Closing In on the Car Heater

A few years ago I realized that automobiles weren't magically invented with heaters already installed. By coming across random references to motor robes I became aware that car heaters were uncommon until at least 1940, and the earliest reported sighting of a car heater that I could find was in a 1951 Plymouth (thanks, Gary!)

I'm pleased to report that we can narrow the field down even further, thanks to "The Boys' Book of Engines, Motors, and Turbines" by Alfred Morgan. Published in 1946, the book lists "car heaters" among the devices in which a curious suburbanite boy might find an electric motor...and since their inclusion in the list is totally blase, I assume that they were quite common by that time.

Therefore we can safely say that car heaters became standard devices between 1941 and 1945, based entirely on anecdotal evidence and my sort-of-quirky and extremely lucky reading habits. Anybody care to find a patent or a catalogue to back me up?

PS: This book is fabulous. When I started reading it I had no idea of how engines, motors, or turbines worked, and now that I'm halfway through I even know what a camshaft is, how hydroelectric power is harnessed, and that if you try to blow out the fire in your miniature steam engine you'll scatter burning alcohol around the room and "singe your whiskers."

Madam Satan

I was going to mention "Madam Satan" when I posted about pre-code Hollywood last week, but because the film had come out in 1930 I figured the New Yorker would get to it soon enough. And here it is, in the June 26, 1930 issue, previewed in a short piece called "De Mille on the Flossy."

We await, with a kind of special breathlessness, the release of the new Cecil B. de Mille picture. Our eagerness is due to our knowing a little bit about the plot. It seems to us by far the finest plot we have ever heard. It is about a girl whose husband has been philandering, and the girl decides to be gay--abandoned, if you will. So she goes to a masquerade party aboard a dirigible (you can see that the thing is getting better already). The party, if we remember the story, winds up in a scene of great dissolution, in which the girl is sold on the auction block to the highest bidder, who is going to have his way with her. The highest bidder turns out to be her husband, but at that moment a Heaven-sent bold of lightning strikes the dirigible and all the guests have to make their escape in parachutes, including Ben Bernie and his orchestra, which has been playing for the dancing. The husband, floating gently earthward, lands in a bear's den in a zoo--and here we will leave him with the gentle reader.

If this EVER gets released on DVD then you really must see it. It's oddly-paced and hackneyed and meandering, but whenever it goes crazy it does so with huge spectacle, and the modern viewer can only sit in awed bafflement. It's nice to hear that the original audiences would have thought it equally fun and bizarre.

Amazingly there are no clips online of the more memorable "Madam Satan" moments -- the parade of showgirls singing "Doin' the Catwalk, Meooow!", the dance sequence meant to evoke modern machinery, the really spectacular blimp disaster -- but here's one of the sweet songs, "All I Know," featuring the two protagonists mentioned in the New Yorker writeup.

The New Yorker's Shy Date with Modern Dance, 1930

Unless in reference to the latest hotcha dancefloor moves or the hottest entertainers at nightclubs, The New Yorker didn't say anything about dance. The closest they ever got was a somewhat irreverent look at Isadora Duncan's achievements...after she'd died.

So imagine my surprise to find, after all my recent modern dance bloviating, a tiny article called "On With the Dancers" tucked into the January 18, 1930 issue.

Our dancers of today are notable for the minimum of dancing in which they indulge. Their performances have become attempts at drama-in-petto, with almost no display of terpsichorean virtuosity. Dancing that is dancing does not really exist on the stage that devotes itself to the incohate form known as "the dance." (This is to be pronounced as if it were a sacred matter, or at least one not totally intelligible to the laity.)

It's sort of amusing to have The New Yorker accuse somebody ELSE of being snooty, especially in the same paragraph as the word "terpsichorean," but it's interesting (if not surprising) to read somebody from almost eighty years ago saying the same sort of thing that I've been saying all month, only shorter and with even less tolerance for the art.

The pseudonymous author divides 1930s dance performances into four categories. The first are the people who star in musical shows (Jack Donahue, Bill Robinson, the Astaires), "and consequently have no aesthetic status whatsoever." The second is exemplified by Anga Enters, who apparently acted out musical scenes in a form of pantomime.

The final categories are the type of modern dance we're accustomed to. The third is allegorical, modernistic, and intended to evoke a state of mind using "poses, of which there is not, apparently, an unlimited variety." The author is particularly critical of Martha Graham's use of "uplifted eyes to complete her pictures." Today's equivalent, I suspect, is the yearning reach-and-grasp.

The fourth category is the athletic "neo-ballet" school, which uses some traditional "moves" but still tries to escape convention. The author mentions Helen Tamiris (simply "Tamiris" back then).

And what was the author's conclusion, way back then?

If you happen not to be in sympathy with the bodily expression of moods, music, or dramatic concepts, it all will seem like a lot of fussiness in which music is supplemented by something extraneous and dancing is reduced to posturing. If the form interests you, you will discover in the activities of the Dance Repertory Theatre, and those who are going in the same direction, a sincere endeavor to make of "the dance" an entity capable of standing on its own legs--and what legs some of them are!

Ahem.

The Yo-Yo - Helen Kane - Poop Connection

If you've been reading this blog today, you've been wondering what yo-yos have to do with feces. I myself wasn't aware of any connection but a November 23, 1929 advertisement from Reubens gives us this, a note handwritten by Helen Kane.


I mentioned this morning that one of the 1929 yo-yo tricks was the "Boop-a-doop," obviously derived from the Helen Kane song "I Wanna Be Loved By You." Then, later in the day, I told three stories about poop. Now I give you a note written by Helen Kane in which she says

I wanna be loved by you --
Poop Popp Poop Poop

There you go! I don't just write about random things! It's all connected, just sometimes you have to wait a bit!

PS: I find it hilarious to think of Broadway star Helen Kane being so drunk at Reubens that she can't even remember the lyrics to her one hit song.

PPS: A long time ago I posted some of the choicest Reubens advertisements. Remember? They would spy on their celebrity guests, and then write about what they ordered and what terrible pigs they were. As of 1929 the new Reubens schtick is to publish celebrity quotes, and then somewhat more discreetly call them pigs.

Motor Robes Revisited

In July I was puzzled by a 1929 advertisement for "motor robes." We decided -- on anecdotal evidence mainly -- that these robes were for keeping passengers warm in the backseat, in the days before cars had heaters.

By way of confirmation and with a tip o' the hat to synchronicity, here's the paragraph I read last night in "Medical Center" by Faith Baldwin:

Danny and the McDonald car rolled for them at a quarter past seven. Sophie, smiling into Danny's interested eyes--she couldn't help smiling at any man and any man's eyes would have been interested--settled herself under the robe with a sigh of comfort. She said, "This is what I call luxury."

What's interesting here is not the confirmation of the "car robe theory," but rather the fact that this book was written in 1940...and they still hadn't designed a car heater. I wonder when this amazing innovation finally came about?

"Stride of Man" by Thames Williamson

I admit it: I have a fascination for things which are under appreciated or outright forgotten. Maybe someday I'll figure out what such things appeal to me, but for now I'll just revel in it.

While going through old New Yorker magazines, I read tantalizing book reviews about authors who you never hear about now; some of them were up-and-coming stars who never realized their potential, others were one-book-wonders, and a few wrote well-regarded fiction of a sort which just doesn't resonate nowadays. In the latter category I put Thames Williamson.

If you can find substantial information about Thames Williamson on the internet then you're savvier than I am. Myself, I read a review of "Stride of Man" in a 1929 issue of The New Yorker, and it sounded strangely intriguing. One trip to abebooks later and I had a second edition copy in my hands, complete with ratty page trimming and a gorgeous art nouveau cover.

Then I read it, and...well, they just don't write books like this anymore.

It's an "epic," tracing the life of fictional Daniel Patterson -- distant relative of Daniel Boone -- from his humble beginnings to the height of his career as an automobile king. That element is straight-forward enough, but the book is really an allegory for American migration, invention, and ambition.

Patterson begins as a pre-teen orphan, living off the land west of the Rocky Mountains during the beginning of the civil war. As he moves east he learns about steamboats, he hunts buffalo, he falls in love, he boards his first train, he tinkers with bicycles...then he migrates to the prairies and tries to eke out a living, before travelling further east to Chicago where he labours in a factory. He deals with unions, he dreams his dreams, and then -- finally -- he starts work on the invention that will make him rich: the automobile.

Through all this he matures as a sort of Ayn Rand hero: serious, fair, able to juggle his workers with his down-to-earth reasoning skills, born of wildness and never tamed by the city or by the demands of high scoiety. It all comes across as terribly contrived...because it IS, and it's meant to be. It's a totally unsubtle pastiche of American-innovator stereotypes, meant to encapsulate the stages that the United States went through in order to become an industrial giant.

Fortunately Thames Williamson is pretty level-headed through most of the book, presenting both the pros and cons of every stage of Patterson's (and America's) development. At the end, however, he introduces a "practical art and culture" character in the form of Patterson's son Brand, who -- after going through the first world war -- decides that it's time for America to leverage its infrastructure toward creating...well, art, or culture, or something.

Through most of the book Patterson argues against anarchists and artists, chastising them for being all "idea" with no "plan." But somehow Brand's arguments eventually sink in, and since Williamson's writing is so non-judgemental, it's hard to know what point he's making. Is he telling us that Brand's ideas are correct, and that in 1929 it's really time for America to plot out a Grand Cultural Roadmap? Or is he saying that Brand has somehow distracted his father, perhaps implying that American businesspeople are likewise being co-oped and distracted by the younger generation?

I don't know, and that's the frustrating thing about "Stride of Man." After 300 pages of lean, quick prose, it descends into pseudo-intellectual babble about destiny and maturation, the kind of talk that the Patterson character had been mocking since the beginning of the book.

Anyway, I DID enjoy the book, and it's certainly like taking an undiluted sniff of Pure '20s Optimism. But if Williamson's other novels are like this I can see why he's been totally forgotten.

PS: The back sleeve of the book advertises MacKinlay Kantor's "Diversey," that damn book that I scorned but which continues to haunt my life. I WILL TRY TO READ IT AGAIN, if just to stop it from tormenting me in the future.

The Adventure of the Behaviourist

During my first years as a Psychology student at the University of Waterloo, I was a dedicated behaviourist. There was something comforting about its endless chains of predictable cause and effect. Next to the more "subconscious" disciplines it was downright simple: you reward or punish a person for doing something, and eventually you can "condition" them to do what you want.

Behaviourists got results...and they could QUANTIFY them! They used a mixture of hard-nosed determination, patience, and metrics to -- say -- turn a kleptomaniac into an upstanding citizen. And I quickly discovered how useful the behaviourist approach was when dealing with pets; thanks to B.F. Skinner and his operant conditioning I had the family cat rolling over for chicken in a pretty much consistent way.

But courses in child development threw me for a loop, with their revelations of hard-wired mechanisms for things like language and knowledge of "self." Suddenly there were parts of human behaviour UNRELATED to conditioning. The REAL blow was the study of Symbolic Interactionism, which shows that we humans relate to our environment in a symbolic way, and therefore a "stimulus" is what we believe and perceive it to be, not something pure that always means the same thing, all the time, to all people.

So I've been forced to let go of much of my love of "billiard ball determinism" and hard-nosed behaviourism, partly because so many other forces seem to be at work, but mainly because all the factors involved -- people, problems, stimuli, responses -- get tangled up with other forces in the real world, making the "laboratory" approach to therapy just as difficult as any other.

So while I skip most of the New Yorker profile pieces, it was interesting to read Kenneth MacGowan's profile of Dr. John B. Watson in the October 6, 1928 issue. Despite the weird synchronicity moment in the first paragraph (Watson was annoyed by the character of "Dr. Watson" in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and here I am reading those stories right now), it's interesting to read a relatively muck-raking article about his academic problems.

By the time of the article Watson had long left academic life. The article claims that this was due to his intransigence and controversial studies, and it inexplicably ignores the entire scandal that surrounded his leaving: his adulterous affair with graduate student Rosalie Rayner. This is my first indication that the New Yorker profiles may have been a BIT of a whitewash.

(Incidentally, for fans of Thomas Pynchon, Watson and Rayner have the dubious honour of conducting the infamous "Little Albert" experiment which gets pride of place in Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow.")

Anyway, Watson was hard at work in the advertising business during 1928, helping with campaigns such as -- more synchronicity here -- Odorono. He made a lot of money perfecting the advertising agency's ability to frighten and titillate us. Maybe that's the way we should remember him; behaviourism was always best at curing phobias, and now we know it was good for causing them as well.

More Vaudeville Cats, Plus Special JJ Synchronicity Bonus!

I've just finished Douglas Gilbert's "American Vaudeville." It really is an exceptional book. Sloppy, yes, full of asides and written almost like a journal, but if you pay close attention you get a real sense of the interconnectedness of vaudeville; the stage hands, the performers, the booking agents, the theatre chain owners, the critics.

But of course you want to hear about the vaudeville cats.

The domestic feline--the writer, who adores them, regrets to say--never graduated with high honors in vaudeville although there were a number of successful cat acts. Of course, these cats are not dangerous, but they are unreliable, merely because they are supreme individualists, preferring to do the thing they want at the time they want to do it; which should be understandable...

Yet even [Tetchow] could get from his pets, for indeed they were that, but one trick each. His star performer was a tom who ran from the wings, scrambled up a rope hanging from the proscenium arch, got into a basket attached to a parachute and came floating down to the stage.

Heck, my cat could do that. Or at least she would if there was a toilet up there to drink out of.

It may be unnecessary to say that goats are difficult to work with and more unreliable than cats.

So no goats in baskets.

Special synchronicity bonus for reader jj! He mentioned this act last week, and what did I find on page 247?

Willie [Hammerstein] combed the museums and side shows for his freaks. In Philadelphia he found the wonderful Sober Sue...A number of the best comics of the period tried [to make her laugh]--Sam Bernard, Willie Collier, Eddie Leonard, Louis Mann. All failed. But the customers kept coming, not to see Sober Sue, but the comedians who (without salary) were contributing thousands of dollars in prestige and box-office take... When the engagement terminated it was discovered that her facial muscles were paralyzed and it was physically impossible for her to laugh.

Apparently Sober Sue suffered from the very odd Mobius syndrome, and her real name was Susan Kelly.

Yaaargh, Synchronicity! "Diversey"

In May of last year I was stuck in a hotel room with MacKinlay Kantor's book "Diversey," and it annoyed me so much that I made a beeline to Barnes & Noble to ask for something "happy."

I mentioned this in the blog and Eric replied in the comments, explaining that Kantor was actually a well-resepected author at one time. I found that hard to believe, but since Eric was a professor (and actually spent a great deal of time riding busses on Diversey street) I bowed to his wisdom and assumed that this novel was just a rare moment of badness for Kantor.

But what do I find in the August 18, 1928 New Yorker book review section?

ANOTHER book against which insomniacs are warned by the publishers with considerable justification is MacKinlay Kantor's "Diversey," based on the activities of Chicago's gangsters and their corollary network of machine guns, gin-crazed girl friends, and crooked politics...

That makes it sound a lot more interesting than I remember it, but I suppose I'll have to go back and try to read it again. The reviewer genuinely likes the book, and though the section is no longer written by Dorothy Parker, he-or-she seems to have pretty good taste.

More Quirky Vaudeville Anecdotes

I'm having so much fun re-reading Douglas Gilbert's "American Vaudeville." His anecdotes about popular variety acts are priceless and rapid fire. I can't vouch for his accuracy -- heck, he was there and I wasn't -- but vaudeville was so exaggerated to begin with that you can forgive the occasional over-the-top description.

Here are a few more of my favourite moments in the book. First off, he reprints a wonderfully nasty song by Dan Collyer called "Tommy, Don't Wriggle the Baby."

Now I am the oldest one of a family numbering twenty.
At the tender age of one begun my troubles of which I had plenty.
The children I had to nurse, with an infant's nursery bottle.
And when they were twins, upon my pins!--the infants I'd like to throttle!

CHORUS:
Tommy don't wriggle the baby.
Please don't tickle the baby.
Be pertickeler, perpendickeler
Always carry the child.

I think this would be a good companion song to the Talking Heads' "Stay Up Late."

I'm intrigued by the short chapter regarding Charlie Case, who Gilbert describes as "a natural Negro, a gentle neurotic (strange combination!)". Ahem. The transcription of one of Case's routines is unlike any vaudeville act I've heard before, so deadpan in its weirdness. It has a touch of the Marx Brothers to it but is so toned down...

Father was a peculiar man. Us children didn't understand him. Mother understood him. Mother could always tell when father'd been drinking. We couldn't tell. We used to think he was dead.

In the "synchronicity" department, just a few weeks ago I blogged about the practice of "paying the angles" on 1920s radio. This was just as big a problem in vaudeville, and Gilbert knows who to blame.

Lottie Gilson...almost ruined her art with an innovation that is still a nuisance in night clubs and on the radio--song plugging. She was the first of the pluggers, singing for an extra fee the most awful junk of the one-finger Tin-Pan Alley boys...

For an interesting article about the birth of the "hit song," see this parlor songs page.

The Yeast Makes Enemies

It's not unusual for the New Yorker cartoonists to make fun of their own sponsors, but here's my personal favourite:


If you're too lethargic and constipated to click on the picture for a larger view, he's saying "Yeast eater!" This an unquestionable reference to the advertisements for Fleischmann's Yeast, a ridiculous 1920's cure-all that I've been posting about occasionally.

You might be amazed to learn that Fleischmann's Yeast is still being sold, though no longer as a curative...people just bake bread with it nowadays.

You might also be interested to hear that Peter Arno -- originator of the "Whoops Sisters," who flounced through The New Yorker from 1925 to 1927 -- was also married to Lois Long, and somehow I think they both deserved each other.

Blogroll

I've finally gotten around to adding a blogroll to the right-hand column. These are blogs that I read for inspiration and entertainment, and hopefully you'll check them out.

I'd like to draw attention to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Interrobang, whose author is ALSO embarking on a structured walking tour of Kitchener/Waterloo!

More will be added when I discover (or remember them). And if you think I'll enjoy your blog, drop me a line.

John Barth in My City

I am deep in the thick of John Barth's "LETTERS," a novel that requires every inch of attention in order to digest. I am completely drawn into its elaborate conceits and the extraordinarily vivid world of its characters...almost TOO vivid. It is, after all, about the delicate line between fiction and reality, inspiration and fabrication. I constantly need to ask myself (much as the characters do): did this really happen? Is this a real place?

Presumably because it's (partially) related to the war of 1812, southern Ontario figures frequently in the book (in particular Ottawa, Niagara Falls, and Toronto), but usually in a sketchy way which implies that Barth didn't really visit during his research. When, on page 200, Lady Amherst writes about travelling to Stratford for the Shakespeare Festival, I got a creeping sensation...this book is getting awfully close to my stomping grounds. My mother and I were in Stratford just three weeks ago.

Then, suddenly:

...I was handed a sealed envelope with my name on it by one of the ushers. I was obliged to sit before I could open it. The note inside, in a handwriting I knew, read: "My darling: Dinner 8 P.M., Wolpert Hotel, Kitchener."

Yes, I LIVE in that city which Barth describes as "in the middle of nowhere." What's more, the "very European old hotel" is no doubt the WALPER Hotel, built in 1893 after a fire destroyed the original 1820's structure. The Walper is a grand old landmark where drag queens such as yours truly have, at various times, performed in "the improbably elegant German dining room on the second floor."

Given the way the book is going, I'm waiting to come across the character of Muffy St. Bernard IV, bastard offspring of Napoleon and Mary Shelley.

Synchronicity: The Manual

Henning (HE FIXED MY BLOG TEMPLATE!!!) has occasionally loaned me some rare and wonderful CDs by KLF. While their overblown and strangely beautiful "stadium house" sound is fun to listen to, and their collaboration with Tammy Wynette ("Stand By the Jams") is outrageously funny and odd, I reserve most of my affection for one-off KLF side-project The Timelords. They produced one mega-hit single, and then -- in typical quirky style -- produced "The Manual."

Subtitled "How to Have a Number One the Easy Way," it's their tongue-in-cheek guide to constructing the ideal hit single. Amazingly, many people have read The Manual and then produced number one hits, usually before fading away into obscurity. Close to my heart were Edelweiss, who in 1988 combined ABBA and yodelling to create one of my all-time favourite "fun" songs. They credit The Manual. So does (shiver) Chumbawamba for (shiver) "Tubthumping."

Now I find out that "The Pipettes" ALSO give The Manual credit for their success.

So what the heck is IN this manual? I'd love to read it, but until I can find a copy I can only guess, based on the examples provided above. All of these songs have simple repetative beats. Excluding The Pipettes, the songs also juxtapose different song segments that are surprising and seem slightly bizarre. Most importantly, they all have a sarcastic/base/simple/ironic tone reflecting elements of popular culture: The Timelords rip off (among other things) Gary Glitter and Doctor Who, Edelweiss rips off ABBA and German ski resorts, Chumbawamba combines a drinking anthem with "Danny Boy."

From what I hear, the original Manual focused more on electronically sampling other sources, but later groups show that simply referencing those sources is enough to score a hit.

Synchronicity: Still Banned in Boston

While listing the three things that Hugh Hefner had going for him, Pierre Berton says:

Third, Playboy was banned in Canada, which is almost as good as being banned in Boston.