Happy Father's Day

Little Father's Day gift for the common fellow, franks and Seagram's 5 Crown from Life Magazine, June 1945. Looks like the beginning of a good day to me!

Father's Day with Four Roses

1959 Father's Day ad for Four Roses whiskey, cigars, and...bulldogs. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.

Happy Father's Day!

Here's hoping all you dads out there are having a doozie of a pop's day. In the wise words of Frank Butler, "When I was 18 I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while, when I got to be 21, it was amazing to find out how much he'd learned in three years."

Happy Flag Day

Life Magazine, June 1922

Quote for June

There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter.

- Billy Connolly

Poem for June

A Red Red Rose

by Robert Burns

O, my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair as thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
I will love thess till, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run:

And fare thee well, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it ware ten thousand mile.

And the War Begins

Today was the day it all started. On June 29, 1914 Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie arrived in Sarajevo to dedicate a state museum, unaware that the Black Hand had been at work arranging an attack meant to protest Austro-Hungarian rule over lands the organization believed should be unified as part of a Serb-speaking homeland. That morning the Archduke's party had travelled by train from Ilidza Spa to Sarajevo where the met the governor at the station and proceeded n a motorcade of six Graf and Stift Double Phaeton open convertibles.

The first stop that morning was for an inspection of a military barracks. At ten o'clock the motorcade left the barracks and passed by the first would-be assassin in front of the garden of the Mostar Cafe who failed to detonate the bomb he'd been armed with. At ten after ten the car of the Archduke approached the second assassin who threw his bomb which bounced off the folded top of the convertible and landed in the street where it exploded under the next car and wounding a number of bystanders.

Alerted that all was not well, the motorcade sped away leaving the Archduke's would-be killer to the mercy of the Sarajevo police and a mob of angry citizens. The Archduke and his wife arrived at the Sarajevo town hall where, after protesting "Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous!", Franz Ferdinand gave a speech while still bloody from the botched bomb attack.

Inexplicably the Archduke and his party continued from the town hall at ten forty five, travelling along Apple Quay toward the Sarajevo hospital where they planned to visit those injured in the bombing. Due to a miscommunication, the driver took a wrong turn and they ended up on Franz Josef Street. When he noticed the error, the governor of Sarajevo who was sharing the royal car ordered the driver to stop and return to Apple Quay. He stopped to turn around near Schiller's Delicatessen near the Latin Bridge, directly in front of where the final assassin was waiting.

The fatal shots were fired from a distance of just over five feet with a Belgian 9x17 model 1910 semi-automatic pistol. The first shot struck the Archduke in the neck and the second struck the Duchess in the abdomen.  Both died while being driven to the Governor's residence for medical treatment. The days and months that followed would see Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, and England enter a conflagration that would become the Great War, World War I.

Here's Wishing You a Happy Father's Day!

For father's day, here's a little tune from 1933 entitled My Old Man by the Spirits of Rhythm. Hope everyone's having a great day with their respective old man. Happy Father's Day to my old man!

Flag Day in Ward 8

I was surprised to find an ad with a calendar that matches with 2014, but here it is, June 1947. And what drink makes you think Flag Day more than a Ward 8?

The name may make you think of lodgings at an asylum, but the name actually has a political origin. The story goes that the drink is an homage to Democrat Martin M. Lomasney's 1898 victory in a Massachusetts statehouse race. When the election was delivered by voters in the city's 8th ward, the drink had its name.

Full Moon and Empty Arms - Frank Sinatra

June's for lovers as is the moon, she's the queen of enchantment, the silver lady of charms, both desired and untouchable. She sits on the horizon, inviting and enticing, but if you chase after her she merely climbs into the bower of the sky, looking down like a tease.

Tonight I send a little love song out to the moon, a little Sinatra to invite the full June moon to stop on my windowsill and cast her silver light on my while I sleep. Maybe she'll visit my dreams and, like a muse, leave a little something for the page.

Poem for June

With June being the wedding month, I thought I'd share this rhyme entitled Rhymes and Jingles for Every Month from a 1910 book with the melodious title of Weddings and Wedding Anniversaries: A Book of Good Form in the Conduct of Wedding Ceremonies with Added Chapters on Various Anniversaries.

Quote for June

"If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance."

- Bern Williams

June is Busting Out All Over

Welcome to June!

Happy National Accordion Awareness Month

In my story this guy is leading them out of town, Pied Piper style...but that's just me. June is National Accordion Awareness Month - makes the instrument sound like a disease, which ironically is exactly what a poorly played accordion sounds like! Photo from the lovely collection ad Shorpy!

The Full Strawberry Moon

June is the time of the Full Strawberry Moon, named by Native Americans for the ripening strawberries they collected during this time. In Europe, where strawberries were unknown, June’s full moon was given the monikers the Full Rose Moon and the Full Mead Moon. Funny thing that all the names of June’s full moon would make a wonderful romantic interlude, isn’t it? I’m imagining a little fresh strawberry ice cream with candied rose petals and a flute of mead under the full moon.

Happy International Picnic Day!

I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that June eighteenth is International Picnic Day. At least according to web sources. Frankly it has the feeling of a fabricated holiday. All I found on the web were circular references; sites pointing to one another without ever referencing an "official source". Still, it was an opportunity to dig through Shorpy to come up with a great old photograph of a picnic, and there’s a lot to look at in this one!

This particular photo comes from 1941 and even though it was taken in October it seemed suitable for picnic day. Looking at its details I get a little nostalgic. My grandmother used to wear a turban like the one worn by the woman in the foreground. Hers were made of polyester and came in a variety of pastel colors. In fact, I hardly remember seeing my grandmother’s hair at all, for what I know she might have been bald or had a battleship tattooed on her scalp.

It’s also remarkable that the gentleman giving the camera the hairy eye is wearing a nice tie, tie-tack, and striped dress shirt. It’s a pretty remarkable time when a man would dress to sit at a picnic table eating baked beans. I say baked beans because that’s what the label on one of the cans on the ground seems to say. It’s also amazing to see the tableware, real coffee cups, plates, bowls, silverware, and glasses. Plastics were a thing of the 50’s which necessitated hauling a kitchen’s worth of plates and utensils out into the wild in a wicker hamper. My parents had a 50’s version of the picnic hamper complete with melmac plates and aluminum cups in assorted sizes and colors.

The Harvard Brewery was founding in 1898 and survived prohibition, a government takeover, and financial troubles before shuttering its doors in December of 1956. My grandparents beers of choice were Blatz and Old Milwaukee, but I remember the horrid days of the 70’s when they switched to generic beer with its ugly gray and white striped cans.

Ah, things are different now. I’m not a fan of eating in the wild, I hew to the theory even cavemen ate in a cave and we (hopefully) have evolved since then. I have to admit when I see this picture I get a soft spot for packing a hamper on a cool fall afternoon and heading out into nature’s embrace…of course then I think about the yellow jackets, flies, sunburn, and poison ivy and the spell passes.

Happy Father's Day

You might think that Father’s Day is one of those holidays that’s been around for a long time. You’d be wrong. In fact in the US Father’s Day has only existed since 1972. It’s possible that fathers lingered so far behind mothers because they didn’t pose such a ready and obvious market for the flower and card industries, but the origin of the holiday could be traced back to July 5, 1908, when a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers. This Sunday sermon was held to memorialize 362 men who perished in a December 1907 explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah. This was a one-time commemoration, though, and it wasn’t until a year later that Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. Dodd went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers, and government officials in her quest to garner support and she was successful. In 1910 Washington State became the first in the nation to celebrate a statewide Father’s Day.

The holiday slowly spread across the country. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to remotely unfurl a flag in Spokane. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge made the case for state governments to observe Father’s Day. However, ironically, it was men themselves who stood in the way of the holiday’s acceptance. As one historian writes, they “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products--often paid for by the father himself.”

In the 1920s and 1930s a movement to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in favor of a single holiday called Parents’ Day gained support. Rallies were held in New York’s Central Park on Mother’s Day. In a stroke of irony, it was the Great Depression that came to the rescue of Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day, though it hadn’t become official). Struggling retailers and advertisers rallied behind the idea of another holiday to promote sales, redoubling their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men and promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards. When World War II began, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father’s Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

So, in 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday at last. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.

Here’s a hearty Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. I hope you find your Dad’s Day stocking filled with all sorts of manly goodness.

Happy Flag Day

The first proposal for an annual observation of the birth of the American Flag came from Bernard Cigrand in 1886. Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation for a nationwide observance of Flag Day on June 14, 1916 but the holiday didn’t become official until 1949 when Harry Truman signed the holiday into law.

Happy birthday, Stars and Stripes!

Happy National Doughnut Day

It’s the first Friday in June and that means National Doughnut Day. You might be thinking, “What’s this? Another corporately produced holiday and one that takes advantage of America’s poor eating habits?” Well, National Doughnut day actually has quite a long history. The event was created by The Salvation Army in 1938 as a way of honoring the women who provided comfort to soldiers during World War I by serving coffee and doughnuts.

In 1917 the Salvation Army concluded that some of the needs of US soldiers could be met by founding canteens and social centers (called huts) which served baked goods, provided supplies for writing and sending letters home, and provided for mending the soldier’s clothing. These huts typically consisted of six staff members, four of which were women whose job was to “mother” the boys. About 250 Salvation Army volunteers performed this canteen service in France during the war, earning the women who staffed the huts the moniker “Doughnut Dollies”.

In 1919 Billy Frisch composed the song Don’t Forget the Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl) to commemorate the service of the Doughnut Dollies and Arthur Fields later released the tune on an Edison Blue Amberol cylinder.

So, while you’re enjoying a complementary glazed Krispy Kreme with your morning coffee just remember this day really commemorates more than deep fried dough. Then again, there’s nothing wrong with a National Deep Fried Dough day, is there?

The Beaches of Normandy

A LIFE photo of a soldier crawling through the surf under German machine gun and mortar fire.

Most of us probably don’t connect June 6^th with anything more than balmy summer weather and maybe a little vacation time with the family. Turn the calendar back to 1943, though, and you will land on the day of the Allied invasion of Normandy, D-Day. So, while enjoying the tranquility of summer pause a moment to think of all those young men who perished on a French beach for the sake of freedom and say a silent thank you to those who gave everything for what we all too often take for granted.