Early Media Coverage of Jenna Bush, Indiana Jones & Playboy Magazine

By Jason English |

Every Monday, we travel into the archives of The New York Times to find the first time the paper covered various topics. This edition features Jenna Bush trick-or-treating with her grandfather on Air Force Two and Steven Spielberg admitting he didn't give 100% on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Jenna Bush

November 2, 1988

Unmasking Bush Reveals, Well, Bush For those who believe that Mr. Bush would offer more offbeat moments as President than Mr. Dukakis, there was fresh evidence on Halloween. Flying home Monday night from a rally in Kansas City, the Vice President turned Air Force Two into a flying Haunted House, with a darkened cabin and spooky, wind-blown music. As Secret Service agents hovered, his twin granddaughters, Jenna and Barbara, trick-or-treated through the plane in costume, one as a Juicy Fruit chewing gum pack and the other dressed as a Juicy Fruit pack vampire. Aides sported Michael Dukakis masks. And in what had to be one of the most surreal moments of the 1988 race, Mr. Bush appeared, wearing a windbreaker with "George Bush" embroidered on it, and a George Bush mask with wild, carrot-colored hair. He became annoyed when his fellow travelers remarked that the mask looked more like one of Charlton Heston than of the Vice President.

Keep reading for Indiana Jones, Mariah Carey, O.J. Mayo, Superdelegates and Playboy magazine ...

Indiana Jones

June 7, 1981

How Old Movie Serials Inspired Lucas and Spielberg By the time the screenplay [for Raiders of the Lost Ark] was ready, Mr. Spielberg was in no mood for fun. "I read it and wept," he said, "because it just looked like too much work. It was so expansive, it was so—what's the word for when you bite off more than you can chew?" He had just completed the critically unsuccessful 1941, and the idea of another ambitious, expensive and cumbersome movie filled him with dread. So he decided, from the very first, to make what he calls "a real good B-plus film. I decided not to shoot for a masterpiece but to make a good movie that told George's story very well. Sure, I could have gone out and made this movie for $30 million instead of $20 million, in 100 days instead of 73. But it would have boiled down to the same ideas, the same characters, the same continuity of scenes. I could have tried to give it a remarkable veneer that only I and this year's graduating class at USC film school and Stanley Kubrick would have noticed. Or I could have just made the picture and substituted humor and invention for time-consuming technique and additional angles."

O.J. Mayo

December 11, 2003

Still in High School, Certified Celebrities Look Toward NBA In the suburbs of Cincinnati, a 6-foot-5 freshman named O. J. Mayo is already garnering national attention. Mayo, a point guard at North College Hill High School, has appeared on ESPN and CNN and has been featured in Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine and Slam. "We played last Saturday and he could've signed autographs all night instead of playing in the game," said Joe Nickel, athletic director at North College Hill High. "Last Thursday and Friday, an ESPN news crew was here taking pictures of him walking around the halls."

Mariah Carey

June 13, 1990

The Pop Life "It was incredible, like in a movie," Mariah Carey said the other day. The 20-year-old singer and songwriter from New York City was recalling the moment a year and a half ago when she was discovered by Tommy Mottola, the president of CBS Records, who has made her the company's pop Cinderella of 1990.This week her debut album, Mariah Carey, was released by Columbia Records with more fanfare and promotional hoopla than the label has bestowed on a new young talent in years. * * * * * The singer, who lives with two cats in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, is one of three children of Patricia Carey, a vocal coach who used to sing with the New York City Opera. Mariah Carey's parents divorced when she was 3. In 1987, she graduated from Harborfields High School in Huntington, L.I.

Superdelegates

December 22, 1983

A Not so Mad Race for Delegates on Capitol Hill The selection of the first delegates to the 1984 Democratic Presidential convention will take place early next year not in the chill air of Iowa or New Hampshire, as has been the case for many years, but in the temperature-controlled back rooms of Capitol Hill. Under new rules adopted last year by the Democratic Party, House Democrats will hold a caucus, probably in the first week of February, to choose 164 of their number as delegates to the party's national nominating convention, where there will be a total of 3,933 delegates. The aim is to get more of the party's top elected officials involved in the nominating process. * * * * * The party's only black Presidential candidate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, is expected to include this class of "˜'superdelegates'' in a challenge to delegate selection rules. Mr. Jackson, who contends that the rules are racially discriminatory, is expected to argue that setting aside a bloc of delegate slots for elected officials deprives blacks of a chance to compete for these positions. Party officials insist that Mr. Jackson does not have a legitimate issue because the overall delegation to the national convention will reflect the percentage of blacks and other minorities in the party. [From The First Time News Was Fit To Print, Volume XXVIII.]

Playboy

April 24, 1955

News of the Advertising and Marketing FieldsPlayboy Magazine, designed for what it calls "the urban male," has been having trouble with its rate card. When it began accepting advertising in January the rate card, guaranteeing a circulation of 110,000, was obsolete by the time it was printed. The circulation had jumped to 225,000. The revised card, in turn, is obsolete, because the circulation now has gone to 325,000. Hugh Hefner, the publisher, does not mind reprinting the card, with appropriate changes.
From Previous Installments... "¢ The Presidential Candidates (Obama, Clinton, McCain, Huckabee, Paul, Bloomberg) "¢ Greatest Hits (Walkman, Email, Jerry Seinfeld, Donald Trump and more) "¢ November 3, 2007: Appearance on NPR Weekend Edition Saturday
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