This Yesterday’s Newsreel film (episode 109) offers the viewer “television highlights of the news of yesteryear” by providing vintage clips of famous people and events from the first half of the 20th century. The episode begins with a look at the growth of international radio, 1920-1950. Viewers see a radio tower at Port Jefferson, Long Island. In Spain, King Alfonso XIII attends an exhibit and examines a radio. Viewers see the largest wireless station in Bordeaux, France, built by the U.S. Navy. The station, with its giant transistor (01:01), is turned over to French officials, with Admiral Thomas Magruder heading the formal presentation. The world’s largest radio tower sits in the British town of Rugby, home to England’s first wireless station to receive American radio. Captain West of the British Broadcasting Corporation listens to the broadcast. In 1931, Pope Pius XI speaks from the Vatican over radio. Footage shows Iva Toguri D’Aquino, aka “Tokyo Rose,” broadcasting on Tokyo Radio during the war (02:30). American GIs listen to a radio. The episode shows a radio station in Germany featuring a sign that reads “Gross-Rundfunk-Sender Leipzig.” Mildred Gillars, “Axis Sally,” is escorted off a plane in 1948 on her way to prison (03:22) after being the first woman to be convicted of treason against the U.S. Soviet radios are distributed in Czechoslovakia (04:00). Broadcasters read the news on “The Voice of America” (04:30). In El Paso, TX in 1930, a man climbs into a street car that takes him from his suburb home to the city center for work; the trolley car doubles as a mobile diner and serves breakfast. In the “Personalities” segment, viewers see Sydney Chaplain with a dog (05:45), USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid bestowing an honorary degree on Ernestine Schumann-Heink in 1919, and Ring Lardner writing on a typewriter in his Chicago office (06:25). The next segment features footage of flooding in Europe in 1926. Shots include one of a flooded river with a cathedral in the background (07:04), a flooded German street, a flooded Liege, Belgium, people using boats to deliver food supplies to stranded civilians, and the Thames River flooding rural land in England. A liner is dashed aground near the White Cliffs of Dover. Next, viewers see a house made entirely of newspapers in Rockport, MA (08:20). In the aviation segment, a bus pulls Goodyear’s baby blimp, Puritan, for launch at an air field near Washington, DC. “Fashions of the Day” features women modeling 1921 bathing suits on a yacht and on the beach in Balboa, CA (10:12). The episode concludes with footage of Atlanta’s Alexia Sterling winning the Canadian Golf Championship in 1920 and of Ray Ruddy winning the annual two-mile swim race on Lake Michigan in 1929 (11:49).

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com