r/1920s

I thought I'd share some of my favorite portraits of Colleen Moore from the 1920s. She had such a distinctive screen presence, and these photographs really capture the charm and elegance that made her one of the biggest stars of the silent era. Which one is your favorite?

F. Scott Fitzgerald never became the kind of military hero he imagined he might be. After drifting through Princeton without distinction, he entered officer training during World War I, only to be sent away from elite assignments and eventually placed in temporary camps that were quietly disappearing as the war ended. When the armistice came, he suddenly found himself unemployed.

But he had one dream left: New York.

Living in a tiny rented room in West Harlem, Fitzgerald mailed photograph after photograph of himself in uniform to newspapers and publishing houses, hoping someone would notice him. More than a hundred rejection letters came back. Eventually, however, he found work at Barron Collier advertising, earning eighty dollars a week as a junior copywriter.

The office was associated with the Flatiron Building, itself less a comfortable office tower than a giant urban advertisement — narrow, visible, theatrical. Fitzgerald probably worked in more ordinary downtown offices nearby, but the atmosphere of the industry mattered. Advertising in the 1910s was not a quiet profession. It belonged to the speed, noise, and ambition of modern Manhattan.

Senior copywriters handled colorful national campaigns. Fitzgerald did not. He was assigned tiny black-and-white transit ads pasted onto subway doors and streetcar windows — short-lived advertisements for small local businesses, designed to disappear after a few weeks. Scraped away. Washed off. Forgotten.

One surviving line is often attributed to him:

“We keep you clean in Muscatine.”

The phrase impressed his supervisor enough to raise his salary by ten dollars a week.

What mattered was not the laundry itself, but the realization behind the sentence: language could create instant emotional recognition. A few words could manufacture attention, atmosphere, even desire.

Something switched on in Fitzgerald.

After only a few months, he returned to St. Paul and rewrote This Side of Paradise almost feverishly, now using the compressed emotional logic of advertising copy. During the day he repaired the family car; at night he locked himself in the attic and wrote.

When the manuscript reached Charles Scribner’s Sons, editor Max Perkins reportedly sensed that this unknown young man was writing in a new way. Against resistance, he pushed the novel into publication.

And it worked.

To be continued.

Men on stilts were looking after the growing hop bines and maintaining the wire work that the hops were attached to. Hop harvesting was different operation then.