The Gad About Town

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”—John Milton, Areopagitica

John Milton’s essay on the freedom of speech and expression, Areopagitica, was published on this date in 1644. In it, he argued against pre-publication censorship. It was another 50 years before his ideas on liberty began to take hold.

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 381.10 in 1929, and after the October Crash that year it began a plunge to its all-time low of 41.20, which it reached in 1932. On this date in 1954, the DJIA finally closed above that high of 381.10 and has not yet closed below it. (The Dow closed above 19,000 for the first time yesterday.)
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I do not know if my family home was more or less Kennedy-saturated than the homes of other American families that were begun in the 1960s like ours: we had three JFK-memorial books and one LP recording of the late President delivering his speeches that had a glossy full-color portrait on the front of the sleeve and his inaugural address printed as a liner note on the back.

There were November 1963 issues of Life magazine boxed up—Life was the newsweekly that people kept and preserved and re-visited as if events had not happened until confirmed on the giant pages of that publication. (The media preferences I was exposed to when I was young stayed with me into adulthood: Life, not Look; Time, not Newsweek, NBC news, not CBS. To younger ears, I suppose all of that is akin to preferring Safari to Chrome.)

In all of those publications—memorial books and Life magazine alike—color is introduced with photos of the president’s inaugural and then re-visited in photos taken on the morning of November 22, 1963. Those photos remain almost painfully colorful—the bright silver of Air Force One at Love Field, the almost-cloudless blue sky, Mrs. Kennedy’s pink pillbox hat, even the president’s flesh tones—but black and white is re-introduced with the photos taken later that sad day.
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