12/5/22
Newletter179
The Crack of Dawn
Thomas Midgely Jr. went to work for General Motors in 1916 in their research lab. The scientists there were presented with the problem “engine knock.” Automobile engines misfired and subsequently knocked. In 1921 Thomas Midgely invented what was called “Ethyl” or “High Octane” gasoline that eliminated engine knocking. The secret ingredient was lead, which was highly poisonous, a fact noted by Benjamin Franklin 200 years earlier. Nobody cared in 1921. Midgley was considered a genius and was bestowed with awards.
A division of General Motors is Frigidaire that makes refrigerators. Frigidaire (which is what my Hungarian grandmother called any refrigerator) was searching for a better chemical to use as the refrigerant since everything they were using was not only toxic, but inefficient. GM put Thomas Midgely on the case, and in 1923 he invented the first chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which they named “Freon.” This was a great improvement over the previous refrigerants, but it was also even more toxic. In the next 50 years both ethyl gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons proved to be the two most highly toxic and pollutant chemicals on the planet and are credited with being the major cause of the hole in the ozone. Both chemicals have been, to a great extent, banned, although you can still get high octane gasoline, with lead, if you look for it.
In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed, then turn him over so as not to contract bedsores. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation at the age of 55.
My mother was named Shirley and was born in 1931. Her best friend was also named Shirley and was born in 1931. Both of them lived the first 50 years of their lives believing that they were named after Shirley Temple. It was my sad duty to inform them that since Shirley Temple made her first screen appearance in 1932, it was impossible for them to be named after her. The fact was that Shirley was just a popular name at that time.
Shirley Temple made her debut in a series of short, 10-minute films called Baby Burlesks. There are eight of them made in 1932-33, when Shirley was 4 and 5 years old, and they are outrageous. Someone actually went to the trouble of colorizing them, which I think makes them better, and they’re all on YouTube. Each one is a parody of a specific movie or a genre. In the parody of Mae West’s, She Done Him Wrong (1933), 5-year-old Shirley Temple does a great impersonation of Mae West, while wearing a diaper with a comically large safety pin. There is also an African safari episode with mostly 4-5-year-old black kids as natives with bones in their noses. It’s so the opposite of PC, yet still so cute it’s culturally, historically and morally confusing all at once. Shirley is the great white hunter and rides in on an elephant. She clearly couldn’t be happier, pointing at herself with her little thumbs, saying, “Look here.” She takes charge of scenes as though she were Meryl Streep – except she’s 5 and wearing a diaper while riding an elephant.
Within two years Shirley Temple was the biggest star in the world.
In 1934 when 20th Century Pictures acquired Fox Films, thus becoming 20th Century Fox, Fox’s single biggest asset was Shirley Temple, then John Ford, then having a big lot, sound stages and a laboratory.
I was in elementary school in the late-1960s when I first heard her referred to as Shirley Temple Black. I thought, “There’s a black Shirley Temple now? What next? A man on the moon?” When I saw her on the black and white TV news, and it was obviously good old Shirley Temple white (pushing 40 but still looking good with those cute dimples), she was now a right-wing politician supporting Richard Nixon, and she was just called Shirley Temple Black, I’m sorry to report that none of it made any sense to me. Even though I was 9, I thought Shirley Temple was married to John Agar. That she might have divorced him and married a white man named Black was beyond my ken.
Shirley wrote an autobiography, Child Star, in 1988, and it’s miserable. It doesn’t have a single memory that wasn’t put through the Hollywood washing machine with extra bleach.
Shirley Temple then became the American Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, then Ghana, and then Chief Protocol Officer of the United States. She lived to be 85.
And therefore, we should all have a wonderful day.