Tag: 1937

A Drive Up Fifth Avenue, ca. 1937

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You know how, when you’re watching an old movie and there’s a scene in the interior of a car, and through the rear window, you can see rear-projected footage of the city streets the car is supposedly traveling on? If the movie you’re watching is set in NYC, there’s a chance that this is the footage you’re seeing.

This trip back in time begins at 60th Street and Fifth, just a block up from the Plaza Hotel, and continues north for 3.5 minutes or so, and then other angles are shot for the remaining time.

Happy New Year from Your Pals at Cladrite Radio!

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Cab Calloway and his orchestra at NYC’s Cotton Club on New Year’s Eve, 1937? That would make for a memorable New Year’s Eve, indeed! Where do we buy our time-machine tickets?

Happy New Year to Cladrite readers and listeners everywhere! If Cladrite Radio goes off the air tomorrow, as we fear it will (it’s out of our hands—see this post for more info), please keep your eyes on this space, where we’ll post any new developments.

Happy New Year -- Cab Calloway and his orchestra at the Cotton Club on New Year's Eve, 1937

A Journey Through 1937 Los Angeles

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One of our favorite aspects of the historic lore of Los Angeles is the novelty architecture that’s long been so closely associated with the city. So we enjoyed this sequence from Stand-In (1937), starring Humphrey Bogart, Leslie Howard and Joan Blondell.

In this clip, Howard, playing a buttoned-up bean-counter from back east who’s just arrived in L.A. on a mission to oversee a struggling movie studio, is picked up at the train station by a company car. On a memorable ride through the city, he encounters an eatery shaped like a hat (the Brown Derby), a bakery shaped like a windmill (one of the stores in the once-prominent Van de Kamp’s chain), a service station shaped like an airplane, complete with spinning propellers, and several others.

There’s not an establishment in this thirty-plus-second journey that we wouldn’t eagerly patronize, if only someone would perfect a functioning time machine.

Let us know if you have memories of any of these establishments. We’d love to learn more about them.

Be a go-gettin' son of a gun!

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We’ll admit to being suckers for all those “Hey, cheer up, chum — things could be worse!” songs of the 1930s, and we thought we’d share one of our favorites with the Cladrite Clan here today. After all, while our collective troubles might not be at quite the level of the Great Depression, between the oil disaster in the Gulf, the struggling economy, and two ongoing military actions (just to name a few), we’ve got it bad enough.

So we like the sentiments of these Mack Gordon lyrics (Harry Revel wrote the music), and figure they apply every bit as much today as they did back in the ’30s:

Wake Up and Live
Wake up and live; don’t mind the rainy patter,
and you will find it’s mind over matter!
Dark clouds will break up
if you will wake up and live.

Wake up and live; show the stock you’re made of,
Just follow through; what are you afraid of?
Why don’t you wake up and live?
Why don’t you wake up and live?

Come out of your shell; hey, fella,
find your place in the sun.
Come out of your shell; say, fella,
just be a go-gettin’ son of a gun!

Wake up and live; it may be love is yawning.
Up on your toes; a better day is dawning!
Don’t let up; get up and give,
give yourself a shakeup, just to wake up and live!

Come out of your shell; hey, fella,
Find your place in the sun.
Come out of your shell; say, fella,
just be a go-gettin’ son of a gun!

Wake up and live; it may be love is yawning.
Up on your toes; a better day is dawning!
Don’t let up; get up and give.
If Lady Love is yawning,
and a better day is dawning,
Won’t you get up, mister? Wake up and live!

— Mack Gordon, 1937

We like this song enough, in fact, to provide two different recordings of it for your consideration, both of them from 1937.

“Wake Up and Live” — Red Nichols and His Orchestra, feat. the Three Songies

“Wake Up and Live” — The Hudson-DeLange Orchestra, feat. Ruth Gaylor