Prone Position

This is an interesting 1942 picture of some Los Angeles high school girls practicing their marksmanship.  Wow !  Guns in schools…and no one was injured….they were taught by the R.O.T.C. Sgt. how to use the rifle ! 

EHHS had the same thing going on out in those wooden “temporary” buildings where the R.O.T.C. classes were held.  I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I wasn’t part of that activity but did have an interest in one or more of those R.O.T.C. sponsors.  Sorry to say, some of us weren’t too respectful of the boys, but I have to give it to them…their taste in lovely young ladies was exceptional !

As I’ve also mentioned elsewhere in the blog, getting a good opportunity to effectively appraise our young ladies’ figures was difficult in those days due to their wardrobe choices, which mostly mimicked their mothers’ 1940s garb.

So, one memorable afternoon after school, I had some (rare) free time to go out and meet one of the girls I was kind of sweet on…she and the others were on the range, I had to wait.  Now, I’ve always been a very impatient “waiter” but this afternoon was different.

I took a seat in back of them where I had an unobstructed view of the target range.  There, dressed in their R.O.T.C. shorts (or, maybe PE shorts…I forget) were several of our Class of 1963 loveliest, laying prone on the floor, armed, facing downrange, firing away at the targets.  Their shooting form was terrific and I didn’t mind the wait.

No clue if any of them hit the target.

Bang

Pretty Girls – Part 2

Continuing with the thought started in the last post (and here), these HQ portrait scans support the notion that pretty ladies have always been among us. The oldest portrait is one taken by Matthew Brady in 1865, implying the attractive young lady was born in the 1830s or 1840s.

Choices of hairstyles and cosmetics clearly varied over time. Paul Harvey, the noted radio commentator of years past, liked to say that, “times change, but human nature doesn’t. The young Roman lad driving his chariot to town had exactly the same thoughts when he saw a good looking young lady along the road as a young lad has today.” 


And so it goes

Pretty Girls – Part 1

Let’s face it guys, we’ve been wired all our lives to appreciate a pretty girl when we see one. It started sometime around the 6th or 7th grade and to a greater or lesser degree has been with us for over 50-years now. I have little doubt that if we are blessed enough to live a decade or two longer, we will have been a captive of that part of nature for upwards of 70-years before we check out.

Our problem is that for the most part we never advanced our taste in women much beyond that 18-40 year age range. That problem has gotten us into trouble with wives, elicited an “eww” now and then, and has generally caused us to suppress a portion of our fundamental nature…probably for the best, all things considered.

Photography has been with us for little more than a 160-years now, and although it always seemed logical to me that some young women of past centuries were most likely just as attractive as those of that age range today, I’ve never really seen an old picture of one. However, with so much available online today, it is possible to explore the subject a bit.

For instance, the collage above shows a couple of popular and very attractive film stars of the early 1960s and a couple of 1962 Highlanders, Carol Warkentin and Carol Reeder, who I always thought were very attractive. I think our Highlander girls compared very favorably with the best Hollywood put on the screen in those days, don’t you?


Dieu merci pour les jolies filles

Hairstyles 1954 – 2010

Today, I was thinking some about the FBG.  Have I previously said that I don’t like them?  I wondered if anything could be inferred from a periodic superficial examination of attractive women’s hairstyles over a half-century.  Not sure what I expected to find, but I did recall some weird hairstyles in the early to mid 1980s.  Interestingly, it was difficult to find any clear examples of the images I pictured in my mind. 

I saw most of them in the airports as I was traveling quite a bit in those years. They were the first wave of professional women I had seen doing what men had been doing for decades...dragging their ass through a crowded airport, lugging too-heavy luggage, and rushing to make their connections because their incoming flights on the same carrier got them there late.  In my best chauvinistic character, I joked about them being market makers in stuffed bunnies...hold on...recall that they were the first of their kind I had seen in that venue.

There are a couple of the hairstyles I was looking for marked above within the green box.  Pictures of them are really difficult to find on the net.  Wonder if those images have been scrubbed?  Today, those women would be in the 45–55 age range; they were 20-30 then—they are the FBG.

Something stands out, do you see it?  Their hairstyles radically depart from those that preceded them and from those that followed.  I’ve chosen film icons as examples for two reasons; one, they influenced a portion of society at the time; and two, both their hairstyles and photographs were professionally done which aids the clarity of this example. 

Looks like we have mostly preferred ladies having long, straight hair sometimes with a gentle wave.  It was kind of fun putting this one together.

Adios