston; and Seattle, furiously filling spiral notebooks with "apparently random columns of numbers" broadcast from the motherland. Continued

Paul Harvey in cahoots with J. Edgar Hoover?

(Washington Post) ... Harvey tried to be of service beyond the FBI as well, writing in 1956 to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who had made a name for himself by hunting down alleged Communists in the federal bureaucracy, with tips about "known Reds" at a Texas Air Force base. A senior FBI official added a handwritten notation to ensure that Harvey's letter not be distributed outside the bureau's top brass: "No dissemination since identity of Harvey cannot be revealed." Continued

Gen. Lew Allen, Who Lifted Veil on Security Agency, Is Dead at 84

(NYTimes) Gen. Lew Allen Jr., who held influential positions in United States military and scientific spheres, including chief of staff of the Air Force, but who gained the widest attention as the first National Security Agency director to discuss the agency’s ultrasecret work publicly, died Monday in Potomac Falls, Va. Continued

Image: U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia

Shadows of Russia: Wednesdays in January on TCM

"Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Russia captured the imagination of the world — and its mysterious, exotic allure continues today. Hollywood has exploited this fascination for decades with movies that portray Russian history and attitudes with varying degrees of authenticity. The collapse of the Tsarist regime was a perfect subject for melodramas portraying the confl ict, tragedy and romantic nostalgia of a bygone era. Parodies of the severe Soviet lifestyle during the late 1930s and early ’40s were followed by pro- Russia propaganda films made in obvious support of our World War II allies. As anti-Communist sentiment arose in the U.S. after WWII, the Cold War inspired a series of cautionary tales of infiltration along with a whole new genre of political thrillers." Continued

Photo: Turner Classic Movies

Cold War Museum Finds a Home

(HistoryNet) Francis Gary Powers, Jr., the Founder of The Cold War Museum (http://www.coldwar.org/), announced today that the museum had found a physical home. The Cold War Museum will lease a modest size two story building and secure storage facility at Vint Hill, located in Fauquier County, Virginia, less than 30 miles from Washington Dulles International Airport. The lease was signed on December 1, 2009 with the Vint Hill Economic Development Authority, the owner of the 695-acre former US Army communications base.
Powers is the son of Francis Gary Powers, a CIA pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960. The senior Powers was held in Soviet custody until 1962, when he was traded for Rudolph Abel, a Soviet KGB agent who had been captured by the United States. Continued

Photos: Nightening, Library of Congress

The Easy Rider Road Trip: Retracing the Path of the Iconic Movie on Its 40th Anniversary

(Slate) ... Film enthusiasts my age had warned me to expect a film with long, often dull, experimental patches and stoner vagaries. When I finally got around to watching Easy Rider, I discovered those warnings weren't entirely unfounded. But I also discovered a more complex and sour movie than the one I'd imagined. More an elegy for a generation that never got where it wanted to go than a celebration of that generation's superiority, it pits hopefulness against resignation and sets the battle on a lovingly photographed stretch of the United States. Easy Rider hit theaters with a memorable tag line: "A man who went looking for America. And couldn't find it anywhere." Star, producer, and co-writer Peter Fonda hated that line, and rightly so. It's really the story of two men—Wyatt and Billy, played by Fonda and co-writer and director Dennis Hopper—who went looking for America and found it everywhere. They just didn't find a place for themselves. Continued

Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols

(NYTBR) ... Barbara Kingsolver’s breathtaking new novel, “Lacuna,” follows this quiet, dreamy boy, Harrison William Shepherd, from 1929 to 1951. When we first meet him, he’s 12 years old, living at a hacienda on Isla Pixol with his self-dramatizing mother, Salomé, both of them petrified by the howling monkeys in the trees above, which they believe to be carnivorous demons. “You had better write all this in your notebook,” Salomé tells Shepherd, “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.” Continued

Photo: "Portrait of Diego Rivera and Frida [Kahlo] Rivera" (Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress).

Schabowski Shrugged: The unanswered phone calls and misunderstood memos that helped bring down the Berlin Wall

(Slate) Too often, we see history as inevitable. What was had to be, the culmination of seemingly tectonic forces. We tend to forget that history is also defined by the logic of human messiness. Happenstance, chance, even accident always loom large in grand events. Continued

Photo: Berlin Wall, 1961 (Toni Frissell/Library of Congress).

Department of Defense Family Shelter Designs from 1962

"I'd really like to find some mid-century purists out there who bought a house complete with its own bomb shelter. Or even better, a homeowner who built their own to complete the clean, cool, cold war experience. If you are an aspiring mod freak of the latter, perhaps you could use some plans. Here they are:" Continued

William Safire's Finest Speech

(Gawker) - ... Here is the speech he drafted for Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon!
It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which President Nixon had to explain to a nation that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were going to die on the moon. Continued

Found: An Emblematic Cold Warrior

(NYTimes) - The author Neil Sheehan has the metabolism and work habits of an extremely patient bat. He stirs around midday, starts writing before dinner, but doesn’t really get airborne till midnight. He snatches some of his best and clearest thoughts around 4 a.m., after which, too wound up to sleep, he might go out and stroll around the neighborhood. He does this week after week, month after month, without hibernation. His previous book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1989, took him 16 years to finish. His new one, “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon,” which comes out Tuesday, is a history of the arms race and of American efforts to create a nuclear stalemate with Russia. It took 15 years, so he’s getting faster, but not much. Continued

Photo: U.S. Air Force

1959: The Year Everything Changed

(NYTBR) - The image of the 1950s as placid, suburban and conformist is easily scratched away with the touch of a fingernail. Over the past 15 years or so, historians and writers have revealed that many of the big-bang explosions in politics, culture and technology of the 1960s were rooted in little bangs from the previous decade. Continued