... let's ask a psychology professor: Why do people go to nightclubs?
Nightclubs evolved out of the speakeasies of the Prohibition Era, and these days they are mostly legal, but there is still a bit of a sense that they are sinful and risqué.
At the bar of the Stork Club... a coated matron raised her voice.Do we really need an explanation? People want to enjoy life — and the enjoyment of life is within reach. It's not wrong to want to dress up and go out to eat and drink and have a little fun. It's a simple pleasure.
"I do as much for the war effort as anybody," she told her male civilian companion defiantly. If consuming liquor was aiding the war effort, she seemed to be in a fair way that night night of winning the Japanese conflict single-handedly....
People come to nightclubs just to congregate — to see and to be seen...
J. Edgar Hoover is to be found at the far part of the Cub Room with his aide, Clyde Tolson...
The debs com in for lunch, drink mostly coke (at 75 cents a bottle, nickel size) or milk....
"I wonder if they're going to be married," they say. "Isn't that a divine hat?" or a "fetching frock," or a "charming ensemble," or "Why isn't he in the Army?"...
Taking in a night club is a big event in small people's lives. Most people have always had the desire to go and now they feel they can satisfy that desire.
THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1945.
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How much knowledge of the future one needs to excerpt the detail able J. Edgar Hoover and his "aide" Clyde Tolson?
Meanwhile, the NYT didn't have a correspondent in a remote patch of desert in southern New Mexico, about halfway between Socorro and Alamogordo. Exact location Latitude 33° 40' 31'' N, Longitude 106° 28' 29'' W.
Had they, they would have seen some scientists who by May 21 were wrapping up a report on a simulated blast that was run nearby using 100 tons of TNT stacked on a twenty foot platform two weeks earlier (May 7), along with some trace amounts of radioactive material. They measured radiation nearby and concluded that the blast did not spread a significant amount of radiation. This was also a test of the instruments that they planned to use.
Just five days shy of two months later at the same location, the world's first atomic bomb was placed in a 214 ton steel container named, "Jumbo" and tested successfully at 5:29:45 AM. The event was literally the dawning of a new sun, as the brightness in the eastern sky caused some residents of Socorro to believe that the sun was rising several minutes earlier than scheduled. No information was released at the time however.
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer quoted from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-gita, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
That was the moment that forever will define 1945, that moment and the two subsequent uses of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed a combined 200,000 people and brought the war to a quick end.
Whoops. The original plan was indeed to place the bomb inside "Jumbo." However concern about spreading radioactive steel vapor over the countryside (though misplaced in the sense that the radiation still spread just as far in its natural form) caused them to take the bomb out of "Jumbo" and place the container several hundred feet away to measure the explosive effect of the bomb.
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