I usually stay out of the KCMO school-related topics, but when I read about another time-wasting event, I remembered a few old photos I bookmarked some time ago that fit the occasion. The year is 1950:
Every year I have an idea to write a post about a Jewish veteran for the upcoming Veterans Day, but with my lack of interviewing skills and not personally knowing any veterans, every year I come up with nothing. Last year I took a few photos of the Jewish Veterans Museum and since my email to the local post of the Jewish War Veterans went unanswered, I decided to search for something interesting online. Only few names come up when searching for the Jewish Veterans in Kansas City and one of them is Bert Berkley – veteran, civic leader and the Chairman of the Board of Tension Envelope.
The article below was published in the Outlook – Kansas City Business Journal in May of 1979. The issue is available at the Missouri Valley Special Collections at the Kansas City Public Library (if you have a Twitter account, you should follow @KCPubLibrary).
The article is presented almost entirely with an exception of the discussion of the envelope business and its future as seen in 1979; I felt these details were irrelevant. Many of the things the article talks about in the future tense are now well in the past, that’s why I enjoy reading the old magazines.
This is the most typing I’ve done in the past ten years, and even though I am positive no one will finish reading this, I still liked doing it.
You mean to say that going to a Korean Festival is not on your bucket list? Then my bucket list (if I had one) definitely kicks your bucket list’s ass.
The best thing about going to a Korean Festival is a lot of Koreans, they are nice and friendly people who don’t mind a freeloader who showed up as a friend of a friend of a guest.
Any self-respecting Korean Festival starts off by singing Korean National Anthem followed the US National Anthem.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXIJKyuU1d4
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdki1LhKT5k
Korean War Veterans get a lot of respect at the event.
You’d think that reading Korean is hard…
…but you’d be wrong, I immediately knew what the 3rd prize was.
Another great thing about Korean Festivals is a combination of soccer, tennis and volleyball they play there.
For the entertainment Koreans enjoy making fun of the non-Koreans pretending to do martial arts.
I thought something was strange when whatever the martial arts people were screaming sounded a lot like “Jesus First” but then they proceeded to create cross formation and re-enact the Passion of the Christ.
This is the part after they crucified their instructor a.k.a. Jesus…
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxnZAqZ97BI
…so he can return from the dead.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5aAhsfRSl0
Of course no one leaves hungry.
To recap: nice people, a show about Jesus and martial arts, good food and lots and lots of soap.
Sometime ago I was arguing on twitter about the number of women in the medical profession in the USSR. While I knew I was right (because I am always right), my opponent ridiculed my anecdotal references, like a number of female doctors I visited in my childhood, or a number of female students in my Dad’s medical school photo-album. I thought maybe a scientific-looking study would be more convincing.
Women had been 10% of doctors and dentists in 1913. They rose to 77% in 1950 (Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie, 1969a: 103), but then declined to 72% in 1969, when they were also down to 55% among medical students, pointing to an equalized sex ratio in medicine a generation hence.
Although remuneration in the Soviet professions shows nothing remotely like the spread in the United States between the teacher at the bottom of the heap, the engineer somewhat better off, and the doctor way out in front, there is a differential there as well. The Soviet government, always economically pinched, has raised wages and salaries in a[264] manner to attract people into fields which would not otherwise be entered by enough candidates to meet the need. Engineering is the best enumerated. Law is the lowest paid of the professions in the Soviet Union, and in it women are precisely the same proportion (one-third) as in engineering,the highest paid. Women had been 5% of the lawyers in 1926. At present there are 2,500 women judges. So women are majorities in the two professions in the middle of the payscale – medicine and teaching minorities in the two at the extremes-engineering and law. However, the 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan provides sharp salary increases for the two professions of medicine and teaching. Those seeking signs of discrimination no matter what are faced with the fact that, in numbers as distinct from percentages, there are more women engineers than physicians, and more physicians than librarians. The 775,000 women engineers in the USSR (1969) is almost equal to the total number of engineers in the United States (870,000), of whom only 1% are women.
On this International Women’s Day I am posting some photos of the Soviet women at work and at play. Wishing the best to all my female readers, even those who thought they can prove me wrong.
