FIFTIES, SAFFRON AND MORE

SANTA SPOILER.  Vernon Bisterfeldt, a Boise cop working off duty as a Santa, nabbed a shoplifter in 1965 at Welles department store on the Boise Bench.  I was doing rewrite on the Statesman night desk and wrote up a short story with a photo from a staff lensman.  Backlash came the next day when a reader called in to complain that I ruined the Santa story for her kids.  Sorry.

I can relate to being a stranger in strange land  during holidays because much of  65-69 that was me when I was a reporter for the Idaho Daily Statesman.  As the years went by I made friends in the community and would be invited out.  I think this has been a different kind of crazy for me with paranoia related to the virus.  In a month of two with the vaccine that could change too. 

SAFFRON. Hats off to Moinak Choudhury, University of Minnesota PhD candidate, who is teaching the U of M OLLI class on the products of Kashmir and Assam — cashmere, saffron and tea.  Saffron sells for a mere $5,000 a pound and involves labor intensive harvesting.  In a documentary we saw in class I now understand why it’s so expensive.  You might use it in a chicken recipe.  I assume it’s available at better super markets.  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327017

RETRO FOCUS.  Reading Eric Burns non fiction book “1957” prompted me to OD on all things from the 50s including “Rebel without a Cause,” “Untamed Youth” and “Don’t Knock the Rock.”  The last two feature very talented dancers grooving to a very athletic version of the jitterbug.   (I flunked Dance 101.)  Untamed Youth has the girl who invented rock ’n roll Mamie Van Doren in a campy calypso production number — not to be missed.  We shook, rattled and rolled our way through the 50s with Mamie, Elvis, Alan Freed and Bill Haley and the Comets.  

Burns book is subtitled “The Year that Launched the American Future” or at least the ’57 Chevy Bel Air which he thinks defines that year.  I beg to differ.  Richie Cunningham drove a Chevy in American Graffiti.  DIG IT!  

SLAVE TO MADISON AVENUE. Author Sloane Wilson’s 1953 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is considered to be “prototypical of the fifties,” wrote Eric Burns in his nonfiction book 1957.  Also comedian Stan Freeburg on his 1958 CBS Radio show did a mashup of Suit and the cult horror flick I Was A Teenage Werewolf.  I concluded that Suit was another commentary on the vapidness of Madison Avenue, but actually it dramatizes the paucity of rewarding work for returning war heroes who suffer from post traumatic syndrome while trying to fit in.  Tom, the central Suit character, gets a PR job with a TV network and soon learns that the stress and demands of this work will make him crazy so he negotiates with the network chief for a less demanding job and gets it.  I find this unbelievable, having worked for less than two years in network TV news.  I also watched the Suit movie of 1955 with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, who is memorable as Tom’s wife.  Family life is sacrificed at the altar of Madison Avenue in the Suit novel and movie.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049474/