“Movies teach us all sorts of things: how to aspire, whom to fantasize about, (all those princes will come), how to smoke, dress, walk into a room (always like Bette Davis). They teach us whom to love and how, as well as the ostensible necessity of sacrificing love along with careers. . .…
Happy August to you all who have been following Jane Hall’s story and other posts. Please disregard the much older post you just received about Poplar Springs history as it was not supposed to be resent. I simply looked it up for some info. But there is news. Poplar Springs has a new owner…
Jane Hall’s experiences in Arizona and California before she became an orphan in 1930 did not expose her to as many people from other nations as New York City. Although her guardians introduced her to an exclusive social world, when she went to art school at The Cooper Union on Manhattan’s Lower East Side,…
The November 21, 2022, New Yorker cover, “Low Tide” by Barry Blitt, features a huge grey elephant on a red surfboard looking less than confident about the future. How different his mood from a fellow pachyderm that appeared on the December 31, 1938, cover of the magazine, a gleeful pink elephant by Rea Irvin (1881-1972).…
As many of you know, for quite a while I’ve been reading magazines published in the 1930s and 1940s; I’ve been interested in the values that women’s magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, imparted to their women readers. In those days, magazines were filled with articles about current events as well as fiction by…
Dorothy Thompson on the cover of Time magazine, June 12, 1939 She was one of the most celebrated journalists of her era. On June 12, 1939, she graced the cover of Time magazine which called her “‘the second most popular and influential woman in the country behind Eleanor Roosevelt.’” And Dorothy Thompson…
For my followers, please excuse the delay in posting this past 8 weeks. I’m well on the way to recovery from a fractured right wrist. But there is interesting news to report about an oil painting Jane Hall did while she was in art school at Cooper Union (1932-1935). It has now found a…
It all began when I sang parts of a grizzly ballad to my grandsons who are into gory stuff at almost 7 and 9. We wondered where the verses came from, and what the rest of the lyrics were. I wasn’t even sure how to spell the name of the Wratten family, but the tune…
“What interests you most in this Cosmopolitan world of today?” the magazine asked in September 1937. The answer could be found in another question: Is a person’s social standing to be “gauged by his complexion”? Columnist, cartoonist, and frequent contributor to the New Yorker and several other magazines, Weare Holbrook (d.1985), tackles this subject– and…
As I flipped through old Cosmopolitans from the days when the magazine introduced critical national issues to its young, largely female readers, an article from the Oct 1940 issue jumped out at me.* It was written by White House correspondent John Jay Daly and author Donald E. Kehoe. In light of our current battles about…
In 1939 Jane Hall was hard at work as a screenwriter at MGM. Eight months later she would be on the cover of Cosmopolitan. I collected dozens of old Cosmos while working on Such Mad Fun. And though it does not contain any of Jane’s stories, the February 1939 issue of the magazine is fascinating. The…
One focus of this blog is life in the 1930s to 1950s– as seen through popular culture. In 1938, the editor of Good Housekeeping, William F. Bigelow, a big fan of Jane Hall’s work, put together twelve articles as “The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book.” Targeting hundreds of thousands of university and college students, as well…
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