The Louvre, Johann Strauss, Mickey Mouse, Mahatma Gandhi, Fred Astaire, Whistler’s Mother, Dante’s Inferno, Pepsodent …
Or how about Jimmy Durante’s nose, the National Gallery, a Bendel bonnet, a Coolidge dollar or Camembert?
Those 13 people, places and things were all mentioned in a popular song, back when our popular culture was still a culture. I consider myself pretty knowledgable on pop culture references, but there’s at least one there that I never heard of.
I would imagine Bendel bonnets probably had something to do with ladies’ fashion back in 1934, when “You’re the Top” first appeared on Broadway in “Anything Goes.”
The 1930s were quite a time. Of course there was the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and the beginnings of the Third Reich. But it was also a decade of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at the movies, “The Grapes of Wrath” in bookstores and Cole Porter writing wonderful songs.
There was a generation coming of age that would someday be called the greatest, learning to waste not and want not, learning the hard lesson that America couldn’t hide from the world.
Tens of millions of Americans still lived rural lifestyles, many of them never traveling more than 50 miles from home. Popular culture existed in movie theaters and through the radio for most people, and nearly all of that had to be suitable for the entire family.
Without television, and with radio less than a 24-hour medium, people actually used to read books.
People knew that Joan of Arc wasn’t Noah’s wife, and they knew in which century we fought the Civil War. They didn’t think the world was 6,000 years old either.
They even knew Mahatma was a title, not a name.
Those were the days.