Old Photos Answers

To answer the questions from the previous post:

One: Yep, the man in the lower right is "Stick Man" from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, the 1971 record album that now has sold 37 million copies worldwide and includes "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven." The photo album was discovered by a researcher named Brian Edwards. The picture in the photo album is titled "A Wiltshire Thatcher" and is believed to be of a man called Lot Long. The photographer has been identified as one Ernest Howard Farmer. Edwards, the discoverer, called the local Wiltshire Museum about the find, and the Museum ended up buying the photo album for £420.

It's not the exact print from which the record album cover was made. That one was a hand-colored copy that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant found at an antiques shop in a town called Pangbourne. Over the years, whoever had the original that was used on the record cover lost track of it, so it no longer exists as far as anyone knows. Wonder how much that would have been worth on the collectibles market today? A lot of associated "rock history interest" there.

Personally, I was always bemused by that odd choice for a cover picture and never could figure out what it was supposed to mean.

Two: This is probably one of the more unusual author photos I've seen, although of course it probably wasn't taken as such. The woman is P.L. (Pamela) Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins books. She was a mysterious and interesting character, with many semi-aliases. Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia, and called Lyndon, she then became Pamela Lyndon Travers in England where she lived most of her life, and where she was Pamela to her friends...and yet she considered herself Irish. A friend said, "she always wanted to back into the limelight, but she wanted to be there." The picture shows her in 1924 as Titania in a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She lived to be 96, long enough to negotiate with the director of the musical, and she evidently had a lot of Mary Poppins in her own nature. Like Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne, she was a children's author who was a sensitive writer with a real feel for words.

Another odd thing I learned browsing around about this: Emily Blunt's children were much more drawn to Julie Andrews' depiction of Mary than to their own mother playing the part! She said so herself on a talk show.

Three: I'm afraid I thought this was much more obscure than it is. I haven't had a TV since 2014, and wasn't a big "television culture" person before that, so it had escaped my mind that Willard Scott was famous from NBC's Today Show, which I seldom if ever watched. I remembered Willard as a local news weatherman in D.C. from the time I lived there. I think I knew even then that he had been one of several performers who played Bozo the Clown, and that he was the creator of Ronald McDonald, the fast-food restaurant's ambassador in their marketing to kids.

Willard actually did me a small favor. My brother Scott and I encountered him one day at Wagshal's Delicatessen in Spring Valley shopping center on Massachusetts Avenue. Scott said something, and Willard kind of blew us off on the way out the door. Scott, who was witty and quick, might have said a quiet word about the unexpected treatment. When we got outside ourselves, Willard was waiting there, and he apologized to us. He explained that it was difficult being a local television personality because everyone in town knew who he was and wanted a few minutes with him, and "sometimes you just want to eat lunch." He said that sometimes he wished he could walk around anonymously like everyone else. He actually spent more time with us than he had to, almost as if in atonement for not being friendlier earlier. He said enough to let me imagine what it must be like to have every stranger know your face and name. Being introverted by nature (I enjoy socializing but have a limited tolerance for it), I decided right there and then that being famous was not for me. I like being able to walk about in the world anonymously.

A little lesson courtesy of a well-known personality whom everyone knew wherever he went.

That must have been before 1980, when Willard left the local affiliate for the Today Show. He replaced Bob Ryan, who replaced him! They switched places. In the mid-1980s, I introduced Bob at a lecture, so I met him too. I think Bob was more interested in meteorology and its challenges than he was in celebrity, so maybe the exchange of jobs was a good thing for both of them.

Guess I need to meet Al Roker next!

Mike

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[robert e]

Two: That's not surprising about Emily Blunt's kids. The whole point of Mary Poppins is that she's *not* your mother, nor anyone else's. She's magical! Those kids are lucky they had an alternative Mary to believe in. Probably lucky for Emily, too.

Three: I apologize for being the 57th reader to say: "Great Scott!"

[Patrick W]

As you may know, PL Travers was the subject of the movie "Saving Mr. Banks". She was played by Emma Thompson and was shown to be a difficult person to work with. I wonder if that might have been exaggerated to some extent. They do play actual tapes of her over the credits.

[Hans Muus]

Right, the picture on the album cover was called ‘Stick Man’ ? In that day and age in Great Britain and in (the rest of) Europe a ‘stick’ was the word mostly used for what American hippies called ‘a joint’, so …