Election Day… 1940

November 8, 2016
1940

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(Photo by David Eisendrath, Jr.)

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PM, November 5, 1940, Vol. 1, No. 101

Voters Smash Records
By Noon More Than Half of City’s Probable Vote Is Cast
p.1

That Poll of Polls: You Poll It
By Weldon James
Have fun with the pollsters today and tomorrow. Use the chart below to check their final guesses against your own or against actual election results…
p. 7

City Voters Out Early for Heaviest, Quietest Election
…All of the city’s 18,000 policemen were on duty… When the polls opened at 6 a.m. there were lines at almost all the voting places…
p. 8

Victory
pp.14-15

Keep Your Radio Score Tonight
Tables on these two pages are presented to make it easy for you to keep your own score on election returns as they come over radio stations tonight…
pp. 16-17

… The Camera Sees Some of the 50,000,000 Go to the Polls
pp. 18-19

New book alert: “Weegee, Serial Photographer”

November 7, 2016
book

Weegee, Serial Photographer
By Max de Radiguès & Wauter Mannaert
Published by Sarbacane
Published in August 2016

A graphic novel.

The artists’ website: wautermannaert.be
Publisher’s website: editions-sarbacane.com

Publisher’s website via Google translate:

“First on the scene, he did not hesitate to “improve” the crime scene for the photo!

Late 30s, New York, Lower East Side, the favored hunting ground of Weegee (real name Arthur Fellig). In his car, a connected radio on police frequencies; Weegee, cigar, mac and fedora, breakneck photography night, burning life Big Apple shallows of: accident, charred bodies, fire, “passers-voyeurs” … But also, poor, black, little pleasures … Weegee is the observer – vitriolic – of inequality and discrimination of the Great Depression in America. The authors propose us to accompany the lonely Weegee in a photo shoot as snorkeling, vertiginous and raw, the heart of American society before the war, deviant and corrupt.

– Weegge, an unusual and famous press photographer (Life, Vogue, The Daily Mirror …) to a true story briskly!

– Wauter Mannaert young Belgian designer, expressive design treats us the black and creepy atmosphere of the New York of the 30s!”

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This image is from the artists’ website: wautermannaert.be

76 Years Ago Today… William Sharp’s Smuggled Sketchbook…

October 21, 2016
1940, PM, World War II

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PM, October 21, 1940 (Drawings by William Sharp, photos by Alan Fiasher)

“SMUGGLED SKETCHBOOK
The Nazi Terror
On the next four pages, PM presents the first in a series of pictures smuggled from Germany in the early days of Hitler’s reign.
They were drawn by William Sharp, now an American artist…”

William Sharp:
“Born Leon Schleifer in Lemberg, Austria (now part of Ukraine), [on June 13, 1900], Sharp studied fine art in Austria and Poland before finishing his studies at the University in Berlin in 1918. After serving briefly in the German army at the end of World War I, he stayed on in Berlin and worked as a book illustrator, painter, etcher, and lithographer… In the late 1920s, as Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Party grew, Sharp, under various pseudonyms, drew political cartoons satirizing the party and its leader in the anti-Nazi press. After being threatened with imprisonment by the Nazis in 1933, Schleifer and his wife Ruth fled the country and arrived in New York the following year. In 1940, Schleifer became a United States citizen and changed his name to William Sharp. The Sharps settled in Forest Hills and stayed in the same apartment until William’s death in 1961 and Ruth’s in 2002.” Queens Museum website

76 Years Ago Today: “What to do with old PM’s” and “N.Y. Now Has 8668 Horses…”

October 20, 2016
1940, PM

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PM, October 19, 1940 (Unidentified photographer)

“What to do with old PM’s.”
“N.Y. Now Has 8,668 Hoses and Only 18 Blacksmiths
Because a horse walks around on his toenails he needs a new set of shoes every month. His toenails grow and the old shoes won’t fit… horses are disappearing from our town at a rate of 270 a year. In 1924 there were 50,000 of them. The Health Department’s 1939 census turned up only 8,6668.
Laundries, peddlers and milkmen still use horses…
There are some figures to show they object to taxicabs. The ASPCA says most runaways of recent years have been caused by taxicabs cutting in front of the horses.
[Taxicabs drove recklessly and dangerously 76 years ago, and they still do today, some things don’t change…]
…partners in a [Black]smith shop at 301 Spring St. can remember when there ‘was a blacksmith shop on every block from 14th St. to South Ferry’…”
PM, October 19, 1940, p. 56

“It’s Dynamite!”

October 19, 2016
auction

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Photo by Sam Shaw. (Screen shot from phillips.com.)

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(Screen shot from phillips.com.)

“Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, film premiere, New York” 1955
Gelatin silver print.
23 x 19.5 cm (9 x 7 5/8 in.)
‘Weegee The Famous’ credit stamp on the verso.
Estimate £800 – 1,200 •

Phillips London Auction on November 3, 2016.

(Almost all of the above copied from Phillips auction house website.)

I’ll go out on a limb and write that this photo, “Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, film premiere, New York,” was probably not made by Weegee…

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Photo by Sam Shaw and Weegee… (Screen shot from icp.org.)

76 Years Ago Today…

October 18, 2016
1940, PM, World War II

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(Photo by Leo Lieb.)

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(Photos by Bill Brunk and Peter Killian.)

PM, October 18, 1940 Vol. 1, No. 89
It was 40 degrees colder than today… “City’s First Draft Board Sworn In…” Marshall Field becomes largest share holder in PM… Oil in Iraq and Iran? “The Fifth -Column and Its Fellow-Travelers”… “This is the Way They Make a Ballet: ‘The New Yorker.'” And a small World War Two-related Weegee photo…