The Years Without a Santa Clause: Soft Lite Lenses (1944)

What says Christmas more than a pair of drugstore cheaters? Yep, buy cheap non-prescription glasses for granny, that'll go over like a sack of coal. Apparently they were big once, they had offices in New York, Toronto, and London and now they're gone from the face of the Earth. Maybe they only serve elves?

The Years Without a Santa - Big Yank (1944)

Now Santa's gone all lumberjack. It's like the guy on the Brawny paper towel package put on a Santa mask and hat. And the message, well nothing to do with the holiday. No product pimping. No encouragement to buy. Just...the war - always the war.

I've started to miss those Whitman ads. Chocolate fell victim to rationing along with bacon, rubber, gasoline, and new cars. Everything became preserve, reuses, and recycle. Everything was channeling into the war effort.

French Lick in 1944

Sometimes insomnia leads you to interesting discoveries. Tonight, after several hours of fruitless pillow surfing I dug into the Life Magazine archives to while away the midnight hours and I came across a 1944 article about the French Lick spa, what we currently call the West Baden Hotel. Back in the days of World War II, French Lick was slowly passing into obscurity. It'd been a Midwestern hot spot during the Jazz Age, but by black '44 the "It Girls" who'd rouged their knees and caught the midday train from West Baden to the Kentucky Derby had joined the varicose vein club and were more interested in Pluto Springs' purported ability to maintain regularity than catching the eye of the fellows.

Even the staff looks a bit past prime. Hard eyed fellows who looked like they belonged at the sort of sanitarium where the guests aren't allowed to leave whenever they want. It wouldn't be long until the statue of Pluto would be gone from the entryway and the state would be looking for someone to take on the tremendous job of maintaining the hotel and its sprawling grounds.

Eventually a group of Jesuits from Chicago took over the hotel and its grounds. Sometime in the fifties they poured concrete into the springs rather than maintain them, but even with the help of God they couldn't keep the place up. Today all that remains of their attempt is a tiny Jesuit graveyard on the property. It'd take a multi-millionaire with an eye for historic preservation to bring the hotel back to something like it's original glory. I guess money goes where angels can't afford to tread.

Anyway, it was nice to see the place as it used to be - even if it wasn't at its prime. A glimpse of a simpler time whose days were numbered back when this article ran. An ocean away the children or grandchildren of these folks probably were fighting the Nazis or the Japanese. The Grim Reaper was sitting on the veranda, rocking in one of the hotel's famed rocking chairs, and waiting to sweep all of this aside. Time waits for no one and nothing.

Belated Thoughts on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day

A multitude of sources reminded me that I missed the big D-Day anniversary. The fact that I can forget it says something about the men who fought that battle. They spilled their blood to take a foreign shore and in the end they won an America where it's possible to forget their sacrifice and pain. Maybe that's what every warrior fights for, a world that won't remember the need to fight, blissful ignorance. Yet the danger occurs when they succeed for those who forget history's lessons are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

Take the little magazine clipping show above as an illustration of how far we've fallen. This map was published in Life Magazine on June 19, 1944. Just thirteen days after the allies hit the beaches and began hacking their way through the Norman hedgerows a major US magazine was printing maps of the landing sites. Today politicians would dearly love to repeal Freedom of Information Act requests and they routinely try to redact and classify any and all information about military and intelligence operations. Whether you agree with what he did or not, Snowden showed us just how far an unchecked government agency is willing to go for "the safety of the state". Every year it seems like the America I love becomes a little more like all those countries we used to fear. Our government has tried to okay torture, they've made peace with indefinitely detaining suspects without charging them, they maintain off-shore black sites where they can get away with whatever they please, they eavesdrop on our electronic communications, and they practice remote-controlled "targeted killings". In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Yesterday while enjoying my lunch in the shade of a tree I looked up to see a lone Wildcat fighter noisily making circuits in the clear, Indiana noontime sky and that familiar sense of nostalgia overtook me. There was a day when "over there" was much further away, when our government was a body of consensus albeit a fractious one, a time when things moved slower and didn't travel half as fast. It was a time before I was born, but somehow I still miss it. So on this belated 75th anniversary of D-Day I'd like to apologize to the brave men who faced its dangers, I fear we've squandered what you won, but I keep in my heart the hope that someday we'll reclaim it and renew your pride.