1927

ON THIS DAY

On May 21, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean. (NY Times)

1927…..a very long time ago.   My mother was just ten years old!  My dad, thirteen.  What sort of world did they live in?

• “Black Friday” in Germany; the economy collapses
• Socialists riot in Vienna; general strike takes place following acquittal of Nazis for political murder
• Gottfried Feder publishes “The Program of the NSDAP”  ..   Hitler’s Nazi party
• Trotsky expelled from Communist Party
• Some of the literature of the day:  Upton Sinclair, “Oil,”  Sinclair Lewis, “Elmer Gantry,” Erskine, “Adam and Eve,”  Willa Cather, “Death Comes to the Archibishop,” Thornton Wilder, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” (Pulitzer Prize);  Virginia Woolf, “To The Lighthouse”
• Films:  “The Jazz Singer,”  (The first talkie);  “King of Kings, ”  “The Wedding March”
• Artists:   Edward Hopper, Marc Chagal, Georges Braque,  Matisse
• Gershwin, “Funny Face,”  Kern and Hammerstein, “show Boat, “
• Popular songs:   “Old Man River,”  “My Blue Heaven,”  “Blue Skies,”  “Let a Smile be Your Umbrella”
• In science:  Pavlov, “Conditioned Reflexes,”  Lindburgh flies “Spirit of St. Louis” nonstop from New York to Paris in 33.5 hours
• Iron Lung developed by Drinker and Shaw;  Holland Tunnel opens as first vehicular tunnel linking New York and New Jersey;  15 millionth Model T Ford produced
• Josephine Baker is Parisian star
• Harlem Globe Trotters basketball team organized
• Sonja Henie ice-skating champion
• Airplanes first used to dust crops with insecticide
• Great flood disaster in lower Mississippi Valley
• Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs
• Sacco and Venzetti executed
• Fox trot fashionable dance
• Bobby Jones wins US Golf Association Amateur championship

So there it is in a nutshell:   a busy year, an exciting year.  Transportation was certainly expanding, and how wonderful that must have seemed to these small-town kids.  A way to get out!!

The insecticide spraying disturbed me….I hadn’t realized we were ruining the ecology so early…well, except for all the factory pollution.   Sigh, where was Al Gore when we really needed him?

The most obvious things on this list are related to the Nazis, of course.   Foreshadowing if I ever saw it!

I know that when my parents talked about being young, they mostly remembered the Great Depression; but perhaps it was all the exciting possibilities raised in the 1920s that helped them get through that.