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RIP Doris Day

3K views 25 replies 12 participants last post by  DD 
#1 · (Edited)
Legenday big band singer, actress.......from a simpler time.
 
#3 ·
Legenday big band singer, actress.......from a simpler time.

A simpler time?

What prompts folk to say that about earlier times, I do not know.

Perhaps they look at those movies and consider them as documentaries?

Doris Day's life line a simpler time than ours?

No way.

Born in 1922.

People were still making their own soap by hand, and only three percent of farms had electricity by 1930. Is it simpler to do things by hand and without electricity? Depends on what you mean by simple, I suppose.

Great Depression hit when she was a kid.

World War struck before she reached twenty.

Hydrogen bomb developed before she reached thirty.

In 1939, Roosevelt created the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. It started prosecutions to combat lynching, but failed to win any convictions until 1946.

Jim Crow laws remained in place until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the many lawsuits that followed to clear racist laws off the book in the old confederacy states, especially.

She was married FOUR times.

Do the Vietnam War times seem simple to anyone?

If you wanted to research anything, anything at all, you had to drive to the local library and get a big stack of books out on a table. If it was anything very difficult, you had to drive to a University library. Finding out about things was NOT a simple proposition.

Forty two percent of the adults in the US smoked tobacco as of 1965, when records started being kept about it. Tobacco companies used to tell people cigarettes were good for them, even though the companies knew that their products were harmful.

There was a major riot in the streets of every single US city with over one million in population in 1967. Are things now more complicated than that?

Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman elected to congress, and that did not happen until 1968.

Until the 1970s a man could not be convicted of raping his wife, as the complainant is such a case could not be the wife of the accused by statute.

Was Watergate a simple matter, or Iran Contra, considered simple?

The violent crime rate rose from 288,500ish to 739,000ish from 1960 to 1970, and crimes against black people were often not even counted.

Rose colored glasses about the past can give people a false idea about the times we are living in now.
 
#4 ·
Yes simpler times. No personal computers, no cell phones, no GPS, no answering machines, no voice mail, no video games, no calculators, 3 local channels on your 19" black & white TV...........if you wanted to talk to someone, you did it in person or you called them on a land line. Maybe they were home, maybe they weren't. Yes, that is what most people refer to as "simpler times". 20,000 word dissertation-type reply not needed.
 
#5 ·
Well, that is absurd. If someone does not want a cell phone or personal computer, or GPS, or answering machine, or video game, or television, they do not have to have one. If that is all it takes for a simpler life, anyone can have that now if they want.
 
#10 ·
Sad to hear of her passing. One of Hollywood's greats. I usually visit Carmel, where she lived, several times a year. It's also sad that this remembrance thread only lasted three posts until it got political. And yes, simpler times as I remember them; if not less turbulent.
 
#14 ·
Well, it got political first thing in post number one, when there was an allegation that the times she lived in were simpler, a powerful and false allegation that things were better off back then. Which they were not. Repeating such things over and over causes folk to believe it, to ignore the facts related to lower rates of education, bad water, higher infant mortality, and a host of other plain hard facts about the bad things that were happening back then. Women could not get a simple bank loan without getting a man, any man, to cosign. Call that simple? Ignoring the limitations of the past opens the doors to some 'golden age' thinking and is an invitation to reactionary movements. We can and should celebrate the best parts of the past, including the jazz singing of Doris Day. But her times were nothing to look back to as some golden simpler age.
 
#12 ·
Always liked her. I just rented "Young Man with a Horn" a few months ago. It starred Doris Day, Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas and Hoagy Carmichael; about a jazz trumpet player and the mess he made of his life. Based very loosely on Bix Biederbeck's short life. Watch sometime if you haven't seen it. Doris was quite young (28) and played the singer is a jazz (big) band. And Lauren Bacall was sexy as she ever was as a sexually confused perennial college student and wannabe bad girl.
 
#24 ·
Doris Marianne von Kappelhoff
 
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