Blast from the past

[ozcopper]

Many think that London was the best place in the world in the 1960s. Youth culture flourished and post-war austerity finally gave place to a decade of optimism and exploration. In this decade, the traditional hierarchies begin to dissolve paving the way for the birth of the modern age.

During this time, London underwent a ?metamorphosis from a gloomy, grimy post-war capital into a bright, shining epicenter of style?.

The phenomenon was caused by the large number of young people in the city (due to the baby boom of the 1950s) and the postwar economic boom.

Following the abolition of the national service for men in 1960, these young people enjoyed greater freedom and fewer responsibilities than their parents? generation, and ?[fanned] changes to social and sexual politics?.

 

[ozcopper]

Henry Ford receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials, 1938

At a ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford is presented with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday. Henry Ford was the first American recipient of this order, an honor created in 1937 by Adolf Hitler.

This was the highest honor Nazi Germany could give to any foreigner and represented Adolf Hitler?s personal admiration and indebtedness to Henry Ford. The presentation was made by Karl Kapp, the German consul in Cleveland, and Fritz Heller, German consular representative in Detroit.

The peculiar admiration that National Socialists had for Henry Ford and the supposed sympathies that the Detroit industrialist harbored for Nazism keep attracting the curious, both academic historians and internet readers.

There is something irresistible about the connection between the man taken to symbolize American industrial modernity and the quintessential villains of the twentieth century.

In 1918, Ford?s closest aide and private secretary, Ernest G. Liebold, purchased an obscure weekly newspaper for Ford, The Dearborn Independent. The Independent ran for eight years, from 1920 until 1927.

In Germany, Ford?s antisemitic articles from The Dearborn Independent were issued in four volumes, cumulatively titled The International Jew, the World?s Foremost Problem published by Theodor Fritsch, founder of several antisemitic parties and a member of the Reichstag.

In a letter written in 1924, Heinrich Himmler described Ford as ?one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters?. Ford is the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, although he is only mentioned once.

Adolf Hitler wrote: ?only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews?] fury, still maintains full independence?[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions?.

Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his ?inspiration?, explaining his reason for keeping Ford?s life-size portrait next to his desk. Steven Watts wrote that Hitler ?revered? Ford, proclaiming that ?I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany?, and modeling the Volkswagen, the people?s car, on the Model T.

German engineers and industrial managers adapted the technological and functional aspects of Fordism. Flow production (assembly lines and vertical integration) had considerable appeal after 1936 when the Four-Year Plan sparked renewed interest in industrial rationalization.

The Volkswagen plant invoked Ford?s Rouge Factory as a model, and the German Labor Front hired Ford engineers to staff it. Finally, the Nazi-appointed manager of the airplane builder Junkers, Heinrich Koppenberg, was a vocal disciple of Ford production techniques.

Historians have proposed different understandings of the Ford-Nazi connection. Some have offered muckraking indictments of the American industrialist as a Nazi sympathizer and war profiteer.

For others, the connection exhibited Nazi ?reactionary modernism?, that paradoxical Fusion of technological zeal and anti-modern romanticism supposedly characteristic of Nazism.

Others again have suggested a structural nexus between Fordism and Fascism. In this vein, Fordism is essentially understood as a device of capitalist control over the industrial workforce. In Germany, it is asserted, Fordism only became dominant under Nazism.

While Ford was extremely anti-Semitic, at the same time he was very anti-war (and of course blamed Jews for World War I, not surprising given his propensity for blaming Jews for many things). So Ford didn?t like Nazi militarism.

Not enough to turn down this award, but still, he wasn?t close on a political level with the Nazis, and is quoted as saying in the New York Times at the time of the award: ?My acceptance of a medal from the German people does not, as some people seem to think, involve any sympathy on my part with Nazism. Those who have known me for many years realize that anything that breeds hate is repulsive to me?.

While Ford didn?t turn down the award, he also didn?t travel to Germany to receive it, so it was awarded to him in Michigan instead.

But despite these interpretations, the Ford-Nazi connection still leaves us with considerable uneasiness. It ?ts only awkwardly into the master narratives of a historiography still dominated by national conceptual frameworks.

In the American case, the status of Henry Ford as a herald of the roaring 1920s makes it difficult to integrate his Antisemitism and indelicate political leanings into a uni?ed appreciation of his historical role, which, in turn, creates the clich? of the man as an ?enigma?.

 

[ozcopper]

These two men are manumitted slaves. Manumission is the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves. They borrowed the clothes and the hats just for the picture. It?s a posed photograph and a statement about being manumitted rather than a picture of a woman posing with her slaves.

To answer the question of why they are dressed up but shoeless ? it?s part of the old custom of using shoes to denote class, position, or wealth. It was highly traditional that slaves be barefooted. Some countries went so far as to mandate that slaves always be without shoes.

The motivations of slave owners in manumitting slaves were complex and varied. Firstly, manumission may present itself as a sentimental and benevolent gesture.

One typical scenario was the freeing in the master?s will of a devoted servant after long years of service. This kind of manumission generally was restricted to slaves who had some degree of intimacy with their masters, such as those serving as personal attendants, household servants, secretaries, and the like.

In some cases, master and slave had had a long-term sexual relationship. Owners sometimes freed the woman and children born of such relationships.

An excerpt taken from: ?Slavery and identity: ethnicity, gender, and race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808-1888? by Mieko Nishida:

Freedom, of course, did not alter much of the external appearance of African-born ex-slaves; they could not be easily distinguished from their enslaved counterparts, who constituted the majority of the African-born population. Whether enslaved or freed, most had been born free in Africa, and their shared cultural otherness distinguished them from the Brazilian-born population of African descent. There were only a few visible signs of their newly acquired free status.

First, ex-slave street laborers who worked in gangs, as porters, transporters, and artisans were not chained at the ankle or neck. Second, ex-slaves were entitled to wear shoes; the British lady Maria Graham describes shoes as the ?mark of freedom? in her travel journal. Perhaps with their shoes on, African-born slaves of both sexes continued to work with their co-workers of African birth, both slaves and ex-slaves, side by side and were engaged in the same occupations as when they had been enslaved.

Their jobs could have been stigmatized by association with slavery, and the free-born population may not have wished to take them up. But it was African-born people?s unique occupational skills that enabled them to earn extra money as slaves and to purchase their freedom in the end.

 

[ozcopper]

Burst of Joy: The sad story behind the iconic picture, 1973

After spending more than five years in a North Vietnamese camp, Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is reunited with his family at Travis AFB, March 13, 1973.

Burst of Joy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Associated Press photographer Slava ?Sal? Veder. The photograph came to symbolize the end of United States involvement in the Vietnam War and the prevailing sentiment that military personnel and their families could begin a process of healing after enduring the horrors of war.

Prisoners of war freed from the prison camps in North Vietnam landed at Travis Air Force Base in California. Even though there were only 20 POWs aboard the plane almost 400 family members turned up for the homecoming.

Veder was part of big press showing and remembers that: ?You could feel the energy and the raw emotion in the air?. The photograph depicts United States Air Force Lt. Col.

Robert L. Stirm being reunited with his family, after spending more than five years in captivity as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The centerpiece of the photograph is Stirm?s 15-year-old daughter Lorrie, who is excitedly greeting her father with outstretched arms, as the rest of the family approaches directly behind her.

Despite outward appearances, the reunion was an unhappy one for Stirm. It is depressing to read that three days before the picture was taken Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm received a letter from his wife that she wanted a divorce.

His wife took 140,000 of his pay while he was a POW, took his two younger kids, house, car, 40% of his future pension, and $300 a month in child support. She had to pay back only $1500 of his money used on trips with other men.

He fought and lost against her in court. He then had to live with his mom in San Francisco taking care of his older kids. It looks more like Prisoner of Wife.

Three decades after the Stirm reunion, the scene, having appeared in countless books, anthologies, and exhibitions, remains part of the nation?s collective consciousness, often serving as an uplifting postscript to Vietnam.

About the picture and its legacy, Lorrie Stirm Kitching once noted, ?We have this very nice picture of a very happy moment, but every time I look at it, I remember the families that weren?t reunited, and the ones that aren?t being reunited today ? many, many families ? and I think, I?m one of the lucky ones?.

Another account about this story (taken from a newspaper): ?But there was more to the story than was captured on film. Three days before Stirm landed at Travis, a chaplain had handed him a Dear John letter from his wife. ?I can?t help but feel ambivalent about it,? Stirm says today of the photograph. ?I was very pleased to see my children?I loved them all and still do, and I know they had a difficult time?but there was a lot to deal with.?

Lorrie says, ?So much had happened?there was so much that my dad missed out on?and it took a while to let him back into our lives and accept his authority.? Her parents were divorced within a year of his return.

Her mother remarried in 1974 and lives in Texas with her husband. Robert retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1977 and worked as a corporate pilot and businessman. He married and was divorced again.

 

[ozcopper]

John Lennon signs an autograph for Mark Chapman - his murderer, 1980

According to Chapman he actually had the gun in his pocket when this photo was taken, but he chickened out. He hung around in front of the Dakota getting his nerves up until John and Yoko came home later that night.

Chapman waited outside Lennon?s apartment beginning in the afternoon. Lennon and Yoko walked outside to go somewhere and Chapman asked him to sign his record (it was a special edition record, somewhat rare for one reason or another). After Lennon signed the record he asked Chapman ?Is that all??.

Basically asking if Chapman wanted anything else signed to which Chapman replied ?No?. Chapman then waited outside of Lennon?s apartment for Lennon to return. He waited several hours and spent some of the time waiting reading The Catcher in The Rye (a book he was infatuated with).

Lennon was returning from the recording studio that night. He was carrying tapes from the studio under his arm when he was shot. Chapman then read more of his book while waiting for the police to come.

The first to respond after the shooting was a security guard from The Dakotas (the apartments John and Yoko lived in) who approached Chapman as he sat reading. Apparently, all the security guard could do was sob and kept asking Chapman ?Do you know what you did??.

 

[ozcopper]

Harold Agnew on Tinian in 1945, carrying the plutonium core of the Nagasaki Fat Man bomb.

A somewhat odd photo and not terribly exciting unless you are aware of the details. Harold Agnew?s smile sort of disconnects the viewer from the reality of the situation. That box is the direct cause of the deaths of approximately 70,000 people. That little box will change the course of history, and he?s holding it like it?s his lunch.

The oddest thing here is that a whole group of scientists had photos of themselves posing with the plutonium core. They were proud of their invention, and the fact that they were making history. For a whole lot of reasons, they had no second thoughts about what they were planning to do.

Harold Agnew saw the completion of the atomic bomb from start to finish. As a member of Enrico Fermi?s research team at the University of Chicago in 1942, Agnew witnessed the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, Chicago Pile-1. He worked in the Experimental Physics Division at Los Alamos from 1943 to 1945.

While the Trinity test was being conducted, Agnew was already on his way to Tinian Island in the Pacific as part of Project Alberta, the group responsible for the final bomb assembly.

He flew as a scientific observer on a B-29 bomber for the Hiroshima bombing mission, measuring the size of the shock wave to determine the bomb?s power. He also filmed the explosion with a movie camera.

The plutonium core (the box) in the Fat Man weighed 6.2 kg or about 14 lb, the pit is 9 cm (4 inches) across. And only about one-fifth of it, a bit over 1 kg (2 pounds) undergoes a fission reaction. And only a gram (1/30th of an ounce) of that gets converted into explosive energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT.

Fat Man was the codename for the type of atomic bomb that was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki by the United States on 9 August 1945. It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, the first being Little Boy, and its detonation marked the third-ever man-made nuclear explosion in history.
But what would happen if he were to drop it by accident?

To explode, the core has to reach the critical mass. In a uranium bomb, the pieces are kept separate in order to remain ?subcritical?, so that each piece individually cannot start the chain reaction. The explosion is triggered by one piece being fired at the other like a bullet down a gun barrel.

The same style of box was used for the first three cores: the Trinity core, the Fat Man core, and the Demon Core. It was made of magnesium, to dissipate heat and not reflect neutrons. The box was safe to drop; it would?ve just bounced (And yes, they tested it!).

The above picture was kept by Harold Agnew as a souvenir, but the FBI had a problem with it. As Agnew told the story later: ?I was in Chicago after the war in 1946. The FBI came and said they believed I had some secret pictures. They went through my pictures and found nothing. Then like a fool I said: Maybe this one is secret. They wanted to know what that thing was. I told them and they said that it must be secret and wanted the picture. I wanted the picture so they agreed if I scratched out the ?thing? I could keep the slide?.

If Japan hadn?t surrendered unconditionally, their war with the Soviet Union might have gotten a lot bloodier than it was. The presence of the U.S. in Japan at the end of the war might have been the only thing that saved them from being invaded by the Soviet Union. The U.S. had three choices:

    Drop the bomb and wait for unconditional surrender.
    Accept a conditional surrender and let Japan go on and fight the Soviet Union (a certain defeat which could have resulted in yet more power for the Soviet Union).
    Invade mainland Japan and force unconditional surrender at the expense of 1,000,000+ casualties per side.

There are a lot of theories, many of which are advanced by U.S. detractors concerning why the US dropped the bomb besides ?quick end of the war? or that the Japanese surrendered for any reason but the bombs being dropped.

The truth is complex. The Soviets, by treaty, declared war on Japan and began invading the occupied territories on August 9, which was after Hiroshima and before Nagasaki.

In July of 1945, less than a month before the atom bombs were dropped, the U.S. intercepted internal Japanese communications (from Foreign Minister Togo) saying that Japan would never accept unconditional surrender and would instead fight until the bitter end.

Making matters more confusing, the Japanese published two justifications for surrender, one saying the bombs, the other claiming Soviet declarations. If anything, this is an indicator that both were reasons. The truth is, the U.S. most likely dropped the bombs primarily as a desire to end the war with Japan. Any message to the Soviets would have been most likely viewed as a bonus.

In the words of Dwight Eisenhower:

Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act?

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ?face?.

 

[ozcopper]

Nazi General Anton Dostler is tied to a stake before his execution by a firing squad, 1945

General Anton Dostler was a general of the infantry in the regular German Army during World War II. In the first Allied war trial after the war, Dostler was found guilty of war crimes and executed by firing squad.

He ordered and oversaw the unlawful execution of fifteen captured U.S. soldiers. The soldiers were sent behind the German lines with orders to demolish a tunnel that was being used by the German army as a supply route to the front lines.

They were captured and upon learning of their mission, Dostler ordered their execution without trial. The U.S. soldiers were wearing proper military uniforms and carried no civilian or enemy clothing and were in compliance with Hague Convention to be considered non-combatants after their surrender.

Under the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, it was legal to execute ?spies and saboteurs? disguised in civilian clothes or enemy uniforms but excluded those who were captured in proper uniforms.

Since fifteen U.S. soldiers were properly dressed in U.S. uniforms behind enemy lines and not disguised in civilian clothes or enemy uniforms, they were not to be treated as spies but prisoners of war, which Dostler violated.

This order was an implementation of Hitler?s secret Commando Order of 1942, which required immediate execution without trial of commandos and saboteurs

German officers at the 135th Fortress Brigade contacted Dostler in an attempt to achieve a delay of their execution. Dostler sent another telegram ordering Almers to carry out the execution.

Two last attempts were made by the officers at the 135th to stop the execution, including some by telephone because they knew that executing uniformed prisoners of war was a direct violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War.

These efforts were unsuccessful and the 15 Americans were executed on the morning of March 26, 1944, at Punta Bianca south of La Spezia, in the municipality of Ameglia. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave that was then camouflaged.

In the first Allied War crimes trial, Anton Dostler was accused of carrying out an illegal order. In his defense, Dostler maintained that he had not issued the order, but had only passed along an order to Colonel Almers from supreme command and that the execution of the OSS men was a lawful reprisal. Dostler?s plea of superior orders failed because by ordering the execution, he had acted on his own outside the F?hrer?s order.

The general was convicted and sentenced to death by the American Military Tribunal. He was executed by a 12-man firing squad on December 1, 1945, in Aversa.

The execution was photographed on black and white still and movie cameras (there?s a video of this execution in US archives). Immediately after the execution, Dostler?s body was lifted onto a stretcher, shrouded inside a white cotton mattress cover, and driven away in an army truck. His remains were buried in Grave 93/95 of Section H at Pomezia German War Cemetery.

 

[Silver Soul]

^^^ yes, the same army that bombed  thousands of innocent children , and women with weapon's of mass destruction.  Pitiful. 

 

[ozcopper]

Smart, beautiful and deadly, 19-year-old Soviet sniper Roza Shanina had 59 confirmed kills, 1945

Roza Shanina was a Soviet sniper during World War II who was credited with fifty-nine confirmed kills, including twelve soldiers during the Battle of Vilnius.

Shanina volunteered for the military after the death of her brother in 1941 and chose to be a marksman on the front line. Praised for her shooting accuracy, Shanina was capable of precisely hitting enemy personnel and making doublets (two target hits by two rounds fired in quick succession).

In 1944, a Canadian newspaper described Shanina as ?the unseen terror of East Prussia?. She became the first Soviet female sniper to be awarded the Order of Glory and was the first servicewoman of the 3rd Belorussian Front to receive it.

According to the report of Major Degtyarev (the commander of the 1138th Rifle Regiment) for the corresponding commendation list, between 6 and 11 April Shanina killed 13 enemy soldiers while subjected to artillery and machine gunfire.

By May 1944, her sniper tally increased to 17 confirmed enemy kills, and Shanina was praised as a precise and brave soldier. The same year, on 9 June, Shanina?s portrait was featured on the front page of the Soviet newspaper Unichtozhim Vraga.

When Operation Bagration commenced in the Vitebsk region on 22 June 1944, it was decided that female snipers would be withdrawn. They voluntarily continued to support the advancing infantry anyway, and despite the Soviet policy of sparing snipers, Shanina asked to be sent to the front line.

Although her request was refused, she went anyway. Shanina was later sanctioned for going to the front line without permission but did not face a court-martial. She wanted to be attached to a battalion or a reconnaissance company, turning to the commander of the 5th Army, Nikolai Krylov. Shanina also wrote twice to Joseph Stalin with the same request.

In the face of the East Prussian Offensive, the Germans tried to strengthen the localities they controlled against great odds. In a diary entry dated 16 January 1945, Shanina wrote that despite her wish to be in a safer place, some unknown force was drawing her to the front line.

In the same entry, she wrote that she had no fear and that she had even agreed to go ?to a melee combat?. The next day, Shanina wrote in a letter that she might be on the verge of being killed because her battalion had lost 72 out of 78 people. Her last diary entry reports that German fire had become so intense that the Soviet troops, including herself, had sheltered inside self-propelled guns.

On 27 January Shanina was severely injured while shielding a wounded artillery officer. She was found by two soldiers disemboweled, with her chest torn open by a shell fragment. Despite attempts to save her, Shanina died the following day near the Richau estate (later a Soviet settlement of Telmanovka.

Shanina was buried under a spreading pear tree on the shore of the Alle River (now called the Lava) and was later reinterred in the settlement of Znamensk, Kaliningrad Oblast.

 

[Silver Soul]

Those eyes project a devil inside

 

[ozcopper]

Ticket to Armistice - Japanese leaflet dropped on Allied troops, 1942.
Sometimes the Japanese used sexual images in order to influence Allied soldiers to pick up surrender leaflets.

 

[ozcopper]

Leonard Siffleet about to be beheaded with a sword by a Japanese soldier, 1943

Leonard Siffleet was an Australian Special Forces radio operator, sent on a mission to Papua New Guinea to establish a coast watching station.

In September 1943, his patrol was sent to Japanese-held New Guinea, to recon the Japanese forces stationed there. Siffleet and two other Australian soldiers were captured by local natives friendly to the Japanese and turned over to the Japanese.

All three men were interrogated, tortured, and confined for approximately two weeks before being taken down to Aitape Beach on the afternoon of 24 October 1943.

Bound and blindfolded, surrounded by Japanese and native onlookers, they were forced to the ground and executed by beheading, on the orders of Vice-Admiral Michiaki Kamada of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The officer who executed Siffleet, Yasuno Chikao, detailed a private to photograph him in the act.

At the end of the war, Chikao was captured, tried for war crimes, and sentenced to be hanged; his sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment, and upon completion of his sentence, he returned to Japan.

The execution of prisoners by beheading was not an uncommon practice by the Japanese. Under the code of Bushido that the Japanese military conformed to at the time, the act of beheading a captured enemy actually restored some lost honor to the foe, since warriors were considered dishonored if they allowed themselves to be captured alive.

In the eyes of the Bushido adherents, this ?dishonorable surrender? justified the terrible treatment captured Allied prisoners received at the hands of the Japanese.

The photograph of Siffleet?s execution was discovered on the body of a dead Japanese major near Hollandia by American troops in April 1944.

It is believed to be the only surviving depiction of a western prisoner of war being executed by a Japanese soldier. Published in LIFE magazine, it became one of the war?s most iconic photos.

Siffleet is commemorated on the Lae Memorial in Lae, Papua New Guinea, together with all other Commonwealth war dead from actions in the region who have no known grave. A memorial park commemorating Siffleet was also dedicated at Aitape in May 2015.

A photograph of the Japanese soldier Yasuno Chikao an instant before he strikes off Siffleet?s head was taken from the body of a Japanese casualty later in the war, 1943.

 

[ozcopper]

Lina Medina, the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, 1939

In 1933, Lina Medina was born in Ticrapo, Peru. At the age of five years, Lina was brought to the hospital by her parents who complained of abdominal extreme growth.

The girl?s parents initially thought their daughter was suffering from a massive abdominal tumor, but after being examined by doctors in Pisco, Peru, they discovered she was seven months pregnant.

Dr. Geraldo Lozada became Lina?s attending doctor, fully taking over the case. Dr. Lozada took Lina to a more advanced hospital in Lima to confirm the pregnancy diagnosis.

The diagnosis was confirmed. Lina was born with a rare condition called ?precocious puberty?. Precocious puberty is basically the early onset of sexual development.

Most girls begin experiencing puberty around the age of ten (boys usually start a little later, around the ages of 11 or 12). Lina had experienced her first menstrual cycle at the age of two and a half or three. She had fully developed breasts by the age of four. Within five years, her body displayed pelvic widening and advanced bone maturation.

Lina Medina officially became the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, aged five, seven months, and 21 days. She gave birth to a boy by a cesarean section on May 14, 1939, necessitated by her small pelvis. The surgery was performed by Lozada and Dr. Busalleu, with Dr. Colareta providing anesthesia.

The child, weighing 2,700 grams (6 pounds), was well-formed, in good health, and was named Gerardo after the doctor who delivered him. The child and mother were able to leave the clinic after only a few days.

As might be expected, sexual abuse was immediately considered. The father of Lina was arrested on suspicion of rape and incest. He was released due to a lack of evidence. Lina Medina never revealed who the real father of her child is, or the circumstances surrounding its impregnation.

According to a 1955 article reviewing the case: ?some have pointed out, there were frequent festivities celebrated by the Indians in the Andean villages like the one where Lina was born. These often ended in orgies where rape was not uncommon?.

Throughout the years, many people have called her story a complete hoax, however, a number of doctors over the years have verified it based on biopsies, X-rays of the fetal skeleton in utero, and photographs taken by the doctors caring for her.

Gerardo was raised believing that Medina was his sister, but found out at the age of 10 that she was his mother. He led a healthy life until 1979 when he died from bone marrow disease at the age of 40.

In young adulthood, Medina worked as a secretary in the Lima clinic of Dr. Lozada, who gave her an education and helped put her son through high school.

Medina later married Ra?l Jurado and in 1972 had a second son, 33 years after her first. Lina Medina is alive today but refuses to give interviews.

 

[ozcopper]

Rare photo of Kim Il-sung's baseball sized tumor on his neck, 1984

Kim Il-sung holds a unique position in North Korea; although dead since 1994, he remains North Korea?s official leader, embalmed and ennobled in a massive mausoleum in Pyongyang.

The North Korean government refers to Kim Il-sung as The Great Leader and he is designated in the North Korean constitution as the country?s ?Eternal President?. His birthday is a public holiday in North Korea and is called the ?Day of the Sun?.

As he aged, starting in the late 1970s, Kim developed a calcium deposit growth on the right side of the back of his neck. Its close proximity to his brain and spinal cord made it inoperable. Because of its unappealing nature, North Korean photographers were forbidden from taking photos of Kim which showed the growth.

Kim was depicted from his left side to hide the growth from official photographs and newsreels (in his official portrait, he cranes his neck to the right as if to hide it).

As the growth reached the size of a baseball by the late 1980s, it got increasingly difficult to hide, and photos were doctored to airbrush it out. When Jimmy Carter visited North Korea in 1994, western news agencies received carefully doctored photos from Korea News Agency where the lump was hidden.

On the late morning of 8 July 1994, Kim Il-sung collapsed from a sudden heart attack. After the heart attack, his son Kim Jong-il ordered the team of doctors who were constantly at his father?s side to leave and arranged for the country?s best doctors to be flown in from Pyongyang.

After several hours, the doctors from Pyongyang arrived, and despite their efforts to save him, Kim Il-sung died. His death was declared thirty hours later, respecting the traditional Confucian mourning period.

Pyongyang radio said that Kim had succumbed to complications arising from a stroke as a result of psychological stress. In the years prior to his death, he had been receiving treatment for diabetes as well as the hardening of arteries in his heart.

Kim Il-sung?s death resulted in nationwide mourning and a ten-day mourning period was declared by Kim Jong-il. His funeral in Pyongyang was attended by hundreds of thousands of people from all over North Korea, many of whom were mourning dramatically (rumors have circulated that citizens were made to mourn dramatically for the cameras, or face execution).

Kim Il-sung?s body was placed in a public mausoleum at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where his preserved and embalmed body lies under a glass coffin for viewing purposes (the lump was removed from his head). His head rests on a Korean-style pillow and he is covered by the flag of the Workers Party of Korea.

 

[STKR]

KFC advertisement from 1972. ($26.73 in 2022 dollars)

 

[ozcopper]

Pin up girl Cheryl Ladd in the 1970s.

 

[Administrator]

Popular Science Magazine 1963

 

[Silver Soul]

Or burn waste oils with one of these.

 

[ozcopper]

Couple From the 1930s

 

[STKR]

Looks like he's wearing a one piece swimsuit!