Hoover Dam

President Franklin Roosevelt 75 years ago this week officially opened the Hoover Dam in a ceremony at Lake Mead Nv, 20 miles from Las Vegas. His speech was broadcast nationally by radio as an attempt to boost morale midway through the decade of the Great Depression. I was 2 weeks young.

Men came across the vast desert looking for work. 124 men died on the 4 year job, some tumbling down the steep canyon walls. The first and the last to die were a father and his son.

If someone couldn't work he was instantly replaced from a queue of job seekers. The government built a "company town", Boulder City Nv to house everyone.

Lake Mead still is the largest man made body of water in the country. Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Imperial Valley all use the water and power from this dam.

Sept Stock Rise

This surprise Sept stock rise is the highest Sept gain since 1939. Hitler invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939. Remarkable that this war attack would ignite a stock market surge back then. Remarkable.

A WW2 Scene

I was 10 years old when WW 2 ended. There were countless horrors in the war. In "Kaputt", 1946, author Malaparte observed an atrocious scene.

He was sitting in the Europeiski cafe' in Warsaw, he writes, when he saw German troops returning from the front: Suddenly he was struck with horror and realized that they had no eyelids. The ghastly cold of that winter had the strangest consequences. Thousands and thousands of soldiers had lost their limbs; thousands and thousands had their eyes, their noses, their fingers and their sexual organs ripped off by the frost. Many had lost their hair. Singed by the cold, the eyelid drops off like a piece of dead skin.

Their future was only lunacy.