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“The Conqueror”, a big screen epic produced by Howard Hughes was released in 1957. It is considered one of the worst movies ever made, carrying a fantastically low IMDB rating of 3.4 on a 10-point scale.  What truly separates the movie from all others is that it was filmed in a location riddled with high levels of nuclear contamination. The unfortunate choice of locations may have resulted in the cancer deaths of 92 of the 220 people who worked on the set including Hollywood icons John Wayne and Susan Hayward.  Making a Bomb No, this paragraph isn’t about the construction of an atomic bomb but rather the crafting of a comically horrible movie. It was the story of a turbulent love affair between a Mongol warrior chief and the daughter of his worst enemy. The screenplay was written with Marlon Brando in mind for the lead. When John Wayne visited Dick Powell who had been assigned to direct “The Conqueror”, Powell expressed misgivings about the script. However, Wayne became enthralled with the story and despite Powell’s protestations said he wanted the lead role. Powell later said, “Who am I to turn down John Wayne?”. Years later, Wayne mused that the moral of the film was “not to make an ass of yourself trying to play parts you’re not suited for.” The Shooting  Hughes chose to film in St. George, Utah because its rustic scenery was thought to resemble Mongolia. St George was just over 100 miles downwind from the U.S. Military Nuclear Testing Site where eleven atomic bombs were exploded above ground in 1956. The average payload was between 30 to 45 kilotons, far more than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima. By the early 1950s it was known that nuclear blasts produce massive amounts of highly radioactive fallout. However, authorities labeled the area as safe even though abnormal levels of radiation had been detected. So, the show went on and when on-location filming wrapped up, Hughes shipped 60 tons of radioactive Utah dirt to his Hollywood studio so that reshoots would be realistic Fallout  Within a few years of filming “The Conqueror”, members of the cast and crew began experiencing various ailments. In 1963, Pedro Armendariz, a brilliant actor who appeared in over 100 films, was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer. Armendáriz promptly committed suicide at the age of 51.  That same year director Dick Powell succumbed to lymphatic cancer at the age of 53. The great Susan Hayward’s career ended in 1972 when she was diagnosed with skin, breast and uterine cancer. Three years later, she died of brain cancer at the age of 57.  That same year, two-time Golden Globe award winner, Agnes Moorehead died of uterine cancer at the age of 74. Costar and all-round badass Lee Van Cleef died of throat cancer in 1989 at the age of 72. Several hundred Shoshone Native Americans had been cast as Mongol warriors for “The Conqueror”. They were not included in the production’s cancer statistics however 1970s studies found that leukemia rates in the Shoshone Indians of the St. George area were five times higher than the rest of Utah.  John Wayne was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964 and had his left lung removed. This was about the time that the U.S. Surgeon General made the connection between cigarettes and cancer (although most people already suspected the link). Wayne was estimated to be a five pack a day man. As his “Conqueror” co-stars started to die, “The Duke” rejected the radiation theory and blamed his illness on cigarettes. He died of stomach cancer in 1979 at the age of 72. By the early 1970s, Howard Hughes became convinced that his decision to film in St. Geoge had resulted in the deaths of many innocent people. Racked by guilt, Hughes paid $12 million to buy all existing copies of the film. He then quit the film industry after a 30-year involvement.  Further Study If you are interested, a documentary about the infamous movie was released in 2023. The Conqueror-Hollywood Fallout has received excellent reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. It is available on Amazon Prime.  Have a great weekend.

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My college classmate, Duffy Brent who serves as a docent at The American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts, recently turned me on to the incredible story of Jumping Joe Beyrle. Joe was the first American paratrooper to land in France on D-Day. He also has the distinction of being the only soldier to fight for both the United States and the Soviet Union against the Nazis.  Intrigued, I read “Beyond Hitler’s Lines” which is an engrossing story of Beyrle’s amazing exploits. Born in 1923 in Muskegon, Michigan, one of Joe’s first memories was standing with his father in a government food line during The Great Depression. When Joe graduated from high school in 1942, he turned down a baseball scholarship from Notre Dame and enlisted in the army.  Beyrle volunteered to become a paratrooper and was assigned to a parachute division known as the “Screaming Eagles”. Beyrle specialized in demolition and was deployed to England to prepare for the upcoming invasion against the Nazis. While still in training, Beyrle volunteered for two covert missions- successfully delivering gold bars to the French Resistance in occupied France. 2,501 U.S. paratroopers died on D-Day and many more were wounded or listed as missing. The plane carrying Beyrle came under enemy fire over the Normandy coast, and he was forced to jump from the exceedingly low altitude of 360 feet. Joe lost contact with his fellow paratroopers after his landing. Undaunted, he successfully blew up a power station. After performing a few more solo sabotage missions, he was captured by German soldiers. Over the next seven months, Beyrle was held in seven different German prisons. He escaped twice but was recaptured both times. After the second escape, he set out for Poland but boarded a train to Berlin by mistake. Beyrle was then savagely tortured by Gestapo agents but ironically his life was spared by German military officials who determined that the Gestapo had no jurisdiction over prisoners of war.  Taken to yet another POW camp, Joe escaped in early January,1945. He headed east, hoping to meet up with the Soviet army. After a few weeks he encountered a Soviet tank brigade. Joe raised his hands, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted in Russian, “American comrade!”. The battalion commander was Aleksandra Samusenko, the highest-ranking Soviet female tank officer. Impressed by Joe’s story, she allowed him to join her unit on its way to invading Berlin. Beyrle’s demolitions expertise was very useful to his new battalion, and he assisted in the liberation of his former prison camp. One month later, he was wounded during a German air attack.  Beyrle was evacuated to a Soviet hospital where he received a visit from Soviet Field Marshall George Zhukov. The legendary general was amazed by Joe’s story and provided Beyrle with official papers to help him rejoin American forces.  A Soviet military convoy delivered Beyrle to the US embassy in Moscow. There he learned that the U.S. War Department had reported him as killed in action on June 10, 1944. A funeral had been held in his honor in Muskegon.  On April 21, 1945, Beyrle returned home and celebrated V-E Day, with friends and family.  He married JoAnne Hollowell in 1946 in the same church and by the same priest who had held his funeral mass in 1944. Joe spent 28 years as a factory shipping supervisor before his retirement.  Jumping Joe was honored on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day by President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin. Beyrle died in his sleep in 2004 during a visit to Toccoa, Georgia where he had trained as a paratrooper.  Deservedly, he is interred at Arlington National Cemetery. Ironically his son, John Beyrle served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2008 to 2012. Have a great weekend. I’m back blogging but due to an increased volunteer workload and a new cable show, I’m cutting back to twice a month.

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I recently came across a story that I found to be very interesting if not astounding. On June 25,1894 Anna Cohen Kopchovsky, a 5-foot 3-inch, 100-pound mother of three left Boston with the goal of becoming the first woman to bicycle around the world. Annie was a Jewish-Latvian immigrant married to a peddler. She helped her growing family make ends meet by selling advertising space for several newspapers. In the 1880s, British born Thomas Stevens had become the first man to cycle around the world, a journey that took 33 months. Legend has it that two Boston businessmen bet $10,000 on whether a woman could duplicate that feat. The 23-year-old Anna seized on that nebulous story and started publicizing that she was going to take on the (alleged) challenge. She was a masterful promoter as evidenced by a crowd of over 500 gathering at the Massachusetts State House to see her start her trek. The Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire’s handed Kopchovsky $100 in sponsorship money. In exchange, she hung an advertising placard on her bike and changed her surname to “Londonderry” for the journey. The first time Annie had ridden a bike was a few days before her departure. The 42-pound bicycle was nearly half of Annie’s weight. For her world-wide trip she only packed a change of underwear and a pearl-handled revolver. Her ambitious goal was to circle the globe in fifteen months. Annie headed west but when she arrived in Chicago, she realized that would be unable to get across the Rockies during the winter. So the adventurer reversed course and headed to New York, thankfully on a much lighter bike. In NYC, she hopped on a steamer ship bound for France. Journeying across France, Annie sent telegrams to local newspapers advising  them of her impending arrival. At each stop, she gave lectures and provided bicycling demonstrations. When she boarded a ship in Marseille bound for Alexandria, a drum and bugle corps played and thousands of well-wishers cheered. Annie rode and sailed across the Mideast and Asia. She claimed that she visited Russia and North Korea and maintained that she had been briefly imprisoned in China during the Sino-Japanese War.  Her final foreign destination was Japan where she boarded a San Francisco bound ship. Annie arrived in California in March 1894 and spent the next six months cycling across the U.S. On her final segment, Londonderry claimed that she was nearly killed by a runaway horse in California and broke her wrist in an encounter with a drove of pigs in Iowa. She reached her final destination, Chicago, on September 12, 1894, fourteen days ahead of schedule. Truth and Fiction In the 1890s, radical innovations in bicycle design transformed cycling from a somewhat perilous enterprise into a pleasurable, less hazardous and even utilitarian recreation. Bicycle sales exploded as did the popularity of the sport. Bicycles became mass produced and men increasingly used them to commute to work. Because of Annie Londonderry’s exploits. many women took up bicycling for the first time. Women’s fashions changed dramatically as ladies followed Annie’s example and abandoned their corsets and billowy skirts in favor of much more comfortable bloomers. Annie Londonderry was a gifted storyteller and shameless self-promoter. Historians have never verified the existence of a $10,000 wager or an alleged $5,000 prize that Annie continually referenced. And was she really ever thrown into a Chinese jail or injured in a confrontation with a herd of swine? Maybe not. But what is undisputed is that she was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe on a bicycle. Annie became a symbol of freedom, and so did the bicycle itself. World-famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony declared “the bicycle has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Anna Cohen Kopchovsky AKA Annie Londonderry died of a stroke on Nov. 11,1947. She left behind some amazing accomplishments and a lifetime of service as an inspiration to women across the globe.   Have a great weekend summer and a wonderful summer. I’m taking the summer off from blogging. If you don’t own it already, make sure to order a copy of the ultimate beach read “Get Smarter-Be Amazed” on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com. See you in September.

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In honor of all who have served, I am recycling this blog from 2022. On June 6, 1944, the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada invaded Nazi-occupied France. “D-Day” was the most massive military undertaking in history. Here are some interesting facts about that historic day: D-Day was the 20th century’s best-kept secret. The Allies masked their plans with a years-long series of elaborate ruses including false news reports, planted intelligence, and false radio broadcasts designed to be intercepted by the Germans. The allies also created columns of make-believe tanks, fake troop encampments, and inflatable dummy warships. The Germans believed the allies would attack the port of Calais because it was the closest point to Britain. Thus, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to strike at Normandy. Relying on natural light, the Allies needed a full moon for the invasion. On June 5, Eisenhower ordered the attack for the following morning, the last day of the full moon. Wet weather and brutal high winds would handicap the Allies, but the ominous skies convinced Germany’s military leaders that an attack was not imminent and kept German airplanes grounded. The Nazis’ defense of the coast centered on “The Atlantic Wall,” the most robust military entrenchment ever built. The fortifications stretched from Norway to Spain, passing through Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France. The wall was financed by the wealth the Germans plundered from the countries they conquered. Labor was provided by the POWs from those countries. 50,000 German soldiers manned the fortifications. The wall was so strategic that Adolph Hitler brought in revered Field Marshall Erwin Rommel to oversee construction. Allied airplane bombardments began at midnight and simultaneously 24,000 paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to support the invading troops. As dramatized in “Saving Private Ryan,” the allied troops suffered horrific carnage on the Normandy beaches. D-Day was just the start of the brutal Battle of Normandy which finally concluded on August 25 with the liberation of Paris. The vaunted Atlantic Wall collapsed on D-Day. It was the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Field Marshal Rommel, convinced that the sea was too rough for an invasion, had left for Germany to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Hitler was the only leader authorized to order a to counterattack but he slept until noon. Nobody dared wake him which cost vital time for sending reinforcements. TRIVIA Yogi Berra participated in the  invasion, as did author J.D. Salinger and civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Golf great Bobby Jones was forty when he successfully petitioned his Army Reserve commander to allow him to participate. British actor David Niven won a U.S. Legion of Merit Medal. Actor Charles Durning who won a Silver Star was among the only survivors from his Omaha Beach landing group. James Doohan, a Royal Canadian Artillery lieutenant survived six bullet wounds and lost his middle finger on Juno Beach. He eventually found fame as Scotty on “Star Trek.” Actor Henry Fonda enlisted at age 37and was a naval quartermaster on D-Day. He went on to star in “The Longest Day,” a D-Day epic. In one of the most notorious episodes in Oscars ‘history, the masterful “Saving Private Ryan” lost to “Shakespeare in Love” for the 1999 Best Picture award. Shakespeare’s loathsome producer Harvey Weinstein employed backroom bullying to win the honor. Heroes  Waverly Woodson was a medic for the only African American battalion to land at Omaha Beach. Despite being wounded during the landing, Woodson found a relatively safe space on the beach to set up a first aid station. He treated scores of black and white soldiers- removing bullets, patching wounds, and even amputating a foot. After 24 hours he collapsed of exhaustion but returned to his unit within three days. He was awarded a Bronze Star but efforts to award Woodson a posthumous Medal of Honor have been unsuccessful.   General Eisenhower drafted a statement in case the landings failed. It read: “I have withdrawn the troops. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”  Try finding that type of leadership today. Thanks to all the heroes who helped liberate Europe and thanks to all of you who have served. Have a great weekend. If you are looking for a last minute Father’s Day gift, check out my book, “Get Smarter-Be Amazed” online or at The Blue Bunny Bookstore, Dedham.

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Mel Blanc was known as the “Man of 1000 voices”. While that was somewhat of an exaggeration what else would you call someone who was the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, and Foghorn Leghorn. Oh, and as the years went on, Blanc added Barney Rubble on The Flintstones. Mr. Spacely on “The Jetsons” and Secret Squirrel on “The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show”. Melvin Jerome Blanc was born May 30, 1908, in San Francisco and was raised in Portland Oregon. After graduating from high school in 1927 he performed in vaudeville shows throughout the Pacific Northwest. After a stint as a radio announcer, he landed a regular job on Jack Benny’s radio show voicing a variety of characters. In 1942 Radio Daily Magazine reported that Blanc “specializes in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects”.  By 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen different radio programs. Blanc’s fame from “The Jack Benny Program” led to his own radio show beginning in 1946. During World War II, Mel provided the voice of Private Snafu in Army training films. Some of the films were written by Theodor S. Geisel who would later gain fame as Dr. Seuss. BTW, if you didn’t know already “Snafu” is military slang for ‘Situation Normal All F—-D Up. Mel holds the record for the longest voicing of an animated character, having voiced Daffy Duck from 1937 to 1989. He created the voice of Walter Lance’s Woody Woodpecker but only performed the voice in the first four Woody cartoons. A renegotiated contract with Warner Brothers excluded Mel from working with other studios. Despite being a voice specialist, Mel embraced method acting. It was claimed that when he was voicing a character in a sound booth, observers could tell exactly which character he was doing without hearing the sound. In January,1961 a near-fatal car accident left Blanc in a coma.  He was totally non-responsive for two weeks. Then, one of the doctors decided to address one of his characters instead of Blanc himself. The doctor asked, “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?” After a slight pause, Blanc answered, in a weak voice, “Eh … just fine, Doc. How are you?” The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there, and Blanc replied “I tawt I taw a puddy tat”. Soon, Blanc was performing his Flintstone voices wearing a full body cast in his hospital room with the rest of The Flintstones actors. Blanc filed a $500,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His accident was one of twenty-six in a two-year period on what was known as “Dead Man’s Curve”. His lawsuit resulted in the city restructuring the road’s curves. In 1962, Mel and his son Noel formed Blanc Communications Corporation, a media company which produced an astounding 5,000 commercials and public service announcements.  Mel and Noel appeared with many stars including Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas, Vincent Price, and The Who. Blanc began smoking at least one pack of cigarettes per day at the age of nine. He finally quit in 1985  after being diagnosed with emphysema. He died of heart disease in 1989 at the age of 81. The epitaph on his headstone in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles reads “That’s all, folks!”. Have a great weekend. Only 15 days until Father’s Day. For a memorable gift, visit www.tedcurtinstories.com and order a copy of my book “Get Smarter-Be Amazed”.

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On May 16, 1975, Junko Ishibashi Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Tabei only measured 4’9’’ but she was a giant in many ways.   Born in Fukushima, Japan in 1939, Junko Ishibashi’s first mountain climbing experience was on a school trip when she was ten. Although she yearned to do more climbing her family couldn’t fund such an expensive hobby. After completing her studies in English and American literature at Showa Women’s University, Junko joined several men’s climbing clubs. She scaled all of the major mountains in Japan, including Mount Fuji. When she was 27, Ishibashi married fellow mountaineer Masanobu Tabei and the couple had two children. Displeased by the way she was treated by male climbers, Junko founded the first all-female climbing club in Japan. The club morphed into the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition (JWEE). Tabei constantly flouted the norms in Japan’s traditional male-dominated society but people were still shocked when she headed to Mt. Everest, leaving her husband to care for their young children. Junko personally obtained funding from a daily newspaper and Nippon Television but even those sponsors told her that women should be at home raising children. In addition to the corporate funding, all fifteen team members needed to pay 1.5 million yen (US$5,000) to participate in the expedition. Tabei gave piano lessons to help raise her share. To save money, she made much of her own equipment from scratch- she created waterproof gloves out of a car cover and sewed climbing trousers from old curtains (inspired by Maria Von Trapp perhaps?). Epic Climb The fifteen intrepid Japanese women followed the same route that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Nogay had taken on their historic 1953 climb. On May 4,1975 the team was camping at 20,700 ft when an avalanche destroyed their tents. Tabei was knocked unconscious and was buried under the snow. Sherpa guides dug her out but Tabei could barely walk. After recuperating for two days, she resumed the climb. A bout of altitude sickness debilitated the Japanese team and the Sherpa guides. The original plan had been for two women to scale the summit but the remaining Sherpas could only carry enough oxygen bottles for one woman. Tabei was chosen to complete the historic climb. Despite the team’s meticulous planning, Junko was confronted with an unforeseen hazard as she neared the peak. She encountered a thin, treacherous ridge of ice that had not been mentioned in the accounts of previous expeditions. Junko managed to traverse the ridge sideways and later described it as the most dangerous experience in all her years of climbing. Twelve days after the near-fatal  avalanche, Tabei reached the peak with her sherpa guide Ang Tsering. More than 870 women have reached the summit since Junko blazed the trail.   Not content to rest her laurels, in 1980 Junko began her quest to climb the “seven summits”, the highest peaks on each continent. In 1992, she became the first woman to achieve that feat. Indefatigable In her “spare” time, Tabei wrote seven books and organized environmental projects to clean up trash left behind by climbers on Everest, which has become an enormous problem due the growing number of people attempting the climb each year After scaling the seven summits Taibi set a personal goal to climb the highest mountain in every country in the world.  She also led and participated in “clean-up” climbs in Japan and the Himalayas alongside her husband and children. Tabei was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2012 but continued with many of her mountaineering activities. In July 2016, despite her advancing illness, she led a youth expedition up Mount Fuji. Junko Taibi succumbed to her illness in 2016 but not before scaling the highest mountain in 70 separate countries. As the nuns sang in “Sound of Music”, “Climb every …… Oh, forget it. Have a great weekend. If you are in the Boston area on May 22, I will be hosting the Blue Bunny Book Store’s first ever trivia night. For more information and to reserve a spot at this free event go to: The Blue Bunny Bookstore Trivia Night Tickets, Thu, May 22, 2025 at 6:30 PM | Eventbrite

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