Smithsonian.com

Something about the way of life during the Cold War era always strikes me as simple—simple in all senses of the word—plain, uncomplicated, even naïve. I mean, why would children learn to “duck and cover,” as if crouching under your school desk could save you from a nuclear blast?

Earlier this week, as news of the death of 84-year-old Tony Schwartz, the creator of the famously frightening 1964 Daisy Ad crept across the airwaves, tens of thousands logged onto YouTube to view again the iconic political commercial of a small girl in a field counting petals on a daisy just moments before a countdown to the big blast. The horrifying message of the film was driven home with plain, uncomplicated and direct precision. The commercial, which was pulled after airing only once on September 7, 1964, likely clinched the election for Lyndon B. Johnson.

Schwartz, himself, was not a simple man. He suffered from agoraphobia and feared leaving his home. And yet, while he tended to rarely stray from his Manhattan digs, his list of accomplishments includes: radio host; sound designer; college professor; media theorist; author; art director; advertising executive; and significantly, urban folklorist, producing several albums for Folkways Records.

Here at the Smithsonian Institution, where the vast collection of Folkways Records are housed, re-recorded and sold through the online download center, Global Sound, Schwartz is sadly mourned. 

“None of us here ever got to see or meet him,” says Folkways archivist Jeff Place, “he basically did everything from his own apartment. He was fascinated by sound in all of its manifestations, and he collected and analyzed sounds of all kinds—kids playing on the playground and sounds from the street corner.” 

His recordings reflect that age of simplicity. They allow us to linger in a time when life wasn’t zipping around us at 24-7 speed. All complexity melts away while savoring one simple, isolated sound. Take for example, the sound of a coke bottle being opened and slowly poured, a classic soundscape that Tony Schwartz created for one of his commercial clients, Coca-Cola. 

Schwartz, says Place, was a unique individual, just the sort to hit it off with the eccentric Moses Asch, the founder and original owner of Folkways. “Asch was the only guy who would put out commercially released albums of the kinds of ambient type sounds that Schwartz recorded.”

At Global Sound, check out 1,2, 3 and a Zing Zing Zing (1953), a collection of children’s playground rhymes, or his classic New York 19 (1954), recordings of speeches, conversations and songs heard on city streets—hear Schwartz interview an elderly woman, the grocer and a plumber in the track, “Music in Speech.“

A personal favorite of mine is An Actual Story in a Dog’s Life (1958), which aired on the CBS Radio Network that year. From the album, you’ll learn about Tony, his wired-hair terrier Tina, and his dog’s mother and father, Fanny Fishelson and Chip O’Hara. “I recorded all the sounds of all the situations that ‘Tina’ led me into,” Schwartz writes in the liner notes.

This from the guy who scared us near half to death with a daisy.

(Daisy girl image courtesy of Conelrad. Album cover courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways.)

So, why didn’t I think of that? When Art Fry did invent an adhesive-backed note card in 1974 and created the ubiquitous Post-it Note, it took more than just a little ingenuity. It took chemical know-how and some major backing from his employer 3M. “We realized that what we had was not just a bookmark,” says Fry, “but a new way to communicate or organize information.” Hear Art Fry explain how and why in a podcast created by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. What’s your favorite thing you do with Post-it Notes? Tell us in the comment area below.

(Photograph Courtesy of Art Fry.)

Having made more than 1,000 skydives, some 600 with a camera, daredevil adventurer Andy Keech has hot-dogged it with the best of  adrenaline junkies. He’s photographed skydivers boogie boarding and diving through hula hoops mid-air; jumping from single-seat cockpits, having been crouched inside with the pilot; launching from standing positions on the wings of a plane; and forming aerial configurations known, creatively, as the caterpillar, horny gorilla and the Starship Enterprise.

Keech started skydiving in 1959, when the sport was just taking hold in his native Australia and became the first in his country to make contact with another jumper in a free fall. Keech went on to become a national champion parachutist and a top scorer for his team in a world competition.  When he came to the United States, he continued skydiving, resumed piloting (which he started at age 17) and became one of the world’s top freefall photographers, earning assignments with Sports Illustrated, Time and other publications. He has compiled his work in a three-book series, Skies Call. Keech recently spoke at the Air and Space Museum, where he volunteers when not setting records (in his autogiro, a 16.5-foot, engine-in-front plane—another hobby). “Behind each picture is a half-hour story we could talk about,” he said. And so he transported me back to 1976 in the drop zone above a North Carolina airport, where he orchestrated the photograph above. Here’s what he told me.

“During the decade of producing the three Skies Call books, I found images would come to me while asleep.  I kept a writing pad next to my bed where I would sketch the image that came to me. Over time I had as many as a dozen images that had not yet been translated into photographs.

Generally, I had no solution as to how to prepare the scene and get the camera to the position. This was one such image. [It was] four years before the solution came to me. 

I traveled about 400 miles to North Carolina with my equipment and my close buddy Paul Reed, who is a masterful technician and expert jumper. We had a dozen subjects—a mixture of civilian and military weekend jumpers (the really jump-hungry ones who never got enough jumping during the week)—who were keen for the picture.

We also had the ideal aircraft, the Lockheed 10E. It had very docile characteristics while on the verge of aerodynamic stall. It would mush downward with the engines at idle. This allowed jumpers to climb outside the airframe without strong airflow blowing them off. It was sufficiently calm in the bubble of air on the top of the wing so that people could talk to each other.

There was a thin overcast at 7,000 feet. So I set the camera exposure for blue-sky brightness above that layer, and we proceeded with the briefing, rehearsal and loading for take-off. At 7,000 feet, we climbed through the light layer and found, to my alarm, that there was another layer at 25,000 feet. Therefore, lighting was significantly subdued, over two stops in exposure terms and almost certainly beyond the latitude of the film. We had no way to reset the exposure and were therefore committed to proceed. 

The jumpers began to climb out onto the wing. In perhaps 15 to 20 seconds all were on the outside of the fuselage, and I had just begun to trigger the camera when the nose began dropping. The airspeed began slowly to increase and quite rapidly we were all going down.

As we reached 120 mph, the first jumpers began being blown off the aircraft, and by the time we reached 140 mph, all the jumpers had departed like rag dolls in a windstorm. The pilot regained control and returned to the airport. On the ground, I was most concerned until all the jumpers reported in. I was relieved that no one was hurt.

In the debriefing, I went over the possible causes of loss of control. By popular vote (or guess), it was agreed the weight shift forward was the cause. I also mentioned the unfortunate under exposure and that almost surely the pictures would come to nothing. All immediately insisted on doing it again. So, we went ahead with the retake.

The second run-in involved putting less people on the wing and more up astride the fuselage near the center of gravity. As soon as people were in position, the loss of control event repeated itself, but with a more rapid onset. People were blown off the aircraft. Rag doll time again.

Our revised view of the dynamics was that blocking air from the elevator is what caused the nose to drop. Much wiser now, we called off any further attempt. As it happened, the exposures from the first attempt were just inside the limit of the film and were the most suitable for composition. This image was the best on the roll.”

Keech prefers to keep the logistics of where he was when he shot the photo a secret. Any guesses? Tell us in the comments area below. 

(Photograph courtesy of Andy Keech.) 

I find the saturation of computer-generated special effects in today’s movies a bit disappointing. Modern visuals make for extraordinarily slick films, but what happens to the work of movie artists who plied their craft before the age of techno-wizardry?

It’s painfully easy to write off old films as quaint period pieces, failing to realize their contributions to the motion picture industry. Does the average person watching the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” music video realize it’s based on George Melies’ 1902 film “A Trip to the Moon”?

How many moviegoers who sat for Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” avoided the (far superior) 1933 original because of the prevailing mindset that computer-generated images make for a better movie?

This is where a good museum engaged in the fine art of homage is invaluable, and this summer, the Hirshhorn pays tribute to the master of stop-motion effects, visual effects meister Ray Harryhausen, perhaps best known for the skeleton battle from 1963’s “Jason and the Argonauts.”

His animated sequences for a host of sci-fi and fantasy films are painstakingly executed—beautiful works of kinetic sculpture that are oftentimes the token saving grace of an otherwise awful movie. (What’s your favorite Harryhausen moment?) Such was the case of the newly colorized “It Came From Beneath The Sea,” the first installment in the Hirshhorn’s Summer Camp film series.

While this blogger feels moral outrage when “restoration efforts” try to make a film palatable to modern audiences by adding computer graphics or colorizing black and white films, the Harryhausen-approved dye jobs amp up the cinematic schlock to delightful effect.

The audience howled at the awful acting and flat dialog, but whenever Harryhausen’s monstrous four-legged octopus crushed a fleeing mob of people, or besieged San Francisco, everyone momentarily held their whispered criticisms and sat glued to the screen. Though his work may seem a tad dated, Ray Harryhausen’s animations are still appreciable and his influence on the movie industry is undeniable.

Summer Camp continues with “Earth vs. The Flying Saucers” (June 12) and “20 Million Miles to Earth” (June 29), both are also presented in color. (Fear not, fellow film purists: the DVD editions of these films include both black and white and colorized versions on the same disc.)

Those selections are good, but I wish they had decided to screen “One Million Years BC.” Okay, yes, it would be thematically inconsistent, but methinks a bikini-clad Raquel Welch frolicking amongst plasticine dinosaurs would be a surefire crowd-pleaser. Do you secretly harbor affections for a B-grade movie? Which one? Tell us in the comments area below.

The Hirshhorn screenings are free to the public and seating is done on a first-come first-served basis.

I find the saturation of computer-generated special effects in today’s movies a bit disappointing. Modern visuals make for extraordinarily slick films, but what happens to the work of movie artists who plied their craft before the age of techno-wizardry?

It’s painfully easy to write off old films as quaint period pieces, failing to realize their contributions to the motion picture industry. Does the average person watching the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” music video realize it’s based on George Melies’ 1902 film “A Trip to the Moon”?

How many moviegoers who sat for Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” avoided the (far superior) 1933 original because of the prevailing mindset that computer-generated images make for a better movie?

This is where a good museum engaged in the fine art of homage is invaluable, and this summer, the Hirshhorn pays tribute to the master of stop-motion effects, visual effects meister Ray Harryhausen, perhaps best known for the skeleton battle from 1963’s “Jason and the Argonauts.”

His animated sequences for a host of sci-fi and fantasy films are painstakingly executed—beautiful works of kinetic sculpture that are oftentimes the token saving grace of an otherwise awful movie. (What’s your favorite Harryhausen moment?) Such was the case of the newly colorized “It Came From Beneath The Sea,” the first installment in the Hirshhorn’s Summer Camp film series.

While this blogger feels moral outrage when “restoration efforts” try to make a film palatable to modern audiences by adding computer graphics or colorizing black and white films, the Harryhausen-approved dye jobs amp up the cinematic schlock to delightful effect.

The audience howled at the awful acting and flat dialog, but whenever Harryhausen’s monstrous four-legged octopus crushed a fleeing mob of people, or besieged San Francisco, everyone momentarily held their whispered criticisms and sat glued to the screen. Though his work may seem a tad dated, Ray Harryhausen’s animations are still appreciable and his influence on the movie industry is undeniable.

Summer Camp continues with “Earth vs. The Flying Saucers” (June 12) and “20 Million Miles to Earth” (June 29), both are also presented in color. (Fear not, fellow film purists: the DVD editions of these films include both black and white and colorized versions on the same disc.)

Those selections are good, but I wish they had decided to screen “One Million Years BC.” Okay, yes, it would be thematically inconsistent, but methinks a bikini-clad Raquel Welch frolicking amongst plasticine dinosaurs would be a surefire crowd-pleaser. Do you secretly harbor affections for a B-grade movie? Which one? Tell us in the comments area below.

The Hirshhorn screenings are free to the public and seating is done on a first-come first-served basis.