Mechanix Illustrated – March 1939

I often buy old magazines at antique stores and garage sales. They can be fantastic fun to browse through. I have several issues of Mechanix Illustrated, a sort of do-it-yourself mag from the mid-1900s. I’ve scanned in some of my favorite pages from the March 1939 issue. Click any photo to view a larger version. For more from this issue, visit my Mechanix Illustrated gallery on Flickr.

First, the cover:

[Cover of Mechanix Illustrated, March 1939]

It looks as if the magazine has just undergone a price increase: now 10¢. Also, notice that the magazine is guaranteed. How great is that? (By the way, the article on the Technicolor camera reveals that there are only fourteen in existence, and that each one costs $16,000.)

One feature of these mags is the ads. They’re packed with advertising, similar to modern women’s magazines. Of the magazine’s first 34 pages, one full-page and two half-pages are devoted to the table of contents, one full-page to the cover, and only one full-page and ten half-pages are devoted to actual content. The rest is advertising. That’s nine pages of editorial content and twenty-five pages of ads. The magazine’s final 34 pages have a similar ratio of content-to-ads. The middle fifty-or-so pages have fewer ads.

Here’s a typical ad:

I could teach these skinny guys how to gain weight…

Take a look at the news story to the left of the ad. It’s good, too: two guys who’ve built a diving helmet from an old hot water heater. Awesome!

Mechanix Illustrated features announcements of recent inventions. Some of these are absurd, but many of them are neat to see because they represent the advance of technology we now deem commonplace, technology like automobile turn signals:

Technology like track hurdles that tip over on contact:

This issue features a full page on denture technology! This is my favorite photo from the feature:

[photo of dentures smoking cigarette...seriously]

I love the smoking cigarette firmly planted between the teeth. These people had their priorities straight!

Remember that guarantee on the cover?

What if modern magazines carried such a guarantee? Could I return copies of Newsweek that are filled with fluff pieces and thinly-veiled advertisements for new products?

And, of course, no magazine from this era would be complete without an orgasmic cigarette ad:

Remember to check out more at my Mechanix Illustrated set on Flickr.

Modern Mechanix is a great magazine to explore, not just for the humor, but for the novel inventions, some of which became commonplace. Apparently I’m not the only one who loves it: one fellow has gone so far as to construct a Mechanix Illustrated blog!

Space Man

I was in first grade the first time I can remember anyone asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Throughout the year, our parents had come to class to give presentations on their careers. One dad was a fireman. One mom played violin. My mother brought in a food dryer and dried pineapple. Ironically (in retrospect), the presentation I remember most was from a man who worked at the paper mill in Oregon City. He passed around a jar of raw pulp as he described how paper was made. He gave us each a ream to take home.

At the end of the school year, Mrs. Onion asked, “Now that you’ve seen what parents do all day, what do you want to do when you grow up?”

I knew instantly: “I want to be an astronaut.”

For one thing, Steve Austin had been an astronaut. Though his mission had ended in disaster, he did have a bionic arms and legs to show for it. Also, Mr. Spock was an astronaut.

Mostly, I wanted to live on the moon.

Throughout my childhood, I was obsessed with living in space. Every year, my teachers told me, “When you grow up, people will live on the moon,” and I believed them. I wanted to live on a space station orbiting the Earth. I wanted to visit Mars.

I devoured science fiction of all sorts, but especially that which portrayed humans living in futuristic societies. The Jetsons weren’t a comedy to me, but an idyllic vision of what might be. Isaac Asimov’s “Lucky Starr” books were keen not because of the mysteries and the robots, but because they posited a society in which people lived on Venus and Mars and the moons of Jupiter. (Not to mention the asteroid pirates — boy! how I wished I could be an asteroid pirate!)

As I grew older, reality dealt harsh blow after harsh blow to my dreams of living in space. The rapid astronautical advances of my youth gave way to a relative stagnation of space-related progress. Still, I kept the dream alive by watching and reading whatever stories I could find that involved people living in space: The Black Hole, Outland, Alien. (All three of which are horror films to one degree or another.)

In time, my dreams of living in space faded. There were no more moon landings. The Challenger exploded. Gradually I became aware that my peers were actively hostile to the idea of a space program. (I remember one extended argument with some friends about the value and necessity of space exploration; they believed that NASA should be axed completely.)

Now that I’m nearing forty, my youthful dreams seem fanciful. I’d dearly love for the space program to expand beyond shuttle missions and space station stays, but it’s unlikely that we’ll put people on the moon again in the next twenty years, let alone on Mars. I continue to consume stories of space colonization (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful Mars series), but I recognize that our world has become too inwardly focused to dream big anymore. We’re too busy fighting wars. We’re too busy arguing over who should get how much money. We’re too busy consuming. As a society, we have no vision of the future, no vision at all, let alone a vision that includes space travel.

Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, it’s my dream one day to live on the moon.

Adult Onset ADD

Is there such a thing as adult-onset Attention Deficit Disorder? If so, I have it. I can’t focus on anything. I read somewhere today (on the internet) that many others experience this, and that one theory is that it’s the result of being stimulated by too many electronic devices. That seems plausible, but I really don’t know because now I need to go check on another web site.

Also: one difference between me and Kris, part 10,734. I can come home in the middle of the day, and Kris will have every light in the house blazing. They will have all been on since she got out of bed. Kris can come home at 10 p.m., and I won’t have a single light in the house on. It won’t even have occurred to me to turn one on.

A Rock, An Island

I had a conversation with Harrison tonight that broke my heart.

He elected to ride with me as we drove to dinner. I asked him about school. We chatted about classes and reading, and then I asked him about his friends. He explained to me that the other kids wouldn’t let him play with them: the boys didn’t want him in their groups, and neither did the girls. It was obviously something that makes him sad. It made me sad. (And I’m not even his parent!)

We tried to talk about what it’s like to not belong, but the concepts I wanted to share were too abstract for me to express to a seven-year-old, and the ideas he wanted to convey came out in first-grade-speak, a language with which I have difficulty.

We talked about his reading group instead. Harrison loves to read, but he doesn’t really like his reading group because the other members are all girls.

“Girls are okay,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, “but they always talk about girlie things, and they don’t like me to talk with them.” He paused. “Besides, we mostly just talk about reading.”

I didn’t know what to say. I tried to tell him to be patient, to be nice to kids so that they might be nice to him, but even as I said it I knew it was dumb advice. Worthless. Impractical. I asked if he gets to play with any of his church friends. Some play with him, some don’t. Harrison is a sensitive boy, and I can tell all of this is weighing heavy on his mind.

And here’s the thing, here’s the reason this makes me so sad: I was Harrison. I was that kid. I can remember experiencing the same fear, the same sense of not belonging, even in first grade. (Especially in first grade.) I found refuge in books and comics. Eventually I met other kids who seemed to feel the same way I did, but it took a while, and in the meantime I felt alone. I tried hard — too hard — to make friends, to get other kids to like me. Eventually I just gave up. Is this something that every kid feels? I don’t know. It never seemed that way to me; it always seemed the other kids had lots of friends.

As I’d hoped, Hank’s parents seem to be aware of the situation. At dinner, Jeremy asked him about school, about his friends. “How’s that new kid, Joey?” Jeremy said. “Is he still your bud?”

“Yeah,” said Harrison. “He saved me from Brandon the other day.” He launched into a long and detailed (but very bewildering because it was in first-grade-speak) description, replete with wild gesticulations, of how Brandon had been chasing him, but Joey had stepped in to save the day.

Ah, Harrison, how much you remind me of me. Hang in there, my little friend.

(Also at dinner, Harrison — eavesdropping — asked, “What’s divorce?” “I’ll explain it later,” said Jeremy. “Explain it now,” said Harrison, and so Jeremy tried. “It’s when two people decide that they don’t want to be married anymore. It’s very sad.” Harrison nodded: “It does sound sad.”)

The Spontaneous Gourmet

Though I love cooking, I’ve never successfully created a dish of my own until now. I generally make things too complicated. For the past month, I’ve been conceiving an onion-potato dish that I believed might be both simple and delicious. I finally gave it a go last night, and I’m pleased with the results. It turned out exactly as I’d hoped.

J.D.’s Onion-Potato Hash

Dice two medium russet potatoes (about one pound) into quarter-inch cubes. Chop half of a medium yellow onion (about six ounces). Mince three or four garlic cloves. Melt two tablespoons of butter in a skillet (cast-iron if you have it) over high heat. Add the vegetables and stir til coated. Season lightly with salt and pepper. After a few minutes, reduce the heat to medium and stir. Melt an additional two tablespoons of butter on top of the hash. Continue cooking — stirring occasionally — over medium heat until desired texture is reached. Salt and pepper to taste.

I’m sure this is some standard dish that people have been preparing for centuries, but it’s nothing I’ve ever tried. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in creating your own recipe and having it turn out the way you’d planned. Most of the time when I try to create my own dishes, at best I end up with barely edible slop.

Whenever I try to get inventive in the kitchen, I’m reminded of this Roz Chast New Yorker cartoon, which has been a favorite in our house for over a decade.

Here’s what the cartoon says (other than the copyright watermark from the Cartoon Bank):

SPONTANEOUS GOURMET

“Sometimes something happens…and sometimes it doesn’t.”

1. In a small pan, sauté 1/2 c. onion in 2 tbsp. oil or butter.
2. Heat a can of tomato soup to just below a boil.
3. Sift 3/4 c. flour.
4. Pound flat 6 chicken breasts.
5. Add 1/2 c. raisins to 1 egg and let sit overnight.
6. Measure 1/8 tsp. nutmeg.
7. Crumble 14 soda crackers.
8. Grate 2 c. cheddar cheese.
9. Remove the casing from 1 lb. Italian sausage.
10. Take 30 maraschino cherries.

Roz Chast is our favorite New Yorker cartoonist. She’s somehow managed to tap into our brains; she knows what Kris and I both find funny. You can see all 762 Roz Chast New Yorker cartoons at the Cartoon Bank.

Walk the Line

I’ve been listening to Johnny Cash for a little over two years, only having discovered him after he died, yet it seems to me I’ve been hearing his music my entire life.

Perhaps this is because The Essential Johnny Cash (two CDs, thirty-six songs) has become the official soundtrack of “J.D. getting things done around Rosings Park”. My old stereo lives in the workshop. Whenever I have work to do there, or in the garage, or in the yard, I turn on Johnny Cash and let him sing. After nearly two years of this, I’ve gotten to the point where I need Johnny Cash in order to do any significant labor outside. (For example, Johnny Cash was blaring on Saturday morning as we hauled barkdust.) I can’t start working until I hear the familiar tones of the first song: “Hey Porter! Hey Porter! Won’t you give me a sign? How much longer will it be til we cross that Mason-Dixon Line?” I also have a Johnny Cash playlist that resides permanently on my iPod.

Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic from last year, is remarkably similar to 2004’s Ray, which told the life of Ray Charles. This plot summary could describe either film: a young boy is raised in poverty, suffers the death of a beloved brother, carries on due to a love of music, struggles to find a Voice, records some hit records, becomes a slave to Vice, and overcomes said slavery through the love of a woman, who saves him from destroying his life.

Walk the Line and Ray are both well-made films, but they’re both just sort of there. They’re a little dull to watch at times, the inevitable result of trying to compress a lifetime of experience into two hours while still putting the artist’s greatest hits on screen.

That being said, I liked Walk the Line better than I liked Ray, if only because I’m now familiar with Johnny Cash and his music. It was fun to watch Joaquin Phoenix (as Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter) melt into these characters, actually performing the songs themselves.

Walk the Line is certainly worth seeing if you like Johnny Cash.

7.5 Cubic Yards

We have one squirrel who has figured out how to climb the birdfeeder, by-passing the squirrel guard. He’s decided that suet is a tasty treat.

Kris, dissatisfied with the current state of our gardens, recently ordered a dumptruck load of barkdust mulch. It was delivered early Saturday morning. In the back of a truck, 7.5 yards of the stuff doesn’t look like much, but once it’s dumped in your front yard, it makes an intimidating pile.

Tiffany came over to help us haul load after load after load of mulch from the road to the various garden beds. We worked long and hard. At first, I did a good job of sparing Kris’ precious plants, but after about fifty wheelbarrow loads, my ability to care about tender shoots diminished greatly. I do well at the start of big tasks, but am kind of whiny by the end.

Fortunately, we had enough barkdust mulch left over after covering the rose gardens and the herb bed that I was allowed to use some for my grapes and blueberries. I’m sure my plants will be happy.

After three hours and seventy-five wheelbarrow loads of dirt, Kris took us to Red Robin for lunch. The women had hearty appetites, but all I wanted was a light meal and a sweet drink. (To be fair, the night before we’d had a rather large Lebanese meal with Paul and Susan, followed by dessert at Papa Haydn.)

In the afternoon, Kris took a two-hour nap upstairs on the futon, cats at her side. I dozed downstairs in a sunbeam.

There’s still more yardwork to come!

North Country

Deep in my heart, I have a lot of liberal sensibilities. I own some conservatives beliefs, it’s true, but mostly I subscribe to a set of philosophies that would be considered progressive. Open-Minded. Liberal. Even so, there are times I have to shake my head in disbelief at some of the stuff I watch and read from supposedly like-minded people. If similar books and movies were put out by conservatives, they would be mocked to high heaven. The recent film North Country is a case in point.

Frances McDormand and Charlize Theron, two incredible actresses

North Country was released in late 2005 to moderately good reviews (though most came with reservations). The Amazon summary:

A sterling cast and vivid direction give North Country an emotional heft to match its political convictions. Charlize Theron plays Josey Aimes, who goes to work at a Minnesota steel mine after splitting with her violent husband. But the job proves to be almost as harrowing as her marriage; the male miners, resentful of women taking jobs, verbally abuse and play humiliating pranks on the female miners. After being physically assaulted by a coworker, Josey tries to fight against the harassment, but none of the other women will join her case for fear that things will only get worse. North Country, directed by Niki Caro, makes the women’s experience palpable for the audience without overdoing it. But the lawsuit is only part of the movie; the gut impact of North Country comes from the devastating effect the lawsuit has on Josey’s family, friends, and coworkers—thanks to an incredible ensemble cast that includes Sissy Spacek, Sean Bean, Richard Jenkins, Woody Harrelson, and the always powerful Frances McDormand. The courtroom histrionics don’t always ring true, but the family conflict is riveting and deeply moving.

This film is a fictionalized account of a real case, a case that played out over a span of twenty years. The film compresses this to two years, and the compression undermines its credibility. Do I believe that the real women from whom this story is drawn were subjected to harassment similar to that depicted in this film? Yes, I do. Do I believe it all of the despicable events portrayed on screen occurred within months of each other? Hell no. And to ask me to believe this is laughable.

North Country has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The characters are caricatures, cardboard cut-outs made to stand in for real people. Every man is an asshole, except the mercenary lawyer from New York, who’s not good, just not an asshole. The situations often feel contrived. Anything bad that could possibly happen to the main character happens. The script is tired and predictable, to such an extent that three times I knew exact lines of dialogue before they were even spoken. (And I’m not particularly good at predicting that sort of thing.) This film falls all over itself to make its point, yet simultaneously lacks the confidence that it can do so. It has no faith in itself, and most certainly no faith in the audience. It cannot resist repeatedly using footage of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings. What’s wrong with that? This film ostensibly occurs during 1989/1990. The Thomas/Hill hearings occurred in the winter of 1991.

Director Niki Caro‘s first film was Whale Rider, a brilliant coming-of-age tale about challenging convention, with very real things to say about the strength of girls and women. It’s difficult for me to believe that the two pictures are from the same filmmaker.

“Maybe you should sleep on this entry,” Kris told me, when I told her I was going to write it. “You don’t seem to have a depth of appreciation for what some people have had to go through. You’re trivializing it.”

I don’t think that’s the case. I think that films like North Country trivialize the struggles people have experienced to achieve respect and equality. By creating some surrealist feminist fantasy of the world as misogynistic hell-hole, by exaggerating and distorting events to the point of the grotesque, by presenting everything in black-and-white, this story makes light of the struggle the real women faced. Give me a socially progressive work of fiction like Native Son over this crap any day.

“Oh brother,” I said to Kris just a few minutes into the film. “This film’s all about being anti-male, isn’t it?” It was just a guess at the time, but I couldn’t have been any more right. North Country is pure misandry.

(p.s. Read the wikipedia entry on Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., the case on which this film is based. Now that sounds real, that sounds plausible, that sounds like a film I might have liked to have seen.)

Price Increase

Owning a small manufacturing business is interesting. Mostly, Nick and Jeff and I have things in-hand. We’ve been doing this for too many years, and we know how things work. (One reason we have so much slack time in our jobs is because of this: we’re familiar with them, and we’ve built our own little systems to handle formerly-lengthy chores quickly.)

There are times, however, that we don’t know what to do, times when we’re out of our element. There are times I feel like a minor league player who’s making a brief appearance with the big league affiliate because the star catcher has broken his thumb.

For example, I often feel out of my element where pricing is concerned.

Our company doesn’t play games with prices. Our prices are based on how much our material costs, how much labor goes into producing a box, and then a certain (smallish) set profit for each order based on a variety of factors. We don’t arbitrarily raise and lower prices for individual customers. Our prices are fair, and a reflection of the cost of doing business.

Our suppliers, however, do not seem to operate on the same principles. Their pricing schemes are often baffling, whimsical even. Why does one particular grade of corrugated cost more than another? Why this much more? Why does one supplier charge 20% less for this grade but 10% more for that grade? Why will another supplier refuse to ship us board specified in the traditional manner, only shipping us new-fangled board? Why can this supplier get us material overnight, but that supplier takes a week?

More to the point (and the reason for this entry), why does one supplier increase its prices (citing market conditions), while two competitors do not? What do we do when our primary supplier is suddenly charging ten percent more for material than its competitors? Do we just ditch our primary supplier, a supplier with which we’ve had a strong relationship for twenty years? Do we begin to spread things around to the alternate suppliers? What happens when our primary supplier then responds by lowering prices? Do we suddenly drop all the business we’ve moved to secondary suppliers?

I am not fond of price whores, businesses who shift from one company to another based solely on pricing, and I don’t want ours to be that sort of company. Good business is based on more than just the lowest price. On the other hand, I don’t want to pay too much; paying too much takes money out of my pocket and out of the pockets of my customers.

Mostly I am able to make quick business decisions. That’s one of my roles here, I think. But the Big Stuff — stuff like price increases, and new buildings, and equipment purchases — that stuff freezes me in my tracks. I play dozens of scenarios over in my mind, trying to predict every possible outcome, both the good and the bad. What is best for the business? That’s the question I’m always trying to answer.

I don’t have to deal with these sorts of situations often. When I do, they’re perplexing.

The Squid & The Whale

The Squid & The Whale is a great film. It is well-written, well-acted, and taut. It deftly captures a slice of life in 1986 Brooklyn.

The Squid & The Whale is an awful film. It is depressing, self-indulgent, and obscene. It’s vapid, a total waste-of-time.

Which of those two statements actually describes The Squid & The Whale, one of the best-reviewed films of 2005? I suppose it depends on your point-of-view. It depends on what you think the purpose of cinema is, what you bring to the movie, and what you’re willing to tolerate in the name of art.

Here’s a plot summary (from Amazon):

The Squid and the Whale follows the divorce of Joan (Laura Linney) and Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) as it wreaks havoc on the emotional lives of their two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline). Though there’s no plot in the usual sense, the movie progresses with growing emotional force from the separation into the bitter fighting between Joan and Bernard and the hapless, floundering behavior of Walt and Frank, who act out through plagiarism, sexual acts, and drinking.

Some viewers may find the ending too diffuse; others will appreciate that writer/director Noah Baumbach doesn’t wrap up the messiness of life in a false cinematic package. Either way, viewers will appreciate how the specificity of the personalities makes The Squid and the Whale so compelling, as Baumbach has drawn the characters with such detail, both engaging and off-putting, that they leap off the screen. Naturally, he’s greatly helped by the cast: Linney, Eisenberg, Kline, and especially Daniels bite into these often unsympathetic portraits and give fearlessly honest performances, interlocked in both painful and funny ways—rarely have family dynamics been captured so vividly. If there was an ensemble Oscar, this cast would deserve it.

When the credits began to roll, Kris turned to me and said, “That was pretty good.”

“No,” I said. “That was perfect.” I meant it. I think that The Squid & The Whale is brilliant. It has supplanted Good Night, and Good Luck. for the top spot on my Best Films of 2005 list. The Squid & The Whale is great in almost every sense, but I especially love the characters: they are three-dimensional, with clear motives, and they interact in wonderful, true ways. I also love the many telling, tiny details the film observes: the books on the shelves, the glances between lovers, the behavior of adolescents.

Yet I know several people who might have stood up and walked out on this film in the theater, or who would have stopped watching on DVD after half an hour. Why the difference in opinion? It’s a question that strikes to the heart of the way we view cinema in our lives.

The Squid & The Whale is one of a class of films: serious-minded mostly-independent movies that are more motivated by character than by plot. Sideways and Lost in Translation are two prominent examples of recent films of this nature. (Others include Junebug, In the Bedroom, and Welcome to the Dollhouse.)

I like these films because they’re grounded in Real Life. They show real people reacting in real ways to real situations. They show the tumult of emotions and decisions that make up day-to-day existence. They present complex characters, characters that possess elements of the good, elements of the bad, and elements of the ugly.

Because these films are character-driven rather than plot-driven, many people find them dull. But mostly, the people who dislike these films say one of two things: “This isn’t Real Life.” or “I don’t want to watch a movie about Real Life. Real Life is depressing enough. I go to the movies to escape.”

In response to the former, I want to say that these films do depict Real Life. They may not depict your life, but they depict the lives of real people in very real ways. I’m often shocked at how narrow a view of the world (even their immediate world) some people have. Their lives are normal, and they cannot imagine what it’s like to live differently. Are people actually so unaware as to realize that situations as portrayed in these films really are normal to somebody else?

In response to the latter, there’s not much I can say. If you look to cinema solely for entertainment, then these films are not for you. Cinema as entertainment is fine for what it is — escapism — but it does not have the power to tell us anything about ourselves. And it’s true that cinema as art does not always bring us joy, but what it can do is teach us something new about the world, and about people. To me, as a writer, it is much more impressive to read (or see) a story in which real people live and learn and change than it is to read (or see) a story about a giant monster rampaging loose in the middle of a city. Telling an entertaining story is easy; telling a story about Real Life is difficult.

Ultimately, there’s a place for all sorts of films. I only wish that more people would give these small character-driven films a chance. They really are things of beauty.