Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country.

The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry.

Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally.

No pre-war congressional investigation ever called film executives on the carpet for failing to identify the threat to this country in the 1930s, an era when “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at a time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” noted the New York Times.

In his book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, Thomas Doherty, a film historian and Brandeis University professor, explains that there were several reasons for U.S. moviemakers to avoid the issue before Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939.

Americans were suffering through the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Jobs were hard to find. People went to the movies to forget their troubles, watching fare like The Wizard of Oz or Fred and Ginger dancing in art-deco apartments, said Doherty.

MGM boss Sam Goldwyn said if you want to send a message, use Western Union, emphasizing Hollywood’s overriding mission was to provide entertainment, Doherty noted.

Other factors impeding a flow of message movies included the film industry’s production code that restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. The Third Reich wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, with German consul Georg Gyssling lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.

Studios also did business overseas, and Germany represented a big European market for U.S. films, said Doherty.

But Doherty said there some outliers, films that did address the dangers that Nazi aggression presented before the mainstream studios finally got around to the subject.

The first film to do so was Hitler’s Reign of Terror, “an oddball quasi-documentary” made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. that was released in 1934, said Doherty, noting that the film contains some striking footage of Vanderbilt on the streets of Vienna and Berlin amid Nazi brownshirts.

A member of one of America’s wealthiest families, Vanderbilt was a globetrotting raconteur who included “a truly bizarre sequence” with the reenactment of an interview between Vanderbilt and someone posing as Hitler. Vanderbilt asks “the money question,” said Doherty: “What about the Jews, your Excellency?”

“The film gets a limited release in 1934. It’s controversial. The German embassy wants to censor it. It doesn’t have much impact. But whatever you say about Vanderbilt, the film is very prophetic,” said Doherty, noting that Vanderbilt points to the militaristic path that Germany was on, predicting war in Europe “in five or six years.”

Hitler’s Reign of Terror gets an exclusive screening at the Peoria Women’s Club, 301 NE Madison Ave., on Oct. 16 in conjunction with the Peoria Area World Affairs Council. The film will be part of a program commemorating Vanderbilt’s speech at the club in 1939.

Doherty cited another independent film, I Am a Captive of Nazi Germany, released in 1936. Isobel Steele, an American journalist and “party girl,” was imprisoned by the Nazis for espionage in 1934. Steele was released, returning to the United States to star in a film of her experience, the first anti-Nazi motion picture to get a production code seal of approval, he said.

The film studios finally weighed in when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was released by Warner Brothers in the spring of 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe. 

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the public’s right “to control how their thoughts, sentiments, and emotions were published.”

When Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer, offered up his own view of privacy in 2009 by saying, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he was simply channeling an old belief that the devil might call on you when you were on your own. 

But Jenkins doesn’t single out the internet as the lone reason privacy may be under attack in the 21st century.

Reality television has a lot to answer for, she said. Starting back in the 1970s when TV’s Loud family aired their dirty laundry on the air, viewers have seen plenty of petty squabbles and bad behavior over a 50-year period, said Jenkins.

Writing from her home in England, a country with a love of security cameras, as any fan of modern British TV crime shows will attest, Jenkins said privacy concerns over having so many cameras to capture public activity have diminished over the years in the interests of public safety.

Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable, noted reviewer Rupert Christiansen in the British paper, The Telegraph. “Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing, “ he wrote.

T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes.

Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back. 

In a few weeks, he’ll leave Chicago to be part of a nine-car convoy of classic cars to cover the route—to L.A. and back—at an average of 35 miles per hour, the typical speed attained on pre-WWII highways, he noted.

The history that Baker provides isn’t just a nostalgic account of a bygone era. Starting in Chicago, the book outlines places of interest, explains how they came to be, as well as how they came to an end. But all is not lost. Some 30 percent of the places Baker describes in the book are still serving food, he said.

Some of the traditions created for travelers on Route 66 carry on. Baker loves the horseshoe sandwich made famous by Joe Schweska in 1928 at the Leland Hotel in Springfield, Illinois. The secret was the sauce, said Baker. “While one cook is engaged in making the sauce, it is helpful for a second person to prepare ham steak, French fries, and toast,” he wrote.

Schweska has long left the scene, but the horseshoe sandwich is very much alive in Springfield today. Yes, the Cozy Dog Drive-in is also included among Baker's Springfield highlights.

Of the 20 recipes that Baker includes, his favorite is the old-fashioned navy bean soup originally prepared at the Bowl and Bottle Restaurant in Chicago, an eating place originally operated by the Fred Harvey Co., the firm that ran restaurants and hotels usually associated with railway travel in the West.

Baker’s listings tend to whet your appetite. Whether it’s the glazed strawberry pie served at Miss Hulling’s Cafeteria in St. Louis or the onion-fried hamburger at Johnnie’s Grill in El Reno, Okla., you want to settle into a booth and wave down a waitress. It’s not always fancy. Baker includes a recipe from the Old Riverton Store in Riverton, Kansas, for a baloney and cheese sandwich, for example.

You learn things in this book, such as the fact that the Black Cat Café in Commerce, Okla., was where New York Yankee star Mickey Mantle hung out as a teen. “It was the only joint in town that had a neon sign,” Mantle recalled.

While California summoned up images of sand and surf, the first encounter inbound Route 66 travelers had with the state was having to traverse a stretch of the Mojave Desert, no simple trek in the days when radiators often overheated and tires were susceptible to the sharp lava rock found in some places, noted Baker, adding that when Glen Campbell drove a 1957 Chevy across the desert in 1960, he tied water bottles to the car’s grill to refill the radiator.

If you’re looking for evidence of Route 66’s legacy when it comes to dining, consider the fact that two of our best-known fast-food operations—McDonald’s and Taco Bell—sprang up on the Mother Road in San Bernardino. Baker provides the details of the early days of both establishments.

Baker doesn’t shy away from identifying the double standard that existed along the road. “You can’t talk about cross-country travel without talking about racism,” he said. Baker points out that African Americans were often denied service at many of the businesses along Route 66 for decades. He mentions places that didn’t discriminate, as well as citing outlets like Alberta’s Hotel & Snack Bar in Springfield, Mo. where Margie Alberta Northcutt Ellis was “always looking for avenues to meet the needs of her African American customers.”

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting.

For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows the first conceptualization by European physicists to the destruction that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the unique powers of oral history is the way that it puts you back in the footsteps and experiences of the people who lived these events firsthand before they knew the outcome, said Graff.

Narrative history often makes events seem neater and simpler than they felt to anyone who was living them at the time, stated Graff. 

Reading through quotes delivered by major players of the time allows readers to feel the uncertainty that existed while the world was at war. 

Once it became clear—to the scientists, anyway—of the potential destructive power of atomic energy, the race was on. Physicists from across Europe, many of them Jewish and fleeing for their lives as Nazi power expanded, came to the United States with the hope that their work wouldn’t be too late—that Hitler wouldn’t get the bomb first.

Graff noted that sometimes the story of the Manhattan Project tends to center only on the Los Alamos outpost. The war was won by the vast industrial effort that went into the bomb’s creation, said the author. Just as important as the New Mexico lab where the first bomb was detonated were “secret cities” developed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., sites where thousands worked on developing the materials needed to create an atomic reaction, he said.

As a native Vermonter, Graff compared the process of converting 4,000 pages of quotes and notes down to 500 to making maple syrup. “You just boil and boil,” he said of the editing process involved. When all the boiling was done, you’re still left with some 500 voices to relate the process, both scientifically and militarily, that brought about the bomb.

The oral history approach empowers the reader with the ability to skim at record speeds, choosing to skip passages at will to get to later developments. However you tackle the work, there’s a lot of history to consider. Graff said the atomic bombs represented the final part of a fierce U.S. bombing campaign that included that single night in March 1945 when 100,000 people died in the firebombing of Tokyo, the most destructive single day of a war that killed so many. A total of 66 Japanese cities were firebombed in U.S. B-29 raids before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s a section of the book devoted to the transport of the bomb. The U.S.S. Indianapolis, a cruiser back in the States for repair after a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, carried off the mission but was sunk by a Japanese submarine four days later. Of the nearly 1,200 on board, only 316 survived. The survivors spent four days and five nights in the water. Graff includes two quotes to close the chapter: “The Indianapolis was the last major ship to be lost during the war and the greatest single disaster in the history of the Navy,” said Col. Kenneth Nichols.

“If the Indianapolis had been sunk with Little Boy (the bomb) aboard, the war could have been seriously prolonged,” said Luis Alvarez, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist.

As for his next project, Graff said it wouldn’t be an oral history or cover an aspect of WWII. Right now, he’s leaning towards writing about the preservation of history in this country. “As America approaches its 250th anniversary, its history is under attack right now,” he said.

When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years.

Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil.

While U.S. officials are interfering with Latin American governments, many of the rest of us in this country are ignoring the countries and people south of the border.

All too often, it’s portrayed as a region plagued by economic instability, drug cartels, and death squads. The Trump Administration, after all, is going to great pains and expense to stress the region’s problems.

Grandin received the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth, his previous book about the U.S. frontier, and the relentless drive that pushed people west. But an all-out surge to take over territory isn’t the way it worked in South America.

Grandin details centuries of turmoil, bloodshed, and diplomacy in Latin America that have shaped the laws that govern the modern world. Despite the struggles and slaughter of millions over the years, Latin America clings to a social democratic tradition, principles worthy of the United Nations.

Grandin writes that Latin America has helped develop the notion that nations have common interests and that cooperation is preferable to competition.

The United States hasn’t always been the imperialist meddler. Grandin recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that involved mutual respect and admiration. 

FDR’s VP Henry Wallace (replaced by Truman for the 1944 election) talked about raising the wages of the common man on his triumphant swing through Latin America in 1943. “(Latin Americans) didn’t think Roosevelt would run in 1944. They thought Wallace was going to be president,” said Grandin.

Instead, the postwar period brought the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Latin America got left out when it came to the billions the U.S. was spending around the world. If South American countries wanted private capital, they needed to assure investors that it was safe to do so, said Marshall. 

As a result, Latin American regimes turned oppressive. Dissent was stifled. By 1950, nearly the entire region of Latin America was ruled by brutal men,” noted Grandin, citing dictators such as Batista (Cuba), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Duvalier (Haiti), Odria (Peru), and Somoza (Nicaragua). “All were faithful to the U.S.,” added Grandin.

Mexico. With its strong commitment to sovereignty, it plays a central role in the history that Grandin relates. “Mexico’s Constitution was the world's first social democratic constitution, the first constitution to recognize not just individual rights, but social and economic rights. The right to dignity, to a pension, health care, and education,” stated the author.

Grandin also had praise for Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman president of Mexico. “She has the support of 60 percent of the population. The people love her,” he said. 

Liza Tully’s previous literary effort was a grim thriller set in Siberia. “It was a suspense novel, but I realized it was very dark,” she said.

The author, who wrote Finding Katarina M under the pseudonym Elisabeth Elo, decided to follow that with something a little lighter. The result? The feel-good mystery, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant.

Her latest effort teams Aubrey Merritt, “a brilliant Boomer detective," with Olivia Blount, “an ambitious Gen Z assistant.” Together, the pair repair to the lavish Wild Goose Resort in Vermont to solve a murder—or is it suicide? The clues are there for the reader to come to his or her own conclusion, said Tully, who worked as an editor at a children’s magazine before turning to fiction writing. She’s also worked as a project manager at a tech company and as a counselor at a halfway house. 

A lover of mysteries, particularly those of Agatha Christie, Tully said she followed the approach used by Christie, saving the concluding chapter in her book for “the big reveal,” where the detective lays out her case, lists the clues, and names the suspect.

Tully noted that in the world of mysteries today, she plays it pretty straight in the publishing world that now offers a wide variety of mystery categories—such as historical, psychological, hard-boiled, and others. The “cozy mystery” category usually involves “amateur detectives and cats,” she said.

The fact that so many books get published in this country each year—as many as one million titles by one estimate—might give one pause to someone trying to corral readers. But Tully said the fact that so many books are published “is a sign of a free and healthy society.”

Tully, who lives outside Boston with her family, taught classes at Harvard and Tufts before attending night classes at Boston College, a schedule that allowed her to write during the day. As far as her present writing routine goes, “I’ll start at noon and go until four or five,” she said.

As for her intake of books, Tully loves mysteries but said she often reads those with a critical eye, judging style and substance as she shapes her own future efforts. “For my own pleasure, I tend to read non-fiction. It allows me to learn things that I didn’t know before,” said Tully, citing All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley, a 2023 memoir of a museum guard, as an example.

Michael Doyle's Nightmare in the Pacific is a book about an aspect of World War II you probably haven’t heard before: the saga of Artie Shaw, the big-band leader who took his group on a whirlwind tour of the Pacific in 1942-1943.

What makes this story so interesting are the characters involved: Artie Shaw, himself, the motley group of band members that Shaw recruited himself, as well as figures from the worlds of the military and show business. 

Even before the United States joined the war, Shaw exhibited erratic behavior. At the top of his game in 1939, riding the success of big-band swing and a hit recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” Shaw abruptly walked away from the bandstand, disappearing from sight to spend six weeks in Mexico without telling anyone of his whereabouts. 

That was a characteristic of Shaw’s, said Doyle. He would walk away from difficult situations throughout his life. Married eight times (among his brides: movie queens Lana Turner and Ava Gardner), Shaw often turned off the people who were closest to him.

“He was probably a musical genius, but he was also prickly, short-tempered, and driven, Doyle noted. 

Shaw’s epic Pacific roadshow had him playing in Hawaii for several months before heading out to sea where Navy Band 501 played aboard ships, aircraft carriers, as well as indoor and outdoor venues in Guadalcanal, Australia, New Zealand, and islands in between. By all accounts, the band delivered regularly, sharing the hits of the day including his trademark tune "Nightmare," providing entertainment appreciated by military personnel who faced danger far from home.

“Artie had traveled, by some accounting, 68,000 miles throughout the Pacific,” related Doyle in his book. “He had ducked into foxholes and hidden from bombs. He had felt his stomach lurch at sea and in the turbulent air. He had been bedside with the dying, and he had entertained admirals, generals, and foreign dignitaries. He had been cheered by thousands, and he had charmed the president’s wife,” he noted.

And Shaw also had a nervous breakdown that ended his tenure as wartime bandleader. By 1944, Shaw was back in the States, trying to clear his head. 

The band, incidentally, kept playing under the guidance of Sam Donahue, a sax player with the band. The group was sent to play before military crowds in England. They soon became popular favorites, even beating the esteemed Glenn Miller Band in a battle-of-the-bands competition (before Miller lost his life when his airplane went down in the English Channel).

As for Shaw, the post-war music scene brought change. It no longer made economic sense to take 20 musicians on the road. Following the trend that dictated smaller musical groups, Shaw formed the Gramercy Five. But in 1954 he decided to put away his clarinet and walk away from performing completely (save for a brief late-in-life resurrection). He took up sharpshooting as a hobby and appeared occasionally on the What’s My Line TV show.

“As much of a jerk he could be, he had integrity,” said Doyle of Shaw, a musician who didn’t want to spend the last 50 years of his life playing “Begin the Beguine.”

In his own 370-page autobiography, Shaw only devoted three pages to his wartime experiences. Doyle corrects that oversight.

A new book looks at the short history of the freedom of choice.

Some of us have more choices than we’ve ever had—from what to buy and where to live and whom to love, even what to believe--but how did that come about? That’s the basis of the book Sophia Rosenfeld has written, called The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.

Rosenfeld said she wanted to find those times when the early forms of choice were taking shape—when you could marry whomever you wanted, shop for what you might need, and vote as you saw fit. “I tried to find the moments when the practice was new,” she said.

We haven’t always had so many choices, said Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. The dance card is one example, as viewed by the author, of a measure of freedom that emerged in the 18th century, developed in the 19th century, and largely disappeared by the early 20th century. 

"Once, though, dance cards had a real function," Rosenfeld noted. Designed mostly by men and used mostly by women, the cards facilitated decision-making in the ballroom. A lady could show that her dance card was already full, but "the expectation for the woman was a yes," she said.

The process was formal and may seem restrictive by today's standards, but it marked a step forward in the age of choice. 

“Rosenfeld demonstrates how modern societies have made the ability to choose the hallmark of freedom, whether in the marketplace, in ideas and belief systems, in courtship, in voting, in feminist and other rights-oriented politics, or in the social and behavioral sciences. But as we learn from Rosenfeld, this equation of choice with freedom can often exclude rather than empower,” said Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.

Moving from the seventeenth century to today, Rosenfeld pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change.

China is sometimes described as the forgotten theater of war during World War II. But it’s unlikely that the Chinese people have forgotten their eight-year war with Japan, a ferocious engagement that began four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's estimated that as many as 20 million Chinese died in the war.

In Fallen Tigers, Daniel Jackson recounts U.S. involvement in China, where the country provided supplies and air support to a nation that desperately needed it. U.S. airmen who served in China had to contend with a Japanese invasion that, by 1940, controlled China’s skies, 95 percent of its industry, and one-quarter of the Chinese mainland and half its population, noted Jackson.

Supporting China, a country embroiled in a prolonged civil war at the time, was important to U.S. interests, stated the author, adding that keeping Japan “busy” in China reduced Japanese resources that would otherwise be used against U.S. forces in the Pacific.

Jackson provides accounts of singular heroism on the part of numerous U.S. airmen who served in relative anonymity during their time in China. But there are familiar names, as well.

Claire Lee Chennault is the maverick Army Air Force commander who formed the Flying Tigers, the U.S. group of flyers who struck a blow against Japanese air dominance. 

There’s also Merian Cooper, the WWI veteran who escaped from a Soviet gulag after the war, who went on to co-write and direct King Kong (Cooper, himself, is at the controls of the bi-plane that toppled Kong from the top of the Empire State Building). At the age of 48, Cooper returned to the battlefield during WWII and helped Chennault plan a successful raid on Japanese-controlled Hong Kong.

Before becoming the venerable leader of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh was a friend of American forces in WWII. In return for his assistance, he asked for an autographed picture of Chennault and six pistols, explained Jackson. These were items the wily Ho used to forge political alliances.

The Chinese people, themselves, were more than receptive to American assistance during the war, said Jackson. “They knew the risk they were taking by helping Americans,” he said, referring to the Chinese civilians who delivered U.S. airmen who bailed out or survived crash landings to safety. 

U.S. servicemen who landed in the jungle or mountainous terrain were brought back safely 90 percent of the time, Jackson said. Compare that with U.S. airmen downed in Europe during the war--they only had a one in five chance of returning safely, he said.

Despite Japan's policy of deadly reciprocity when it came to dealing with civilian assistance to Americans, the Chinese persevered, the author said. 

Today, the U.S. and China are competing world powers, but it’s important to recall the two countries were once allies who overcame their differences to win a war, said Jackson.

Play This Book Loud is the literary equivalent of a trip to the record store, that enchanting experience of searching for something new from something old. 

Joe Bonomo (pronounced Bo-know-mo, not the Turkish Taffy), an English professor at Northern Illinois University, starts his book that way, recalling the days of the coronavirus when he was offered hand sanitizer and plastic gloves at Green Tangerine, his local record shop. 

From there, we depart on essays on Van Halen’s “Panama,” the Cramps, Green Day, Lester Bangs, Pickwick Records, Dick Clark’s Twenty Years of Rock and Roll double album, to name but a few of the subjects covered. There are also asides on Cragmont Cola (once sold at Safeway supermarkets), radio jingles, and “great archeological artifacts found on YouTube.”

While Bonomo does a lot of looking back, he brings us right to the present, where he feels we’re enjoying a golden age of musical writing. No, it’s no longer confined to the pages of Rolling Stone  or The New Yorker but across the internet, where people like Josh Terry, Steve Pick, Tony Fletcher, Dan Epstein, Heather Ferris, and Aaron Gilbreath, to name a few, are busy posting stories.

Bonomo is busy building his own internet file with the Substack site, No Such Thing as Was. A quick glance at the site reveals that, in addition to posts on Amyl and the Sniffers, the Linda Lindas, Bad Nerves, and the Strokes, there’s a review of George Harrison’s Electronic Sound from 1969, a record that most of us have never heard (the back story on how the record was made may be even more fascinating than the review).

In talking about Lester Bangs, who died at the age of 33 in 1982, Bonomo cites the music journalist as his greatest influence. “He was more than a rock critic. The 45s and album cuts were simply the moving parts that got his words to the page. He was writing about what it means to be alive,” he said.

If you’ve ever come across a Pickwick Records release, you’ll be interested in Bonomo’s take on the subject. The company, which specialized in producing cheap knock-offs of hits of the day, was started in 1950 by Cy Leslie, “a Harvard-educated World War II vet who understood the dynamics of the wallet,” he noted. Recalling a Pickwick release of Beatle favorites, Bonomo is still amazed that the label attempted to duplicate "Mother," John Lennon's primal effort from an early solo album: "Who'd want to tackle a performance so raw and private, not to mention infamous and epochal?"

As for the 1973 Dick Clark release, “a wide-ranging potted history of rock and roll,” Bonomo pointed to the different genres of music represented on the album as well as the historic significance of the era that produced it. At the time of the album’s release, American Graffiti was also hitting theaters with a musical salute to nostalgia.

The author of Play This Book Loud always has something interesting to offer when it comes to the music front. Bonomo makes the point that Green Day, a band that still sells out arenas, has a career that parallels Bruce Springsteen in many ways.

Where else do you get an essay on the 7-Eleven convenience store chain’s 1966 release, “Do the Slurp?” The promo novelty 45 knocked Bonomo out as a kid, a memory he still can’t shake but happily shares with you.