ALL THE THINGS WE WERE

Louise Tanner's ""scrapbook of the people, politics and popular culture in the tragi-comic years between the Crash and Pearl Harbor"" takes up where Caroline Bird's The Invisible Scar left off, filling in a canvas of faces as distinctive as a Hirschfeld cartoon. Her tour of the Thirties is more social comment than content. In Funnyland, formulae ruled supreme and only Skeezix grew up to go to war; the movies remained bland, and father repaired to them from the social significance at home. On radio, Benny and Allen feuded, Amos 'n' Andy were the most popular men around. In music, there were Rudy and Russ and Bing, Leadbelly, Duke and Cole; sports fans rooted for Joe and ""Babe"" and the Yankees. Brenda Frazier and Veronica Lake were in fashion. America took to wheels in Tin Lizzies and Packards. Artists and writers--Picasso, Dorothy Thompson--were politically engaged. This author (Mrs. Patrick Dennis) writes some big little vignettes (the 1932 Olympics, Dorothy and Red) and gets in some quick footwork on such topics as the Ford Sociology Department and the Readers' Digest ""condensation"" that ran longer than the ""original"" from which it had been ""cut."" She closes with a deja view of Bob Dylan--""The world he is against is the world of the 30's."" A spirited March of Time on the road to nostalgia.