Saw the WaPo front page for my birth date, which happens to be a summer day in 1939 antedating that "dastardly" attack on Pearl Harbor by two and a half years.
Honoring tradition of the bad news first, at the top of the first column the wire service reported the fatal electrocution in Tientsin of a Chinese civilian male. He had made contact with an electrified fence that the occupying Japanese forces had erected around the British and French compounds. The victim's body was left dangling on the fence. The battles of World War II began in Asia before they did in Europe, and well before the "awakening of the sleeping giant" on December 7, 1941.
Also at the page's top, King George V was pictured with the Queen and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, the royal couple just back from a good-will visit to the States and Canada.
The day before, six people in D.C. had suffered heat exhaustion and one drowned. Curiously, the Post used the convention of designating three of the victims as "colored." Presumably (and ironically) the four victims with no identification were "white."
Plans were revealed for closing Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, which the Attorney General described as a "place of horror," operated under a system that was "necessarily vicious." (Surely he meant unnecessarily vicious?) Alcatraz was not closed until 1963--24 years later.
Lady Astor, a member of the British Parliament, who was notorious for saying outrageous things, some of them vicious (e.g anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic), advocated a tax increase on tobacco, saying that smoking is "almost" an egregious "crime." A peer thought this view was curious since she was born in Virginia, USA. She replied, "When I was in Virginia hardly anyone smoked a cigarette, and the Bishop of Virginia ... said he would rather see his daughter drunk than smoking a cigarette."
A "pert Broadway showgirl," a Miss Maurice, testifying in a federal mail fraud case, said that the defendant, a Mr. Buckner, had romanced her by, among other enticements, inviting her to go with him to Manila on a business trip. "Was that an elopement?" the Assistant US Attorney asked. She said, "Oh no. He often talked about marriage, but only like you'd talk about the war in China." Cross-examining, the defense attorney asked, "It's not uncommon for a gentleman to ask a lady to take a trip, is it?" "Oh Mr Minton!" she said, flushing and lowering her shadowed eyelids. Tee-hee-hee. All present found that titillating. The prosecution interjected, "I don't know where Mr. Minton comes from; that must be the new technique." Mr. Minton (chuckling): "At any rate, I was young once."
Me too.
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