THE 1930s: FASHION: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

New York department store Bonwit Teller hired Spanish painter Salvador Dali to design a group of its store windows, marking the influence of Surrealism on American fashion.

Lewis Gannett, conservationist, was one of the earliest critics of the automobile's impact on national parks, complaining in 1937 that "the floor of Yosemite is an amusement park, as crowded a city as New York's Central Park.… Nothing in America is less wild than … Yosemite Valley."

Noting the growing dependence on the car in Los Angeles, critic Douglas Haskell commented in Architectural Record in 1937 that "Los Angeles is a city built on the automobile as Boston was built on the sailing ship. It appears to the casual view as a series of parking lots interspersed with buildings."

In 1934 entrepreneur Richard M. Hollingshead jr., with help from Willis Warren Smith, formed Park-In Theaters, a chain of drive-in movie houses. Business proved so good that they franchised Park-In Theaters for one thousand dollars each plus 5 percent of gross earnings.

At the 1931 Conference on Home Building, President Herbert Hoover explained the significance of home ownership to the American dream. The aspiration to own a home, he said, "penetrates the heart of our national well being.… There can be no fear for a democracy or for self-government or for liberty and freedom from home owners no matter how humble they may be."

Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover complained in 1939 that the popular tourist camps located on the outskirts of towns and cities across the country not only were stopovers used by tourists but were becoming "camouflaged brothels."

New York store Bonwit Teller, with offices in Paris and London, appointed Hortense Oldlum president of the company in 1937, making her the first woman to head a major American department store.

In 1932 Dorothy Shaver, vice president of Lord and Taylor, explained that while she appreciated French designers, "American designers are best equipped by tradition, background and feeling to understand the needs and demands of American women's clothes."

Trailer manufacturer George Sherman, founder and president of the Covered Wagon Company, displayed his first streamlined, modern trailer at the 1930 Detroit Automobile Show and began to fill orders at a rapid pace as Americans' passion for travel took the auto industry by storm.

Ever optimistic about the utopian implications of technology, architect Frank Lloyd Wright predicted in 1932 the existence of a "great architectural highway with … roadside markets, super-service stations, fine schools and playgrounds, small, integrated, intensive farming units … and fine homes winding up the beautiful natural features of the landscape."