the soda pop pioneer

There were all sorts of pioneers in America.

Some made it into the history books and others didn’t, even though their work impacted the day-to-day lives of millions.

So it goes with Claud Hatcher, the soda pop pioneer who gave America Royal Crown Cola.

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The American King of the Jungle.

Okay.

So, Johnny Weissmuller could never have played Hamlet.

But, for the role of a jungle superhero of exceptional masculine beauty and athleticism who said little, there was no better choice than the Olympic swimming champ.

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FDR, the failed screenwriter

It’s 1923.

Adolph Zukor, the president of Paramount Pictures, calls story editor Jane West into his New York City office.

Zukor is holding a letter from forty-one-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, the unsuccessful 1920 Democratic vice presidential nominee and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, who then worked for a Manhattan financial company.

FDR was out of government and disabled from polio.

And he had written a screenplay for a movie about John Paul Jones, the naval hero of the Revolutionary War.

‘Would Paramount have an interest in this story?’ his letter asked.

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The New York Times 6:00 AM extra edition, 6/6/44.

“The invasion of Europe from the west has begun.

“In the gray light of a summer dawn Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower threw his great Anglo-American force into action today for the liberation of the Continent.

“General Eisenhower’s first communique was terse and calculated to give little information to the enemy: ‘Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.’

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‘We’ll start from right here.’

For more than thirteen thousand American paratroopers of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, D-Day began a day early, on June 5, 1944.

Shortly before midnight on June 5, they boarded more than a thousand Douglas C-47 transport aircraft.

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Mount Vesuvius

For ten days in March 1944, Mount Vesuvius spewed volcanic rock and ash into the air and poured a river of molten lava down the mountainside.

It was a major eruption.

Three Italian villages and part of a fourth were destroyed.

And no volcanic activity at Vesuvius since then even comes close to the scale of this event.

The American servicemen stationed in Naples and at Pompeii Airfield, a temporary airbase built the year before, were shocked.

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no politics allowed

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was a popular television variety show on the CBS network in the late 1960s.

The program featured political satire and musical performances geared toward a young, progressive audience.

The program was controversial and there were continual conflicts with CBS executives over the show’s content.

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Turning history on its head.

During clandestine operations sprung from the catacombs of Odesa, Ukraine, he was called “Cyrus,” after Cyrus the Great, the founder of the ancient Persian Empire.

For it was Cyrus the Great who had freed Jews held captive in ancient Babylon and given them money to rebuild their temple.

And in his name, Vladimir Molodtsov, a thirty-year-old Soviet intelligence officer, led the resistance fighters of Odesa, the pre-war home of two hundred thousand Jews, in desperate efforts to free the city from the cruel occupation of the Nazi-allied Romanian army.

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Pack the Court

During FDR’s first term, the Supreme Court struck down eight of his New Deal programs.

They included programs for industrial and agricultural recovery which were foundational to his efforts to lift the country out of the Great Depression.

The Court ruled these programs unconstitutional by construing the Constitution’s clause granting Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce narrowly.

And many Constitutional scholars disagreed with the Court’s analysis.

Public sentiment grew that the Supreme Court had become an enemy of everyday working people.

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the student of history

By June 27, 1940, France had fallen and all of western Europe was under Hitler’s control.

The German flag flew over the Palace of Versailles.

The next day was the twenty-first anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler intended to make a mockery of the anniversary, and the New York Times reported that he ‘slept nearby.’

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