LIFE Goes On

That, despite the fact that the magazine LIFE itself went from a weekly on its first release in 1936 to twice a year in 1973 to three in 1978 to a monthly in 1979 until 2000, when it ceased to be. (Wish some of the bigger monthlies today which are essentially catalogs with the occasional vapid piece on weight loss or beauty enhancement or otherwise "progressive" celebrity or other fifteen-minute-of-fame personal life article would go the same way, but I digress.) I finally sat down to read a LIFE magazine I'd bought at a flea market last month -- the March 22, 1948 issue with a profile of Thomas Dewey, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, also governor of New York and now perhaps best known outside New York as the falsely-predicted winner of the 1948 election. Think "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN"; of course, not the only time in recorded history a national newspaper's been wrong (it was the Chicago Tribune, and in the aftermath of a strike they had to print several hours before all the returns were in), but it's probably remembered the most!

Anyway, this coffee table book-sized magazine (at 156 pages) had some amazing stuff, and I like looking at older issues as opposed to reprints, because sometimes the more things change the more things stay the same -- Welch's used to make fudge bars? -- but also you've got to feel that some of what was regarded important enough to write enough ... let's see, nearly 70 years ago is not what you've heard. Forget non-white people unless they're rendered in caricature (there's a report of a Tokyo poetry contest that Hirohito and other Japanese, royal and common, attended with only a drawing for it), and look for nigh-endless depiction of smoking ads, Elsie the Borden Cow with a family, and a beer drinking cow that set a world record for producing milk in a year (Bridge Birch in Hampshire, England at 45,081 pounds), an article on the Brando family of actors -- apparently Marlon got an older and then-more famous sister Jocelyn, the Age of Exploration documentary, mirror frame glasses coming into vogue ... wow, when money was worth its face value.

I could get a year subscription to LIFE for $5.50 -- fifty cents more than this copy cost me!

And that's all I have to say about that, David