Month: October 2018

Reflecting on his life, President Dwight David Eisenhower, a.k.a. Ike, said, “Not making the baseball team at West Point was one of my greatest disappointments, maybe the greatest.” He did make the football team (he was a varsity starter as a running back and linebacker in 1912), but after he broke his leg, he turned to coaching and other sports including gymnastics and fencing. Ike famously played a lot of golf during his presidency. Read more about 1950s culture in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

Hallmark, founded in 1910 as Hall Brothers greeting cards (by siblings Joyce, Rollie, and William), changed its name to Hallmark Cards in 1954. The company introduced gift wrap in 1917 and added “Hallmark” on the back of its cards in 1928 as a sign of quality. Hallmark was the first company to advertise nationally, beginning in print with Ladies Home Journal in 1918 and then on radio with Chicago’s “Tony Wons Radio Scrapbook” in 1928. Read about how an inventive greeting card designer wooed a young Italian immigrant 100 years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).