1934 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

The Spingold Trophy for contract bridge donated by Chicago-born New York journalist-turned-Columbia Pictures publicist Nathan B. Spingold, 48, will be awarded to Challenge Knockout Teams (Spingold Master Knockout Teams beginning in 1938) that have competed since 1930 for the Asbury Park Trophy.

The board game Sorry introduced by Parker Brothers of Salem, Mass., frustrates players under age 8 who cannot bear to have their pieces sent back by rivals. Based in part on pahcheesi, the game will remain popular into the next century (see Monopoly, 1935).

Lego toy blocks for children are introduced at Billund, Denmark, where local carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, 41, has turned his shop over to making wooden blocks that fit together and started a company that he calls Automatic Binding Blocks. He has held a competition among his employees to select a new name for the company and won it himself with a contraction of the Danish leg godt, meaning "play well." Christiansen has been making stepladders and ironing boards as well as toys, but economic conditions had depressed sales; he will start using plastic for some of his blocks in 1947, and Lego will become the largest such firm outside America, providing the basis of a great European fortune (see 1958).

U.S. men's underwear sales slump after moviegoers see Clark Gable remove his shirt in the film It Happened One Night to reveal that he wears no undershirt. Sales of men's caps have declined because of their association with hoodlums in gangster movies.

The Washeteria that opens April 18 at Fort Worth, Texas, is the first launderette. Proprietor J. F. Cantrell has installed four washing machines and charges by the hour.

Scranton, Pa.-born New York milliner Sally Victor (née Josephs), 29, opens her own salon, catering to socialites and entertainers with custom-made hats (customers soon include Irene Dunne, Helen Hayes, and Merle Oberon). A millinery buyer for Macy's until she married millinary wholesaler Sergiu Victor in 1927, Victor will popularize the baby bonnet, Flemish sailor hat, and pompadour hat before starting a ready-to-wear line in 1951.

Former Lachasse designer Digby Morton, now 27, opens a London fashion house under his own name, having transformed the classic Donegal tweed suit into high fashion through intricate cutting and carefully planned placing of seams that give it a more more feminine line (see 1928). London-born designer (Edwin) Hardy Amies, 25, succeeds Morton at Lachasse; a former school teacher at Antibes, he will take a geometrical approach to the tailored suit, using the fabric selvage around the body instead of downward, and will eventually gain prominence under his own name (see 1946). The house of Digby Morton will continue until 1957.

Outboard motor inventor Ole Evinrude dies at Milwaukee July 12 at age 57.