How Al Capone Became Scarface

Young Al Capone got a job in a bar along the Jersey boardwalk. A woman and a man came in and sat down at a table. Capone gave them their drinks and went back to the bar. The woman was a real Italian beauty. Al couldn't keep his eyes off her. He went back to get their glasses and that was when he said it. I tell you honey, you got a really nice ass. The man who turned out to be the woman brother jumped up with a knife and started slashing at Capone.

Once twice the knife slashed Capones cheek. Blood flowed down his neck. Capone went crazy and the man barely made it out of the bar. Capone was stitched up but the scars remained. At first they were deep red and angry. Capone was very touchy about the scars. He never wanted to be photographed on that side. He didn't let anyone call him Scarface. Many times he would powder the scars over so they wouldn't be as prominent.

The man turned out to work for a local mobster. Capone was told he could not retaliate. As Capone rose up the man came to work for him and Al harbored no ill will. He had popped off and the woman's brother did what any brother would do. Scarface would not be so benevolent to other men who crossed him.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Echoes of World War II

Those Goddamn Japs. I have heard that before from the Greatest Generation. You cant blame them. They fought the Japanese for four years after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941. The Japanese embodied everything that Americans hated for those war years. They attacked us and assumed we would cower and that they could consolidate their gains in the Pacific before we could fight back. A few of our carriers were not at Pearl and that happened to save us for that scenario. But what still echoes today is that Americans hated the Japanese yes because they attacked us, but there was a racial component.

Imperialist Dogs. That leaked out of Kims mouth recently. Close your eyes and listen to the the hyperinflammatory rhetoric and the racial component of the Korean Crisis  hits you between the eyes. The Americans are the aggressors and the Koreans are the pure people who have been wronged. North Koreans believe they are the purest race and that Kim is divinely chosen. In World War II we had the Emperor who was divinely chosen. The problem was that the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man woman and child for the Emperor. It took two atomic bombs to get him to tell his people it was over and even then the military wanted to fight on.

The North Koreans view us the same way we view them. Different. Odd. Dangerous. This was World War II thinking that allowed us to drop those two bombs. This is the racial component. Somehow the Japanese were not human. They had done inhuman things and so that allowed us to not treat them that as humans. We are drifting quickly to this same thinking. Hopefully, people will not be saying sixty years on...those Goddamn North Koreans.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Thank Al Capone for the Date on Your Milk

You always think that date on the milk came from some company who thought it was a great idea to let people know when their milk was going to spoil. And that date is pretty accurate and once it expires your milk goes sour. What most people don't know is that you can thank Public Enemy #1 for keeping your kids milk from tasting like the inside of an old shoe. Al Capone aka Bottles is the man who thought it would be a good idea to put a date on the bottle of milk so mom would know when to buy the milk and if it was going bad the next day.

So how did a gangster in the twenties make this change to bottling milk and just about every other perishable that we now take for granted. Capones bootlegging operation was vast and not only  did he bottle booze and beer he bottled milk. And he remembered as a boy many sour bottles of milk and one thing Capone was and that was inventive. In a different time he might have been a very successful manufacturer or run a corporation. He saw problems and solved them and ran a vast network of breweries, bottling operations and oversaw a transportation network that involved employing thousands.

So he saw it as logical to time stamp a date on a bottle and give a consumer an idea of how old hte milk was. The early dates were just the date of the actual bottling but of course this gave way to what he now have and that is an expiration date. Capone of course would not live to see his legacy in the from of a plastic jug of milk in a supermarket but it is one of the few things that transcend the murder and mayhem we associate with the man who went by the nickname "bottles."

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair