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In March 2010, while listening to PBS, I heard an obituary of radio writer and producer Norman Corwin.  For years, Corwin has been one of my favorites, chiefly because of (or only) his wonderful On a Note of Triumph.

On a Note of Triumph, difficult to describe, better yet heard–but I suppose I can sketch its parameters.  It is an hour-long radio show written by Corwin in 1945 for CBS on the occasion of V-E Day.  It is a sharp departure from anything that listeners in 1945 may have heard:  oblique, poetic, indirect.  Don’t worry; it is packed with plenty of mid-century pomposity, self-congratulation, and in-your-faceness, too.

One reason for this pomposity is Martin Gabel, whose bellowing stentorian narration grounds this piece firmly in its time.  Bernard Herrmann, famed for his Hitchcock scores, wrote the music for On a Note of Triumph.

On a Note of Triumph is one of the most bizarre pieces I have ever heard:  an artifact of the age, yet pure poetry.

For the past two decades, I had been expecting Norman Corwin’s death with some fear.  I had never met the man.  Yet he so perfectly represented a time in history that I loved.  Now it was here.  Norman Corwin’s death at age 100.

No, wait.  The old duffer was still alive!  This was simply a retrospective on his 100th birthday.  Fooled again.  Norman Corwin was still alive and well, no doubt in his Santa Monica, CA home listening to this retrospective, too.

Praise be!  Death is stopped forever!

I have heard of spite fences.  I have heard of architectural holdouts.  But spite houses are a new thing to me.

Spite fences are built by people who want to “spite” their neighbor, building a fence that often blocks the view of the unoffending neighbor or otherwise is designed to irritate him or her.

Here is a spite fence built by wealthy businessman Charles Crocker on San Francisco’s Nob Hill to frustrate German undertaker, Nicolas Yung, who owned the smaller house and refused to sell out:

An architectural holdout is a building whose owner refuses to sell out to a larger project.  New York was at one time filled with these places in the 20th century; now, not so much.  A typical architectural holdout is a cottage house with a modern hotel wrapped around it.

Now, I hear of spite houses, which seem a weird combination of spite fences and holdouts.

According to Wikipedia, in its spite house entry:

At the turn of the 20th century, the city of Alameda, California, took a large portion of Charles Froling’s land to build a street. Froling had planned to build his dream house on the plot of land he received through inheritance. To spite the city and an unsympathetic neighbor, Froling built a house 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, 54 feet (16 m) long and 20 feet (6.1 m) high on the tiny strip of land left to him. The Alameda Spite House is still standing and occupied.

We see this everywhere at some point towards the latter half of the 1960s.  Helvetica font runs rampant.  It’s everywhere:  in the LIFE copy, in the ads.  It permeates other publications, as well, but rarely as much as in LIFE.

Not only that, but lower case.  It’s more of that faux humility.  Helvetica is a very fake-humble typeface, almost pretentious in its lack of artifice.

One feature I see again and again from the 1930s to the 1950s is the Gentlemanly Library.  In so many cases, I imagine a permanent set at MGM or Warner’s where actors would sit down for their LIFE feature about Errol Flynn the Distinguished Scholar (or something).  Or at least Errol the scholar when he wasn’t statutorily raping young ladies on his yacht, the Sirrocco.   The Gentlemanly Library was simply a meme:

One thing that elevates this shot of Jean Hersholt and wife Via is that this does look like a real library.  That award on the upper-right looks real.  It looks…Danish (Hersholt was a Dane).  And then there’s that book dead-center in the picture laying horizontally.  Finally, those curtains look so weirdly arranged, they have to be real.  Hersholt was a rarity in Hollywood, an authentically humanitarian guy who helped found the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills.

Apparently, Pabst Blue Ribbon wasn’t yet the darling brand of pretentious downwardly-mobile art-types, because this advertising segment tries to put some gloss on the product.  Notice the touch-up of the PBR bottles.

This is more about words than it is about nuclear war.

But it’s trivia that has been lodged in my brain for years.

Herman Kahn

Herman Kahn was a well-known military strategist who published On Thermonuclear War in 1960.  Kahn, considered a major spear-rattler in the Cold War, was parodied by Walter Matteau in Fail-Safe.

A.Q. Khan

Then we’ve got Abdul Qadeer Khan, or A.Q. Khan, the insidious founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Kahn and Khan.  Two men, same jobs, names differing only by the placement of one letter.  Not only that, but the two Khan/Kahns couldn’t be further in terms of ethnic and religious heritage, Khan being Muslim and Kahn being Jewish.