Read Beat (...and repeat)

While Rosie the Riveter is a vivid symbol of World War II, emphasizing the vital role women played in the workplace during the war, an "Airplane Annie" tag was never developed that might have fit Ann Baumgartner, the American aviator who became the first woman to fly a jet aircraft as a test pilot during WWII.
As a member of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) program, Baumgartner was one of 1,000 women who contributed to the war effort by ferrying planes into position for deployment overseas.
She's just one of the female soldiers Lena Andrews writes about in her book, "Valiant Women," chronicling some of the many contributions made by women in the 1940s war effort.
"The military women of WWII brought the woman's movement into the modern era," noted Andrews who outlined some of the challenges women confronted to serve their country in wartime.
The WASP program was discontinued in 1944 when the women who served were accused of being job-stealers and "unqualified seductresses," stated Andrews. It took more than 30 years before the U.S. Air Force finally recognized the women's contributions, granting them full veterans' benefits, she said.
Another forgotten female who served her country during the war will soon be the subject of a Netflix film production from Tyler Perry, said Andrews, referring to Charity Adams who led the 6888th Central Postal Battalion (known as the Six Triple Eight), the Army’s only all-women unit that served overseas in WWII.
Adams headed  the battalion, made up largely of African American women, that cleared a backlog of more than 2 million letters and packages intended for the soldiers who were serving on European front lines.
"Everyone knows how important the mail was for the morale of soldiers during the war where letters were often read out loud," Andrews told Steve Tarter.
Women served in all phases in WWII, she said, from dealing with all the paperwork created with millions in world-wide service to planning functions such as analyzing ocean tides and currents to establish the best landing areas for troops deployed to Pacific islands controlled by the Japanese.

The publishing industry has undergone change since 1960, notes Dan Sinykin, the Emory University English professor whose new book is "Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature."
If you're familiar with names like Ballantine, Bantam, Berkley, Dell, Doubleday, Knopf, Putnam and Viking, these once-independent publishing houses are among the companies in the stable of  Penguin Random House, now the largest book publisher in the world.
Sinykin told Steve Tarter that the consolidation that's occurred in the publishing world has meant that editors now pore over profit-and-loss statements where they once courted writers. That's left to literary agents these days.
Sinykin said changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, its literary form, and what it means to be an author. 
Thankfully, the rise of the conglomerates has also spurred on nonprofits such as Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press that seek to protect literature from market pressures. Sinykin also singled out employee-owned W. W. Norton, the lone big house of the six large publishers that remains independent and provides a market for "misfit fiction.". 
It's a subject that's largely escaped scrutiny, said Sinykin, quoting Marc McGurl, author of "The Program Era," who noted that the publishing industry "has grown so large and internally complex that few scholars attempt anytime to gather its splinters."
But Sinykin has gathered a number of those splinters, adding that there's the traditional publishing industry led by the mighty conglomerates along with the growing world of internet publishing where Tik Tok now creates some of the biggest best sellers on the market. said Sinykin.
The ubiquitous AI looms as a change agent in the future for the publishing world, he said, suggesting that the impact will become clearer once law suits are settled.
 

Fifty years after his death, Pablo Picasso remains a central figure in the art world. Along with his famous periods--blue, rose and African, for example--there were the many women that shared his life.
Picasso's love life was almost as colorful as his art, critics have noted.
That triggered Jeanne Mackin into writing "Picasso's Lovers," a work of historical fiction. "I wanted to tell the story from a woman's point of view," she said.
Sometimes criticized for his treatment of both wives and lovers (such as the Paris Review article entitled "How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art"), Picasso isn't viewed as a villain by Mackin.
"No one forced these women into Picasso's life," she told Steve Tarter.
Mackin spins her story from 1920s Europe to 1950s New York. The period when Picasso visited the French Riviera in 1923 is also part of the story, she said, crediting Gerald and Sara Murphy as the wealthy American ex-patriots who helped make it fashionable for celebrities like Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway to enjoy the south of France.

When Betty Friedan returned to her home town of Peoria in 1978 for a high school reunion (Peoria High School, class of 1938), she'd already covered a lot of territory.
Rachel Shteir (pronounced sh-tire) outlines much of that activity in the book, "Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter."
Friedan, of course, wrote "The Feminine Mystique," a book that one can say with some confidence helped change the world. Published in February 1963, "Mystique" helped further women's rights like nothing else had before (save the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote in 1920).
When "Mystique" came out in paperback in 1964 the first edition sold 1.4 million copies. Friedan automatically became a star, a crusader and a symbol of the need for change.
"Friedan was no saint," wrote Shteir. "Butshe was an oracle and an iconoclast, ahead of her time, the American activist with a Russian soul, the artist of moral and intellectual fervor, driven by a desire to change herself and others.  She said things (about women, about Jews) that many people did not want to hear."
But Friedan said those things. Yet Friedan was not immune to changing her own views on things.
"It used to embarrass me, even to admit that I came from Peoria.," she wrote in the New York Times in 1978. "It was a vaudeville joke, the epitome of the hick town...the town where I was born and grew up, and knew I had to get out of. I never wanted to go home again, or so I always used to tell myself. I remembered only the pain of growing up in Peoria. I never would admit the pleasure, the delight, the sweet sure certainty of belonging in Peoria--that small, satisfied, deceptively simple, mysterious, complex heartland of America, which undeniably provided my roots, and therefore the roots of whatever vision of equality, passion for justice, or sense of possibility drove me to the women's movement in the world." 

Born on a farm in Oklahoma's Cherokee Nation in 1879, Will Rogers went on to become one of the most celebrated people of the 20th century, hobnobbing with the rich and famous while entertaining millions in movies, on radio and through his newspaper column.
Gary Clayton Anderson, an accomplished author (previous books focus on Sitting Bull and the Indian Southwest), offers a portrait of Rogers and his rise to fame and fortune.
"Over 100,000 people attended his funeral in Hollywood, an event that was broadcast live on radio," noted Clayton after Rogers died in a plane crash along with friend and pilot Wiley Post in 1935.
Starting with rope tricks, Rogers perfected a stage act that involved a monologue citing news events of the day and gently chiding leading politicians and celebrities with a folksy drawl.
He also wrote a weekly newspaper column. "He dominated the press. Everyone got the Friday paper to read his column, often on the front page," Clayton told Steve Tarter.
Established journalists of the day were somedays irritated by Rogers' "down home" success. H.L. Mencken, one of the leading columnists of that time, was particularly irritated at the fact that, while Mencken's column ran in 200 papers across the country, the Rogers column was carried by 400, said Clayton.

 

Dawidziak, a former TV critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal, has written books about three prominent TV shows: Columbo, Twilight Zone and Kolchak the Night Stalker.
Columbo ran for 10 seasons while Twilight Zone ran for five and been repeated endlessly over the years. Kolchak, on the other hand, lasted for only the 1974-75 season and 20 episodes.
Dawidziak told Steve Tarter that the Kolchak series was preceded by two TV movies that aired in 1972 and 1973. When the first Night Stalker movie aired on ABC in January 1972, it picked up a 54 percent share of the TV audience, said Dawidziak.
Even though his class of movie enthusiasts had never heard of that first TV movie, Dawidziak said that, after watching the film, "students loved it."
"The magic that worked in 1972 still works today," he said.
That magic is largely due to the performance delivered by Darren McGavin who plays reporter Carl Kolchak for a Chicago newspaper where he tangles weekly with his editor played deftly by Simon Oakland, said Dawidziak.
"Kolchak is such a creature of life. He's constantly getting knocked down but he just gets back up and keeps going. He's constantly seeking the truth. I look at him as a knight errant in a seersucker suit and porkpie hat," he said.
Dawidziak said he expects to have a revised version of the Kolchak book ready by next year. 

In turning their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places, the authors of "The Injustice of Place" discovered that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice but rural areas that are often ignored.
Kathryn Edin and Tim Nelson, both of Princeton University, noted that, along with Luke Shaefer, who co-authored a previous book on poverty with Edin, set off on a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas to better understand the poverty that exists in those places. 
What they found, the pair told Steve Tarter is that these poverty-stricken areas were rung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials. Areas home to desperate poverty were also places that bore witness to considerable wealth. 
Edin recalled that a Mississippi politician told them that he wished that instead of setting up segregation academies, whites in the area would have gone to school with black neighbors. If they had, things would have been different, he suggested.
In regards to education in America: "We've got to face the fact that we're as segregated as we were prior to the (Supreme Court's)  Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954."
Edin added that people returning to some of the poor communities are now seeking changes in order to make things more equitable. 

The Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain remains with us today but when Piggly Wiggly first appeared on the scene in 1916 it was part of a whole new concept in retailing: the self-service store.
Lisa Tolbert, a professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, explores the Piggly Wiggly phenomenon through 1940 at which time the self-service approach had become commonly accepted, she noted.
Tolbert describes how the self-service store was "a starkly different experience" than shopping in a counter-service store. She also tells the story of Piggly Wiggly founder Clarence Saunders, a white supremacist who courted African-American customers, was the consummate salesman.
The Piggly Wiggly story is also a franchising story with most stores operated by independent franchisees with five stores or less. Advertising is also part of Tolbert's story: Piggly Wiggly took out a two-page spread in the national magazine Collier's in the 1920s, an unheard of effort by a grocery chain that usually focused on the local newspaper, Tolbert told Steve Tarter.
For the first half of the 20th century, Piggly Wiggly went head to head with another national chain, supermarket giant A & P, to sell America its groceries, she said. 

Bill Hammack follows in the illustrious footsteps of Don Herbert ("Mr. Wizard"), Carl Sagan and Bill Nye the Science Guy (and, to some extent, Alton Brown of the Food Network) as one of the explainers of the universe.
While the aforementioned individuals developed a following on television, Hammack, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, has reached millions via public radio and YouTube by being able to explain complicated things in a way we can all understand.
His new book, "The Things We Make," continues Hammack's efforts to explain the engineering method. As he told Steve Tarter, the book is accompanied by four 12-minute companion videos on YouTube. You can find all kinds of videos on engineeringguy.com that offer views on everything from an aluminum beverage can to the steam turbine.
When asked about artificial intelligence, Hammack responded, "I can only give you an attitude but I think it's been incredibly overhyped." 
As an example, he cited the development of self-driving cars as one that would take "a very long time" to fully replace human-driven models but that we might experience an incremental use of autonomous activity sooner with  self-driving vehicles that could operate between O'Hare Airport and the 18 largest hotels in the area, for example.
Hammack delves into plenty of history while reviewing engineering principles. He points to the power of "the rule of thumb" in explaining why cathedrals built in the Middle Ages remain intact.
Among the numerous awards that Hammack has received over the years is the 2021 National Science Board Public Service Award.  

As co-founder of the Rails to Trails Confederacy, Peter Harnik has visited 207 rail trails across the United States as part of his work on a fascinating chronology of  rail corridors that have become trails for bikers, joggers as well as folks just out for a walk.
But Harnik also supplies the background on how these trails came to be, a rail history that salutes the train era. "The rail-trail is laid onto the detritus of a surpassed technology. Today's bicyclists, walkers, runners, skaters, skiers, equestrians and even snowmobilers are merely Johnny-come-lately beneficiaries of a surface network created by radically different people for a totally different purpose," he noted.
"Since they were built to carry some of the heaviest rolling loads ever devised, the roadbed engineering had to be astoundingly precise," stated Harnik.
But train lines that grew like Topsy ran into technological challenges from cars and planes. While freight rail remains a thriving business, passenger rail fell on hard times in this country. As a result, entire corridors went unused, providing an opportunity for trail buffs.
"I love trains and bikes," he told Steve Tarter. Bicyclists powered the rail-trail movement, said Harnik, adding that bicyclists feel they needed a place of their own, having been forced off the road by the automobile. 
Harnik saluted the many trail advocates across the country--people like East Peoria attorney George Burrier Jr.--who helped establish rail-trails across central Illinois and May Theilgaard Watts, a naturalist at the Morton Arboretum, whose letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune in 1963 led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path, the first rail-trail project undertaken in a densely populated area.
As for what lies ahead Harnik said that there are more than 100,000 miles of abandoned rail corridors waiting for either a revival of rail or conversion to a trail.