Bloody Face Of Baseball
I am ugly enough without being smashed in the face, good thing I don’t like baseball.
An unidentified fan is assisted after being hit by a foul ball hit by Cleveland Indians’ Kelly Shoppach during the second inning of a spring training baseball game against the Kansas City Royals Tuesday, March 3, 2009 in Surprise, Ariz. The game ended in a 9-9 tie after ten innings.
Fans duck for cover as the bat of Baltimore Orioles’ Ryan Raburn flies into the stands during the third inning of a spring training baseball game against the Detroit Tigers in Sarasota, Fla., Friday, March 30, 2012.
Continue reading →Old Photos: Poster in The Window
This photo attracted my attention with a sign in the window “Whiskey Sold By Case”:
Then, upon closer examination, I noticed a poster in the window promoting V-Mail.
V-mail stands for Victory Mail. It was based on the similar British “Airgraph” system for delivering mail between those at home in the United States and troops serving abroad during World War II. V-mail correspondence worked by photographing large amounts of censored mail reduced to thumb-nail size onto reels of microfilm, which weighed much less than the original would have. The film reels were shipped by priority air freight (when possible) to the US, sent to prescribed destinations for enlarging at a receiving station near the recipient, and printed out on lightweight photo paper. These facsimiles of the letter-sheets were reproduced about one-quarter the original size and the miniature mail was delivered to the addressee.
I didn’t find the exact same poster, so here are few other ones.
Visit Smithsonian online exhibition about V-Mail.
Continue reading →Misty Water-Colored Memories…
Sometime ago I wrote about the city where I grew up. Few more photos found on Flickr posted by a Western tourist prompted this post.
This cannon was taken from the sunken British steam-frigate Tiger. “On the 12th of May (1854) the steam-frigate Tiger, which ran aground in the fog, was fired at by the artillery of Odessa. The vessel was destroyed, the captain mortally wounded an the crew captured.” It was later recovered in installed on a pedestal in 1904 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the attack.
Continue reading →Old Photos: The U-2 Incident
Although the American plane was shot down long before my time, I knew about it from my parents. The Soviet leadership made the biggest possible deal out of this incident with a show trial, press conferences and even a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
The U-2 flight was just one in a long line of the CIA failures and the aftermath embarrassed President Eisenhower who was reluctant to authorize the mission in the first place.
If you have some spare time you can read the original Life Magazine articles about the trial here and here.Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev at the press conference.
Continue reading →Old Newspapers: Hyatt Regency Disaster
Everyone in this town knows about this, even people like me, who came here years after it happened.
Just a few pages from the Kansas City Times and Kansas City Star issues in the days after the accident (should be mostly readable if clicked).
Continue reading →