It has been 40 days since I’ve posted about a purchase— not to be confused with a gift— of crappy old books. During those 40 days, I have acquired 48 crappy old books.

Check out those two Robert’s Rules books! In all my years of scouring crappy old book and junk stores, I had never come across Robert’s Rules of Order before and then… boom! I found the Revised edition (1915) in town on the 18th and the Newly Revised (1970) in Tupelo on the 19th. If ever we need to bring order to the Farm, we’re set!

Don’t worry about those last four entries, I’m not going continental. I found those and the other philosophy books (above & below) in a box on the floor of a hallway. Free.

That War Department book (1929) is interesting. You can contact your commander, take a test on the book’s content, and if you pass, receive a certificate!

The crappy old book book to which the post title alludes is History As You Heard It by Lowell Thomas (Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1957).

Do you recognize Mr. Thomas?

Some of you may have heard of Mr. Thomas. Indeed, some may have heard him! For those such as I, who have a vague “sounds sort of familiar” feeling, here are a few snippets of the Wikipedia entry on him.

Lowell Jackson Thomas (April 6, 1892 – August 29, 1981) was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveler, best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous. So varied were Thomas’s activities that when it came time for the Library of Congress to catalog his memoirs they were forced to put them in “CT” (“biographies of subjects who do not fit into any other category”) in their classification.^{[citation needed]}

In 1930, he became a broadcaster with the CBS radio network, delivering a nightly news and commentary program. After two years, he switched to the NBC radio network but returned to CBS in 1947. In contrast to today’s practices, Thomas was not an employee of either NBC News or CBS News. Prior to 1947 he was employed by the broadcast’s sponsor, Sunoco. When he returned to CBS … he established an independent company to produce the broadcast which he sold to CBS. He hosted the first-ever television-news broadcast in 1930 and the first regularly scheduled television news broadcast (even though it was just a simulcast of his radio broadcast), beginning on February 21, 1940, on NBC.^[5][6] But the television news simulcast was a short-lived venture for him, and he favored radio. Indeed, it was over radio that he presented and commented upon the news for four decades until his retirement in 1976, the longest radio career of anyone in his day (a record later surpassed by Paul Harvey).

History As You Heard It (1957) is 

“a daily chronicle of the years between 1930 and 1955, a collection of excerpts from the news broadcasts of Lowell Thomas.”

 I skimmed through 46 pages, from June 22, 1933 and the Hiterlites attempt to abolish the Old Testament, to December 2, 1936

and rumors of poor King Edward VIII’s abdication. [I still think they should have named the kid Edward.]

For your … — “amusement” doesn’t sound quite right, given what was going on in the world  ’33-’36 does it?– . I’ve got it! Here are some crappy old news events that portended of things to come (although some news is amusing).

October 27, 1933— The Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Ickes, produces video praising Islam’s contribution to women’s rights  [sorry that was yesterday’s news] … announces today a Federal Housing Corporation is going to be established.

March 5, 1934— It seems almost unbelievable that Dillinger could have escaped so soon after he was put in prison. … The fact that he escaped by means of a pistol carved with razor blades out of a piece of wood caps the climax of incredibility.

October 22, 1934— They got Pretty Boy Floyd, the last of the Dillinger big shots. In Iowa, Federal agents dropped Pretty Boy with a well-aimed bullet, so that he crept away into a thicket like a wounded animal. Now comes the last word, the would was mortal. They found him dead.

January 4, 1935— President Roosevelt summed up his program in one characteristic phrase when he spoke of guaranteeing everyone “the security against the major hazards and vicissitudes of life.”

I had to look that one up just to be certain. You know what one of the definitions of vicissitudes is? The “ups and down” of life. Ha. I don’t think it worked and I’m glad it didn’t. You can learn a lot when you’re down. “Can” being the operative word.

May 20, 1935— At Cincinnati next Thursday evening, the first baseball game to be played at night under the big arc lamps in the major leagues.

January 7, 1936— We hear defiant muttering in New Deal circles, talk of curbing the power of the Supreme Court, depriving the nine high Justices of their right to knock out congressional laws because they consider them unconstitutional.

March 30, 1936— The German election has aroused a new case of the jitters. After 99 percent of the voters have endorsed Hitler’s policies, he will be spurred on to fresh aggression.

June 1, 1936— By a five-to-four decision the Supreme Court put the quietus on the minimum wage law of New York State.
Thus ends the most momentous session of the Supreme Court in its entire history. Law after law, cardinal points of the New Deal Philosophy and policy, has been thrown into the wastebasket as contrary to the Constitution of the United States.

[Sigh. We know how that turned out.]

November 16, 1936— At eight o’clock this morning some 250,000 of Uncle Sam’s gray-clad mail carriers started on their rounds to make history. To three million employers they carried the new social security cards.