Top Secret Heros

The young girls came from all over the United States, volunteers all, wanting to help the war effort in any way they could. They headquartered and were trained in Washington, DC; sworn to secrecy and given Top Secret clearances, these 10,000 dedicated women formed the core of America's enemy code breakers.

They comprised 70 percent of the code-breaking operation, but as women in a male dominated society they walked without curiosity through the government's most restricted halls. When they were occasionally questioned, they gave innocuous - and successful! - replies: 'I sharpen pencils,' or 'I'm an assistant secretary for General so-and-so.' 

After the war many of these women used their experience to leapfrog into careers previously unattainable for females, but they always kept their war duties secret, so much so that only now have their exploits been uncovered. Read about them in 'Code Girls.'

A Blast from the Past

The Maxwell House coffee sign dominated the Hoboken, NJ skyline until the '90s. Ever wonder what's there, now?

The one percenters are moving in. The dockside city that Frank Sinatra called home, where Marlon Brando made his bones in the gritty film drama 'On the Waterfront', where the Hudson Tubes (If you're under 50, read PATH) daily shuttles thousands of Jerseyites under the river to Manhattan now can be yours in a spectacular condo complex called Maxwell Place.


For a mere million and a half you can own a one-bedroom, two-bath beauty with an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building. Get a ticket to ride the 14th Street ferry a couple of blocks north and you can be sipping coffee in your Wall Street office while the great unwashed are stilling humping it aboard NJ Transit.


Ain't capitalism grand?

Sliced Bread? The story, right here!

On occasion, you may have heard it said of some wonderful gadget, “This is the greatest invention since sliced bread!” This is intended to be both a compliment and a reference to how revolutionary and world-changing the invention is. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that while people have been slicing bread for eons, pre-sliced, packaged bread has only been available since 1928, when Otto Frederick Rohwedder introduced the world’s first mechanical bread slicer.

At first sales were not spectacular; bakers complained that pre-sliced bread would dry out quickly. Then a slicer-owner figured out how to slice and bag the bread simltaneously and the revolution began. The first national baker to use the slicer was Wonder Bread.

In an amusing afternote, the Toastmaster company had invented a pop-up toaster four years before sliced bread, but sales of manually sliced toast were slow. The pop-up toaster and uniformly sliced bread was a marriage made in heaven. By 1933, only five years after its introduction, American bakeries were turning out more sliced than unsliced bread, and the rest, as they say in the pulps, is history.
(Liberally edited and re-written by JAK from web material.)
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