"It ain't the things you don't know that get you into trouble.  It's the things you know for sure that ain't so."   -- probably Mark Twain

When I first started to build a model railroad set in the late 1930s, it didn't take me long to realize I didn't know much about that period.  As I researched for background, I found a lot of the things I thought I knew weren't exactly accurate.

This being the Great Depression, I had expected things to find things pretty stagnant.  As I discovered, however, there were a lot of things going on in a lot of fields. Here are a few of them:

THE ARTS

Literature

• In 1937, Margaret Mitchell, born in Atlanta in 1900, won a Pulitzer prize for her novel Gone with the Wind.
• Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) wrote and illustrated his first fantasy for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937.
• J.R.R.Tolkien's book The Hobbit or, There and Back Again was published in 1937.
• Store-distributed magazines made their appearance in the 1930s. The A & P chain started Woman's Day in 1937.  (Family Circle had been introduced in 1932 by Piggly Wiggly markets.)
• Look Magazine was started by Gardner Cowles, Jr., in 1937.
• Action Comics, begun in 1938, introduced Superman, by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
• In 1938, Augusta Baker compiled Books About Negro Life for Children, the first of a series of book lists about the black experience.

Theater

• Aaron Copland, beginning to explore American folk traditions, created the ballet Billy the Kid in 1938, using themes from cowboy songs.
• The Boys from Syracuse by Rodgers and Hart (1938), was the first musical based on a Shakespearean play: A Comedy of Errors.
• Mary Martin, U.S. actress and singer, made her Broadway debut in 1938, singing My Heart Belongs to Daddy.

Music

• Composer Carl Orff's famous oratorio Carmina Burana debuted in 1937.
• The Trapp Family, (the Austrian family of singers memorialized in The Sound of Music) escaped Nazi-dominated Austria in 1938.  Maria Augusta Kutschera (1905-87) was governess to the seven children of widower Baron Georg von Trapp.  They were married 1927, and had three more children.  The Trapp Family began singing liturgical music as a family in the mid-1930s, and had their first European tour in 1937.
• Calypso music, folk music of Trinidad, became popular as a form of jazz music in the U.S. in 1938.

The Movies

• The character known as the singing cowboy was introduced in the movies the mid-1930s.  Tex Ritter appeared in the movie Sing, Cowboy, Sing in 1937, and Roy Rogers in Under Western Stars in 1938, his first leading role.
• Walt Disney produced the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937.
• The Marx Brothers made A Day at the Races in 1937 and Room Service in 1938.
• Bette Davis won her second Academy award in 1938, for Jezebel.

Radio

• American bandleader Kay Kyser's 1937 radio show Kay Kyser's Kampus Klass became the network radio show Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge in 1938.
• Roy Acuff reigned as the "King of Country Music" at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry from 1938 to 1992.
• Bud Abbott and Lou Costello made their radio debut in 1938.
• On the evening of October 30, 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a one-hour dramatic series produced and directed by Orson Welles, presented a dramatization of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, about an invasion of Earth by Martians.  The production was done as if it were a series of news flashes and on-the-spot reports.  In spite of repeated announcements that it was a play, millions of listeners, no doubt already edgy from the recent war news from Spain, Czechoslovakia, and China, panicked, with many taking to the streets to fight or flee.

SCIENCES

• The first radio telescope was built in 1937 by American electrical engineer Grote Reber.  Its 31-foot reflector was made of wire screen, rather than polished glass or metal.
• Technetium, the first chemical element to be artificially produced, was discovered in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre.  This synthetic, radioactive, gray metal is produced by bombarding molybdenum with deuterons in a cyclotron.
• Cyclamates (Artificial Sweetener) were developed in 1937, but not marketed until 1949.  By contrast, Saccharine was discovered in 1879, and is still [1996] used as a sugar substitute.
• Nylon, discovered in 1935, was introduced commercially in 1938.  The first nylon fibers offered for sale were bristles in toothbrushes.  Nylon stockings became available in 1940.
• In 1938, Roy Plunkett of Du Pont discovered a white powder in what had been a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas.  This powder, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), is now known by the Du Pont trade name Teflon.
• Xerography was developed by physicist Chester F. Carlson in 1938.  In 1947, commercial rights to Carlson's invention were obtained by the Haloid Company of Rochester, N.Y., later renamed the Xerox Corporation.
• Carl David Anderson, another U.S. physicist, proved the existence of the meson in 1938.
• Googol, a name for 10 raised to the power of 100, is said to have been invented in 1938 when U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner asked his 9-year-old nephew to think up a name for a very large number, specifically, 1 with 100 zeroes after it.

TRANSPORTATION

• The United States automotive industry continued to make engineering progress throughout the 1930s.  Window defrosters became available in 1936, and automatic transmissions in 1937.  The automotive industry was also close on the heels of the railroads in introducing streamlining.
• The first tube of the 8,200-foot Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River opened in 1937.
• Transpacific airmail service, begun in 1935 between San Francisco and the Philippines, with stops at Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, was extended to Hong Kong on April 21, 1937.
• On May 6, 1937, the German passenger dirigible Hindenburg, on the first flight of its second season of transatlantic service between Germany and the U.S. and South America, caught fire and exploded as it approached its Lakehurst, N.J., mooring, killing 35 of the 97 persons aboard.  With its destruction, the era of the dirigible passed, and interest in transatlantic air services waned.  The famous eye-witness account of this tragedy was made by a newsman and technician from WLS in Chicago experimenting with the concept of recording news stories on-site to be broadcast later.  The recordings, which include accounts of the emergency measures taken to handle the disaster, were aired the next day, the first recorded news ever broadcast by NBC.
• As civil aviation became big business, Congress wrote the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
• The Overseas Highway, opened in 1938, linked Key West to Miami, 155 miles away.
• The first improved road across the entire state of South Dakota was completed in 1938.  The State of South Dakota had their own cement plant, near Rapid City, producing up to 643,000 barrels a year.
• Tractors at road construction sites during this era were most likely outnumbered by mules.

AVIATION

• On January 19, 1937, Howard Hughes (founder of the Hughes Aircraft Company) set a transcontinental speed record: 2,453 miles, from Burbank, California, to Newark, New Jersey, in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds.
• Two Soviet pilots, Valeri Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov, made nonstop transpolar flights from Moscow to the United States in 1937, flying single-engined monoplanes.
• In June, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her copilot, Lieutenant Commander Fred J. Noonan, left Miami, Florida, on an around-the-world flight attempt in a twin-engine Lockheed aircraft.  On July 2, the plane vanished near Howland Island in the South Pacific.
• Starting on July 10, 1938, Howard Hughes and his crew flew Lockheed "14" around the world, 14,971 miles, in 3 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes.
• The German Focke-Achgelis FW-61, the first successful helicopter, was built in 1937.  In 1938, it was flown to the altitude of 11,000 feet, and kept there for about 80 minutes.

MEDICINE

• In 1937 a new, special branch of medical practice was established: anesthesiology.
• The American Board of Plastic Surgery was founded in 1937.
• The National Cancer Institute was created in 1937 by an act of Congress.
• The first blood bank was set up in 1937, in Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
• Altitude sickness (or mountain sickness), an acute reaction to changes from low-altitude environments to altitudes above 8,000 ft, was first recognized as distinct condition in 1937.
• The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the National Foundation-March of Dimes) was formed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938.
• Plastic contact lenses were introduced in 1938.
• The modern euthanasia movement began in 1935, with the founding of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society in England.  The Society for the Right to Die was founded in the U.S. in 1938.
• The hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann in Basel, Switzerland.  It was used to treat terminal cancer patients.

LAW

• In 1937, penalties similar to those for handling opium and related drugs were applied to the unauthorized handling of marijuana.
• In 1938, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibited adulterated or misbranded cosmetics in interstate commerce, and prohibited the sale in the United States of domestic or imported foods that are impure or mislabeled.
• The United States government passed the Wool Products Labeling Act in 1938.  This act requires that products containing wool carry a label showing the amount of wool, the percentage of new or recycled wool, and the percentage of any fiber other than wool that accounts for more than 5 percent of the content.

PUBLIC WORKS

• San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937.
• The Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River in Washington, was completed in 1937.
• Quabbin Reservoir, the largest body of inland water in Massachusetts, was created in 1937 by damming the Swift River.
• The Kerr Dam in Montana was completed in 1938.
• Rye Patch Dam on the Humboldt River in Pershing County, Nevada, was completed in 1938.  It impounds the waters of the Humboldt River for use in Lovelock Valley.
• In 1938, the year after the worst Ohio River flooding to date, Congress authorized the construction of a system of tributary reservoirs to impound excessive runoff, and the building of flood walls for the protection of downstream communities along the Ohio River.
• Tygart Dam, on the Tygart Valley River in West Virginia, was completed in 1938.
• Alcova Dam in Wyoming was completed in 1938.
• Madden Dam in Panama was built in 1938.  It formed Madden Lake, which serves as a reservoir for the Canal, and is also used to generate electricity.
• Work on the Grand Coulee Dam was in progress during 1937 and 1938.  Ask anyone who lived back then: it was just one dam thing after another.
• In 1938, the Eternal Light peace memorial was lighted in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

AGRICULTURE

• Farmers were being paid up to $8.00 an acre by the government to plant Kudzu, as a way to prevent erosion.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.
• The Farm Tenant Act of 1937 provided loans to help tenant farmers buy their own land.
• The All-American Canal opened in 1938 (completed in 1940) brought water directly from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley, California.  This 80-mile (130-kilometer) canal is [1996] the largest irrigation ditch in the United States.
• In 1933, the U.S. government sought to prevent the overproduction of wheat by paying farmers to reduce their wheat acreage by 15 percent.  But 1934, 1935, and 1936 brought droughts, reducing wheat production to the point where the U.S. had to import more than it exported.  The world's carryover in 1937 was the lowest since 1919.
  Overproduction again became a problem, however, and in 1938 the government enlisted the farmers' cooperation in a more extensive program of wheat control.  It included crop insurance and acreage control, starting in 1939.  The government bought and held some surplus supplies of wheat, and aided exports by providing subsidies to make up the difference between the U.S. price and the world price.
• Oregon has led the country in lumber production since 1938.

LABOR

• In 1937, unions became eligible for membership in the American Arbitration Association, a non-profit-making organization, supported by its members.
• The Railroad Retirement program was enacted in 1937.
• The Social Security payroll tax in 1937 was 1 percent for employers and employees.
• The Fair Labor Standards Act became law in 1938.  For all industries in interstate commerce, minimum wages were to begin at 25 cents an hour and in seven years rise to 40 cents an hour.  The maximum work week was to begin at 44 hours and in two years become 40 hours.  This placed "a floor under wages and a ceiling over hours."
• The Air Line Pilots Association, International, a labor union based in Washington, D.C., gained collective bargaining rights from federal government by 1938.  It was founded in 1931 by pilot representatives of major U.S. airlines, and was rooted in earlier unions, such as the Air Mail Pilots of America (1919) and National Air Pilots Association (1928).
• The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), led by John L. Lewis, was formally established in 1938.

BUSINESS

• In 1937, Nash Motors merged with Kelvinator Corporation, forming Nash-Kelvinator Corporation.
• Oil strikes in Marion County, Illinois, result in a boom in 1937.
• The first soft-drink machine appeared in 1937.
• The first instant coffee, Nescafe', was invented in 1937.
• Volkswagenwerk AG, the German automaker, was founded in 1937 by Ferdinand Porsche, with the cooperation of the German government.
• In 1937, the International Whaling Agreement was signed by the whaling nations in an attempt to conserve whales.  The agreement placed minimum length restrictions on whales taken and established a three-month whaling season.  The number of whaling vessels per country was also limited.
• Ford Motor Company produced the first Mercury in 1938.
• Hewlett-Packard Corporation was founded in 1938 by William Hewlett and David Packard, engineering graduates of Stanford University.  They produced an audio oscillator that was used by Walt Disney studios in the sound system for the film Fantasia.
• Owens-Corning Fiberglass was formed in 1938.
• Alaska's famed Kennecott copper mines closed in 1938.
• Petroleum in Saudi Arabia was first discovered in commercial quantities in 1938 by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco.)
• In 1938, the Mexican government seized the holdings of foreign oil companies in that country.  Mexico seized all the oil lands of American companies and failed to pay them adequately.  The Roosevelt administration made only mild and tactful protests.
• Samsung Group, a conglomerate based in Seoul, was incorporated as Samsung in 1938.  It was founded as a rice mill in 1936.

FOREIGN NEWS

• When Britain's King Edward VIII gave up the throne in December 1936, his brother Albert, duke of York, replaced him and took the name George VI.  He was crowned on May 12, 1937.
• New Schwabenland, Antarctica, a portion of Queen Maud Land, was surveyed from the air and mapped by a German Antarctic Expedition of 1938-39.
• By the 1930s, the French birth rate had fallen so low that the government passed legislation in 1938 to encourage population growth.  This legislation, providing such benefits as family allowances and medical and educational aid, was still in effect in the 1990s. 
• Malaysia's first public library, a Carnegie library, opened in Kota Bharu, Malaya, in 1938.

MISCELLANEOUS

• In 1937, the nation's gold reserve was moved to Fort Knox for safekeeping.
• In 1937 Congress passed the Bituminous Coal Act, which outlawed unfair competition between mine operators, established industry-wide collective bargaining for miners, and provided for fair minimum prices.
• In 1938 the United States House of Representatives created the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate threats to the national security and potential subversion.  It was often called the Dies Committee after its chairman, Martin Dies, an extremely conservative Democrat from Texas.
• The Bank of Canada, created in 1935 from the 1934 Bank of Canada Act to give stability and order to country's finances, became nationalized and wholly owned by government in 1938.
• Marie of Romania, queen of Ferdinand I of Romania, and for many years a strong influence in Romanian politics, died in 1938.
• Su-Lin, first of the very few giant pandas to be exhibited in the West, reached the United States as an infant in 1936 and was a popular attraction at the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago, Ill., until his death in 1938.
• The Chocolate Chip Cookie was invented in 1937 by Ruth Graves Wakefield, proprietor of The Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts.  The Great Depression ended soon afterwards.