BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

FASHION

Taking a tip from the man on the job, the wise feminine shipbuilder wears working clothes for comfort and safety. She wears a man’s type shirt with a close fitting collar for protection. Her hair is up . . . she wears strong, serviceable jeans or overalls without cuffs, low-heeled work shoes and a closely fitting jacket for comfort. From “War Fashions for Feminine Safety,” ca. 1942.

This poster, originally put up at a shipbuilder’s yard in San Francisco Bay, was used to headline a 2014 National Archives exhibit on “How World War II Changed Women’s Fashion.” Such thinking achieved fashion apotheosis in the Harper’s Bazaar cover for March 1943. In it, a very cool girl waits patiently to donate her blood to the American Red Cross. Her auburn locks are not covered but tightly controlled by a white cloche hat and framed by her jacket’s high black collar. She carries a rough, reddish hold-all, and she’s determinedly on duty. The picture is headlined “SPRING FASHIONS”, and it was taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, by then an established figure in the American fashion trade. The fall of France, in June 1940, destroyed the publishing calendar of Harper’s Bazaar and other leading fashion publications. Their annual lead had always been the great shows of Paris designers. Would they now turn to London for inspiration? Hardly likely. Indeed it was Dahl-Wolfe who led the effort to find an American theme for American women’s fashion. And with more women in the work force (and, be it said, in the forces) American fashion would develop a new look. And Louise Dahl-Wolfe was ready for it. This all-American woman was born in San Francisco, of Norwegian immigrant parents, on November 19, 1895. They wanted all three of their daughters to prosper in this new world, and in Louise’s case they encouraged her artistic tendencies. She studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, became “bored” with it, and transferred what she’d learned to photography and architecture. In 1927 she took up with a sculptor, Meyer Wolfe, married him in 1928 and (keeping her own surname) moved back to his home country to capture the feel, the taste, and the design of American life. Her first published photo was “Tennessee Mountain Woman,” aged and wrinkled, half in shadow, wearing a man’s black hat decorated with flowers, and sitting on a cabin porch. It brought Dahl-Wolfe back to New York, where she did commissions for Saks and Bonwit-Teller and covers for Harper’s Bazaar—and portraits of some remarkable Americans, including recent ones like Albert Einstein, exiles like Josephine Baker, and oddballs like Carson McCullers. Who better, then, than Louise Dahl-Wolfe to lead and to document a sea change in American fashion? It would give us Rosie the Riveter, and in that March 1943 Bazaar cover, Dahl-Wolfe gave us the 18-year old starlet, Betty Bacall. Renamed “Lauren,” Ms. Bacall would make her own contribution to the changing image of the new (stylish but defiantly American) woman of a new age. ©.

[Stanley]

FIREWORKER

The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each of you is a fuse. Ed Koch.

Thus Koch, then mayor of New York, inspired a class of high school graduates to do great, explosive things. Commencement speeches are too often like that, meaningless and awkward. And one hopes that in this instance some of the graduands knew that to light the fuse was, anywhere in New York, illegal, and had been since 1909. The statute heads up Chapter 270 in the state’s criminal code, which includes other ‘public nuisance’ offenses like refusing to yield a party line in cases of emergency. Since 1909, the fireworks regulations have been extended and clarified (to keep up with fireworks design) and in one case, in 2014, amended to allow the use of sparklers. The prohibition has, from time to time, been attacked, usually from the libertarian or nostalgic ‘fringe’, but a few years back a local historian lamented the effect of the 1909 statute on the businesses occupying ‘Firecracker Lane.’ That was the local name for a short stretch of Park Place between Broadway and Church Streets occupied almost exclusively by fireworks emporia. At #12, 4 stories in brownstone, was Pain’s Fireworks. It was the chief of them all, proudly announcing its trade every flat surface. And it wasn’t even ‘American.’ Its founder, James Charles Pain, was English, born in Lambeth, London, on November 20, 1836. He came from a long line of gunpowder and fireworks manufacturers, all of them Pains, the first having been licensed in 1670 to make and sell gunpowder, presumably for lethal purposes. But by the time James went into business for himself it was mainly used for entertainment. Indeed his father was listed in censuses as a “pyrotechnist.” James took over the business in 1860, and then after a fire (not a good thing in this trade) moved it to Brixton. Thus the fuse was lit, and his business exploded to include a large (200-acre) manufacturing site, with James traveling the world to find new markets for pyrotechnics (and, incidentally, a new line of marine safety flares). For his services to the Portuguese crown he was named a Knight of the Order of Christ. He established the Firecracker Lane shop in the 1870s and placed it under the supervision of his son Henry. New York’s 1909 statute blew the fuse on that operation, and forced New Yorkers to get their black market crackers from Pennsylvania and then, after the Quaker state’s ban, from Ontario. As for Pain’s Fireworks, it still thrives, but it’s main business is now the design and delivery of fireworks spectaculars. But you don’t light their fuses anymore. They’re set off by wireless signals, from a safe distance, and they cost the earth. ©.

[Stanley]

LEGO

hat basically happens is that when a company becomes great, and I’m being a bit rude here, people think they’re some kind of genius [and] we can move into all sorts of other businesses because the net bottom line is . . . we’re just geniuses. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp.

Here Jørgen Knudstorp diagnosed a a comorbidity which has often afflicted leading members of industrial and financial elites, and not only in Denmark. With a little geopolitical license, we can call it the Musk Syndrome. In Musk’s case, spectacular success in one field encouraged success in another, and another, and then, suddenly, Elon demanded a trillionaire’s salary and cavorted on the stage of populist politics with a chainsaw which, he declared, was emblematic of good government. At such points in the syndrome, modesty is perhaps the only cure, but (by definition) modesty has become the hardest to acquire of all the virtues. Hard, but not impossible, as Jørgen Vig Knudstorp demonstrated when, at the tender age of 32, in the year 2000, he was chosen as ‘director of strategic development’ at LEGO. The Danish company was then a world leader. Built on plastic bricks and the popular supposition that genius lurks in every child, it had expanded into adjacent fields (LEGO theme parks at home in Billund and then in several other countries; video and board games; retail stores.) But LEGO was a feeble giant, overconfident, overextended, and nearly bankrupt. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp thought it past time to be “a bit rude,” and in 2004 the Christiansen family brought him in as CEO. Born on November 21, 1968, Jørgen had a long and episodic education, interrupted by spells of school teaching and then capped by a PhD in economics. He’d also made a good marriage, to Vanessa, a Danish MD, and blessed with four kids (who, one imagines, played with LEGO bricks). Once installed as CEO, he rudely shed the company’s arrogance (in effect, selling off its debts) and set about rebuilding the company “brick by brick”, as the London Financial Times wittily put it in 2009 when, in the midst of the world financial crisis of that year, LEGO moved back into the black, where it has stayed ever since. It’s fitting: LEGO stems from the Danish leg godt, “play well” in English, and if one translates literally the company’s motto it is “the best isn’t excessively good.” But the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, preferred “only the best is good enough.” It’s important pointing out that, among Jørgen Vig Knudstorp’s achievements perhaps the most striking is that he preserved the Christiansen family’s ownership of LEGO. Still only the second non-Christiansen to head LEGO, Jørgen resigned as CEO in 2016, to universal plaudits. Visiting consultancies aside (wherein one presumes he preaches rudely about modesty), he still lives in Billund where today he, Vanessa and their four children will celebrate his 57th birthday. ©

[Stanley]

CLUTTERBUCK

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it. Unidentified US Army Major, commenting on the destruction of Ben Tre, February 1968.

No quotation better sums up the immorality of America’s war in Viet Nam, unless it is Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s blustering threat (in 1965) “to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” It was the moral problem that fueled campus protests in the 1960s, but there was another way to look at the problem, and that was to stress the disproportionality of the American escalation. This was the tack taken by a friendly critic, a British army officer named Richard Clutterbuck, who had led the successful campaign against a nationalist-communist insurgency in the Malay peninsula. There were those in the US military who wanted to listen. Clutterbuck was invited to teach his subject, which he called “counter-insurgency,” at the US Army Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, in 1961-1963. His ideas had some effect, but not enough, and he returned to SE Asia to continue in his tactical approach. As he worked, so he wrote. Two books came out at the time, The Long Long War (1966) and Riot and Revolution in Singapore (1973) detailing British counter-insurgency in countryside and city. His were piecemeal operations. He left HQ and shed his rank badges (he was a colonel) to accompany small foot patrols. He talked to village elders and urban youths. He was more likely to recommend building roads than bombing jungle trails. He tinkered. One is tempted to stress his engineering degree (1937) at Cambridge in explaining all this, and indeed he was a problem-solver, not a theoretician. But in truth he was a military man, through and through. Richard Lewis Clutterbuck was born on November 22, 1917. Clutterbuck’s father was a career soldier (a major in the Royal Artillery), but he had a civilian education, at Radley College and then Cambridge. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, Royal Engineers, in 1938, fought in France, then North Africa, then Germany. Now Captain Clutterbuck, his education in counter-terrorism began in Trieste, sorting out the warring factions in that ‘neutral’ city, and then continued in Palestine where he focused on Zionist terrorists. So he was prepared for his next big assignment, coordinating police with military in the Malay peninsula. His bravery, and successes, won him further promotion there. But he was also of an academic bent, and in 1968 he enrolled, part time, in a London University PhD. So when Major General Richard Lewis Clutterbuck retired from military service, in 1972, he joined the Politics department at Exeter University. There student radicals didn’t much like his politics, but they liked his openness and his eagerness to learn from and to listen to his students. Whatever his uniform, these were his habits. ©

[Stanley]

THESPIANS

Oh, the man who can drive a theatrical team,

With wheelers and leaders in order supreme,

Can govern and rule, with a wave of his fin,

The whole of the World with Olympus thrown in!

The Gods’ chorus from Thespis: or, the Gods Grown Old, 1871.

Thus the deal is done. A traveling company of players has stumbled upon, or up, Olympus, and found the gods unhappy there and disappointed by their human handiwork, below. The players will replace—play the parts of—the gods and goddesses. If they succeed, Jupiter knows what the rewards will be. But should they fail they will be known as tragedians, condemned forever to play to empty houses and wake to horrid reviews. That is the basic plot of Thespis, the first-ever Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera, which opened at the Gaiety Theatre, London, on December 28, 1871. First reviews were mixed, but the operetta grew on the London crowd and the London critics, and it ran into February. It was even attended by Victoria’s second son Albert, duke of Edinburgh, who is said to have enjoyed it. It first appeared as the second feature in a sort of Christmas pantomime, and so there was a lot of slapstick, even a custard pie thrown by a member of the actors’ company, Stupidas, into the face of another player, Preposterous. But the basic comedy is domestic, for once in place as pseudo-Olympians the actors and actresses discover that the unusual linkages among the gods and goddesses were difficult to carry off, in real life. But Gilbert & Sullivan operettas were never to be known as ‘realistic.’ Sadly, Sullivan’s music to Thespis has been lost, but Gilbert’s lyrics can be read online, including its anachronistic in-jokes, for instance about Victorian railway schedules. But the play does refer to a real event, and a real person, and to one of the few precise datings to come from the 6th century BCE. For it was on November 23, 534BCE, that the actor Thespis of Icaria made theatrical history by winning the first Athens “best tragedy” prize). A lot of the rest is legendary, but it is said that Thespis was the first actor to step out of the chorus and to speak his own lines as his own character. Pretty heroic when you think about it: and Thespis also invented, or pioneered, the use of masks to underline further the individuality of his ‘role.’ And Gilbert’s idea that Thespis and his company might have stumbled up Olympus to interrupt a parley of the gods is based on the legend that Thespis (though an Athenian) did trundle about in Greece with a company of thespians carrying their props (and presumably their masks) in a horse-drawn wagon. In short, Thespis was the very modern model of a modern actor-manager, and that is how he was portrayed by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan at panto-time, 1871. ©
Bob Bliss