No commentary (except those made describing the pictures). The pictures themselves ARE the message. Enjoy.
“Honey, there’s a baby in the oven.” Literally! The Great Gas Scare in WWII Europe.
“What do you mean by you won’t sell me life insurance?” How product-testing (bullet-proof vest in this case) used to be done.
“Yes, Ms. Freud. A mustache DOES make the man!” Charlie Chaplin in 1916.
“Bring THIS back to the Wildwood beaches!” Anette Kellerman was arrested for public indecency in 1907 for promoting this fitted one-piece bathing suit.
“Fuck gun control!” 106 year old Armenian woman protecting her home.
Pre-slime burgers. The original Ronald McDonald in 1963.
War IS hell! London, 1940, after German bombs fell.
“It will look REAL. We promise!” Suntan vending machine in 1949.
“No, Johnny, you won’t grow a third testicle” Watching a nuke go off in 1953.
“Could that be ….Stucky? Joyful Austrian boy receives shoes during WWII.
“You think YOU have it tough? STFU!” Christmas Dinner during the Great Depression.
“And you think cops today are assholes?” Cop riding his Harley-Davidson with the Mobile-Jail option, 1921.
“Yes, Johnny. Once upon a time Americans weren’t scared of jack shit” That was in 1923.
“Hitler’s mommie kept nagging that practice makes perfect’.” Rehearsing his ‘Deutschland!Deutschland!Deutschland!’ speech in front of a mirror in 1925.
From Prohibition to office Whiskey vending machines in just 25 years.
“Infidel bitchezz!!” 1950’s library scene in Afghanistan.
Where Google gets its ideas from …. 1963 “TV glasses”
Bush should have bombed Sweden. The Bin Laden family in Sweden around 1970. Osama is on the far right in the green shirt.
Hero, or villain? Lincoln assassination co-conspirator Lewis Payne just before his execution in 1865.
That’s one well trained pussy. Cat. Shooting and recording the iconic MGM logo.
Heroes! Where have they all gone today? Veterans protesting against the Vietnam War in 1970.
“Yes. That phone number is heya heya ho-hiya heh heh ho.” Injun phone operator in 1925.
Coming soon to America, Part 1: Bank rush to withdraw gold in Shanghai in 1949.
Coming soon to America, Part 2: German (Weimar Republic) play with stacks of worthless money in 1922.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ ‘puters!!” The pre Common Core years. NASA Engineers, 1961.
The pre Surgical Strike era. Dresden after being fire-bombed.
Justice is slow. Sometimes it seems like there is no justice at all. I believe justice will visit each and every one of us, sooner or later. Nazi soldiers react as they are forced to watch footage of Concentration Camps.
Deep down inside … Stalin was a guy who loved to have fun.
Our Admin just mistimed his condo purchase. Einstein at Wildwood.
In 1914 a boy was hurried off to war. He left his bicycle chained to a tree. He never made it home. His parents left the bicycle there as a memorial to their son.
When this tree was a seedling … the Roman Empire still existed. Think about that for a moment. “Angel Oak” in South Carolina is believed to be over 1,500 years old.
Check out those prices!!! The Grand Grocery Co., Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942.
For our Chicgo999444. South Water Street Depot, Chicago,1944.
Before there were McMansions. Broclton, Mass., 1940
Keeping America free. Assembling B-25 bombers at North American Aviation, Kansas City, 1942
This man is truly free. Shepherd with his horse and dog on Gravelly Range, Montana, 1942
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The smaller pictures were all copied from this very interesting and excellent web site; http://www.checkthisyo.com/
Ever since earning my Disaster Preparedness merit badge in the Boy Scouts, I’ve always wanted to see a nuclear bomb go off. In fact, I’d like to be close enough to get bowled over by the pressure wave.
I watched a documentary recently about that film of the Holocaust those Nazi’s were watching. If it’s the same film, it was made by the British with input from Alfred Hitchcock.
Another great site for some very interesting pictures is: http://iliketowastemytime.com/ Their vintage photos are fantastic.
Those old pictures tell a lot stories of a simple way of life but in many ways a hard life. Especially the one showing the kids in that house during the great depression. I don’t think most Americans could mentally cope with that kind of poverty today. I don’t think America as one nation will survive the hardships that are coming our way. In the 1930s America was 90% white and at least paid lip service to the Christian principles that shaped our nation. Now the Christian world view has been torn down and in its place a Godless secular world view rules .Hard to have hope.
Anyway nice job Stucky.I always enjoy your post.Thanks for taking the time.
Smokes in the 60’s thru 70’s were roughly 50 cents/pack. A silver 50 cent piece now sells for $5.36 or so. The cost of smokes in my area is between $5 and $6. Had taxes not exploded on smokes the price would be less than what a 50 cent piece is worth now. Prices are not the problem. The money IS the problem.
The new money issuance must be returned to the Treasury where it belongs. Credit must be segregated to loans ONLY, not final payment.
“Anyway nice job …. Thanks for taking the time.” ———– bb
No. THANK YOU for commenting. It was up for two hours and only T4C commented. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the effort. OTOH, maybe I should anticipate more accurately what folks would enjoy … but, that’s difficult.
“Those old pictures tell a lot stories …” ———– bb
Yes. Yes, indeed!! Ms. Freud had a tear in her eye when she saw the bicycle-in-the-tree and the story behind it. And when she got to the last picture of the guy who is “truly free”, she just said “Wow, that’s great.” Glad you enjoyed it, bb.
“Another great site for some very interesting pictures is: http://iliketowastemytime.com/ Their vintage photos are fantastic.” ———- I_S
+1000
I’m always looking for great sites AND great pics AND great stories. Thanks for the link!
You seem to like things that go BOOM! I’ll bet you blew up a lot of shit when you were a young lad.
Damn, old Einstein had legs like a Rockette……..who knew?
Stucky
I always read your posts. This one was fantastic! Thank you for your contributions to TBP.
Thanks, dragonfly.
I_S posted a link to a site with lots of pics. Here’s one below. Also learned something new. China is also building Ghost Cities in Africa … Angola … 750 8-story apartments …. virtually empty …….. because AFTER building it they discovered hardly any Angolans could get a mortgage …… hahahahaha!
They are pretty though.
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Story here in case image does not show —> http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/12/03/chinese-built-ghost-town-in-angola-10-pics
Annette Kellerman was arrested for public indecency in 1907 for promoting this fitted one-piece bathing suit.
—-caption to Kellerman’s photo
Annette Kellerman for president. Heh,
Nice post, Stucky. I enjoyed it greatly.
OTOH, you said, “It was up for two hours and only T4C commented. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the effort.” Knock off the ego trip, Sticky. Do you think everything you post is worthy of a Pulitzer Prize? Doesn’t work that way.
I spent over 2 months putting together my “He Lied, 150 Died” post about psychotropic drugs and their DANGEROUS effects on young minds. I was extremely careful about my research and wording in the article, which resulted in …… 15 responses on this site PLUS maybe 2 responses from over 60 people in my address book to whom I sent it, one of whom called me paranoid on the subject.
Talk about an article going over like a lead balloon, that was it. Don’t care. Not giving up on the subject. Ever.
“Knock off the ego trip, Sticky.” ——- SSS
Ouch!! Well … the truth hurts. Yeah, ego is involved. But, in my own defense, it’s also disappointing because I honestly do want to add to people’s lives here, make them smile, make them think, add some knowledge if possible. So, it bums me out when it appears I failed. But, yeah, ego is part of it. Also, fuck yeah, they’re all Pulitzer worthy! lol
Wow, you spent as much time on the “150 died” article as I did on Medieval Churches. It’s a shame about the number of responses. FWIW, the reason I did not comment was because I couldn’t finish the article … it just brought back too many sad memories of what I went through with my son.
Thanks for the compliment. Now I feel bad for saying you haven’t polished your sword for 30 years .. in the wanking thread. Well … almost sorry,
SSS, didn’t you date Annette?
That was Mucky. Anyway, Annette’s got some nip showing, not that I was looking
Thanks for the great post, Stucky. Every photo brought pangs.
I think the one that “gets” me the most is that of the tiny, and frightened but determined, 106-year-old Armenian woman with the huge weapon, defending her home.
I think of people like her every day. They live in all the countries that we have declared to be “enemies”. They never asked for the situation they are in. They are mostly people like ourselves- all they want to do is go to work, raise their families, be with their loved ones, live in their houses in peace. They never did a damn thing to deserve their houses and businesses being bombed or occupied, they never did a thing to deserve starving in the ruins or trying to put the pieces of their lives back together again as refugees in a strange country, without a drop of money or access to help.
We could easily become “them”.
Stuck –
Great photos. Many of these I’ve seen before, but many I had not. I love to look at old photographs. It always makes me wonder about the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of the people, places, and things in the photos.
When we used to live in Corpus Christi, TX, I used to love to go to the airport. The airport has displayed photos from a man’s portfolio. I can’t think of his name to look them up. Doc McStuffins, maybe. Anyway, old photos of the Corpus Christi area from the 30’s. It didn’t matter how many times I had seen them before, I would wonder what was happening behind the scenes.
I had never seen the picture of the Bin Laden family before. He looks like he might be just another smiling teenager. Wonder if he was always evil, or what happened in his life. Weird.
Thanks for putting these together on TBP, Stuck. Always nice to have a break from the doom.
Stucky said;
“You seem to like things that go BOOM! I’ll bet you blew up a lot of shit when you were a young lad.”
Dude you have no idea! In SC I had access to professional fireworks and I already knew I could walk into a store and buy gunpowder plus I was into launching model rockets. Needless to say it took very little imagination for me to make some pretty big booms. I once blew a 12″ diameter tree right out of the ground. Another time I attached a couple of D sized rocket motors to a regular garden shovel and launched it. I failed to account for the aerodynamic properties of the shovel head and my audience was nearly knocked unconscious by the handle as it spun around wildly trying to find the “up” I had intended.
I almost blew up a cop car one time with a cop in it. I had built a small golf ball sized bomb and attached it to an aerial firework hoping to use the aerial bursting portion to ignite the bomb. I laid it on the street and lit the fuse. It hauled ass down the street a couple of hundred yards and exploded under a cop car that was crossing the street I was using. We ran towards the cop car because we knew the big boom had failed to go off and wanted to recover it. The cop circled back and wanted to know what it was and I showed him a simple bottle rocket. He was amazed because it “shook the whole car”. He never even got pissed. I had actually used a much larger rocket that what I showed him. I forgot to mention this all happened on a military base. Oh, that golf ball sized boomer I made would have definitely done serious damage to the cop car had it gone off. I learned that later when I put it in a rock outcropping and set it off.
Those big professional mortar type fireworks are WAY MORE IMPRESSIVE when launched only 50′ up into the air. You end up “inside” the burst and have to dodge flaming balls of fire. Cool as fuck! If I had to live my life over again I would definitely go to college to study high energy physics and blow shit up for a living.
Last time I did any of that was about fifteen years ago when I taped about two hundred green sparklers together tightly with one sticking out. It blew a 10″ diameter hole in a city sidewalk and set off every car alarm for 20 blocks. Good thing I was a concrete finisher! Fireworks are illegal where I live now which is probably a good thing.
Great stuff, Stucky- esp. the bicycle.
FYI- look closely at Ronald McDonald and you will see (drumroll) Willard Scott.
TBP’s Pictorial Essays routinely feature the most unique and fascinating fooking pictures to be found on any website, bar none. Both in the essay itself as well as in the comments section.
Kudos Amerikan imperialists!
One of our more glorious days….
I’d give anything to ride this candle. Five F-1 engines burning 3357 gallons of fuel per second pushed the Apollo 11, Saturn V rocket 42 miles into the sky in only 150 seconds before the first stage fell away.
I spotted this vid on http://dailytimewaster.blogspot.com/. All kinds of cool stuff on there.
And a two………..
Be sure to click if it doesn’t post. It’s a 6 minute close of Apollo 11’s ass end gettin’ to work!
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Thanks for the post..Bike/tree…Touching…Geeks On Ladders doing math..I almost fell out of my chair..Thinking about one of my Buds…You Guys Rock…Mike
I_S
Your cop car story ……. with all due respect, you are fuckin’ nuts!! 🙂
One moar question. Did you ever get injured? It seems that with amateur blower-uppers that it’s almost inevitable, given enough opportunities.
Stuck
Everyone is too busy masturbating to comment on your article.
Friggin’ fantastic rocket launch vid!!!
I went to Cape to Cape Canaveral once, in the late 70’s. Three things I have never forgotten.
1) The Assembly Building .. that big cube building … no pictures EVER do it justice … you have to be inside it to appreciate it’s vastness
2) The Crawler-Transporter .. biggest friggin self-propelled land vehicle ever built … 6 MILLION pounds
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3) The Saturn V lying on its side …. look at that scale!! … it’s beyond fucking fantastic to see it in person
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That rancher’s dog is the spitting image of our oldest member of the pack. Loyal dog, stays up all night to keep the predators off the livestock.
I will take the Armenian woman if she wants to throw in with us. All the food she can eat and ammo she can fire.
The photo of the bicycle was haunting if the story behind it is true (looks a little small for a guy old enough to enlist) and the one of the child with her doll in the ruins of London was inspiring.
The Dresden photo was allegedly the inspiration for the final scene in Planet of the Apes. A great metaphor for where Western Civilization is heading.
Thank you Stucky. I always look forward to your essays.
“The photo of the bicycle was haunting if the story behind it is true (looks a little small for a guy old enough to enlist) …….” ———— HF
Wow, just wow. Did some research …. you are 100% correct …. the story is NOT true.
I originally looked for old US history pics on google … that pic came up … I clicked “go to page” … and I summarized the story in a brief description. Can’t remember the website because I eventually selected a better looking picture from another site.
At any rate … the REAL story is told in the link below … by the OWNER of the bike!!!
http://www.craigboyce.com/w/2012/07/bike-in-tree-vashon-island-the-real-story/
Stucky, I never got hurt due to an accident but I did intentionally try to hold a ladyfinger firecracker in my hand and light it off. I don’t know if you recall ladyfingers but they were these tiny things about as big around as a pencil lead and maybe 3/4″ long. If you unrolled the damn things your were lucky if you could see the miniscule amount of powder inside. Hell, the fuse was bigger than the “stain” of powder inside.
Anyway, after lighting off thousands of these things (in conjunction with playing war with our plastic army men) I decided that I could hold one of these things in my hand and keep my hand closed when it popped. I had given it quite a bit of thought and decided to use my left hand (I’m right handed) in case I suffered permanent damage. We went down to the woods and I found a way to hold it securely while still allowing the fuse to burn. I suffered a small burn from the fuse but there was no real way to avoid that.
I placed it in my hand just so, held it closed for all I was worth and had a friend light it while I turned my head as far to the right as I could with my left arm outstretched. I would love to have some high speed (slo-mo) film of my hand during the explosion. I swear that my hand was blown open so fast and so hard that my fingernails bounced off my wrist after being bent completely opposite the direction they are supposed to bend by the explosion. I was both shocked and impressed with the power of the ladyfinger. I had NO HOPE of keeping my hand closed at all! The explosion never broke the skin but it felt like I’d stuck my hand out a car window at 55mph and open hand slapped a flat surface. Fuck it hurt! I I swear I could SEE my hand was actually throbbing in time with my heart beat and it was fire engine red. I couldn’t make a sound because it hurt so bad. I just stood there looking at it as a few tears slowly streamed down my face.
After a few minutes I started to flex my hand and thankfully found that everything still worked. A few days later it was just an indelible memory and another of hundreds of “close calls” from my childhood. I attribute my avoidance of injury due to boomy stuff to my habit of working alone. I only had one or two friends that helped me carry out my evil deeds but I did almost all prep work alone in a swampy area of the woods. The last thing I needed was some dumb ass throwing sparks while I was taking apart fireworks. I was no brainiac but working alone minimized the potential for mistakes.
One of my best (most fun) ideas was to build rocket guns. I made a little pistol grip shaped piece of wood with a length of heavy gauge metal rod coming out of it like a gun barrel with about a 4″ diameter metal plate where the rod came out of the wood. I then built three small, single use disposable rockets that were propelled by A sized Estes engines. The rocket was loaded onto the rod via guide lugs (straws) glued to the side of the rocket. The igniters were taped into the engines and a battery with a couple of alligator clips made for quick arming of the gun. All you had to do was point the thing and push the doorbell button where the trigger would be.
When my friends saw this they all wanted one so we sat out in the woods building these things and then we’d have a rocket war by standing in a big circle a couple hundred feet away from each other and fire at will like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Again, this was on a military base and a good time was had by all. I used to have a shirt that said: “I’m the kid your parents warned you about.”
A kid would probably end up in GITMO doing that shit today.
Stucky, my wife and I spent our honeymoon in Orlando followed by two weeks of beach hopping up the coast while going home. We went to tour NASA’s Cape Canaveral one day and then went back to Cape Canaveral Naval Air Station (we had military ID’s) a couple days later to watch STS-26R launch into space. It was the first flight after the Challenger disaster. I’d have rather seen an Apollo launch though.
Look up those crawlers today. They are being rebuilt for the upcoming Space Launch System.
Stucky,
Thank you for the link.
I believe TBP has many readers who don’t post, but who enjoy the site.
Of all the economic sites I read, TBP is my fav.
With that said, I will go back to being a silent reader. 🙂
Phenomenal easy stucky. Kudos to you. I hope there are more like it in TBP’s future. Love it.
bb’s comment about Americans not being able to cope with poverty resonated with me. Those considered poor in our nation today have a greater standard of living than nearly everyone else in all of human history. With so many depending on government handouts and a large segment of our nation coping with life through the use of pharmaceuticals, I worry that society would go absolutely mad if the economy truly entered a deep depression. Looking at true poverty like that in the photo makes you grateful for the standard of living we have now.
Does anyone know where I can get one of those ice cold whiskeys from a vending machine? 🙂
Dresden.
700,000 phosphorus firebombs dropped on 1.2 million people. Almost one bomb for every two people.
The temperature in the city center reached 1600 Centigrade.
Kurt Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden during the bombing. Afterwards, he was forced to dig out bodies. This was the inspiration for “Slaughterhouse Five”, since they took refuge in a cooler inside an old slaughterhouse during the bombing.
They killed 400,000 men, women and children. Two days after they burned and bombed Dresden to the ground, a flight of B-17’s passed over and dropped leaflets.
“To the people of Dresden: we were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realise that we haven’t always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.”
Vonnegut described the bombing as beginning on one side of town at the outskirts, then proceeding to bomb the entire city in a straight line, ending on the opposite outskirts. Throughout the night, the bombers criss-crossed the city, saturation bombing.
His eyewitness account damns the Allies and proves their bullshit claim that “We missed. Our bad.” is in fact bullshit of the worst sort….
I was going to post some other, more graphic photos of Dresden, but I choose not to.
Excellent pictorial essay STuck.
Billy- +100 on your post
Admin- Your (8:55am) post was too funny………..beverage alert please.