Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here is your 30-second summary!

Men, mental illness and movie magic. That's it!

Let's talk about Clara Bow.

First, let's drop her into history. In 1921, the Yankees purchased 20 acres in the Bronx for Yankees Stadium.

The baby Ruth Candy Bar was introduced. The movie The Kid, starring Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Cuyen was released.

And so was the Sheik with Rudolph Valentino.

Sinnel No. 5 was introduced. Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The infamous Black Sox trial was held in Chicago. And in 1921, Clara Bow wins the fame and fortune contest which changes her life.

Clara Gordon Bow was born on July 29th, 1905 in Brooklyn, New York to Robert and Sarah Bow.

Now that line alone sounds like sweet, not so much.

She was a very unwanted child, if I may say so. Her mother's first words in fact after she was born were take her away, I don't want her.

Robert and Sarah were grindingly poor, painfully poor, and not like poor struggling to survive.

Let's get out of this. Poor, just existing, until they could die, kind of.

The tenement apartments of Brooklyn during this turn of the century were, how shall I say, overcrowded, dreary hopeless places.

Each floor, which could have hundreds of people on it, one toilet, nobody had a bathroom.

Most apartments, including theirs, were just one big room. Nobody had hot water.

And the heat was certainly not central. It was a wood-burning stove in the middle of the room that had to do double duty of cooking and heating.

It was not good.

Well, and then these things were designed with an air shaft in the middle that was theoretically supposed to provide light to every apartment.

But instead, people threw their trash in there. So imagine living on the bottom, say, three, four floors.

After a while, the only thing that came through was not delightful sunshine, but was a horrible reek that never went away.

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