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  • Posted by Dobrien 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    St Paul was also a gangster holiday town. Dillinger had a place on Lexington Ave. story goes that they gave the coppers some cash to be left alone , in return they didn’t shoot the place up.
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  • Posted by katrinam41 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Alvin is a good name. My father's middle name was Alvin, and my brother's (retired police chief) middle name is Alvin.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    One of my favorite movies as well. I have it in my movie collection to watch once in a while. Besides Gary Cooper, I liked Walter Brennan as the preacher. Yep, grand pappy Amos singing "Ol' Time Religion"!
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Good for you! Gary Cooper plays him in one of my favorite movies, though Gary lacked Alvin's red hair and red mustache.
    Also, Sgt. York did a Clint Eastwood on several charging Germans with a M1911 Colt .45 and not the captured German Luger pistol Cooper used playing him.
    Reckon the movie makers thought the Luger looked cooler.
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Me dino saw the movie. Liked it.
    As for the TV show, shortly after going off the air after the Prohibition bust stories ran out with The Untouchables taking credit for stuff they never did (such as taking down Ma Barker and her gang), I read that members if the Mafia had been laughing at the show ever since it started.
    What the Mafia particularly laughed at were the raids on bootlegging warehouses where each time gangsters would savagely fight back at times to the last man with bodies strewn all over the place.
    What realistically happened most of the time was that cornered mobsters usually surrendered on the spot. Why would they want to die when they could easily afford lawyers?
    Must admit it was fun watching all that silly kid stuff when I was a kid. Now I find the show amusing. One gunfight took place in Harlem. Just before it started I got to see the face of a black lady. May be wrong, but I think that was the only black person shown on The Untouchables EVER! Keep in mind that this TV show began before MLK started to do his thing.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    One of the first big government propaganda shows on tv.
    It deified the scumbag FBI jackboots interfering with the free market's response to hideously bad big government policy banning sale of alcohol.
    Government is bad at everything except possibly stealing from honest people.
    Government is the real organized crime.
    NIFO
    (But I love the movie version Untouchables. Sean Connery was great in it. "What are you prepared to do?") https://youtu.be/xPZ6eaL3S2E
    Sean's question applies to all "patriots".
    The phrase that comes to mind: "We pledge ... our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Me dino's middle name is Alvin, who was my father's cousin and best friend. Alvin flew a P-51 and shot down three Italian planes before being shot down over the Mediterranean by a Messerschmidt.
    His remains are still at the bottom of that sea. When I was a kid, another kid who learned my middle name always had to bring up Alvin and the Chipmunks popular at that time. That got very tiring.
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Seems that back then if you weren't a farmer in a field or a laborer at work, you were wearing a coat, a tie and a hat like a fedora or a derby.
    Old dino recalls JFK being credited with all but killing off the hat industry by going around bare-headed with well-combed hair.
    Still recall being a kid watching a black and white episode of The Twilight Zone about the sun growing larger and cooking our planet.
    One actor really made an impression on my young mind for wearing a tie and a coat with a splotch of (studio) sweat showing as seeped up between his should blades.
    Me little dino thought wearing such proper attire while being cooked to death really looked stupid.
    At least he wasn't worrying with holding a hat since he played a scene indoors.
    When I was a Marine in uniform you could not go outside without your "cover." When inside you had to take your "cover" off.
    Unlike the army, you never saluted inside because you could only salute when you wore your "cover." I kid you not.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 2 years, 1 month ago
    Whew, that eagle has work to do! Great collection, OUC. I like the light at the end of the tunnel.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    An old friend of mine, who passed last year (RIP Frank), said Frank Nitti would come to stay at his parents place in Rochester, NY to get out of Chicago once in a while. My friend was just a child at the time and had no idea of who Nitti really was until many years later. Rochester was supposedly "neutral territory" and the mobsters left each other alone there. That all blew up in the '60s and early '70s when a bunch of Godfather style hits took place. Now mob-wise things have been quiet for decades.

    Added note: My friend also was a P-51 pilot in Korea.
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  • Posted by $ 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Hmmm, even though we watched those shows and movies we still knew right from wrong...we never thought the gangsters were good guys...

    Try explaining that to the younger generation these days...
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 2 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    When I was a kid during the Sixties watching Cagney and Edward G. Robinson play gangsters during the Twenties and the Thirties on TV,
    \they would sometimes go to prison and repeatedly be saying "Nyah, ya dirty screws" to prison guards.
    As a corrections officer between 1982 and 2003, not once did I hear an inmate ever say that. Not even with the"nyah" left off.
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 2 years, 1 month ago
    Chiggers, it's da cops! Yeah, me a dino bad ass I be fingerprinted three whole times! Yeah, three whole times, youse mugs!
    Furst time it be da U.S. Marines! Did time on Parris Island for openers! Took me share of slpas n' punches. Even got kicked once.
    Second bust came cuz me dino outta work. No newspaper would hire me for not snitchin' up Schiff on de Gipper.
    So dat wuz the Alabama Department of Corrections. Funny thing about dat joint. Dey lemme me go home after each work assignment.
    Det thurd time wuz I got fingerprinted by det Wackenhut Security Corporation. Cause me could stake out banks. Youse see? To stake out banks!
    Even got to operate in a truck stop fulla drug dealers n' lot lizards. Fun chasin' out lot lizards! See? Bwahaha!
    Yeah, cause me a bad ass. Yeah. See? See? Me bad.
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