Meditations
from Florida
Going, going... almost gone!
The Twentieth Century:
told us
There was a time I
thought there was
only one gangster
in the world,
the one my father
always talked
about. Pa knew him
from the movies he
had seen about him; his name
was Al Capone.
After the difficult war years
times were more relaxed, there
were plenty of automobiles,
there was jazz, there were
new dances, Americans had
money and they wanted to
spend it.
Al Capone
Then on January 29,
1920 a new law was enac
ted which remained in
effect until 1933. The un
popular era of
Prohibition had arrived.
Mcoholic beverages could
longer be manufactured
or transported, or sold.
Soon the stuff was home
made or smuggled into
the country and if the
Feds found the stuff it
was destroyed.
Organized crime took over, there
were fortunes to be made, and this is
where Al Capone came into the pictu
re. Chicago was where he ruled over
the mob and where he made twenty
million dollars a year.
Try as they might, the Feds
could not nail him
down on murder,
f smuggling of alcohol
(bootlegging), or elimi
nating his enemies mer
cilessly.
Ironically, Al Capone was
finally caught
income tax
evasion and
sent to prison for eleven years, first in
Atlanta and then Alcatraz.
Years later, while Pa was grieving over
my mother's death, one of his grands
ons tried to cheer him up by sending
him a letter in which he enclosed a
picture of Al Capone's cell, especially
for opa.
Apparently my pa had told him the sa
me Capone-the-gangster stories he had
told us so long ago, and the young
man had not forgot
ten. Pa just stared
at the picture and
shook his head.
I don't think he ever
knew that Capone
was born only two
weeks later than he, on
January 17, 1899.
Jazz
One of my favorite inven
tions is the radio. It is truly a magic
box, and it had its golden years be
tween 1935 and 1956 here in America,
perhaps until somewhat later in Euro
pe and the rest of the world. Regular
broadcasting started in The Hague in
1919, while
Denmark had
a state system
in 1925. Now
it was not on
ly the privile
ged few who
could hear an
opera, a show
or a play, or
any kind of music, all you
had to do, was sit by the radio and he
ar it all for nothing. Also, you could let
your imagination roam far and wide
and make up your own scenes accor
ding to what you heard.
Today that has changed.
Radio is still with us,
but it is television that
we watch and what you
once heard on the radio,
plays, opera's and come
dies to name a few, you
Tekst: Juul Lentze
