Photography – Tidbits and Timemachines

Apologies for being MIA for months and months. I promise, I will be back in the near future to finish revisiting The Bell Jar with you and hopefully moving on to another great novel. In the meantime, I wanted to post a quick, fun, yet useful, tidbit.

Have you ever gotten a stain on your shirt and thought, well now, how on earth am I going go get that out? Well, look no further. I have been there. While walking my dog today, I tried to do a good deed. I picked up a McDonald’s wrapper that was lying in our neighborhood park parking lot to throw away. Unbeknownst to me, the wrapper had a package of honey dipping sauce with it. I ended up slopping honey all over one of the gloves I was wearing. As soon as I got back home, I grabbed a handy little pamphlet I inherited from my Grandma, entitled Housecleaning Hints. It has tons of useful information right at your pre-internet fingertips on how to keep your entire house, including drapes, davenport/sofa fabrics, and apparel clean.

The closest thing to getting honey out on this list is to soak it in boiling water (fruit stains). I used very hot water, and crossed my fingers. For other trouble shooting ideas on stains, give this a gander:

This particular book was put out by Procter & Gamble in 1931. American companies in the early to mid-20th century were known for giving out free publications as a way to corner more of their share of the market. The General Foods Cooperation did it with Jell-O. Calumet and Clabber Girl baking powders had their own free cookbooks. And, have you ever noticed that General Mills always insists you use Gold Medal All-Purpose Flour or Swans Down Cake Flour in every Betty Crocker baking recipe? It’s a not so clever way to make more money.

Procter & Gamble is quite the conglomerate of businesses these days. While items such as Chipso Flakes and Star Washing Powder have long since landed in the graveyard of bygone products, Procter & Gamble’s modern portfolio ranges from Pringles to Mr. Clean to Gain to Tide to Crest toothpaste, not to mention 17 other big names. They really are a force in the American logo landscape.

Coffee Break – LIFE Magazine, April 19, 1943

16,000,000 military personnel were deployed during the span of WWII.¹

LIFE Magazine excelled at capturing candid photographs. There was a phenomenal staff photographer on their payroll. His name was Alfred Eisenstaedt. You can learn more about Alfred’s life here. He was based out of LIFE’s offices in NYC. His most famous photograph might be the VJ Day kiss in Times Square. Photographs he took during the WWII years were often weighty and important. He wasn’t one to shy away from the gritty side of life.

For a quick coffee break, I’d like to share some lesser known photographs he took. They were featured in LIFE Magazine’s April 19, 1943 issue. While this coffee break may not be uplifting, I feel these photographs are important illustrations, encapsulating the daily reality for thousands upon thousands of US citizens. Consider the time these photos were distributed. The United States had been to war for two solid years, with no end in sight.

The pictures speak for themselves. With each one, I wonder what happened to these people. The ones anxiously waiting to board and go off to war. A war they might have already seen, but most likely not. This very well could have been their first deployment. Did any of them really know what they were heading off to? How could they? What of the ones they left behind? These pictures sadden me.

The new bride from the cover photo². Will she ever see her groom again?

The new mother, wondering if her baby will ever really know its father? Will he be coming home to see the baby grown up?

Loved ones nervous as to what the future holds.

Tears people can’t contain. Emotions running so high.

Nurses enlisting to do what they feel is the right thing.

This one hits me in the gut. The caption is so depressing.

This overhead shot Eisenstaedt took shows the scene from a bird’s eye view.

And this was just one day, out of 1,365 days that the US was at war. Just one day at one station in the country. Even though the numbers being deployed fluctuated from day to day, the scene was the same. Nervousness, sadness, weariness, loneliness, and headache settled in like a fog.

I simply cannot even imagine what this generation went through.

Gnam, Carl. “U.S. Involvement in WWII: How (and How Much) the Military Grew.” Warfare History Network, 26 June 2017, warfarehistorynetwork.com/us-involvement-in-wwii-how-the-military-grew/.
‌ ↩︎
The picture is of Lieutenant John Hancock Spear and his wife Ester. Page 20 of this issue of LIFE says they were married for four days before he had to go off to war. ↩︎

Tag: Photography

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