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1926: Oh, What a Year!

31 Wednesday Dec 2025

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One Hundred Years Ago (with additional commentary from me)

February 6

The skull of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa is stolen from his grave in Chihuahua. Its whereabouts are unknown to this day. (His widow, Luz, keeps the touring car in which Villa was shot, in 1923, in the front yard of their hacienda. It becomes a planter.)

March 4

A writer in in Budapest commits suicide and leaves behind a note containing a crossword puzzle. The puzzle is yet to be solved.

May 9: Explorer Richard E. Byrd and his Navy Chief Aviation pilot Floyd Bennett claim to be the first people to fly over the North Pole, in their plane named “Josephine Ford,” which, if you ask me, looks far to small to make such a demanding trip.

May 12:  Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his fifteen-strong crew fly over the North Pole in their “Norge” airship, becoming the first verified explorers to accomplish the feat. Seventy years later, it’s revealed that “Josephine Ford” had sprung an oil leak and the Americans had to turn back before they reached the Pole.

Damn.

June 23

The first Scholastic Aptitude Test (now commonly referred to as SAT) is administered to 8,000 high school students. The test, based on a World War I aptitude test administered to immigrants, is aimed at keeping Jewish students, disturbingly bright and hard-working, out of Ivy League colleges. I am not making this up.

Read more: 1926: Oh, What a Year!
SATs and American JewsDownload

August 23

“The Latin Lover” Rudolph Valentino, Hollywood silent movie star, dies suddenly of perforated ulcers, aged 31. His condition is named after him as “Valentino’s syndrome”. The following day, 60,000 mourners cause a riot in New York trying to reach Valentino’s body. (Part of Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik was filmed in the Guadalupe Dunes.)

September 20

The North Side Gang attempts to assassinate powerful mob boss and rival Al Capone at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois. Despite over a thousand rounds of submachine gun ammunition being fired, Capone escapes unharmed. (Capone favored the Central Coast as prime territory for bootlegging. By tradition, the photo below shows Capone shooting pool at what is today the Cool Cat Cafe in Pismo Beach. Those windows remain.)

October

6. Against the St. Louis Cardinals, The Yankees’ Babe Ruth hits three home runs in a World Series game, the first player ever to do so.

14. A.A. Milne’s children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh published by Methuen & Co. in London. (Eeyore fan here.)

22. Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel The Sun Also Rises is published. (About bulls but not balls.)

31. On Hallowe’en,  escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini dies from sepsis after suffering a ruptured appendix during a dangerous escape attempt from a water tank.

November

3. Sharpshooter Annie Oakley, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and later the subject of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, dies in Greenville, Ohio aged 66. (Sitting Bull, who befriended her, called her “Little Miss Sure Shot; the Wild West Show visited San Luis Obispo twice in the early 1900s.)

https://jimgregory52.com/2023/1/25/when-buffalo-bill-came-to-san-luis-obispo/: 1926: Oh, What a Year!

13. P. L. Travers’ short story “Mary Poppins and the Match Man” appears in The Christchurch Sun in New Zealand, marking the first published appearance of the eponymous character. (Mary’s a Kiwi!)

December

3. Mystery and thriller writer Agatha Christie disappears from her home in Surrey, England. She would be found 11 days later at a spa in Harrogate, purportedly suffering from amnesia.

5. Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin is released in America, being shown in New York. (The stairway shootout in Kevin Costner’s The Untouchables is an homage to a similar scene in Potemkin.)

The staircase shootout, The Untouchables

5. French Impressionist painter Claude Monet dies in Giverny, aged 86. The only time I have ever time-traveled was thanks to Monet.

https://jimgregory52.com/2023/04/09/time-traveling-with-monet/

11. Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, publishes Volume 2 of his manifesto Mein Kampf. (It is the safest place for Germans to hide their money, in that no one has ever read Volume 2.)

31. Buster Keaton’s brilliant film The General–his unlikely hero, a Southerner, steals a locomotive during the Civil War—debuts in Tokyo.

Thank you to historic newspapers.com

Terence Stamp, 1938-2025. Thank you.

18 Monday Aug 2025

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His Da was a merchant seaman and so rarely home. Home was London and, as a toddler, he survived The Blitz. Two decades later he even survived Peter O’Toole, his friend. O’Toole, common to British actors, wasn’t just a drinker. He was a carouser. Maybe this man, Terence Stamp, was among the crowd who went bar-hopping all night Friday and decided to stop into a West End theater for the Saturday matinee. They were there to hoot at the actors from their seats in the dark.

Just before the curtain, though, O’Toole leaped from his seat.

“Good GOD!” he cried. “I’m IN this!”

This story is, of course, apocryphal, but carousing, and booze, was a kind of second Blitz that Stamp survived. He even survived a relationship with the woman, Jean Shrimpton, whom many consider the first modern Supermodel, she who paved the way for Cindy Crawford, Gigi Hadid, Tyra Banks, and even Shrimpton’s contemporary, Twiggy. (Shrimpton is now eighty-two.)

An older O’Toole outside a Soho watering hole.
Shrimpton and Stamp, about 1965.

We Yanks take some credit in the creation of this marvelous actor. He was smitten by Gary Cooper when his Mum took him to see Beau Geste when he was a little boy; when he was a teen, James Dean cemented his decision to become an actor.

It was a sound choice. At the very beginning of his film career, Stamp’s range was already extraordinary: He was the guileless and doomed young sailor in Billy Budd, and a few years later was the brooding and paranoid soldier, the flame to Bathsheba’s moth in the first film production of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. (I enjoyed both that version, with Julie Christie, and the later one, with Carey Mulligan. The earlier version led me to Thomas Hardy novels, and that was a good choice on my part. For one thing, I learned as much about dairying from Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as I had about whales from Moby-Dick, and the former learning was far less painful.)

For purely gratuitous reasons, Carey Mulligan’s horseback ride from the second film version. (The video link should work if you click on it.)



Thankfully, the news services put together a composite of some of Stamp’s roles. He made an indelible impression as General Zod in the first Superman films with Christopher Reeve. He was a superb supervillain, and those were films that he was very proud of.

Because I am a hopeless Romantic, it’s one of his supporting roles that I remember best. The film was called The Adjustment Bureau, and it’s based on a story by the brilliant American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

The premise is simple, and similar to The Matrix. We are not in control of our lives. They are foreordained, every moment planned from birth to death, and if someone or something threatens to violate The Plan, the Adjustment Bureau intervenes for course correction. They’re easy to spot, because all of them were slim-lined early 1960s suits. And all of them wear hats.

In the film, Matt Damon, as David, is an earnest young United States Senator who falls head-over-heels with a dancer, Elise, played by Emily Blunt. She falls in love with him. He is a button-downed traditionalist. She’s a free spirit. Can’t blame either one.

In The Adjustment Bureau, Blunt and Damon first meet in the men’s room at the Waldorf, where he’s trying to gather himself after a defeated run for office; she’s hiding in there because she’d crashed a wedding party.


But this love is NOT in the young senator’s Plan. So, the Adjustment Bureau agents, led by Stamp, intervene to separate the young couple forever. Stamp’s gravitas is expertly played in this scene, and it allows Damon’s line, at the end, the weight that it deserves. Sometimes there would be cheers from the film’s audiences at this point.

Stamp, an inherently generous actor, made those cheers happen.





My Waycool Big Brother

18 Sunday May 2025

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May 12, 2025:

Tomorrow is my big brother Bruce’s birthday. He has many distinctions and we have more than a few similarities.

Distinctions:

1. He was the only one of the four Gregory kids to inherit Mom’s brown hair and eyes. His middle name is “Keefe,” Mom’s maiden name, and traceable back to her ancestors in County Wicklow, on the Irish Sea. The first photo shows him with our beautiful Mom.

2. Family legend has it that he was so reluctant to start school at Margaret Harloe Elementary that he climbed the school flagpole and hung there awhile. They were sensible. He got hungry.

Bruce, front row to the left of the chalkboard.

3. We both later attended Branch, but because he was four years older, he got to hear aged, aged Fred Jones speak about the 1886 double lynching from the PCRR trestle at the base of Crown Hill. Fred saw it happen.

4. His AG(U)HS teachers adored him. Room 301 (I taught in 306) had glass soundproof booths for Sara Steigerwalt’s speech class (we both loved Sara, who was scary). Six years after he’d explained the Battle of Gettysburg to his classmates, his battlefield map of July 2 was still in one of those booths.

Our other scary/much adored teacher was English and Journalism teacher Carol Hirons. I was teaching at AGHS the year of Carol’s retirement, and on her last day, she walked up to me with an 11th Grade American Lit anthology that I recognized immediately.

She had tears in her eyes. “Jim, I wanted you to have this.” I got tears in my eyes as Carol walked away toward the parking lot, and then I opened the book. 

It was Bruce’s.

5. Learning to drive a stick eluded me, until Bruce taught me on his little MG sedan. I hope we didn’t run over too many of Mr. Shannon’s Brussels Sprouts.

The MG


6. He is gifted mechanically. I have a hard time clearing out the vacuum cleaner of debris. His airplane and car and ship models were meticulous. Mine looked like the mashed potatoes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Bruce was a finish carpenter.

Bruce made this Revell model of the Confederate commerce raider, Alabama, but his was under full sail. It was marvelous. I got a little bit even many years later when, at Mission Prep, I taught Travis Semmes, a direct descendant of Alabama’s captain, Raphel Semmes.


7, He is meticulous. We had a drawer full of “Mad” magazines, his, and they were arranged in some fashion I did not understand–either by date, theme or the redness of Alfred E. Neuman’s hair.

It never failed. “Been in my ‘Mads’ again, haven’t you?”

He was a pain in the ass until he turned nineteen. He took great joy in picking on me.


More on this at the end.

Similarities:


1. It is almost impossible to tell us apart on the telephone.


2. We are both TV Boomer Generation types. Here are Roberta, Bruce and I watching the TV when we lived on Sunset Drive. Yes, that is a TV.

3. We are both Branch School products, including several grades spent in the 1888 schoolhouse that still stands in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. (Photo above, although we lacked the belltower. Termites.)


4. Bruce was the emcee for the 1966 Senior Class play at AGUHS. I was the emcee for the 1970 AGHS Senior Class play.


5. We both enjoyed setting up toy soldiers and them utterly destroying them with industrial-strength rubber bands that our Dad brought home from the Madonna Construction Co. offices, where he was comptroller.

6, Both of us took our first airplane ride, to Marysville, where Dad was bidding a job, in Madonna Construction’s Aerocommander, piloted by Earl Thomson, one of the founders, in 1939, of today’s airport. In the photo, that’s Madonna and the first Gov. Brown in front of that airplane. (That trip led to me writing a book about local World War II combat fliers sixty-two years later.)

Bruce was later a busboy at the Madonna Inn, where I took Jeri Tomson, my 1969 AGHS Christmas Formal date, for two prime rib dinners which set me back $13.84.

7. Bruce was the editor of the Cuesta College newspaper, “The Cuestonian.” Four years later, so was I.

When he turned nineteen, (I was ADHD and so a much BIGGER pain in the ass than he ever was), I’d become slightly less annoying, at fifteen. That’s when he turned into the best big brother anyone could hope for. 

Tomorrow he turns 77. I am 73. 

He’s still the best big brother anyone could hope for.

This lovely little girl…

02 Wednesday Apr 2025

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My Great Aunt Jane, or Jennie, or Mildred Jane Wilson, a name that has persisted, unfortunately ever since a collateral Gregory married the great man’s aunt, Mildred Washington. Even my Aunt Mildred Gregory preferred “Aunt Bill.” That’s Aunt Bill circa 1935.


But, you must admit, Great Aunt Jane, or Jennie, was an enchanting little girl. She was born in Licking, Missouri, in 1884 and died in Yellowstone, Montana, in 1978.

So that’s Jennie, then Jennie with my grandmother Dora (a year older), then Jennie with her husband, Mr. Kofahl, and daughter, Sally Ruth, (who died in Taft, where there are entire regiments of Kofahls.)

So that’s Jennie, then Jennie with my grandmother Dora (a year older), then Jennie with her husband, Mr. Kofahl, and daughter, Sally Ruth, (who died in Taft, where there are entire regiments of Kofahls.)

What disturbs me a little is that Jennie, such a lovely little girl, looks more and more like Rasputin.


She did not get that from her mother—my great-grandmother, Sallie McBride Wilson. That’s Sallie, on the right, her sister on the left and my great-grandfather, Taylor Wilson, in the center. Sallie has such a sweet face; she died young and left Taylor the heartbreak he never got over. This photo, a tintype, was in a Texas County, Missouri root cellar for thirty-five years before it was restored to my father.

Then, good grief, I realized where Jennie’s expression came from. It wasn’t Rasputin. It was my Confederate ancestor, Gen. James McBride, for whom I am named. He was Jennie’s grandfather.

That’s the General’s look, which I always ascribed to chronic constipation.

However, Jennie evidently was a wonderful mother to Sally Ruth, and her brother, Jim Ed Wilson, was the police chief of Shafter.

Missourians like two names.

Three more Wilson brothers worked in the Taft oilfields–the top three in the photo. One of them, I think Cal, grew so frustrated with the camp cook that he threw him into a boiler. We have never ascertained whether it was lit. He must’ve been crabby, like the General.

Cal’s nephew, Robert Wilson Gregory, was stationed at Gardner Field in Taft—Chuck Yeager trained there—discovered that not only was the food terrible, but that the head cook was embezzling mess funds and serving substandard farm, when Army food was already awful, while pocketing the Army’s money. Busting the cook got Dad into Officers’ Candidate School.

Don’t mess with an accountant.

Or, I think, with Aunt Jane.