40 Glamorous Photos of Janis Paige in the 1940s

Born 1922 as Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington, American actress and singer Janis Paige began singing in public at age five in local amateur shows. She moved to Los Angeles after graduating from high school and was hired as a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II.

Paige began co-starring in low-budget musicals. She co-starred in Romance on the High Seas (1948), and later co-starred in adventures and dramas, in which she felt out of place. Following her role in Two Gals and a Guy (1951), she decided to leave Hollywood.

Paige appeared on Broadway and was a huge hit in a 1951 comedy-mystery play, Remains to Be Seen. Stardom came in 1954 with her role as Babe in the Broadway musical The Pajama Game.

Paige made her live dramatic TV debut June 27, 1957, in “The Latch Key” on Lux Video Theatre. She also appeared on 87th Precinct, The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, Trapper John, M.D., Columbo, and Caroline in the City, and in the 1975 television movie John O’Hara’s Gibbsville (also known as The Turning Point of Jim Malloy).

Paige is considered to be one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. She was given a star in the Motion Picture section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6624 Hollywood Boulevard on February 9, 1960.

Take a look at these glamorous photos to see the beauty of young Janis Paige in the 1940s.

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In 1935, Hessy Levinsons Was Selected as “the Most Beautiful Aryan Baby” by the Nazis. She Was Actually Jewish!

Hessy Levinsons Taft (born Hessy Levinsons; May 17, 1934), a German Jew, was featured as an infant in Nazi propaganda after her photo won a contest to find “the most beautiful Aryan baby” in 1935. Taft’s image was subsequently distributed widely by the Nazi party in a variety of materials, such as magazines and postcards, to promote Aryanism.

Hessy Levinsons on the cover of a Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus (or Sun in the House), January 1935.

Taft’s parents, Jacob Levinsons and Pauline Levinsons (née Levine), were unaware of their photographer’s decision to enter the photograph into the contest until learning that the photo of their daughter had been selected by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as the winner.

Fearing that the Nazis would discover that their family was Jewish, Taft’s mother informed the photographer that they were Jewish. The photographer told her mother, Pauline, that he knew they were Jewish and deliberately entered Taft’s photograph into the contest because he “wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous.” In July 2014 Taft told the German-language newspaper Bild that “I can laugh about it now, but if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.”

The parents were equally shocked and “amazed at the irony of it all.” In the weeks afterward, the picture was everywhere. It was in storefront windows, in advertisements and on postcards. One time, her aunt went to the store to buy a birthday card for her first birthday in May of 1935 only to find a card with Taft’s baby picture on it. “My aunt didn’t say another word, but she bought the postcard which my parents brought with them throughout the years.”

In 1938, Jacob Levinsons was briefly arrested by the SS. In the same year, the family immigrated to France and settled in Paris, then later moved to Cuba and from there to the United States in 1949.

Hessy Levinsons studied chemistry at Julia Richman High School in New York, and majored in chemistry at Barnard College, graduating in 1955. As a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University she met her husband, mathematics instructor Earl Taft. She and her husband joined the faculty at Rutgers University, but she left academia to raise a family, later working on the AP Chemistry exam for the Educational Testing Service.

Hessy Levinsons Taft holds a copy of Sonne ins Haus.

After 30 years at the Educational Testing Service, she returned to New York as a chemistry professor at St. John’s University in 2000. Her research in this later period of life focused on water sustainability. She retired in 2016.

32 Fabulous Portrait Photos of a Young and Handsome James Spader

Born 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, American actor James Spader had his first major film role in Endless Love (1981), and his first starring role was in Tuff Turf (1985). He rose to stardom in 1986, when he played the rich, arrogant playboy Steff in Pretty in Pink.

Spader has portrayed eccentric characters in films such as the drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), the action science fiction film Stargate (1994), the controversial psychological thriller Crash (1996), the erotic romance Secretary (2002) and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012). He also voiced and performed motion-capture of the titular character of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015).

His television roles include those of attorney Alan Shore in the last season of The Practice (1997–2004) and its spin-off Boston Legal (2004–2008) (for which he won three Emmy Awards), and Robert California in the comedy-mockumentary The Office (2005–2013).

Spader currently stars as high-profile criminal-turned-FBI-informant Raymond ‘Red’ Reddington in the NBC crime drama The Blacklist (2013–present) for which he has earned two Golden Globe Award nominations.

Take a look at these photos to see portrait of a young and handsome James Spader.

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Historical Photos of Germany in the Era of Hyperinflation in the Early 1920s

During the hyperinflation in Germany of 1920s, the country’s currency, the mark, went crazy. The government of the Weimar Republic may have been able to clear its debts, but it came at the cost of the citizens’ savings. It’s an era that is still part of the national psyche today.

German hyperinflation after the First World War originated in the decision of July/August 1914 to suspend the gold convertibility of the mark and associated gold-reserve requirements. As with other hyperinflations, this one was irregular.

German wholesale prices slightly more than doubled during the First World War. By February 1920 the ratio to 1913 prices was about 17, but then fell, irregularly, to a ratio of 13 in May 1921. After May 1921 inflation resumed and between then and June 1922 average monthly inflation was 13.5 per cent; in the following 12 months it reached 60 per cent (including a short cessation in early 1923 as the Reichsbank temporarily pegged the exchange rate), and 32,700 per cent or about 20 per cent per day between June and November 1923.

The mark was stabilized in later November 1923 at one million millionth of its 1913 dollar exchange rate. Although only the period from June 1922 was ‘hyperinflationary’ (above 50 per cent per month), this period cannot be studied independently of the preceding inflationary history.

A shop owner advertises “selling and repairing in exchange for food,” one of many Germans turning to a barter economy amid hyperinflation, 1922.

Children play with virtually worthless marks, 1922.

Boys fly a kite made of banknotes, 1922.

A shopkeeper stuffs excess cash into a tea chest next to his register, 1922.

Children use bundles of banknotes as building blocks, 1923.

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Beautiful Vintage Photos of London in 1961

These stunning images were taken by Charles Weever Cushman, an amateur photographer, during his holiday in London with his wife in 1961. The bustling life in the capital city was captured vividly through them. Let’s take a look back:

Swarm on Bell lane.

Shepherd Market, Mayfair.

Guards on sentry at St. James’s Palace.

Piccadilly Circus at night.

Aldgate Market.

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Amazing Photos of a Refugee Camp in Småland, Sweden During World War II

A set of amazing photos from Sten-Åke Stenberg that shows everyday life at a refugee camp in Småland, Sweden during World War II.

“I found a little album in my uncle’s (James Waldemar Stenberg) belongings. During a period of time he lived together with two sisters. One was Emma Johansson and she appears on the second photo in this set. They never told me very much about their lives, but this little album unveals that Emma worked in a refugee camp during the Second World War.”

“It is possible to see a box on one photo with the text Kooperativa Bredaryd. That is pretty close to were he and the sisters lived when I was a child (Smålandsstenar). It was a big refugee camp close to Bredaryd in Öreryd. It was mainly Norwegians that stayed there. The people on these photos look more like they are from East Europe.”

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18-Year-Old Teddy Boy George Photographed by Friend Jurgen Vollmer in 1961 at Rabenstraße Stop in Hamburg

Jurgen Vollmer captured these images of George Harrison with wind-blown, slicked back hair during and after a ferry ride on Hamburg Lake in Spring 1961. By this time, The Beatles had adopted the brushed forward hairstyle worn by Vollmer, Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann. Vollmer recalled: “...occasionally George would comb his hair forward, but always combed it back again. He said the Rockers gave him funny looks.”

In 1960, Astrid Kirchherr took some superlative photos of The Beatles in Hamburg. She took none at all in 1961, scaling back her work to help out Reinhart Wolf. His other assistant Jurgen Vollmer made up for it. Early in this second visit he asked George to go out with him for a few hours for a solo session, and George agreed, slipping into his leather jacket and greasing back his quiff. The others showed their intrigue with nods and winks. They knew Jurgen had a crush on George; he sometimes wore an I LIKE IKE badge he’d altered to read I LIKE GEORGE. “It was chemical,” said Jurgen. “I liked George the most. He was very quiet and shy, like me, and also a dreamer.”

This was an experimental day, because Jurgen had never done a photo session before. He was using a Rolleicord camera borrowed from Wolf, probably the same one Astrid had used for her first shoot. The results were similarly excellent. He fired off a role of twelve black-and-white photos on the Alster ferry, and eight more frames on the landing stage at Winterhuder Faehrhaus, and George’s character and youth shine fresh from the spring images.