Day: June 1, 2012

Mr. Washington issues a thank you

To the United Brethren of Wachovia.

Gentlmen,
I am greatly indebted to your respectful and affectionate expressions of personal regard, and I am not less obliged by the patriotic sentiments contained in your address.

From a society, whose governing principles are industry and the love of order, much may be expected towards the improvement and prosperity of the country in which their Settlements are formed,–and experience authorizes the belief that much will be obtained.

Thanking you with grateful sincerity for your prayers in my behalf, I desire to assure you of my best wishes for your social and individual happiness.

G. Washington

President George Washington included the Salem Moravian settlement among his stops during his 1791 Southern tour. Washington was greeted by a band when he arrived in the afternoon of May 31. On June 1 he spent the morning touring Salem, with visits to a workshop and Choir house. At 2 pm leaders of the community delivered a formal address to Washington. The President then responded with a few comments, which, according to Moravian records, are those above. Washington left Salem and headed for Guilford battleground at about 4 a.m. on June 2.

Lost Colony Opens 75th Season Tonight. We’ve got prompts

Title page of Lost Colony "prompt" book
As the sun drops below the horizon tonight, more than 100 actors, singers, dancers and stage technicians will mount the opening night show for the 75th season of Paul Green’s award-winning drama The Lost Colony. The play premiered on Roanoke Island in the summer of 1937. The images featured here are from a prompt book used for productions during the outdoor drama’s first season. Although the name of the play’s director, Samuel Selden, is on the cover, our records do not indicate whether the prompt book belonged to Selden or another member of the cast or crew.

‘Smoke Without Fear’: The industry strikes back

“Reports linking the death rate from cancer with cigarette smoking were ridiculed this week by Donald C. Cooley, author of  ‘Smoke Without Fear,’ a 32-page booklet published by True Magazine.

“Cooley, managing editor of Your Health and Your Life magazines, has one piece of advice to persons who enjoy smoking and who have been unsuccessful in their attempts to give up the habit — quit trying.

“Cooley pointed out that consumption of cigarettes in the United States has increased 456 percent since 1920, and lung cancer deaths in men have increased 411 per cent since 1930.

“A graph, he adds, would show cigarette smoking and lung cancer deaths shooting up at the same frightening rate.

” ‘However,’ Cooley said, ‘you can make a similar chart showing that the cost of living has increased in about the same proportion as has male lung cancer. A debater might argue that four times as many men now have cancer because coffee now costs $1.20 a pound, as against 30 cents in 1930.’

“By the same token, he pointed out, life expectancy has risen with the increased use of cigarettes.”

— From Billboard magazine, September 18, 1954

Donald C. Cooley is actually Donald G. Cooley, otherwise best known as author of  “The New Way to Eat and Get Slim” (1941) and founding editor of the magazine that would become Mechanix Illustrated.

tobacco.org reprints Cooley’s sophistic booklet , which was the brainchild of Hill & Knowlton, the industry’s PR factory.