Tag: World War II

Perusing the RUHS Archives

Editor’s Note: On March 26, 2019 I made a few corrections to dates throughout this post after the RUHS Archivist, Therese Martinez, offered some notes.

Now the piece should hopefully be even more accurate.

Sometimes work can take you to unexpectedly interesting places.

In my perpetual search for Gladeo interviewees (because internship hours), today I took my Mom’s advice and spent time with the Archivist at my alma mater, Redondo Union High School.

Apparently I’m just gravitating toward the school this weekend, be it for theatre or history.

About two years after I graduated in 2015, an old storage space for janitorial goods was converted into this fancy Alumni House.

The school has been around since ~1905, so there’s a whole lot of alum to keep track of.

But more importantly, the Alumni House became a space for memorabilia — old class photos, yearbooks, furniture, mascot costumes, etc.

Since this wasn’t a place when I attended high school, I never got to check any of it out.

Now that I did, I’m pretty upset that everything wasn’t so open and available back when I was working on the High Tide. Would’ve loved to peruse for a story or two!

Some of the archived pieces go way back to the 1920’s.

Like this mirror, a senior present for the school from the class of 1925:

In that same vein, there were publications like yearbooks and newspapers from around the 20s, as the High Tide has been in business since 1920.

Old versions of the yearbook, called “The Pilot” (which had even earlier publications going back to 1915), were particularly cool because a lot of them had student signatures from all those years ago:

It’s pretty incredible to not just see pictures of folks long since entering the cradle of old age, but to see what and how they wrote to one another.

Gotta love an age where everyone wrote in clean, precise cursive.

And where nobody wrote “HAGS” because they weren’t enmeshed in a culture of shorthand acronyms and emoji that have cursed our modern, digital age into regressed diction.

… Sorry, did I say that out loud? My old man is showing.

A few other specific items on display were of note.

Like this class photo from 1921 — the oldest one we have available, apparently:

Or the old met version of our mascot, Sammy the Seahawk.

Apparently dubbed “Scary Sammy” because… Well…

Look at him.

That is a terrifying mascot costume.

Though alongside the old costume, I also found out that the first time RUHS received the “sea hawk” as its mascot was in the banner of a High Tide issues from 1926.

A lot of the other things around the Alumni House were just as cool, but in the interest of not having a 3,000 word post I think it’s safe to share the rest in a neat little slideshow:

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However, don’t think this is the last time you’ll hear from me about the Alumni House.

I’ve already started the gears turning to get a video interview with the RUHS Archivist for Gladeo, alongside a Career Profile on being an archivist.

So whenever that’s coming together, assuming I’ll be on set as a producer of sorts, you know I’ll be sharing bits and pieces of it.

Stay tuned.

The content of most photos here are courtesy of the RUHS Archives.

Gamers just want to have fun

With this showing up in the mail earlier today, I suppose it’s as good a time to talk about it as any.

I’ve spared no shortage of copy writing about my Gaming in American Culture class. From not knowing what to write for my semester-long project to what I wrote about for my semester-long project, from my re-absorption of Ender’s Game for our discussion on militarization of video games to my new absorption of a Barbie game from the early 1900s.

Given my general adoration for all things video games, it makes sense that I’ve been enamored with so many things which have been assigned in this class.

It was a good decision to follow my friend Mimi into a random American Studies class as my ‘fun’ activity for my last semester of undergraduate college education.

One of the most interesting aspects of the class has been the gradual shift of my understanding of U.S. history based on different elements of popular culture that, for the most part, I already knew about.

For instance, that aforementioned analytical reading of Ender’s Game. Or our in-class discussion today about the 1983 Matthew Broderick classic WarGames.

Part of our discussion hinged on the shift from a World War II mentality of game theory in that the best way to win is to make sure your opponents can never fight again to a Cold War mentality of anxious peace through the zero sum game of the nuclear arms race (“The only way to win is not to play”).

But then we also tied the movie into discussions of early hacker culture with the development of Spacewar! in 1962, really the first game that taught people computers could be used for something other than work.

As well as the game that got banned at Stanford for being too addicting and inhibiting work (which you can now play in all its antiquated glory here!).

However, another branch of our discussion was the change in concepts of masculinity that came from gaming culture and nerd-driven movies in the 80s.

A shift from the grizzled frontier-pushing heroes of John Wayne to the intellectual digital frontier exploring cowboys of Matthew Broderick’s David teaching a computer to play tic-tac-toe.

That’s where Carly Kocurek’s book, Coin-Operated Americans, is going to pick up the slack for next week.

According to the blurb on the back, it “explores the development and implications of the ‘video gamer’ as a cultural identity,” most notably in relation to the perception of games as a “boy’s world.” But also looking at the moral panic stemming from 1976’s Death Race and other culture examining video games like Tron and WarGames.

Hence us watching the latter movie before reading the book.

That’s essentially my big task for the next week, getting through this little tome while dealing with Comm Law homework and such.

Luckily, now that my big networking event and midterms are out-of-the-way, I have a little extra time to settle down and read.

So if I wind up coming back in the near future with an obscure book review, now you know why.

When did we start labeling ingredients?

A few weeks back I talked about the essay I was going to have to write for my Visual Communications class.

I’m sure if you follow my posts regularly you remember this one. My little laugh at the 1950s era advertising we could choose to analyze.

In that case I’m sure you also remember that I decided to go with this 7-Up ad.

Boy is it more and more beautiful every time I see it.

I bring up the subject again because I started to work on the actual paper itself yesterday evening and already the damn thing has taken me down a bizarre rabbit hole.

A rabbit hole that, in all honesty, is pretty interesting. If you ask me at least.

Here’s some more in-depth context before I get into that branch of my research. The content requirements for the essay are relatively straight forward. We simply have to examine the image we chose from the six perspectives that were elaborated in earlier in the semester:

Personal — Our gut reactions to the image.
Historical — How the context of the time shaped the image.
Technical — What techniques and elements went into creating the image.
Ethical — Would ethical philosophers find the creation or use of the image justified?
Cultural — What symbols can be found in the image that relate it to the culture of the time.
Critical — Taking a second, more objective look at the image now that all of the analysis isdone to see how thoughts and opinions might have changed.

My deep dive began as I broached into the historical aspects of the advertisement.

Most of the analysis was easy enough. The ad comes from the 1950s, so there was plenty to discuss as far as the post-war economic boom and opening stages of the Cold War went. Both contributed to the development of a middle class American ‘nuclear family’ that in many ways became dependent on purchasing power to show their status and connection to the mainstream culture.

What I looked into had nothing to do with that overall historical context. Instead it came from pinpointing a very specific part of the advertisement.

In the lower right-hand corner there’s a block of text which, among other things, tries to convince new parents to feed their babies a “wholesome” mix of 7-Up and milk.

More important to point out for my purposes is the section where the advertisers tell readers that they have all the ingredients in 7-Up listed on the bottle — despite the fact that it was not required.

When I read that I stared at the screen for a moment mulling things over. Were food labels not required in the 1950s? There was a Food and Drug Administration overlooking those matters at that point in time, wasn’t there?

It was a bit of a tangent, sure, but if I found the idea so interesting it seemed like a good research avenue to go down.

… Only in part because I needed a few more sources to fit the requirement and some U.S. government resources seemed official enough to justify using. I promise.

I found that, yes, the FDA did exist prior to the publication of this 7-Up advertisement. The FDA came into place alongside the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in 1906 according to the horse’s mouth.

However, labels on food like you see required today, with their widely enumerated requirements that are stipulated upon in this most recent FDA Food Labeling Guide from 2013, were not required until the passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA). Prior to that, listing things like ingredients and nutritional information of food product labels were purely voluntary.

So it seems like the 7-Up people were right in congratulating themselves for posting that kind of information on their product in the 1950s.

But in that case, just when did it become a requirement for everyone?

Diving a little deeper into the subject I came across this discussion of the history behind nutritional labeling on the National Center for Biotechnical Information’s website. As a subset of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, I figure they’re a pretty reputable source.

According to this source, the NLEA wasn’t officially passed until November 1990.

That’s almost 90 years after the FDA first came into being. It’s astounding to me that it took that long to get this kind of legislation passed!

Perhaps that’s hindsight bias in some respect. Food labels are so ubiquitous in the 21st century, and they’re the butt of so many jokes about GMOs and fake ingredients, that it’s hard to imagine a time they weren’t in use.

To think that time was just a few short decades ago…

Humans are pretty crazy, huh?

Old Fort MacArthur Days: A day of fun, sun and guns for the whole family

Who are these beauties you see above the title here? Why, that’s me and my little sister Alyson, dressed in 1940’s era attire. Both of us outside, at that. What could possibly bring us outside the comfort of our home on such a wonderful afternoon?

Plenty of things, actually. It was a really nice afternoon.

But in this case specifically, we were out and about with my good friend Sam at Old Fort MacArthur Days. Held at its namesake, Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, and spilling into the nearby Korean Friendship Bell, Old Fort MacArthur Days is an annual event where tons of people gather for a weekend to put on their finest displays of historically accurate military and era-specific gear so they can reenact events and educate the public.

Those are essentially the two major selling points of the experience. It’s huge in scale with tons of antiques and goods to sell, and each group has people manning the station that are veritable experts in the field they represent. You can stand around and ask the people in dress anything about the time period they’re dressed for and they’ll more than likely have the answer – and then some.

It’s a hard experience to explain for those who haven’t been, but my family has been going on and off for a long time now, as it’s definitely worth going as much as possible.

One thing the event suffered from this year was a blazing hot sun. For as entertaining as everything was, it was torture standing out in the open for the reenactments and listening to the representatives of the different eras. I can’t imagine what it must have been like standing around in heavy armor or old fashioned dresses and such.

Even without bulky clothing, I still managed to burn the hell out of myself out there. You can even tell in the featured image here, the back of my neck is red as it gets. As a result, I’ve been pretty exhausted and uncomfortable most of the afternoon, which is partially why it took until almost midnight to get something out about an event that ended at 4:00 p.m.

Because I’m still exhausted and also fairly lazy, I’m going to take the easy way out on this one and post a slideshow with all the cool pictures I got of all the booths so everyone can get something of an idea of what the event is like.

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If you like the kind of stuff you see here, I can assure you it’s an even better experience in person. Seriously, I wholeheartedly can’t recommend Old Fort MacArthur Days enough, and implore whoever can go to go next year.

If not for the scale and the educational value, at least for the glorious anachronisms.

Ben Franklin hanging out with Teddy Roosevelt? It’s there. Revolutionary soldiers calling for the death of a fallen gladiator? Got that. Roman children checking out World War II rifles as women in puffy colonial-era dress wander in the background? You know it.

Undoubtedly incredible.

I wanted to add an aside here at the end saying that I also have some pretty great videos showcasing some of the weapon demonstrations, a gladiator fight, the Civil War battle and a cowboy skit.

However, I haven’t been able to get it in a format where I can upload the videos easily yet. It’s actually part of the reason I’ve taken so long to write this, as a matter of fact. Until I figure that out I’m going to leave this here as a reminder that I’ll be adding them in once I do.