July 4, 1936: George Varoff shattered a world record for pole vault in New Jersey as the American track and field teams, including Jesse Owens, prepared for the Olympics in Berlin. Mr. Varoff’s mark was 14 feet 6 1/2 inches. The current world record, set by Sergey Bubka in 1994, is 20 feet 1 3/4 inches. Photo: The New York Times
Jan. 5, 1954: Pierre Auguste Cot’s “The Storm” was hung at the Metropolitan Museum, one of several hundred works that went on display in newly renovated galleries that grouped paintings by time period rather than nationality — an arrangement that the museum director Francis Henry Taylor hoped would “bring order out of chaos.” Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
March 11, 1934: At the Istanbul Academy of Art, students studied from classical statues, dug up nearby. Until 1926, Turkish art students were prohibited by the Koran from making representations of the human form — only architecture was taught at the academy previously. Photo: The New York Times
Oct. 15, 1925: From the Mid-Week Pictorial, “High Art of the Zoo: The giraffe of the mechanical menagerie will stoop to nothing, so the artist must climb skyward to present him with spot No. 203.” Photo: The New York Times
Finishing touches were applied to a diorama in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Named for Carl Akeley, the explorer who conceived and designed all the displays and died on Mount Mikeno in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1926, the hall presents several animals that Mr. Akeley had killed himself, The New York Times reported on May 17, 1936. “He will probably be set down as one of the most famous lovers of all natural things,” Russell Owen wrote. Photo: The New York Times
From the Mid-Week Pictorial, date unknown: “‘I Want a Comb and Brush’: A Prized, but Somewhat Disheveled, Orangutang Does Hist Best to Look Pretty for the Hopeful English Photographer.” Photo: The New York Times
March 29, 1925: The crew of the U.S.S. Wyoming enjoyed several species of mascot to cheer them on their naval maneuvers: “a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a marmoset, a kitten and other strange beasts.” Photo: The New York Times
The Stockholm, the famous boat to collide with the Italian liner Andrea Doria in July 1956, arrived in New York to unload the crash’s survivors and undergo repairs. Photo: The New York Times
July 30, 1956: After the Stockholm, a Swedish liner, collided with the Andrea Dorea, an Italian cruise liner, killing 51, the damaged ship was dry-docked for repairs while its only Spanish seaman visited Linda Morgan, a 14-year-old American girl he rescued who spoke Spanish and was initially reported dead. In the crash, she had been “transferred from her berth on the Italian liner by the twisted steel of Stockholm.” Photo: Carl Gossett/The New York Times
From the Mid-Week Pictorial, Sept. 30, 1933: a naval regatta performed exercises at Weymouth, England, in front of the H.M.S. Renown, which was built during World War I, reconstructed between world wars, and spent a lot of 1943 marshaling Winston Churchill to various conferences with Allied leaders. Despite the ship’s proud service, she was sold for scrap in 1948. Photo: The New York Times
