Old Photos: Enos “Country” Slaughter
Hall of Famer Enos “Country” Slaughter played for Kansas City Athletics in 1955-1956.
There is a video about this car, not sure why people don’t allow embedding.
Continue reading →Old Photos: Flowery Face Lift For Neosho, MO
There is already a post on this blog about Neosho, MO also known as the Flower Box City, but it seems like the Life Magazine Archives recently received a great many new color photos (or I just failed to notice them before). These photos look like stills from the Andy Griffith Show except they were not taken in the imaginary Mayberry, but in the very real American town of Neosho, not too far from here, for the 1955 Life Magazine article “Flowery Face Lift, Neosho learns what petunias and marigolds will do for a town”
Old Photos: More From 1938 Kansas City
Continuing from my previous post, more photos of 1938 Kansas City made by William Vandivert. Most or all of these are previously unpublished; I could not find a corresponding issue of the Life Magazine from 1938. At the end of the post there are a few vintage burlesque show photos, they are hardly NSFW but be careful scrolling all the way to the bottom if someone is looking over your shoulder.
Continue reading →Old Photos: Soviet Medicine II
Voltage and Violets for the Insane.
Soviet ideologists once had a hard time accepting the fact that mental illness, which Communist theory blamed on capitalistic class exploitation, didn’t disappear in the new classless society. Even today, Russian psychiatry is anchored to a search for physical rather than psychic cures to mental disturbances. Practically speaking, Freud and his disciples, with their emphasis on long-range individual therapy, can have no real place in a health system devoted to fast, mass treatment. Instead, Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist who pioneered the theory of the conditioned reflex, remains the accepted master, and psychiatric care depends heavily on a variety of machines and physio-therapeutic devices. Electricity is a popular treatment for everything from schizophrenia to insomnia.
Unsurprisingly, the primary therapy is work. All but the most severely ill are given some simple task to do at their bedsides. Those less afflicted are put to work at repetitive jobs such as making shoes or artificial flowers. A patient close to recovery might get employment in a special section of an ordinary factory outside, from which he would be expected to work his way back into society.Read about the punitive psychiatry in the USSR.
Continue reading →Old Photos: Kansas City 1936
Previously: Kansas City 1938 (more and even more), 1945, 1954
Note: These photos are dated with the year 1936 on the archive pages, but some of them are used in the article “A Great Newspaper Builds a Great Art Museum” published in 1939. I have no way to tell when they were taken.
Continue reading →