January 2013

“Into The Fray” by Tom Mascaro

Into The Fray:  How NBC’s Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News
By Tom Mascaro
ISBN #978-1-59797-557-5, $29.95

Into The Fray vividly recounts the characters and experiences that helped create a unique, colorful documentary film crew based at the Washington bureau of NBC News.  From the Kennedy era through the Reagan years, the journalists covered wars, rebellions, the Central Intelligence Agency, covert actions, the Pentagon, military preparedness, and world and American cultures.While the above excerpt from the book’s foreword  by Drew Pearson might not give goose bumps, don’t be fooled.  This is a darn good read!

For we Marines who grew up during this period and served in  virtually every “clime and place” mentioned, the book explains many of the reasons why we were there risking life and limb.  You will meet World War II Marine combat correspondent Stuart Schulberg, son of Los Angeles movie royalty, and Ted Yates, who cut his journalistic teeth on the Camp Lejeune Globe in the early 1950s, you will be right at home.

(more…)

Rosenthal photos up for auction

NEW YORK—Bonhams is honored to announce its upcoming 22 February sale, World War II: the Pacific Theater, the first-ever auction to focus entirely on the war’s historic events in the Pacific Ocean and western Pacific Rim. The chronologically structured sale begins in December 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and concludes with signing of the peace treaty in Tokyo bay on the USS Missouri in September, 1945. From iconic monuments to ships models, this sale offers powerful, authentic WWII material sure to interest individuals and institutions alike.

“We only have a few more years to learn from our WWII veterans during their lifetimes, so the timing of the sale is important to collectors,” explained Tom Lamb, the Director of the Books & Manuscripts Department at Bonhams in New York, and one of the specialists for this sale.

The sale’s top lot is the original 1945 Iwo Jima Monument, a symbol of wartime bravery and national unity which was unveiled on Constitution Avenue in Washington DC in November, 1945 (est. $1,200,000 – 1,800,000). It is one of the most potent images of heroism in battle of the 20th century. The world-famous monument depicts the raising of the Stars and Stripes on the summit of Mt. Suribachi by five Marines and a Navy Corpsman. Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer, captured the Pulitzer-Prize winning scene that inspired the monument’s creator, Felix de Weldon. The monument is perhaps best known in its secondary incarnation, the eighty-ton bronze Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Bonhams will auction de Weldon’s original cast stone version, which until 2007 had been drawing crowds at New York’s distinguished Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

(more…)