D-Day: New York

The Skyview NYC Taxicab that the tipster may have seen on TCM was in the musical "Anchors Aweigh". The scene where Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are Standing up and looking out at the city in Betty Garrett's Skyview cab. Those DeSoto Skyview Cabs were sold exclusively through James Waters Chrysler Agency in Long Island City, Queens.
The price for a new one was about $1100. I once heard a story that he was Walter Chrysler's Son-in-Law but I can't confirm it.

I believe this is the light-up sign on top of the Sky-View Cab Company. It looks like neon. I was watching an old movie from the forties (?) on TCM and I noticed these cabs. They had a sunroof cut into the roof of the cab so the passengers in the back seat could look up and see the buildings. I can't remember the movie, but the plot involved the passenger looking up and seeing something relevant to the story line. It must have been a gimmick for the cab company. It also must have been one of the early sunroofs in a car!

June 6, 1944, I was 16 years old and in Basic Training with the the US Maritime Service at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Many of us teenagers had close relatives in the military and wished we were there with them to fight the Axis. A month later, I was in a North Atlantic convoy assigned to a 20 mm anti-aircraft gun hoping that a Nazi plane would dare to fly over. "I'd show 'em." Of course I didn't tell this to my shipmates.

From a 2005 NYT article on the Zipper:

The Motograph News Bulletin, to use its original formal name, began operation on Nov. 6, 1928, election night, as a band of 14,800 light bulbs that extended 380 feet long and 5 feet high around the fourth floor of what was then the Times Tower. It was installed for The New York Times by Frank C. Reilly, according to an article in The Times, which identified Mr. Reilly as the inventor of electric signs with moving letters.

Inside the control room, three cables poured energy into transformers. The hookup to all the bulbs totaled 88,000 soldered connections. Messages from a ticker came to a desk beside a cabinet like the case that contained type used by old-time compositors. The cabinet contained thin slabs called letter elements. An operator composed the message, letter by letter, in a frame.

The frame, when filled with the letters and spaces that spelled out a news item, was inserted in a magazine at one end of a track. A chain conveyor moved the track, and each letter in the frame brushed a number of electrical contacts. Each contact set a light flashing on Broadway.

There were more than 39,000 brushes, which had to undergo maintenance each month. The frame with the letter elements passed up and overhead, forming an endless circuit. Mr. Reilly calculated that there were 261,925,664 flashes an hour.

The National Archives in College Park, Maryland has recordings of the entire NBC and CBS broadcast day from D-Day and anyone can go in and listen to them. It's a very good way to get a sense of what the day was like for people at home listening on the radio as events unfolded.

Those great old DeSoto cabs had a sliding roof panel to let passengers see the views above them while being carried through the Manhattan canyons. The skyscraper with the clock housed the Paramount Theatre, a wonderful place to visit for a movie and a live stage show. I saw Phil Spitalny and his "All-Girl Orchestra featuring Evelyn and her Magic Violin" there with my family. The movie was "Miss Susie Slagle's," starring Veronica Lake and Sonny Tufts.

On January 6, 1944, I was 6 years old in Fort Smith, Arkansas, part of a young generation which at the time had no knowledge of a condition known as peace. On that day, my mother received a phone call from a fellow church member who was calling everyone in the congregation to say that the invasion was under way. This was the signal to come to the church to pray. Our family; mother, father and two boys walked to the church to pray for the safety and success of our "American Boys" on that day.

According to various sources the NY Times installed the first moving "news ticker" in 1928, using 14,800 electric bulbs. Given the technology of the day, I can only guess that each bulb required a relay, which would have to click on and off almost instantly to momentarily light its bulb, as the text scrolls along. This must have been a maintenance challenge (there seems to be a few extra bulbs lit, and some brighter ones that may just have been replaced). They may have used or even invented the "matrix" technique still used today for LCD displays, which uses "crosspoint" wiring to greatly reduce the number of lines going from the elements to the control system, but my mind still boggles at the number of wires remaining, and what kind of electro-mechanical system translated "operator input" to the streaming text. If only Shorpy's world-wide readership included a retired electro-mechanical sign technician!

is what this could have been titled. The scrolling electric sign was as good as it got then, and I am sure those folks were fairly amazed to see it. I wonder what it took to program it?

My great-uncle went in at D Day +60 (August 7) as a replacement in the 2nd Infantry Division (L Company, 23rd Infantry Regiment); he was seriously wounded at Brest, France, a month later, died in 1956...and I was named for him.

That was never far from my mind when I served in Iraq in 2004 at the same age he was when he earned his Purple Heart and (I believe) a Bronze Star.

To all those who went in on D-Day...and throughout WWII, I stand and salute.

we can't see many faces in the crowd. We'd have to start wondering what they were thinking -- Is my son there? My dad? My husband? My brother?

Funny but I cannot summon up any memory of D-Day. VE and VJ Days, and the dropping of the two A-bombs are sharp and clear, but not D-Day.

I think perhaps that it might relate to what happened in early May. I was out riding my trike when a Western Union messenger rode up on his bike and went into the three-family apartment in which I lived. I heard a terrible scream through the open windows of the first-floor unit. All the neighbors (women since the men were in the military or working) flocked to the apartment with screams continuing for some time. I learned that the woman's son had been killed in action.

I did not totally understand the horror, but I was sad because the young man had been very nice to the punk kid airplane nut from the third floor, even letting me hold his model planes.

The first-floor family were an elderly couple, with the one child, who had become a fighter pilot in the Pacific. The husband walked with heavy braces and crutches, and, as I later learned, they just quit and gave up life. They moved within days and we never heard from them again.

I think that I was in a bit of a void for a while.

Yet to be born, a twinkle in my father's eye as he dropped from the sky into Caen with the Canadians early that morning. RIP Dad.

My brother landed D-Day plus 12 and my uncle D-Day plus 20. They were lucky, I guess, and returned to us to live out long lives. Great photo. Really profound.

Before zooming in to see the image full size, on first glance the guy on the left and the guy 2nd from the right were in a posture not to different than someone holding a cellphone to the ear. Of course it's clear they were dragging on fags, sucking on coffin nails, drawing down on Pall Malls while taking in the portentous news. As someone not born until 12 years after the war was over - I am fascinated by what day to day life in the US was like, mobilized for war. Of course I grew up knowing it was a success, but at that very moment, who knew how this was going to work out - the intensity of the moment, even for folks in the street in Times Square, must have been incredible.

Does anyone know what the curved metal object with letters on it is? It appears to be on top of a car on the right.

[DeSoto "Sky View" taxicab sign. - Dave]