Last month my son and I made a visit to McMinnville Oregon specifically to visit Howard Hughes’ ‘Spruce Goose’ in a museum constructed specifically to house and display that magnificent aviation folly. My interest in vintage aviation continues to grow. I’ve been collecting old New Yorker Magazines for years but
Here’s a curious piece of footage shot in the old Penn Station circa 1945. It appears to have been photographed as background footage for a very forgotten Jane Russell vehicle called ‘Young Widow’. Like so many other bits of motion picture ephemera, its real value isn’t for the reasons that
Between 2018 and 2022 (or so) I hosted my podcast, ‘Movies Til Dawn’, which consisted of me and veteran directors having conversations about…well…lots of different stuff. There was no specific formula to these conversations–I usually told the subject beforehand that we could talk about anything they felt like. Thus my
Yesterday I posted about the hard-kicking all-female big band Francis Carroll and Her Coquettes. Today we take a look at ‘The International Sweethearts of Rhythm’, who were believed to be the first racially-integrated all-female big band in the United States. Though they’ve been more or less lost to history–and that’s
.By 1958, Howard Hughes had become a recluse. His drug addictions resulting from his disastrous air crash in 1946 which I posted about yesterday were undoing him mentally, physically and emotionally. This once very public figure now cowered in a penthouse hotel suite in Las Vegas, hiding from the world, doing business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhZqKlO6wEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1aKNy7hBV4 Airplane pilots are always quick to tell you that 99 percent of all aviation accidents are due to pilot error. This is almost a religious incantation with them–they believe firmly in ‘trusting the machine’, which I imagine is the only way to get over the insane fact that they’re
This past weekend my son and I journeyed to the little town of McMinnville, Oregon, to see what is arguably the ninth wonder of the world; the biggest plane ever built and never flown. Howard Hughes ‘Spruce Goose’ is a flying boat that was intended to be used during the
The famous (in her day) nightclub hostess/chanteuse Texas Guinan was captured on film on several occasions, the most elaborate of which was a feature she starred in called ‘Queen Of The Nightclubs’. Shot in 1928, it was likely the best and most detailed view of the true look, tone and
We close this weeks peculiar byway into the world of competitive race car driving with the silliest bit of stock car racing footage you’ll ever see. It’s a French attempt at the sport and while it sort of looks, acts and sounds like a car race it’s actually a very
Here’s a terrific look at the auto races of the 1920s. There’s a wipe out that’s awfully similar to the terrifying one I posted yesterday which occurred this past weekend, a mere one-hundred years later from the one in today’s video. Aside from the automobiles, the race looks pretty much