Even during the 1973 energy crisis, President Nixon kept the air conditioning turned up in the summer so that he could have a fire going year round in the Oval Office.
It’s All Fun and Games
I just spent way too much time researching early playgrounds. It’s totally fascinating.
According to this video at the New York Times, narrated by Parks and Rec commissioner Adrian Benepe, the first municipal park to be equipped as a playground was built in Seward Park, on New York’s Lower East Side, in 1903. Part of the reason it was built was to get kids off the streets. Before playgrounds, kids died on a regular basis getting run over by streetcars and horses as they played in the streets. And at that time, the lower part of Manhattan was crammed with people, mostly newly-arrived immigrants who worked long hours, and their children were often unsupervised.
Here are some images of kids playing in the streets:
And swimming in whatever water was available—whether it be this fountain in Chicago:
Or this dock on the Hudson River in New York:
This is one of my favorite Lewis Hine images, showing kids from a Lower East Side neighborhood playing baseball:
And here’s a fascinating video called “East Side Urchins bathing in a fountain” from 1903. From what I can tell, it appears to have been a staged and directed short film, produced for Thomas Edison’s company. It’s only a little over a minute long and worth a click-through.
So cities began building places for kids to play. Below is a collection of images of early twentieth century playgrounds. Some of them look pretty fun, while others make my mother’s heart quail at the harrowingly dangerous equipment. (Notice, for instance, the little guys in the picture directly below who’ve climbed to the top of that swingset):
East Side Children, 1910- 1915, Library of Congress LC-DIG-ggbain-13995
New York City – children on the street: boys playing checkers in the street, 1908 – 1915 Library of Congress LC-USZ62-71201
City Children Library of Congress LC-USZ62-71330
NYC Boys swimming at dock 1908 Library of Congress LC-USZ62-41531
Lewis Hine, Children Playing Baseball on the Lower East Side, NYPL Digital gallery Image ID: 416562 Wading pool Armour Square, Chicago 1909 via Wikimedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Armour_Square.jpg
Angel Guardian Orphanage 1914 Chicago, courtesy of http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com/2008/10/angel-guardian-orphanage-chicago-1914.html
The “giant stride,” courtesy of: http://preservationinpink.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/giant-stride.jpg
Carl Mydans, 1935: Playtime, Radburn New Jersey http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1997000656/PP/
Rings and Poles, Bronx Park 1911 Library Of Congress LC-B2- 2236-6 [P&P] LOT 10832-2
New York Playground, 1910- 1915, Library of Congress LC-DIG-ggbain-14007
New York Playground 1910- 1915, Library of Congress LC-DIG-ggbain-14004
Summer on A children’s city playground, 1926 Library of Congress LC-USZ62-47700
merry-go-round Library of Congress between 1918 and 1920LC-DIG-npcc-00292
Marjory Collins, 1942, Greenbelt, Maryland. Federal housing project. Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8d20979/
Seattle children’s playground, 1909 via widimedia (detail) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_-_children%27s_playgrounds_1909.jpg
On the Up Side . . .
During the 19th century, bedrooms that were papered with poisonous, arsenical-green wallpaper tended not to have bedbugs.
Source: Bill Bryson, At Home, page 315
Nose Job
The Byzantine emperor, Justinian II, was sent into exile in 695 after having his nose cut off. In 705 he reclaimed the throne, wearing a gold nose.
War Hero
Hitler invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939, and the Nazis continued their sweep through Eastern Europe throughout the fall of 1939. Just as this was happening, a Japanese diplomat named Chiune Sugihara reported to his new job as Vice-Consul of the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania’s temporary capital of Kaunas.
The tiny country of Lithuania was situated right between Germany and the Soviet Union. (Those two powers were not yet at war, but soon would be.) No sooner had Sugihara arrived than Jewish refugees from Poland began streaming into Lithuania, most without money or belongings, and all bearing horrifying tales of Nazi atrocities.
They joined the Lithuanian Jews, and all grew increasingly desperate to flee the Nazis. But it wasn’t easy to flee. In a shameful chapter of Western European and American history, many countries would not issue visas allowing Jews sanctuary.
But then a loophole was discovered. Desperate Jewish families learned of two Dutch Caribbean islands, Curacao and Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), that did not require formal entrance visas. The Dutch Consul had permission to stamp Jewish passports, allowing people entry into these territories. But to get there, they had to travel overland, across the Soviet Union, and then over to Japan. The Soviets insisted that anyone travelling east across their country have transit from Japan pre-approved before they would be allowed to leave Lithuania.
On June 15th, 1940, the Soviets invaded Lithuania. By July, they ordered all foreign embassies to leave Kaunas. Almost every consul left, but Sugihara asked for a 20-day extension. The extension was granted.
Sugihara was well aware that Jewish refugees needed Japanese transit visas to accompany their Soviet exit visas. But he did not have the authority to grant them visas, without permission from the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo.
Hundreds of refugees thronged to the Japanese Consulate, desperate for visas. Sugihara wrote to Tokyo for permission three times, and three times was firmly denied permission to issue visas.
After discussing it with his wife and children, Sugihara chose to defy his superiors. He began to grant visas anyway. This was a huge act of disobedience—a direct violation of his orders–and it put him and his family in grave danger. For 29 days, from July 31st to Aug 28, 1940, he and his wife sat and signed visas by hand.
With Japanese visas in hand, the refugees were permitted by Soviet officials to travel to Moscow, and then via trans-Siberian railway to the eastern coast of the Soviet Union and on to Japan.
According to witnesses, Sugihara was still writing out visas as his train pulled out of the station. He threw them out the window to those desperately waiting on the platform, and then tossed his visa stamp to a refugee, who was able to save more Jews.
What became of him? Sugihara was dismissed from his position for unspecified but suspicious reasons in 1945, and held a series of menial jobs for the next few decades. In 1985, he was finally recognized for the hero he was, having saved at least 6,000 (by some accounts as many as 10,000) people from the hands of the Nazis, and receiving Israel’s highest honor.
Image: Chiune Sugihara via Wikimedia
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/sugihara/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/sugihara.html
Food Fight
In 1805, half of the Harvard student body was suspended after rioting against the awful food in the dorms.
Model Citizens
The models for the painting, “American Gothic” meant to depict a farmer and his spinster daughter, were actually Grant Wood’s sister and their family dentist.
Blowin in the Wind
Around the turn of the last century, women used their vacuum cleaners as blow dryers, attaching the hose to the end that blew out warm air.
Down and Out at Downton
Fans of Downton Abbey, I wonder if you remember this scene from episode 8, Season 2, when many people at Downton are falling ill with Spanish flu (the year being 1918).
As one after another person staggers away from the dinner table with fever, Maggie Smith, as the Dowager Countess, remarks: “Wasn’t there a masked ball in Paris? When cholera broke out? Half the guests were dead before they left the ballroom.”
Her son, Lord Grantham, replies, “Thank you, Mamá. That’s cheered us up no end.”
The writers have done their history homework. The Parisian ball to which she’s referring happened during a deadly cholera outbreak in 1832, which claimed at least 19,000 lives. As recorded by German poet, Heinrich Heine, cholera struck suddenly at the society ball, where masked entertainers were performing.
“Suddenly the merriest of the harlequins felt a chill in his legs, took off his mask, and to the amazement of all revealed a violet-blue face,” Heine wrote. “It was soon discovered that this was no joke; the laughter died, and several wagon loads were driven directly from the ball to the Hotel-Dieu, the main hospital, where they arrived in their gaudy fancy dress and promptly died, too….”
On a related note–my son was reading Poe’s Masque of the Red Death for school, and the plot line sounds eerily similar to what happened at the Paris ball. In Poe’s story, masked revelers suddenly begin dying of a fictitious disease, which he describes as “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores.” The story was published in 1842—ten years after the Paris ball Heine wrote about. Poe may have modeled the Red Death after tuberculosis, as pretty much everyone close to Poe had expired from that disease. And yet, it also sounds a lot like cholera. There was an outbreak of cholera in Poe’s hometown of Baltimore in 1831, and he can’t have failed to witness its ravages up close.
As we nonfiction writers like to say, you can’t make this stuff up.
Irena Sendler
Along with so many others, I’ve been haunted by the story of the teacher in Newtown who risked her life to save her students. Here’s the story of another brave woman that I wish more people knew about. Her name was Irena Sendlerowa.
Known also by the shortened surname Sendler, Irena was born in 1910 into a Roman Catholic family in a town fifteen miles southeast of Warsaw. Her father was a doctor. Most of his patients were Jewish.
The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and in 1942 herded 450,000 Jews into a sixteen-block area that became known as the Warsaw Ghetto, without food or medicine. A seven foot wall was erected. Thousands began dying of starvation and disease even before the Nazis began deporting them to the death camps.
Sendler obtained a fake ID and passed herself off as a nurse, securing permission to travel in and out of the Ghetto. She saved as many as five hundred Jews before she even joined the Polish underground and became head of the children’s bureau, set up to save Jewish children. With the help of a group of close friends that she recruited, Irena rescued Jewish children, creating false ID papers which kids had to commit to memory (birth, baptism, family history) forged by priests and officials in the Social Services Department.
She smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins. Young babies were sedated so they wouldn’t cry. She trained a dog to bark as she passed through Nazi checkpoints, which drowned out the sound of any crying child.
What is so very haunting about her story is how difficult it must have been to convince Jewish parents to part with their children, with no guarantee that the child would be kept safe, and then to find Christian families willing to shelter the children, risking execution of their entire family. According to this PBS website, many escapes had to be timed to the second. Older children were drilled to memorize their new false identities. The city was crawling with Gestapo on the lookout for Jews that had escaped from the ghetto. “Any child on the street could be stopped and interrogated. If he was unable to recite a Catholic prayer he could be killed.”
Irena was caught by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured in an effort to get her to reveal the names of her fellow resistance fighters. Despite having her arms and legs broken, she withstood the torture. As she was on her way to her execution, a Gestapo officer accepted a bribe from her resistance comrades to help her escape. He added her name to a list of executed prisoners and released her. She was never again able to walk without crutches.
In all, she helped to smuggle out as many as 2500 children. She kept a record of their names in glass jars, which she buried beneath a tree in the yard. After the war, she tried to reunite the kids with their parents, although many of their families had died.
In a letter just before her death to the Polish Senate, she wrote: “Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.”