I am going to begin a series of blogs that have to do with December 1941…..These pages will bring back memories for some and surprises for others.  One will realize quickly….things change sometimes, but sometimes they remain the same.

NOW PLAYING……

THE BIG HOUSES

Astor…Broadway at 45th……..The. Chocolate Soldier with Rise Stevens and Nelson Eddy

Palace…Broadway at 47th…Weekend in Havana with Alice Faye, John Payne, Carmen Miranda

Radio City Musical Hall…6th Ave. at 50…The Men in Her Life with LorettaYoung and Conrad Veidt

 

GIFT IDEAS…….

Alfred Dunhill of London…Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth

“Thumbs Up” for Gloves and Handbags from England…Britain delivers the goods. Dunhill exclusives are traditionally superior.  Ladies’ gloves from $3.50; handbags from $5.00 and in calf $15.00, $32.00 in alligator.   Men’s gloves from 4.00

Bayberry Mist. A cologne refreshing as sun and wind across the dunes…gay and fragrant.  One half pint…Christmas packaged..$1.65 tax included at Personal Appearance, Inc., Provincetown, Cape Cod, Mass.

Chateau Frontenac, A Canadian Pacific Hotel in friendly old Quebec….6 day Christmas Weekend  12/23 to 29    $76.00   Price includes round trip rail fare, lower berth. hotel room, and meals.

7th Park Avenue…Housekeeping apartments…south exposure apartments …1 & 3 rooms, kitchen, and bath.  Hotel services available.  $810–$1150   Regent 4-6600

 

WAR!!!!!!

War came to us with the ball in Brooklyn’s possession, on the Giant’s 45 yard line. “Japanese bombs have fallen Hawaii and the Philippine Islands”, a hurried voice broke in to announce. “Keep tuned to this station for further details.  We now return you to the Polo Grounds”.   No more than that.  Twisting the dial, we got other voices:  Jingle Bells for example.

Gradually, all the voices—in reality one voice, the placid, rather foolish voice of America on a Sunday afternoon—took up the incredible story from the Pacific.  It came in slowly, disjointed, fragmentary, contradicting itself now and then.  A man in a private plane over Diamond Head, just flying for fun, shot down by two planes coming in from the sea, with the rising sun on their wings.  Japanese parachute troops dropping on the beach at Waikiki; three hundred and fifty men killed by a direct hit on the barracks at Hickam Field, and a ship capsized and burning in Pearl Harbor; a transport loaded with lumber torpedoed and sunk a thousand miles west of San Francisco; an unidentified ship, probably an aircraft carrier,shelling the forts at Honolulu; fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty planes bombing Oahu; and all over this country, in Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Dallas, the commentators talking rapidly but evasively, not yet knowing what to say about a catastrophe as sudden and preposterous as something contrived by Orson Welles, not yet able to believe that war had at last made the full circle of the world in Sunday morning.

We write this still not fully understanding anything very clearly ourself.

(from the New Yorker  12/13/41)