Creative History

  The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place exactly one-hundred years ago in 1924.  And just like today’s annual holiday spectacle, this first incarnation of the iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade, marched straight down 34th Street in midtown Manhattan and ended outside of Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square.     However, unlike today’s parade that is full of marching bands, celebrities, broadway dancers and larger than life inflatable balloons and ornate floats--that first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was composed entirely of Macy’s employees….and Santa of course!  But even the big guy in the red suit played a slightly different role in that first parade than he does today.  Rather than riding through midtown at the head of  a reindeer driven sleigh and waving at the throngs of onlookers who line the parade route, the Santa Claus of 1924 sat in a stately throne, was crowned “King of the Kiddies” by his elves (which sounds vaguely...

  “The bald eagle is a bird of bad moral character.  He does not get his living honestly.  He is too lazy to fish for himself.” Those are the words of legendary, larger-than-life, founding father Benjamin Franklin.  Ben Franklin, both as a scientist and as a statesman, was the most famous and well-respected American in the entire world at the end of the 18th century during the early days of our American republic.   He, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for framing and shaping the laws and ideas that are articulated in the United States Constitution which have endured for nearly two-hundred and fifty years.  He was America’s first diplomat and was instrumental in winning American independence from Great Britain by negotiating international treaties that brought France and Holland into the American Revolution on our side and thereby tipped the balance of power against the British.  Franklin invented bifocals and experimented with e...