My Favorite Quotation About Dogs:

“Very, very early a dog learns that life is not as simple a matter to his master as it is to himself. There are times when he reads trouble, that he cannot help or understand, in the man’s eye and voice. Then he can only look his love and loyalty, wistfully, as if he felt his own shortcoming in the matter of speech. And if the trouble is so great that the master forgets to eat his dinner; forgets, also, the needs of his faithful little friend, it is the dog’s dear privilege to bear neglect and hunger without complaint.”

Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson, page 17

I took this photograph of a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air on display at the Festival Italia in Wakefield, Massachusetts, yesterday. You can see the distinctive roofline of the Lucius Beebe Memorial Library reflected in the hood. I wish I had taken more photographs of this beautiful automobile, but I was feeling conflicted about it. My mother owned a red and white Chevy Bel Air, bought used in 1960, and that’s always been my idea of the ultimate cool car. Seeing this Bel Air reminded me of ours, but the differences between the models just made this one look not quite right to me.

I did a little research on the 1955 Bel Air when I came home last night — in other words, I Googled it. It was called “The Hot One” and its sales brochure suggested “Try this on for sighs.” Apparently young people loved it because “this car’s so perky it always looks like it’s going to a party!” And it was a powerful car: the Turbo-Fire V8 engine “put a heaping hoodful of fun under your foot — 162 h.p.!” I don’t know anything about engines and couldn’t tell you the horsepower of my current car, but who wouldn’t want a heaping hoodful of fun under his or her foot? But best of all, it was motoramic! I don’t actually know what that means, but it sounds so modern! 1950s modern, that is.

It’s amazing how little sales resistance I have even to advertising that’s over fifty years old.

Here’s a collection of televisions ads produced by the Jam Handy Organization from the Prelinger Archives via the Internet Archive:

1955 Chevrolet Screen Ads

I love roaming around through the amazing collection of public domain books on the Internet Archive, but there’s no good way to search just the illustrations within the books. I have been copying some of the images and posting them to Flickr, linking back to the Internet Archive book record both as a credit and for more information.

Right now I am working with James Arthur Ambler’s Worcester Illustrated from 1875, which has lots of pictures of commercial buildings, factories and more. The size and quality of my images vary as I experiment with using different versions of the Internet Archive files and different ways to make copies. I’m also fooling around with the files a bit, straightening and cropping them, doing minor color correction and adding borders. I’m not very good at this, but I’m not going to worry about it. I feel like I am making these images more findable and more shareable, and that even at their worst they are way better than noting.

I am putting these in a Flickr set called Worcester History Images along with some of my scanned old Worcester postcards. When I have time, I’d like to get these into a real database, put them on a Google map, do some then-and-now photographs, etc. But right now, I just want to get these out there so they can be search and found, so someone might find a picture of the factory where his great grandfather worked, or the school his great-great-grandmother attended.

This ten minute black-and-white film was made for the Chevrolet Division, General Motors Corporation, and is one of several Jam Handy productions from the Prelinger Archives available through the Internet Archive.

On the Air — Internet Archive

As the narrator says, “Yes, it’s swell teamwork on the part of everyone that gets speedy, accurate information for modern roadmaps!”

This film was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, known for its stylish and imaginative training and promotional films produced for the armed forces, the automotive industry and other industrial clients. Caught Mapping was sponsored by Chevrolet, and not surprisingly there are lots of great shots of modern, reliable automobiles handling all sorts of road conditions, and running smoothly enough to allow the passenger to be taking legible notes. There are also a few shots near the beginning of the motoring public consulting road maps. I particularly like the two young women wearing their glamorous hats, one of which looks like a big feather was shot straight through it.

The film runs a little less than ten minutes and is an interesting and informative look at the ways street maps were maintained in the days before GIS, GPS, satellite imagery, Google Maps and Google Earth! I wonder if fifty years from now, people will be looking back at the primitive processes Google is using to gather the imagery for Streetview, which is not unlike the road warriors driving around to personally check every inch of road.

Caught Mapping — View the video on the Internet Archive site, with more information and different video formats to download.

Born Josephine Cottle, her career began in 1940 when she won a national talent contest called Gateway to Hollywood. The official prize was a movie contract RKO contract under the name Gale Storm. She fell in love with contest’s male winner, Lee Bonnell, who she married in 1941.

In the 1940s, Gale Storm appeared in many B movies but her big break came in 1952, when “My Little Margie” premiered as a summer replacement for “I Love Lucy.” Both shows were set in Manhattan and revolved around madcap women and their crazy schemes which often involved dress-up and deception, always backfired and both amused and exasperated the men in their lives.

But Margie was younger than Lucy and single, living alone in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with her handsome, widowed father, businessman Vern Albright. Many of the plots revolved around Margie’s attempts to advance her father’s career or protect him from romantic entanglements. When things fell apart, as they always did, Margie would do her classic “Margie gurgle” and Vern would say, “Well…that’s my little Margie!”

This program was never a critical favorite, but it was lively and popular, and I remember it well. I loved Margie’s glamorous lifestyle with her handsome, indulgent father. I thought her behavior was appalling, but loved her high spirits and was fascinated by the way she got away with the most outrageous antics just because she was so adorable.

“My Little Margie” was an unusual show because it began on television but crossed over into radio. The program ran from 1952-1955, and Gale Storm went on to new comedy, “The Gale Storm Show,” (known in syndication as “Oh, Susanna”) in which she played cruise director Susanna Pomeroy. Storm, who recorded several songs during the 1950s, sang on her new program, and three of her records from this period were commercial successes : “I Hear You Knocking,” “Teenage Prayer” and “Dark Moon.”

In later years, she continued to perform on the stage and in guest spots on television programs. Her 1980 autobiography, “I Ain’t Down Yet,” revealed her struggle and eventual success overcoming alcoholism.

Storm’s first husband died in 1987, and in 1987 she married former TV executive Paul Masterson, who died in 1996. Gale Storm and Lee Bonnell had three sons, Phillip, Peter and Paul, and a daughter, Susanna. Storm is survived by her children, eight grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, plus a lot of fans for whom she will always be Our Little Margie.

My Little Margie Episode from the Internet Archive

At first we see the story as if it were a movie, and we see the scenes that the boy is seeing in his mind. Then the view switches, and we’re in the radio studio, where we see the actors reading from their scripts and the sound effects men producing the sounds of horse hooves, cars, doors, fire, gunshots and more. The film keeps switching, showing us the boy in his bedroom, the Western scenes in his head, and the smooth operation of the radio study producing this fantasy.

This film is a great look at how radio dramas were made. I’ve seen other behind-the-scenes looks at old time radio studios in action, but I thought this one was particularly effective, contrasting the drama produced by the imagination of the listener with what’s really happening in the studio.

Back of the Mike was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, a Detroit-based company run by Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy. Jam Handy produced hundreds of short educational and industrial films. This is one of many in the Prelinger Archives available through the Internet Archive site.

Back of the Mike (1938)