[...] In 1928, Al Jolson, fresh from the fame of appearing in the first talking motion picture, “The Jazz Singer” of 1927, also began appearing in American Tobacco Co. cigarette advertising for their Lucky Strike brand… American Tobacco, and other tobacco companies, would soon make film-star and celebrity advertising of cigarette brands a staple in their tobacco promotion campaigns through the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond… This story covers some of that history [...]

Statue of a young Babe Ruth just outside the gates of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore. Statue by Susan Luery; photo by Leo Cloutier, pbase.com. See other statue perspective, below.     In Baltimore, Maryland, at the Camden Yards baseball park, home of the Baltimore Oriole’s professional baseball team, there is a statue of Babe Ruth, [...]

Jimmie Foxx, 21 year-old baseball star of the Philadelphia Athletics, featured on Time magazine cover, July 29, 1929.     In the summer of 1929, the year in which the stock market crashed, America was a nation not expecting disaster.  These were, after all, the “Roaring Twenties” and America was feeling pretty good about itself.  A [...]

     In 1921, they called it “the largest audience in history,” the 300,000 or so people estimated to have heard one of the first radio broadcasts of a special event – the outdoor heavyweight championship boxing match between American Jack Dempsey and French challenger, Georges Carpentier.  Dempsey was reigning world champ at the time, and [...]

…Shown here on the April 1920 cover of “Photoplay” is Pearl White, a popular silent film star. …At least part of White’s notoriety in “The Perils of Pauline” series was due to a business battle in the newspaper industry. The premier of “The Perils…” film arrived in Chicago in the midst of local turf war between William Randolph Hearst and Rufus McCormick of the Chicago Tribune…