The name “Bernard Baruch” is nagging you as something familiar because it was a reference on one episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle. It’s the start of the “Moosylvania Saved” story, the last serial of the last season. Fearless Leader was looking for advice on his country’s bankruptcy and went to an electrical brain which the Narrator introduced as “Pottsylvania’s answer to Bernard Baruch”. You saw this while watching WNEW, Channel 5 (“o/` The fun’s on channel five-five-five-five, the fun’s on channel five! o/`”) when you recognized it as being some kind of a reference to something, the way that “Kirwood Derby” thing probably was. But it also registered as probably not a reference to something real, the way that jewel-crusted toy boat supposed to be owned by Omar somebody apparently was.
Yes, Ray Billingsley’s comic strip Curtis is in reruns too. I don’t know why or for how long.
I admit I didn’t know until I googled him that he apparently coined the term Cold war .
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Glad to help you learn this! He is kind of one of those warnings about the transitory nature of fame, or at least public renown. On the other hand, he’s got some name-recognition a half-century after his death and he’s probably not going to become more obscure than this, at least for a good while.
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A good lesson for Mr Durwood Kerby
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Quite so! I hope he’s able to benefit from it.
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Erik Loomis was there
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/04/erik-visits-american-grave-part-77
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Ah, thanks for the link. I’m surprised that he’s apparently never been portrayed on-screen. Granting that he did the kind of work that isn’t extremely cinematic, since it involves making decisions about the boring important stuff instead of blowing up people, but he was around for a lot of the key moments of the first half of the 20th century.
But then I’ve also long been surprised nobody’s made a film about Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling. I mean, it’s a widower president courting a woman while Europe’s at War and we’ve invaded Mexico and might go to actual war, and he proposes and she refuses and they keep dating, and how is this not the sort of thing that would be a sucker for a best-picture nomination in the 90s that everyone would later say was a sad mistake? I mean, there’s even a key moment where Colonel House gets sent off on the Lusitania, although not on the historic sailing of that ship. There’s a slightly weepy prestige romance just waiting to happen here.
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Even Princeton is a bit iffy on Wilson these days. Between flipping & dragging us into war, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, the health frauds near the end, and of course his massive racism, the challenge of making a Wilson movie that doesn’t just piss off everyone is probably too much.
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Yeah, Wilson is a whole bunch of problems. Given the time of his and Edith’s courting — 1915 — the only historical point that would actually need addressing is his incredible racism. Nothing good to be said about that, naturally, and it’s probably not better if Edith Bolling’s the protagonist.
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