January 16, 1942 - The Death of a Hollywood Legend

A significant and very sad anniversary.

Seventy-five years ago today, in the early morning hours of January 16, 1942, actress Carole Lombard was tragically killed when the TWA DST airplane she was traveling on, crashed into Potosi Mountain, 32 miles southwest of Las Vegas.  She was returning to her home in Hollywood, California after attending a war bond rally in her native Indiana.  All twenty-two passengers on board lost their lives, including Lombard's mother Bess Peters, her close friend Otto Winkler and fifteen Army servicemen.

The search and recovery efforts were based out of the small desert town of Goodsprings, Nevada.  I visited Goodsprings as part of a cross-country roadtrip during the summer of 2015.  It is famous for the Pioneer Saloon, which pays homage to Lombard and actor Clark Gable, to whom she was married at the time of her death.  Potosi Mountain can be seen in the distance from the saloon's Carole Lombard Terrace.

Biographer Robert Matzen has written what I consider to be the definitive chronicle of Lombard's life and death - Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3.  

Henry J. Kaiser - Out to Launch

You can learn a lot from cartoons.

Case in point: the 1944 Warner Bros. cartoon The Weakly Reporter.  This particular Merrie Melody was a send-up of life on the home front during World War II, and featured numerous situations and references that are near indecipherable to many modern viewers.  One must literally reach to the bookshelf or search engine to even be able to understand the meaning and context of many of the short's gags.

The closing sequence of the cartoon pokes fun at the very rapid production of warships at American shipyards at the height of the war.  The closing shot of the film zooms in on a small shack in a shipyard.  A sign on the door says "HENRY J. KAISER - PRIVATE."  A smaller sign, hanging from a nail, proclaims, "BACK IN 2 MINUTES - OUT TO LAUNCH."  So of course it begs the question, who is, or was, Henry J. Kaiser?

Kaiser was a very well know American industrialist throughout much of the mid-20th century.  Prior to World War II, his construction firm worked on such high profile projects as the Hoover Dam and the Grand Coulee Dam.  He began building ships just prior to the war.  He became famous in the field for being a master of mass production.  According to Wikipedia:

He became most famous for the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California during World War II, adopting production techniques that generated cargo ships on the average of one every 45 days. These ships became known as Liberty ships. He became world renowned when his teams built a ship in 4 days. The keel for the 10,500 ton Robert E. Peary was laid on Sunday, November 8, 1942, and the ship was launched in California from the Richmond Shipyard #2 on Thursday, November 12, four days and 15½ hours later. The previous record had been 10 days for the Liberty ship Joseph M. Teal.

His most famous and lasting legacy is likely Kaiser Permanente, considered to be the first health maintenance organization.  Kaiser passed away in 1967.

Windows to the Past: Leslie Brooks at the Hollywood Canteen

Columbia Studios starlet and pin-up girl Leslie Brooks gets help from a serviceman outside the soon-to-open Hollywood Canteen in this photograph from fall of 1942.  The gentleman is Yeoman Seymour Rice of the Coast Guard.

The Hollywood Canteen was located on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood.  It operated during the war years from 1942 to 1945 and featured free food and entertainment for servicemen and servicewomen.  The Canteen was the brainchild of stars Bette Davis and John Garfield, and they enlisted the entire entertainment industry to donate labor, materials and services to construct and operate the venue.  By the time it closed on Thanksgiving Day 1945, it had served nearly three million military personnel.  In 1944, Warner Brothers released the film Hollywood Canteen which drew inspiration from the actual nightclub.

Brooks was twenty years old when she signed with Columbia Pictures in 1942.  Her career in Hollywood lasted less than a decade.  She played secondary roles for Columbia before being leaving the studio in 1948.  Her personal life at the time was marred by a troubled marriage to ex-marine and struggling actor Donald Anthony Shay that ended in a divorce and a bitter custody fight over their daughter Leslie Victoria.  She would go on to marry land developer Russ Vincent in 1950 and effectively retire from show business.

Can War Marriages Be Made to Work?

War marriages were very much the stuff of Hollywood romance during World War II.  The most shining example would likely be the 1945 MGM classic The Clock, starring Judy Garland and Robert Walker as a young woman and a soldier who meet and fall in love over the course of a few days and quickly rush to the alter (or in their specific case, a New York City  Justice of the Peace.)

There was certainly a reality behind these whirlwind movie courtships, so much so that the War Department produced a pamphlet in 1944 urging soldiers to demonstrate caution and good judgment when considering any such hurried decisions involving near spontaneous matrimony.  The 32-page booklet was entitled Can War Marriages Be Made to Work? and was classified as War Department Education Manual EM30.  It was part of the G.I. Roundtable series, a series of pamphlets that were also designed to be the basis of potential discussion groups attended by servicemen.

The pamphlet quickly poses the question, "Why War Marriages?"  The answer:

Many war marriages are hasty marriages. Many are made while men are on leave or furlough. Often the time of the marriage is determined by the approaching end of a short leave.

Military promptness and the speed-up of work in war plants tend to hasten marriage. Entrance into service is an abrupt change Of status. Why not, some argue, make an abrupt change from single to married status? If war can change life overnight, why not make the change more complete by marrying? If the Army is going to snatch you away from civilian life, why not strengthen your ties with that life by leaving a wife behind you? And for many a girl who watches the boys going away from the home town, the "dates" of the hectic hours before they go may seem the last chance for marriage.

Courtship, no matter how disguised, is competition. To the soldier marriage offers, among other advantages, a device to ward off the competition of rivals while he is away.

In war nothing is certain but uncertainty. Even an unwise marriage may give a feeling of certainty for a moment. Unconsciously it may seem to offer an escape from doubts and confusion.

Many war marriages come about through loneliness or fear of loneliness. A soldier returns to his home town on leave; his old friends are gone; many things have changed. Or a girl takes a job away from home and is separated from her family and friends. Both to the girl away from home and to the soldier on leave, marriage is an intimate relationship that seems to offer escape from loneliness. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—if there is nobody else. And there may be nobody else in time to prevent a marriage that might never have taken place under normal conditions.

Though very much rooted in the culture of the 1940s, Can War Marriages Be Made to Work? provides some surprisingly progressive advice by way of its concept of the 50-50 marriage:

The "fifty-fifty" marriage, the kind in which neither husband nor wife orders the other around but in which they share equal authority and parallel responsibility, seems to have the best chance of success. There are persons who like to be bossed and others who enjoy bossing. If such individuals happen to pair off, the marriage may be a success. But in general American women are not by temperament or by training inclined to play the role of door mat in marriage any more than American men.

In fact, a couple's attitude toward equality in marriage relationship may be as important as the actual division of authority and responsibility between them. One recent study showed that husbands opposed to rights for women were somewhat less likely to be happily married than those more tolerant on the subject of equal rights and responsibilities for women. Many happily married couples assert that a "fifty-fifty" meeting is not enough—that each must be ready to go more than half way and provide, -in a "sixty-sixty" arrangement, a wide area for compromise.

Windows to the Past: The Reality of Rosie

Rosie the Riveter has long been the symbolic icon of women working in American industry during World War II.  This stunning color photograph from June 1942 showcases a real life study of that homefront dynamic.  The unidentified woman in the picture is working at a North American Aviation, Inc. plant in California.  The picture was taken by photographer Alfred T. Palmer who was at the time working for the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection.  

Photo from the Library of Congress Prints and Photograph collection.

Americans! Share the Meat

In this era of Double Quarter Pounders With Cheese (McDonalds) and 2/3 lb. Monster Thickburgers (Hardees), it's interesting to reflect back on more conscientious and certainly leaner times.  This World War II era public service poster was produced in 1942 by the War Information Office and  prepared in cooperation with Foods Requirement Committee of the War Production Board. 

Image courtesy of Northwestern University Library.