The world sure has changed in 40+ years, and not necessarily for the better. I like to think of how fresh and clean the world must have seemed to Mr. O'Connor in 1947 as he machined a street car axle. WWII was over, GI's were returning home, some attending schooling under the GI bill, others marrying, buying houses, starting families and resuming life. A job with security and benefits in a good trade was something to be sought after, at least for Mr. O'Connor and people of his generation. It was also the case with my own father, a vet returning for WWII after some time spent in military hospitals. Simpler times, a world seemingly full of hope and endless possibilities.
No one got upset over a pinup girl on a calendar, and people tended to be a bit more formal and a bit more 'mannerly' to counterbalance the pinup calendars in the shops. My own father never went anywhere without getting 'dressed', and usually wore a necktie. He NEVER went on the job as a construction inspector without a pressed shirt, necktie, jacket, and a good shine on his shoes. If we went to visit relatives or anyone else, he wore a necktie. For that matter, when I started dating, I had to 'pass inspection' to get out the door of our house. This meant a necktie and sport jacket, shined shoes, and a reminder to 'mind my manners'. How the world has changed since then! I still tip my hat to ladies, hold doors, and say "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'am" and stand up when anyone comes into a room where I am sitting.
We had the culture police or PC police some to the powerplant a few years back before I retired. We knew what we were in for, a lecture on 'sexual harassment' by an uptight female attorney from corporate human resources. We decided on a nice welcome for her. In the front row, we seated two men, one from my own crew. He was a US Navy veteran, a destroyer (tin can) sailor from the early 60's. This fellow had a mermaid with her boobs showing, wearing a sailor hat on one arm, and a nude gal in sailor's gob hat and neckerchief on the other arm. That man's wife sat on his right. Next to her sat a warehouseman, chief of his local volunteer fire company. He had a tattoo of a dreamy eyed nude blond on his arm, wearing a fireman's hat and entwined with a firehose with a drop coming off the nozzle. The inscription read: "fireman find 'em hot and leave 'em wet". We had setup the presenter of the sexual harassment lecture. Sure enough we got an uptight woman attorney in a granny frump dress, buttoned to the wrists and neck, no humor whatsoever. She delivered her lecture in a belligerent manner, and asked what we considered to be "dirty pictures". 20-odd people of both genders in the room began snickering and the lecturer looked down at the arms on the men in the front row. She turned red and said firmly: "That's DISGUSTING ! How many of you find those tattoos to be offensive ?" Needless to say, the fellow with the Navy tattoos wife spoke up about being married to her husband for over 35 years, and then the room dissolved into hollering and telling this gal we did not appreciate her or the lecture she was delivering. She asked the women in the room if they found the tattoos or the way we acted at our powerplant to be sexually offensive. The women told her we were all one happy group and got along well. The lecturer really got flustered at that point, and finally said: "I resent you people up here in the country... you are all one happy family and anything goes and no one gets offended..." The room erupted in solid applause and catcalls and yells. Needless to say, even though I was 'management', I was quite proud to be a part of the crew at our powerplant. We stood together and showed that uptight attorney we did not need her or her sexual harrassment training.
Sending uptight attorneys from HR in the suburbs of NY City to a powerplant up in a lonesome valley to deliver a lecture on corporate policies about sexual harassment is a joke. These people in corporate have never seen the kind of work done in a powerplant, and do not know what it is to sweat through a 36 hour breakdown job, or to work with heavy tools and rigging and work until people are damned near exhausted, but keep on going. We tried to explain that cursing and hollering and trading insults were all a part of getting a job done, and we stood together as one crew regardless. Again, the attorney said she had no idea what it was like, and we told her about working despite getting bruised, blistered, tired, stoved-up, and keeping on going. Someone who has never done that kind of physical work nor even seen it done has no idea how people doing that sort of work will act. Expecting them to follow some BS corporate guidelines after winding up black-and-blue or stoved-up from swinging a 16 lb sledge in some tight and otherwise impossible location is absurd. We knew it, we made the power that kept the whole corporate structure running, but corporate saw fit to tell us how to behave and much else. It was the tail wagging the dog and we resented it.
As for pinup art, as Lathefan has posted, one of the greatest of the artists depicting pinup girls was Vargas. Vargas' artwork adorned many US aircraft in WWII. Vargas was an incredible artist and he had a way of depicting pinup girls, who, even when clothed, left little to the imagination. I had an uncle who made his living as an artist, doing airbrush retouching and restoration of photos and painting portraits of people who sat for them. My uncle was a WWII veteran (US Army Signal Corps, tech sergeant). My uncle had studied at the Art Students' League in NYC during the depression days, and loved to draw or paint nude females and he was damned good at it. My uncle lived into his nineties and was battling dementia and failing eyesight. He and his wife were reclusive, holed up in their apartment in Brooklyn. Despite all of this, my uncle would take a brown paper grocery bag and cut a panel of brown paper out of it. Next thing anyone knew, he'd be doing a nude female from memory, using anything from pencil to charcoal or pastels. Right to the end, my uncle never lost his skill and appreciation of the female form. When he was in his '80's, I bought him a couple of books of "Vargas Girls". My uncle was highly critical of most so-called contemporary artists' work, but he really appreciated the Vargas Girls. Vargas girls were popular during WWII and into probably the 70's. Vargas emigrated to the USA, and when he did, he was attracted to girls coming off shift in factories, saying they exhibited something girls in Europe did not, saying American girls really had something special- which he spent the rest of his life depicting. I've got pictures my uncle painted during the Depression at the Art Students' League, one depicting the Dust Bowl that really speaks quite well. I also have a large reclining nude my uncle painted somewhere along the line. When my uncle died, we buried him at a crowded Jewish cemetery out in Maspeth, Queens. He had died alone, restrained in a hospital bed. I brought an American Flag with me, and at the undertaker's, I draped his casket with it. We loaded his casket into the hearse, and I asked to ride shotgun in the hearse so my uncle would not make his last ride with strangers. I rode out from Brooklyn with my hand over my shoulder on his casket. At the cemetery, we folded the flag into the 'three cornered hat' and I gave a short eulogy. Mom was the surviving sibling from that family and she took her brother's death hard. Before we lowered the casket into the earth, I handed my sister some artist's brushes and tubes of oil paint and asked her to arrange it on the casket. Seeing the pictures Lathefan posted reminded me of my late uncle Sam. I lose track of how many years he's been gone. I have his 'Weston' multimeter and his small tools that he carried with him in Europe, including up into Norway, in WWII in the signal corps, and I have that nude he painted awaiting a suitably large wall to put her up on. The picture of the two farmers in a hardscrabble dust bowl scene is on our dining room wall. I ought to hang the nude on the wall, if for no other reasons than honoring my uncle's memory and spitting in the eyes of the sexual harassment and political correctness police.