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Same As It Ever Was
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 — This is a 1:23 scene from Keeper of the Flame, a George Cukor film made in 1942, from a screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart. Katherine Hepburn plays the widow of Robert Forrest; Spencer Tracy is a former war correspondent who had planned to write Forrest’s biography. Seventy years later things still work the same way. In case of technical difficulties, here is a transcript; Hepburn is speaking: The morning of the accident I stole his keys, came here, and opened this. [Opens the door to a large cupboard.] This is what I found: the key to Robert Forrest’s fascist organization. …
Printing on the Wooden Common Press
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 — Jack Williams, of Effingham, New Hampshire, demonstrating his wooden common press at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Friday, October 24, 2008. The demonstration was part of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s Portsmouth Literary Festival. Jack built the press himself, from plans drawn by Clinton Sisson, of the Smithsonian Institute. Sisson’s plans were drawn up from careful measurements taken from a press in the Smithsonian’s collection which was once used by Benjamin Franklin. The gentleman wearing a black baseball hat at the start of the clip is Harold Whitehouse, a former linotype operator for the Portsmouth Herald. [We could …
Surely It’s Just an Oversight
Thursday, May 3, 2012 — The following item ran in our “Admiral Fowle’s Piscataqua River Tidal Guide (Not for Navigational Purposes)” for this date: “1945 — The RAF bombs the German ship Cap Arcona in the mistaken belief it’s carrying SS officers. Of 4,500 concentration camp inmates aboard, only 350 survive.” For some reason this debacle, like 1944’s Exercise Tiger, is rarely recalled by armchair generals and talk show chickenhawks.
When E.F. Hutton Confesses …
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 — The following item ran in our “Admiral Fowle’s Piscataqua River Tidal Guide (Not for Navigational Purposes)” for this date: “1985 — E.F. Hutton, the brokerage company, pleads guilty to 2,000 federal charges; agrees to cough up $10 million.” In the early 1980s, federal prosecutors nailed E.F. Hutton & Co. on a massive, company-wide check-kiting scheme. Twenty-five senior officers were implicated, and three could have gone to the slammer, but the Justice Department let them off with a fine that William Safire — no socialist he — said was the equivalent of “putting a parking ticket on the Brink’s getaway car.” …