Darwination Scans

The Standard, April 1904 / Stage-Door Johnny and the Appeal of Broadway

2012-01-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

The Standard 554 (1900-04.Standard Press)(D&M)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Breaking out of the box?

Today I offer an interesting publication I don't really know too much about (like that's something new), a stage/theater/vaudeville/society magazine called The Standard that merged with what was apparently a similar magazine in Vanity Fair (completely separate, I gather, from the publication that continues to this day by the same name). Today, we might not recognize these magazines as gentleman's magazines, and, indeed, there probably was a wider readership, but the wall to wall pictures of girls says otherwise. Over a century later, our modes of entertainment are very different. This was the age of the the stage - the theater, music halls, vaudeville, and other dramatic entertainments flourished in big cities, and the magazines regarding this night life stepped out of the normal bounds of propriety. Before the explosion of humor, artists models, flapper mags and girlie pulps in the 20s, some of the first magazines to make a habit of putting girls on display, relishing in risque innuendo and stretching the public tolerance for a bit of exposed flesh were the theater and early movie magazines of the previous decades.

Starlets and stage girls sold movie tickets, and they sold magazines, too. The sin centers of Broadway and Hollywood paraded their lovelies across the pages of many publications in a reciprocal arrangement that gave free advertising to entertainment moguls and free models to the publisher. I'll write more about the Hollywood connection and movie magazines later on in this series, but for now I want to do a couple of posts on Broadway-centric publications. Broadway would be immortalized in the late 20s and 30s in a number of girlie pulp titles including Broadway Nights, Gay Broadway, Broadway Follies, and Broadway Night LifeBroadway Night Life, along with New York Nights and Cabaret Stories, a testament to the sex appeal of New York night life. Certainly location is not all that is evoked by these titles but also a wider relationship between men on the town and the girls who entertained them. The chorus girl had a tight grip on the imagination of the American male. Francis Smilby writing in Stolen Sweets about the birth of LVP writes on the subject of the "stage door johnny" in France:

The stage door of the theater was, certainly from the eighteenth century at least, a place where gentlemen of taste, refinement and money could meet pretty girls who, though not social equals, had the advantage of possessing virtue that was indirectly purchasable without being chalked up in the brutal economic terms of the whore; girls with whom some semblance of a relationship could be enjoyed.

During late Victorian times, a prosperous leisured class had time and money on its hands. The entertainment industry, the theater and music hall, thrived, and so did the stage-door johnny. Wives appeared quite happy to be left in sexual peace, and to endure, or indeed accept, there husbands' extramarital affairs. Provided, that is, that they were of an approved social level. A love affair with an equal might rate as infidelity, where as a mere affaire with an inferior - an actress or showgirl - did not endanger the social status of the wife.

Similar arrangements took place in America, too, no doubt. But let's get to some bits from this April 1904 issue of The Standard. The Standard was published simultaneously in New York and London, and the Masthead lists some circulation figures:

Scrollable Image of the entire page

Also on the first page, Dottie Goodyear, stage actress, shows some leg, anything above the ankle was prone to raise some eyebrows:

One characteristic of The Standard is at times artful experimentation with photography, superimposing images on backgrounds is one of the more common techniques, but there is also neat tricks with combining figures and objects of different scale.

Prancing about The Bowery:

Scrollable Image

The centerfold uses a similar technique but uses dozens of figures. I imagine putting all these photos together took some doing and skill.

Scrollable Image

This photo stands out in the issue for inventiveness with photographic trickery:

Scrollable Image

The most common theme among the photographs in the The Standard seems to be chorus girls at play. Just imagine what those girls get up to with no gentlemen around:

Scrollable Image

Spanked for flirting with the manager of the company?! Oh my...

Scrollable Image

Wash day. Wet t-Shirt contest!!!! Erm...

Scrollable Image

A variety of entertainment.

Scrollable Image. There's a photo of Burr McIntosh on the scrollable image. Sometime I'll do a post on his Burr McIntosh Monthly, a very neat magazine that ran from 1903-1910.

Beyond its place as a proto-girlie magazine, The Standard is of interest as stage History. Here's Ethel Barrymore of the famed Barrymore clan as a young woman:

Or here's an actress I've never heard of, I'm assuming from Vaudeville, Josie Sadler, apparently a physical comedienne:

Scrollable Image

And if,after reading the publication, you shake your head that I'd call it a girlie magazine (with wall to wall photos of ladies, you'll surely come to the same conclusion), I offer up the ad page as evidence of the readership. I'll clip a few sections out then post a scrollable image with even more.

Cures for STDs and Impotency

I assume this is an abortifacient. The ad pages of the girlie pulps would become one of the few early outlets for women's birth control products. I'll write a little bit about Margaret Sanger's purported involvement with magazines and magazine distributors in the 20s later on in this series on the birth of the girlie pulp.

Whoa, a 110 year old penis pump. Can't say I've run across an ad for such a device in such an old publication before.

A marketing ploy for a new magazine. Every subscription comes with a bottle of whiskey. A home life mag at that, heh heh.

And here is the scrollable image for the whole page of advertisements.

A very foreign girlie mag to the modern reader perhaps, but the little ads in the back haven't changed so much, eh?

Next time here on D&M scans (big thanks to McCoy for the excellent edit on today's issue!), another issue of The Standard from shortly hereafter when the magazine goes to a weekly format as well a 1907 incarnation of the publication after it has merged with Vanity Fair.

The Standard in Gay Paree, April 1901

2012-01-13T09:29:00.000-08:00

The Standard Quarterly v04n23 In Gay Paree (1901-04) (Darwination)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Cover artist unknown. I love the design and the red inks. Who wouldn't want to take a peek at what's inside?

I have a few issues to share and discuss next post of a turn-of-the-century proto-girlie magazine, the weekly issued The Standard, but I thought I'd transition from the last scan of a French photo album first to an American album, also of French girls, a quarterly edition of The Standard. This edition takes a look at fashions and the girls of Paris, as the whole world looked to France as a beacon of fashion and modernity. Unlike the weekly edition, the quarterly edition is bound on a coverstock featuring colored ink and is composed almost entirely of pictures and captions. Some of the girls within have a unique beauty of peculiar character, I doubt you'd find them in the fashion magazines of today. Today, it's hard to recognize the racy aspects of a magazine like this, but there is much leg and bare shoulders on display in an era that seemingly frowned on such display.

The edition opens with a neat art nouveau illustration of a series of postcards, "The Five Senses," and an ode to the girls of Bohemian Paris. A photograph of Mlle. Mendes accompanies, showing the reader a little leg.

Scrollable Image

"A group of group of shoulders, lines, and s-curves"

Scrollable Image

Mme. Sinclair, opera singer, a bit of dirt thrown in the corner regarding a Captain Le Fevre, apparently disinherited in some type of scandal. I like curves as much as the next guy, but the curves of the corsets in here can be downright strange.

Scrollable Image

Another crazy corset, a miss Meaty Fleuron, implied to be a burlesque artist. I see some web mentions of her as an actress. That's one crazy hat for sure.

Scrollable Image

The centerfold. Letuce, the artists' model poses eating grapes, playing flute, sleeping by the edge of a brook.

Scrollable Image

Burlesque and vaudeville stars. The Darling Sisters, Jermonde, Mme. Devieux, Cleo De Merode, Yven Chatalet - "one of the daring exponents of the extreme school of burlesque." I'm not sure what the teachings of that school are, but I think I'm supposed to be curious...

Scrollable Image

Nice blue inks from the inside back cover.

Scrollable Image

Ciriac, Burlesque Star, eats a plate of oysters

Scrollable Image

There are many more images within. How different were the fashions of 110 years ago.

Next time, I'll take a look at the weekly edition of The Standard and see what those American girls are up to at the dawn of the century.

Le Panorama, Summer 1899

2012-01-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

So I've started my series on the origins of the girlie pulp with La Vie Parisienne and plan a number short posts on how the magazine influenced the magazine soup of the 1920s that birthed them. First, however, I want to take a look at a few earlier publications that might shed some light on some previous evolution of the girlie magazine. The cover and illustration art from La Vie Parisienne had great influence on the girlie pulps, but there were other influences from France as well, particularly in the photographic vein.

Today, I'm posting a periodical French photo album from Summer of 1899. In the back of the pulps for years, you could find on offer from peddlers "French Photos", "French Postcards," French Album", as code for pictures of naked women. Judging from the use of multiple languages throughout, this publication appears to have also been distributed well-outside of France, and I imagine it is representative of other magazines like it.

A strange album, the photos are much doctored, airbrushing of the naughty bits is as odd as the insertion of models into backgrounds. Next time, I'll post some American publications from the same period that are also experimenting with photographic trickery. The pink cover stock and rainbow tinted inks are pretty cool. Thanks to McCoy for the edit!

The inside front cover/indicia page:

Scrollable Image

Ladies at the beach...

Scrollable Image

Err, isn't that the girl from the middle of the previous picture also in this one, in the same pose?

Scrollable Image

You quickly realize looking through the photos that something isn't quite right with the perspective and the figures:

Scrollable Image

Any naughty bits on the figures is airbrushed out:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

This one looks like it has two different photographic background sort of slapped together, look at the treeline in the background.

Scrollable Image

I like the centerfold, with the flowers around the border:

Scrollable Image

Little bits of grass cover the nipples of this lass. Hey, isn't sunbathing with your goods on display in front of the field hands a bit provocative?!?!

Scrollable Image

Love the red ink.

Scrollable Image

The back cover in cool rainbow ink with advertisements and magazine credits.

Scrollable Image

Next time, a look at some proto-girlie magazines from this same period in America that also experimented with photography and veered from fashion/theater news into naughtier territories.

La Vie Parisienne / Francis Smilby's Stolen Sweets

2012-01-09T00:25:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

The first issue of La Vie Parisienne I ever saw. Dated 1917-08-25, I found this beauty tucked away in a little booth in an antique mall in Lawrence, KS. A playful but thoughtful lass looks longingly to the sea. Where's her man? Gone to war? Set to sail? Hurry home, handsome, youthful love is fleeting. I don't have a full scan for this issue (my copy is missing pages), but McCoy and I have prepared a few issues which I'll be posting links to full scans for later in the post. I've done some work killing the fold where someone has folded this issue in half but I haven't done much work removing the bleed. Still - a gorgeous image.

I begin my series on the origin of the girlie pulp with La Vie Parisienne, a magazine that predated and influenced magazines in many countries in the Americas and Europe. Dian Hansen's multi-volume work from Taschen, History of Men's Magazines, opens Volume 1 with a chapter titled, "Paris 1900-1938: Cradle of Print Erotica" and the claim is not overblown. Of course, there were naughty pictures and collections of erotic art before La Vie Parisienne, but most often these publications were very expensive and the playthings of the rich or as brief as a postcard when it came to the taste and affordability for the other classes and weren't periodical in nature.

The little I've read about La Vie Parisienne comes from Francis Smilby's Stolen Sweets, to my knowledge the first book written containing much information about the girlie pulps and vintage pin-up art. Smilby is probably best-remembered for his long career as a cartoonist for the likes of Playboy and Punch and had a long and successful career in illustration, advertising, and graphic design, but he also was an archivist of the blues and recorded musicians like Otis Spann and Memphis Slim when they visited the UK during the blues revival of the late 50s and 60s. We pin-up aficionados thank him greatly for Stolen Sweets, a book that has very much influenced lovers of girlie art and spurred much further investigation. Jack Raglin posted his remembrances of Smilby in a series of posts on his blog starting here, and Douglas Ellis mentions Stolen Sweets as the first, essential book on the subject in his Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps and avoids where possible printing the same covers (I'm sure I'll be mentioning Ellis' book later in this blog series on the girlies).

Stolen Sweets is sadly out-of-print, but do find a copy if you can. Smilby focuses a narrow selection of artists (Enoch Bolles in particular) and does not offer too much information regarding specific girlie pulp titles, but his taste is exquisitely excellent, and he celebrates the vintage pin-up with a well-written aesthetic appreciation in addition to fantastic full-page reproductions of French magazine and classic girlie pulp (and movie mag) covers. In particular, I admire his enumeration of the qualities of the vintage pin-up, and I'm going to him at length here. Of the ladies painted on the covers of these magazines, Smilby writes of the pin-up girl in his preface, contrasting her with her photographed counterpart:

How very different are the girls of the artists. These are as fresh, as lively and lovely as the day they were painted. For ironically, the artists was capable of producing a far more vital, more living image than the camera. And it is these qualities, as epitomized by these girls, that make many of their photographic descendants on the covers of today look lifeless and dull.

As a professional artist myself, I have not only an affection for these covers but also a great admiration for the unsung and often unknown artists who created them. Indeed, everything in this book comes from my personal collection, assembled over many years.

The girls to be found on the inside pages of these magazines, whether in illustrations or cartoons, generally exist within a story context. But the girls on the covers have the special quality of a pinup. They exist in their own right, and without relationship to others. Their only communication is with the reader, and it is this direct and intimate involvement that is the basis of their appeal.

There is much to be enjoyed in these covers - elegance, gaiety and wit, happiness and nostalgia, sex appeal and fun. And maybe there's something to be learned as well. Perhaps we should try to infuse a little of these very human attributes into some of the more clinical attitudes toward sex so often found in the world of today. Dehumanizing attitudes that can reduce the magic of femininity to mere physical and anatomical terms. Whereas these charming girls of not-so-long ago remain as feminine, as entrancing as ever - as fresh as the day they came of the drawing board.

Smilby describes so well the magic of the pin-up artist.

He begins the book with a discussion of the French magazines, and I believe his English perspective is particularly suited to the task. First off, it can be hard here in America to find the earlier French magazines like La Vie Parisienne, Le Sourire, and Paris Plaisirs, secondly, Smilby has a European insight into the French culture (and language) that we vulgar, err puritanical, err whatever, Americans (I speak for myself, at least) are lacking, and, indeed, perhaps no other country could have produced such a unique magazine. Love affairs and all matters having to do with love have always been a French concern. Smilby writes, France was the first lady in the world of love, and over the centuries had so polished and perfected the art of love that it seems difficult to believe that it wasn't a French invention. Flirtation for women was a fin art, indeed almost a way fo life, and for the men, galanterie was more than a mere code of manners. The magazine La Vie Parisienne was to become the leading reflection of this national love affair with love."

La Vie Parisienne began on January 4, 1863, as a weekly magazine covering most facets of high society from art to politics. The magazines slogan spoke to its many contents "Moeurs Elegantes, Choses du Jour, Fantaisies, Voyages, Theatres, Musique, Modes" (Elegant Customs, Current Affairs, Imaginative Pieces, Travel, Theater, Music, Fashion). By the late 1870s, illustrations began to appear displaying the more frivolous and slightly naughty aspects of the Le Moulin Rouge and the music hall. As the 80s progressed more and more stories and features appeared showing the more intimate details of the mode and manners of the various social classes in their sometimes secret lives, and this trend would continue into the new century along with the addition of advertisements for luxury items and sometimes risque products for the upper class. And class attitudes and mores had so much to do with how different national audiences suppressed or embraced sex, sexiness, extra-marital sex, and the magazines that sold such. Smilby writes:

The stage door of the theater was, certainly from the eighteenth century at least, a place where gentlemen of taste, refinement, and money could meet pretty girls who, though not social equals, had the advantage of possessing virtue that was indirectly purchasable without being chalked up in the brutal economic terms of the whore; girls with whom some semblance of a relationship could be enjoyed.

During the late Victorian times, a prosperous leisured class had time and money on its hands. The entertainment industry, the theater and music hall, thrived, and so did the stage-door johnny. Wives appeared quite happy to be left in sexual peace, and to endure, or indeed accept, their husbands' extramarital affairs. Provided, that is, that they were of an approved social level. A love affair with an equal might rate as infidelity, whereas a mere affaire with an inferior - an actress or show girl - did not endanger the social status of the wife.

It was the large, libertine class of France that could afford and appreciate La Vie Parisienne. The advertisements, stories, and illustrations all point to a level of sexual liberation amongst both French women and men out of place in other countries. The large English middle class has always had a tendency towards censorship and suppressing the appetites and vulgarities of the upper and lower classes, and the naughty magazines in America did not bloom until the 1920s after various genres of magazines were able to push the boundaries of mainstream or at least side-street acceptability for risque content.

Smilby writes of LVP:

But it cannot be too strongly emphasized that it was no commonplace periodical. Indeed it was of the very highest quality, written for, and read by, the upper and moneyed classes. This was splendidly demonstrated by a full-page advertisement that appeared in 1907. Headed "Sovereigns with Subscriptions to La Vie Parisienne," it illustrated no less than eight European monarchs who were all subscribers, including Czar Nicholas of Russia and, boldly centered, His Majesty King Edward VII of England. Its stories were for elegant society, its fashion articles for women of taste and weath. Never did its drawing feature the petite bourgeoisie...La Vie Parisienne was strictly for "upstairs," and it was indisputably the leader, the forerunner, of a whole world of publications that dealt with what nowadays we call "sex," and which the French, with far more flair and feeling, simly called l'amour. It was the traditional association of France with l'amour, in the arts as well as in social life, that combined with this high social level of permissiveness and the new twentieth-century creative impetus to make Paris the center of the world of sex - the dream city that filled the nights of lonely men the world over: the mecca of those who dreamed of women, love, and beauty.

By World War I, La Vie Parisienne hit its stride, and the years from the war up to the 30s were the heyday of the magazine. When American soldiers went to Europe to fight, they found there a magazine the likes of which they'd never seen before which would absolutely influence their magazine ventures upon returning.
Indeed, many of the covers of the day spoke directly to the American in gratitude. Two cover images I've gathered from eBay from the war. The first is by Georges Léonnec, himself a veteran of WWI and quite the gifted artist for the February 9th cover in 1918:

And another small eBay image for the May 19, 1917, issue (I can't make out the artist):

There is a way-cool site here with more images from wartime issues as part of larger project on French magazines from the war in general. Click around, and you will find samples of many French magazines, a very cool project and a neat avenue for learning about The Great War.

Before I get on to the issues I'm sharing, let me give a final word from Smilby on the real appeal of the magazine, the art, "In a land where women and love were worshiped as almost never before, La Vie bred and developed a group of very gifted artists - Léonnec, Barbier, Hérouard, René Vincent, Kuhn-Regnier, Maurice Milliére, Vallée, Brunner, Pavis, Vald'Es - whose understanding of the very essence of femininity, whether mental or physical was unsurpassed. They produced work whose excellence in terms of draftsmanship, observation, imagination, and understanding made La Vie Parisienne of the period unequaled of its kind, and possibly never to be repeated." And while I admit I do sometimes find LVP high-falutin' and stubbornly understand next to zero of the French language, the art in the magazine is often jaw-dropping, ranging from art noveau to art deco to more classical modes, so onto a display of the art and enough of the jabberjaw.

All three full issues I'm sharing tonight were actually labelled as "from the Smilby collection" when I got them from England from eBay. They seemed to be apart from any larger collection. I do hope that all the lovelies he collected during his life have found a safe home. On to the scans!

La Vie Parisienne 1921-04-16 (Darwin-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Whoa, mama. Cover by Georges Pavis. These French girls can be more than a little intimidating. They seem to be in charge most of the time, heaven forbid. Centaurs, fauns, fairies and other woodland beasts appear often in the pages of LVP, giving the magazine an A Midsummer Night's Dream quality.

more images from the issue:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

I better stick a page of advertisements in here while I'm at it. The nature of a magazine's advertisements reveals much about who is reading and with what intent.

Scrollable Image

La Vie Parisienne 1922-06-17 (D&M). Merci to McCoy for the edit work!

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

She takes such care of her pitiful piggy. I don't think that is a look of contempt... I've seen a few pig covers on LVP - it almost makes you feel ashamed for being a man, oink, oink.

Scrollable Image

the centerfold

Scrollable Image

The little spot illustrations that pepper the magazine are great, directly influential on the girlie pulps.

by Henry Gerbault

Scrollable Image

La Vie Parisienne 1929-09-07 (D&M). Thanks again to monsieur McCoy for the artful edit.

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Cover by Léonnec. Beware the goat. The devil often appears on the magazine's covers. Always hanging around, always up to something naughty, stirring from the nether regions.

Ain't sayin she's a gold digger,

Scrollable Image

the centerfold, the beach is always popular in the 20s issues

Scrollable Image

Don Juan at it again, illustrated fiction.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

from the inside back cover, I like to collect images of monkeys and apes with girls //

Scrollable Image

And to finish my post tonight, here is a gallery of some more covers and art from the magazine. The first three are from Stolen Sweets. I sure would like to see the book come back into print. The prices of a used copy seem to indicate there is an audience. Perhaps, at least, there is a way to do a digital version.

December 5, 1925 - Léonnec, "Innocence." Smilby's caption goes "The curious blend of innocence and voluptuous debauchery implicit in [the] painting should perhaps be viewed in relation to the contemporary cult of some smart-set partygoers for opium. In spite of its title, an extraordinarily sensuous and powerfully erotic cover."

Scrollable Image

I wonder whether the above cover influenced one of my favorite Weird Tales covers from the enormously talented Margaret Brundage, from the October 1934 issue, image gathered from Heritage Auctions:

Scrollable Image

A couple of butterfly covers. I collect covers with the butterfly theme (my wife was once a Lepidopterist), sometime I'll have to do a butterfly-themed post.

June 17, 1933 - Leo Fontan

Scrollable Image

September 10, 1932 - Umberto Brunelleschi

Scrollable Image

Also from Stolen Sweets, some 1892 interior illustration. I'd like to find some of the earlier issues - or maybe some collector will start scanning them ;D

Scrollable Image

A Pavis predecessor to the girl on the moon I posted last time from Bedtime Stories, image from here.

To go with the goat cover from the 1929 issue, some devilish images:

January 9, 1926 - Léonnec

Not quite a devil. Curious with the question marks. This last bunch are some nice images from eBay. Somebody was selling framed cut out covers. There's a lot of that for this magazine because people frame covers and cut out the color pages for prints. I hate to see magazine butchers at work, but I think lots of the art from this title has at least been saved that way. I try not to get too mad at the people who cut magazines up, grr. La Vie Parisienne 1919-11-01 cover Herourd

A ghost of a man. La Vie Parisienne 1917-02-10 cover Leonnec

This reminded me of the cover I opened with. La Vie Parisienne date unknown Herourd

Rainbow power - La Vie Parisienne 1923-04-14 cover Fontan

Cupid is a constant presence on the LVP covers, he's everywhere, striking up trouble per usual. She looks none too impressed. La Vie Parisienne 1921-07-16 cover Herourd

Damn Cupid. La Vie Parisienne 1924-11-29 Herourd

This bird talks to animals, I tells ya

And to boot, here's a very nice collection of Chéri Hérouard art that I stumbled upon while looking about for this post, a collection of images made during the creation of a wiki for him.

Next time, some follow-up on La Vie Parisienne and Paris' impact on American magazines. La Vie Parisienne was copied, pilfered, slandered, and translated by decades of American publishers. French becomes synonymous with dirty, Parisifying pulp and girlie mag titles for decades to come. French photos, you know the kind.

Happy New Year! / The Girlie Pulp Covers of HJ Ward

2012-01-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

At Jack Raglin's blog on Enoch Bolles, he's posted a Bolles' girl dancing on the tabletops for New Year's, so I thought I'd post a New Year's cover of my own, surely one of the strangest girlie pulp covers in my collection.

Back when I posted the Fall 1937 issue of Tattle Tales, I mentioned H.J. Ward's girlie pulp work included some strange paintings, and this is a prime example. As the kids say, WTF. New Year's Chicken? His tenure on this particular Donnenfeld Magazine produced a number of odd compositions.

This November 1936 issue sold on eBay recently for over two hundred bucks. I've seen it sell like that a couple of times. I'll find an affordable copy one day, hrm:

I think it's more cute than weird, but for some reason I don't find pin-ups with food all that appetizing. Definitely a classic.

Hot Dog, anyone?? August 1937 from eBay auction:

Err...

Scrollable Image

I shared this strange February 1937 cover from my collection at a yahoo group because of its bizarre nature, and somebody pointed out the fact that it might have to do with the idea that big feet mean big lovin, oh my.

Since that 2009 Tattle Tales post, a new and very well done book has come out on Ward from David Saunders, and I recommend it to fans of his work. It's the same format as his book on his dad, artist Norm Saunders, and you can get it here. David keeps up the very helpful index, The Field Guide to American Pulp Artists here.

One of Ward's oft-noted paintings, Evil Flame, sold recently on Heritage Auctions for a whopping $143,000. Robert Lesser writes about this one in his book Pulp Art.

Scrollable Image

I do think it is good but prefer Ward's girlies from the covers of Bedtime Stories. Ward's excellent but often disturbing work for the Spicy line from Culture/Trojan with their girls in terror stands in stark contrast to the pin-up girls from the smoosh pulps who are in no terror whatsoever. A woman in terror is not consistent with inviting and warm nature of the pin-up girl, for this reason (along with story genre differences) I always bristle that the Culture/Trojan spicy line sometimes gets considered alongside the girlie pulps. But I quibble...

My favorite covers by Ward for the girlies were for Bedtime Stories. These girls are lush and almost glow with innocent sexiness. This first cover comes from my fellow pulp scanner Cimmerian's collection, August 1936, fantastic:

Scrollable Image

The October 1937 cover is my favorite. I love the colors and the smile on this smoking babe (from an eBay auction):

The colors on the March 1937 issue are great too:

or March 1936:

or February 1937:

Lovely girls from the great H.J. Ward.

Bedtime Stories can be a bit pricier than most of the other girlie pulp titles, so I don't manage to get one very often. Here's one I'm dying to find, a most wanted pulp, the February 1936 issue. I can't peg the artist, but I love it.

And I better not leave today without sharing a cover to cover scan!! An issue of Bedtime Stories so you all can investigate a full issue, August 1935. McCoy handled the editing work on the issue, so big thanks to him. Earl Bergey meets the pink elephants, a hung-over pinup?!?

Bedtime Stories v03n10 (1935-08.Detinuer)(D&M).cbr

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Too much of that New Year's champagne, no doubt. I've got a pal that thinks hungover girls are sexy. I dunno about that, but this blonde is a cutie.

contents and samples from the issue!

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And lastly, a Bergey girl from my collection, January 1935, bottoms up and Happy New Year!

Scrollable Image

For next time, I've just re-read Francis Smilby's Stolens as I've gathered material on La Vie Parisienne. I'm finally ready to start in on a series of posts on the birth of the girlie pulp....

Postscript!!! Oh yeah, I wanted to share along with the cover I led off with today what I think this is a UK edition. Notice the differences between the covers, the details on the face. This one is probably another pressing by UK publisher pirateers. Or perhaps Donnenfeld sold coverless, returned issues overseas. Of course, he reprinted his own pulps too, so it is hard to know and this could be his own reprinting. I'll do a post sometime on UK pirate editions. The middle class there managed to suppress naughty publications quite handily, so, of course, US editions were much in demand...

Scrollable Image

The TOC in the original
the TOC in the reprint, curious.

Dare, June 1954 / Inside, August 1955 / TV Life, April 1954

2011-11-24T19:14:00.000-08:00

*Quick Note - After becoming increasingly frustrated by image compression and degradation in older .jpegs with my image host, I'm trying a new one for this post as an experiment to see how I like it. I'm looking into the best way to host images. I have over 30,000 images in my account and like the uploader at Tinypic and how the "scrollable images" are big and no frills, but the enormous amount of jpeg artifacting that seems to appear after an image has been on their server for even a short bit drives me crazy*

After the last couple of long-winded posts, I thought I'd take a bit of my Thanksgiving Day respite and post a trio of pocket magazines that I've scanned very recently that McCoy has performed his edit magic on. I'm a little shocked to look back through my posts here on my blog and to find only a single pocket mag, the iconic one-shot, Teen-Age Gangsters from Hillman. Though the lifespan of this variety of magazine was short, say approximately the mid-50s, there were a great number of titles and approaches. Just about any genre of magazine might be found in one iteration or another amongst these mini-mags (even smaller than digests), and I am constantly discovering new titles. In my Teen-Age Gangsters post, I guessed that comic publishers experimented with these magazines when the comic-market imploded following a mainstream attack on comics in the early 50s (if you are unfamiliar, I highly recommend David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America). Indeed, at least two producers of comics, Hillman Publications and Martin Goodman's Magazine Enterprises began to diversify - Hillman also moving into pulp paperbacks and Martin Goodman also moving towards sweat magazines as well as a number of other full-sized magazines in the mid-50s. It's hard to tell from the publisher names given on the indicia pages on many of these magazines exactly which publisher owned them (no doubt intentional in many cases), but I would guess that other names in comics tried their hands as well (Ace? Dell?).

However, other, more-mainstream publishers originated the boom in these little magazines, namely Cowles Magazines, Inc. publisher of Look. Theodore Peterson in his Magazines in the Twentieth Century gives the only information I've ever seen on this type of magazine, calling them "super digests" and with his typical but somewhat endearing tendency to dismiss the riff-raff of the magazine world writes that the pockets "carried the conciseness of the news magazines almost to the point of absurdity, and they borrowed its brightness of style, its preoccupation with personalities. They exploited the appeal of the picture magazines. They packaged their contents in a publication so small it scarcely covered a man's hand. Their fad as a type of magazine of any importance was correspondingly short; it lasted less than a decade." Gardner Cowles, Jr., who thought Americans needed a stashable and concise way to get the news put the most successful of the pocket magazines, Quick, on sale in nine test cities. The first issue used a single sentence to cover most news items, and the longest story consisted of only six sentences. It was an instant hit. Circulation was 200,000 by the seventh issue, 850,000 a year later, and was at 1,300,000 in 1953 when Cowles got rid of the magazine (which is about the time some of its seedier imitators picked up the ball). Advertisers had to make special ads for such a small magazine, and a distinct dearth of advertising was probably part of the appeal even if it did not translate into profits for the publishers. Newsweek attempted to duplicate the circulation success of Quick with People Today but sold it to Hillman only 8 months later. That magazine had a peak circulation of 500,000 which isn't too shabby at all. Still, there must have been a fad aspect in the popularity of these magazines that, matched with their lack of ad revenue and high production costs (which might not have been so bad for some of the outfits that seem to have published a number of these titles at once), spelled a short life span. Noting that many of the titles later on edged into increasingly sleazier content, I have to wonder if the pocket mags didn't earn themselves community disdain. Of course, I readily admit, their tendency towards scandal and rapid-fire change of subject matter is what I find endearing about the pockets. They're great fun and antidote (as so many magazines of the day are) to Norman Rockwell type preconceptions of life in the decorous and demure 50s.

Admittedly, I developed this preconception on sick days home from school in front of the TV, watching 50s sitcoms in syndication. I might very well be of the last generation with high exposure to Leave it to Beaver, My Three Sons, The Andy Griffith Show, etc., as I came of age without cable. Three channels along with the local UHF stations are what we had to choose from before cable, and daytime fare on sick days was limited to soaps, game shows, and reruns. Really, some of those old shows seem pretty great to me now (and probably more subversive than I realized at the time). How completely different TV watching is today with 200+ cable stations and TVs and computer screens all over the average house from the way it was when there was just a few channels and a single TV in the living room. Whether TV programming deserves to rate highly as a shared cultural experience or no, Americans used to spend much more of their time watching the same programs. Which I suppose gives me a segue to one of tonight's mags, TV Life. I'll try and not interject too much more here and just get up some samples and maybe a full article here or there. They are so much fun and well worth a download. McCoy's two page edit style is a great presentation, so thanks to him for his work.

TV Life v01n06 (1954-04.Crest)(D&M)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Rosemary Clooney is the cover girl for the issue.

TV Life reminds me a lot of TV People, and as you might expect considering the popularity and novelty of the medium, the public was very interested in TV personalities at the time. Some of those personalities faded quickly out of the limelight and others hold a special place in the hearts of Americans even all these years later.

Contents. Ricky and Lucy eating watermelon.

Scrollable Image

The article on Dorothy Dandridge which focuses on her racy lyrics. This same year, she would become the first black woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for best actress for Carmen Jones.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Rosemary Clooney

Scrollable Image

Sid Caesar

Scrollable Image

Jack Webb

Scrollable Image

Lucy and Desi's latest movie

Scrollable Image

Inside v01n08 (1955-08.Dodshaw)(D&M). Mario Lanza on the cover, lip-synching scandal pre-Milli Vanilli.

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Venturing into less-wholesome material here, Inside was a mini-Confidential. Publisher Dodshaw had a number of other entertainment-themed pocket mags including Fame, Pose!, Pulse, Star, and maybe others.

contents

Scrollable Image

Leno-Conan is far from the first lTV host feud. Godfrey vs. Sullivan.

Scrollable Image

Concerns regarding Tony Anastasia's control of the NY waterfront, key in cold war operations.

Scrollable Image

Elia Kazan, unAmerican? I've got a copy of Baby Doll I keep meaning to watch.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Cold medicine = drug-crazed teens?! Fear of juvenile delinquents features prominently in the pocket mags. A generation "pampered" according to their parents' standards. A generation that hadn't been forged in unity by WWII. And they listen to that devil music!!! Robotrippin? Speed? What's this syringe got to do with it?! o.O

Scrollable Image

This lot looks like trouble.

Scrollable Image

Even Bing's boy is up to no good!

Scrollable Image

Lastly, Dare v01n14 (1954-06.Fiction)(D&M), Sex and the atom bomb, America's got the big one, baby. Is this hysteria, or am I just getting turned on - I just can't tell.

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Dare is one of my favorites, a companion to He, always pushing the crazy up to 11. Dangers are everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

Contents

Scrollable Image

C-Bomb, because, you know, the A-Bomb isn't scary enough.

Scrollable Image

And if the nukes don't get you, you'll grow old enough that they replace your parts with animal organs.

Scrollable Image

More J.D.s, violence in the streets!!!!!!! Whatsamatta with kids these days...

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Love the girls' hairdos.

Scrollable Image

Dare doesn't shrink from showing graphic violence. A cop killer gets his.

Scrollable Image

Remember, crime is all around you. Pickpockets! I've always marveled at descriptions of the deftness of old-time pickpockets. The watch bit is too much. No way do I believe that somebody could snag the watch. The newspaper bit reminds me of the excellent Sam Fuller/Richard Widmark flick Pickup on South Street. Don't be a mark for dips!

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And crazy people. They're everywhere. You're neighbor might be an axe murderer. Just beneath the surface - bloody fucking murder, man.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Even the nice looking man in a bow tie might just slit your throat.

Scrollable Image

Next issue, your neighbor is a red spy. It's a dangerous world out there. Learn Karate now.

Scrollable Image

You can find many more pocket magazines in here. I try and keep that folder updated whenever I come across a new scan. Thanks to everyone that scans them, especially McCoy who did most of the scans in that folder.

Next time - ze women of La Vie Parisienne..

Collier's Illustrated Weekly May 10, 1902/Philippine-American War

2011-11-21T20:52:00.000-08:00

A political cartoon regarding the Philippines from the ever-brilliant Winsor McCay.

Alright, I've done my 60 minutes of cardio at the Y and eaten a delicious dinner my wife prepared with soba noodles, chicken, endamame beans, shredded carrots and some sort of orange and lemongrass vinaigrette and feel refreshed, so I'll hop back on the keyboard here and finish my train of thought.

While most of the attention and recollection of the war goes to our exploits in Cuba, the protracted struggle and the real lesson in empire was in the Philippines. While the American media focused on Cuba, American leaders were ready to fight in the Pacific when the war broke out, and I'm fairly sure that this was a large, underlying motivation in forcing Spain's hand. While there was the Teller Amendment for Cuba, no such promises were made for the Spanish holdings in the Pacific. America saw the European powers scrambling for land and influence in the East and could be left out without a port closer to the action than Hawaii.

The Filipinos were very close to having run the Spanish out by the time America arrived on the scene. The revolution began in 1896 when revolutionaries including the popular Emilio Aguinaldo began to fight the Spanish, scoring early victories. By August of 1897, the fighting looked to be going nowhere and armistice negotiations were opened between the governor-general and Aguinaldo. By December of that year, an agreement was struck where Aguinaldo was paid to leave the country, retreating to Hong Kong and asking his countrymen to lay down their arms. In April of the next year, just four months later - and the details are murky on this - Admiral Dewey communicated with Aguinaldo via American Consuls in Hong Kong that if he would take up arms once again that the U.S. would recognize Philippine independence with Spain overthrown. The U.S. consuls and Dewey would later repudiate that this was the case. On May 1st, Dewey defeated the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in a matter of hours, similar to how the fleet in Cuba went down quickly. Dewey arranged for the transport of Aguinaldo back to the Philippines, and, by June, rebel forces had captured the entire territory with the exception of the walled fortress in Intramuros within Manila and turned over 15,000 Spanish prisoners to the United States. On June 12, Aguinaldo proclaimed Philippine independence. The friendship between the Filipinos and America was greatly injured, though, when the Spanish made a deal (not knowing that the day previous on the other side of the world Spain and America had agreed to cease hostilities) to allow the Americans to take Manila in a mock battle and saving face from being defeated by islanders by specifically disallowing the guerrillas from entering the vanquished city. Wiki sez:

On August 13, with American commanders unaware that a peace protocol had been signed between Spain and the United States on the previous day, American forces captured the city of Manila from the Spanish. Governor-General Fermin Jaudenes had made a secret agreement with Dewey and General Wesley Merritt. Jaudenes specifically requested to surrender only to the Americans, not to the Filipino rebels. To save face, he proposed a mock battle with the Americans preceding the Spanish surrender; the Filipinos would not be allowed to enter the city. Dewey and Merritt agreed to this, and no one else in either camp knew about the agreement. On the eve of the mock battle, General Thomas M. Anderson telegraphed Aguinaldo, “Do not let your troops enter Manila without the permission of the American commander. On this side of the Pasig River you will be under fire”.

At the beginning of the war between Spain and America, Americans and Filipinos had been allies against Spain in all but name; now Spanish and Americans were in a partnership that excluded the Filipino insurgents. Fighting between American and Filipino troops almost broke out as the former moved in to dislodge the latter from strategic positions around Manila on the eve of the attack. Aguinaldo had been told bluntly by the Americans that his army could not participate and would be fired upon if it crossed into the city. The insurgents were infuriated at being denied triumphant entry into their own capital, but Aguinaldo bided his time. Relations continued to deteriorate, however, as it became clear to Filipinos that the Americans were in the islands to stay.

On December 18th, 1899, Spain agreed to the Treaty of Paris wherein Spain surrendered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and would be paid $20 Million for the Philippines. Many considered taking only a single port in the Philippines but McKinley feared that allowing the Spanish to retain control was unwise, even if they did not keep it, they might sell it to other European powers. On December 21st, McKinley issued to the Filipinos a Proclamation of Benevolent Assimilation (what nation could resist such a thing? LOL) that would be published in January in which America assured our "little brown brothers" that we had only their best interests at heart. Needless to say, having just cast of the yoke of one imperial power, the Filipinos were not eager to take on another. Aguinaldo rapidly issued a counter-proclamation, "My government cannot remain indifferent in view of such a violent and aggressive seizure of a portion of its territory by a nation which arrogated to itself the title of champion of oppressed nations. Thus it is that my government is disposed to open hostilities if the American troops attempt to take forcible possession of the Visayan islands. I denounce these acts before the world, in order that the conscience of mankind may pronounce its infallible verdict as to who are true oppressors of nations and the tormentors of mankind." Tensions rose.

It must be fairly noted here that ratification of the Treaty of Paris by the Senate was hotly contested. The newly-formed Anti-Imperialist league with champions like Mark Twain and Henry James bitterly opposed annexation. Senator George Frisbie Hoar said, "This Treaty will make us a vulgar, commonplace empire, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and other classes must forever obey." Andrew Carnegie was prepared to write the U.S. Treasury a check for $20 Million dollars to forget about the whole thing. Indeed, on February 4th, 1899, the treaty was two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to pass. But, that evening, the pot boiled over. American sentries encountered rogue rebel forces, and shots were fired. Though Aguinaldo looked for a cease-fire and to explain that the rebels had acted against orders, The Battle of Manila ensued on February 5th. On February 6th, the Treaty of Paris passed the Senate by only one vote. Two Senators had changed their vote in order to "support the troops" because fighting had begun.

- - - Erp..I'm going to have to pick this back up in the morning - It's time to watch The Walking Dead with the mrs. on my DVR. Brainssssss. I'm completely addicted to that show. Sigh, I never get as far with the typing as I hope to, c'est la vie, but I'll get back to it after I get the kids to school in the morning. - - -

----Well, rather, it's Monday evening, and here I go again. The best laid plans of me and mine or summat.---

So, fighting begins in earnest with the Battle of Manila. The Americans sweep through the town along a 16 mile front shocking the rebels in their fervor. The Filipinos suffered ten times the casualties as the U.S. , and, after some continued skirmishing on the outskirts, the rebels would leave Manila in disappointment that there was no popular uprising and surprised that the Americans did not retreat at night like the Spanish had. The attitude of the commanding officer for the U.S., General Elwell Stephen Otis was that, "Fighting having begun, must go on to the bitter end." A First Philippine Commission led by Jacob Schurman had been appointed to survey the Philippines and determine how to best handle our new acquisition in January, before the fighting erupted, but by the time the members arrived on the islands in March, military leadership viewed them as a hindrance to the war effort (Otis was on the commission and also Military Governor and boycotted meetings of the commission as annoyances). The New York Times wrote of this "insane attack of these people upon their liberators. It is not likely that Aguinaldo himself will exhibit much staying power, after one or two collisions the insurgent army will break up." Otis himself, even in the face of escalating conflict, quickly declared that the insurgency had been broken and that further attacks were being conducted by "isolated bands of outlaws." If all this doesn't sound awfully familiar to the present American public, you haven't been paying attention, because this is freakishly similar to what happened and is happening in Iraq to me with the American public's indignation that the Iraqis might not want us there or with Rumsfeld's statements on the staying power of the insurgency. But I interject. The First Philippine Commission recommended the establishment of a duly elected civilian bicameral legislature, free schools, improvement of infrastructure and other modernization of the islands. The U.S. found itself dealing with different groups from different parts of the islands with varying attitudes towards the Americans, a fractured populace. McKinley wanted peace through "kindness and conciliation" but in the first two months of the war America suffered 500 casualties, and by August of 1899 Otis asked McKinley to quadruple the number of troops on the ground. In this madness, the First Philippine Commission concluded that "the United States cannot withdraw. ... We are there and duty binds us to remain. The Filipinos are wholly unprepared for independence ... there being no Philippine nation, but only a collection of different peoples." The official report states:

Should our power by any fatality be withdrawn, the commission believe that the government of the Philippines would speedily lapse into anarchy, which would excuse, if it did not necessitate, the intervention of other powers and the eventual division of the islands among them. Only through American occupation, therefore, is the idea of a free, self-governing, and united Philippine commonwealth at all conceivable. And the indispensable need from the Filipino point of view of maintaining American sovereignty over the archipelago is recognized by all intelligent Filipinos and even by those insurgents who desire an American protectorate. The latter, it is true, would take the revenues and leave us the responsibilities. Nevertheless, they recognize the indubitable fact that the Filipinos cannot stand alone. Thus the welfare of the Filipinos coincides with the dictates of national honour in forbidding our abandonment of the archipelago. We cannot from any point of view escape the responsibilities of government which our sovereignty entails; and the commission is strongly persuaded that the performance of our national duty will prove the greatest blessing to the peoples of the Philippine Islands.

The conquered are incapable of practicing democracy on their own and must be helped. Our little brown brothers would only fall prey to other world and regional powers if we allowed them self-determination. We are duty-bound to correct the situation that we find ourselves in. Ugh. And if all of this echoes what's happened in Iraq, what follows is certain to echo the American experience in Vietnam.

In order to inflict losses on the Americans in the hopes that McKinley would lose the 1900 election (which he did not lose - the economy was doing very well, and he won in a comfortable victory against anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan), Aguinaldo moved further away from conventional warfare and to guerrilla tactics. The 80-100,000 rebels remained in the field, wore civilian clothes, and could strike quickly and then blend into civilian populations. At first, it seemed that the hit and run raids and long-term outlook of the rebels might lead to a stalemate and force withdrawal. America responded to these tactics with a "total-war" doctrine. Civilians were put into "reconcentrados," concentration camps surrounded by dead zones (the exact same tactic used by the Spanish in Cuba that so incensed the American public!@), and any food outside of these camps would be destroyed to deny succor to the rebels. American soldiers took to calling the Filipinos "Indians," and many came to scoff at the idea that these people were their "brothers." And to be fair, war is war, and atrocities were certainly committed on both sides. There were cases where captured Americans were crucified upside down and their stomachs neatly cut so their entrails would hang in their faces. The errant U.S. soldier might be buried up to his neck near an anthill and his mouth stuffed with sugar. In the Samar province, a sneak attack caught 50 Americans at rest who were all mutilated and cut to pieces by machete. In response, General Jacob Hurd Smith ordered his men to kill everyone over ten years old. The burning out of entire villages was commonplace. A New York soldier wrote, "The town of Titatia [was surrendered to us a few days ago, and two companies occupy the same. Last night one of our boys was found shot and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger." Letters that went to the press such as this were countered by Otis going to commanding officers and forcing soldiers to retract statements. Freedom of the press was yet another victim of these battles. Total casualties on the islands are politicized and hard gauge (as in Iraq), but estimates of population loss goes from 200,000 to well above 1,000,000 during the span of the war.

Though there were bursts of violence that went on for years, the war did wind down when Aquinaldo was captured in 1901 and the Second Philippine Commission established local governments. Some fighting did continue, though, even after the official end of the war in the Summer of 1902 when Roosevelt (who became President following McKinley's assassination by an unstable anarchist) pardoned all Filipinos who had fought against the U.S. Various groups would fight against the U.S. occupation until 1913. In 1916, the Jones Act passed by the U.S Congress promised eventual independence. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 made this more concrete by promising independence after 10 years. Of course, the war intervened, and many Filipinos fought bravely to expel the Japanese just as they had fought originally to expel the Americans, and many Filipinos were executed by the Japanese government for spying for American and providing comfort to our prisoners of war. From a speculation standpoint, I have to wonder if our bases in the Philippines as continuation of this imperial experiment led to the deaths and suffering of so many American soldiers. Stuck on an island so far from support, our soldiers had no chance when the Japanese took over the islands. Would what these near 80,000 soldiers faced in the Bataan Death March had been avoided if America had just ceded the islands back to their inhabitants after perhaps keeping only a port or two? At what point do foreign outposts we hold for strategic purposes become liabilities in drawing us into regional conflicts or indefensible in global war? Maybe I come off as a small-minded isolationist in these last couple of posts, but, damn, I can't help myself...

But anyways on to the magazine scan to accompany my ramblings, an issue of Collier's from May 10, 1902. I'll blog some other time on the history of the magazine, but tonight I'm just going to put up the article by William Taft, who headed the Second Philippine Commission, a commission that actually had power unlike the first and went about improving the island and incorporating former insurgents into the government to try and get the Filipinos up to speed in Democracy. I really enjoy these turn-of-the-century Collier's. They are over-sized slicks on about 32 pages, well-printed, and feature the premiere authors, illustrators, and statesmen of the day. I'll put up the Taft article first but then I'll go ahead and put some other snippets from the mag up as well partly to maybe tie into some other ideas I've mentioned about the time period but also just to show how neat-o the magazine is. The scan is over 3 and a half years old. It'd look nicer if I were to re-edit it today, but with boxes and boxes of magazines to scan, there's no way I'm going to worry about do-overs any time soon.

The Western issue!
Collier's Illustrated Weekly v29n06 (1902-05-10.Collier's)(Darwination-DPP)
Cover by Frederick Coffay Yohn

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

It is the Western issue, and Collier's calls the Philippines "Our Very Farthest West." Preceding the Taft article is a pictorial of the Moro tribes, one of the groups that would fight against the U.S. for the longest.

Scrollable Image

I like how the article begins with a picture of a couple of rebels "not yet pacified". The language is creepier than anything. Taft would next become Secretary of War in 1904, a role in which he could continue his involvement in the Philippines, and then serve as President for a single term following the 1908 election. His time in the Philippines made him popular with the American public. Whether it readied him for the position of U.S. President is another question.

Scrollable Image

Note also the pictures on the bottom of the page on The West - Present and Passing

Scrollable Image

Cool photographs of San Francisco and Honolulu

Scrollable Image

Fellow Kansan William Allen White (the Journalism school at my Alma Mater, KU, is named after him) on how far The West has come and how it will drive growth in times to come. I love all the spot illustrations in this issue, they really add a lot of character.

Scrollable Image

De Chillun in the West by Frank L. Stanton. This is supposedly black dialect (popular in songs of the day), but it sure doesn't sound like it to me. He did the lyrics for "Mighty 'Lak a Rose" which I know from Coleman Hawkins' At Ease album, one of my favorites that I've just about worn out in my record collection.

Scrollable Image

Among other bits from the magazine I didn't put up - an ad for stock offering in the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. - get in on the ground floor, more on empire - England in India and Ireland, foods effect on beauty, the latest designs in Spring hosiery and footwear, a pictorial on Idaho gold miners, the Long Island Automobile Club's One Hundred Mile Endurance Run, and fiction in "The Western Boom Town" by E. Hough and part of "Ranson's Folly" by Richard Harding Davis - Hearst's prize reporter during the Cuba Conflict, the story is illustrated by Frederic Remington who also supplies the centerfold which I'll close with (the entire story is available at Project Gutenberg here btw). Enjoy the issue! Soon - Stolen Sweets and La Vie Parisienne. Next, a quick post of three varied pocket mags.

Scrollable Image

Illustrated War News, July 1898 / The Spanish-American War

2011-11-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image
Illustrated War News v01n03 (1898-07.Tousey) (M&D).cbr
Get the full hi-res scan here

I'd meant to get this Illustrated War News posted last weekend, but life (or perhaps football) intervened, and today I've decided to join it with an issue of Collier's in an examination of a couple of artifacts from the Spanish-American War which is largely a glanced over period in American History yet a very valuable experience regarding the lessons of foreign intervention, lessons which America seems to need to learn over and over, as many of our trials Cuba and the Philippines are being reiterated in the Middle East today.

The American intervention in Cuba and concurrent war against Spain is often marked as America's emergence onto the world stage or as the beginning of American efforts at empire or colonialism, concepts many at the time found to rub against the grain of a country that began as rebellious colony itself. Marking too great of a line in the sand here might be a bad idea, as our method of settling the frontier might be regarded as a colonial system itself. Sending out settlers into the foreign wilds of America to form outposts with strong ties of feeling and commerce that would later be fully annexed into the country proper and which were protected by the American military certainly seems like a colonial system to me, but I suppose you could split hairs on this. And certainly America had defended its interests on the world stage before and had many confrontations on the American continent with the governments of Central and South America and with the European powers that had entanglements on this side of the globe (the Mexican-American War stands out as the largest example).

Here, I'll give an unabashed plug for my Kansas cousin's new book where much of this History is discussed, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America, a concise and even-handed examination of the competing interpretations and uses of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century.

Scrollable Image

I'm awfully proud of my little cousin's academic exploits and success as a professor at Oxford (though I fear what that his children will talk funny and prefer tea to coffee), and I learned much from his latest book about politics in the 19th Century both foreign and domestic. It's plainly written and appeals to any with an interest in America's evolving place on the world stage and perhaps a path not taken in American foreign policy. The Spanish-American War and the issuance of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (which many might argue was in opposition to the original doctrine and rights of self-determination in the Americas) acts as the bookend to Jay's discussion, as America's appropriation of Spanish holdings meant a new level of American involvement far from its own shores. You can get the book and see some glowing reviews at Amazon here, or I recall that Jay mentioned it was available as book of the month through some History book clubs, so check it out.

I had some great History teachers in High School, but I remember very little regarding The Spanish-American War. In fact, all I really remember is the term "Yellow Journalism" and the murky facts surrounding the sinking of the Maine. Lately, I've learned more about the conflict, and it is indeed a fascinating History with many reverberations.

America's war with Spain to many scholars seems almost inevitable for two reasons. Firstly, America of the 1890s was in a sense bursting at the seams. In my recent post on Argosy and the birth of the pulp, I gave a number of statistics showing how the economy of America was rapidly expanding with an emphasis on developing infrastructure and new markets. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner's oft-cited Frontier Thesis caused a stir in that it points out that, per the census of 1890, there was no longer an American Frontier, a concept he argued is central to the American character. Although, we would (and do) perpetuate the idea of the wild west, in fact our population was so well distributed that a frontier had ceased to exist. Panicked that America had expanded as far as it might at home, America began to look elsewhere for markets in which to expand, particularly to the East. There was a rush on to exploit China and Japan and all points in the East, and America did not even have a base to replenish coal supplies for its Navy, a key instrument America would use for opening closed markets in the East. I do not think it is cynical to say that this was one reason why America was happy to fight Spain. Spain's holdings in the Philippines and Guam suited this need nicely, and I suspect this is one reason why America would stay in the Philippines for so long despite the hardships (more on that later). Theodore Roosevelt, who would play such a large part in the war, had reviewed Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History for The Atlantic Monthly in 1890 and came to believe a strong Navy is key to realizing world power. You can read his review here. As an aside -Roosevelt was very active and made much of his living and earned much of his popularity from writing for the magazines (I'll put up my scan of his "The Home Ranch" with Frederic Remington illustrations one of these days from The Century in 1888). In his role as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to John D. Long, Roosevelt went about modernizing our Naval infrastructure, and, indeed, it was Roosevelt working while Long was on Summer vacation that had readied Admiral Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet in The Philippines if war were to break out in Cuba.

In fact, it was U.S. entanglements in Cuba that helped expose this need for modernization of the Navy. America had long had its eyes on Cuba. The island being so close to Florida, this is only natural, and there were many times where "annexation" of Cuba was considered going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps the most notable argument for the taking Cuba was the 1954 Ostend Manifesto a document arguing that America should offer to buy Cuba from Spain and take it by force if refused. Southern slave holders believed that Cuba would naturally come into the U.S. as a slave territory or that Cuban independence might mean the abolition of slavery on the island and the creation of another island like Haiti, always a Southern bugaboo, ruled by others than the white man where slaves might escape to or gather forces for a revolt. The Ostend Manifesto angered northerners, and arguments for Cuban annexation or independence were often formed due to shifting positions on both sides on how a free or American Cuba would affect the slavery question. Maybe the Cubans thought that after the Civil War America might more readily lend aid to rebels and independence with the slavery issue out of the way. 1868 marked the beginning of the Ten Year's War, Cuba's first war for liberation from Spain. And America did almost go to war with Spain at this time. Joseph Fry, former officer in both the Federal and Confederate navies, commanded the Virginius, manned by a mix crew of Americans and Britons and owned by Cuban revolutionaries, in running supplies through Spanish blockades to rebels. In 1973, the Spanish captured the Virginius and quickly courts-martialed and executed Frye and over 50 passenger and crew members. On the brink of war, Spain surrendered the Virginius back to the Americans, who had decided that the ship was not eligible to be flying the stars and stripes being Cuban owned, and Spain agreed to pay Americans damages for our slain citizens. During the tensions, a Spanish ironclad was at rest in NY Harbor, and America realized that the U.S. Navy had no ship capable of sinking it. The Navy ordered up five modern vessels, all of which were used in the Spanish-American War.

Beyond America's desire for new markets, the war in Cuba was fueled by the American press. In 1896, William Randolph Hearst, 33 years old and son of a successful CA goldminer, bought The New York Journal. Hearst, who would shape the face of the American media for decades to come, saw the atrocities being perpetrated by the Spanish against the Cuban population as a way to sell papers. It is probably unfair to simplify it to only that, as Hearst seemed to have a genuine concern for the plight of the Cubans and an actual desire for America to step in. The Spanish, who had for decades failed to completely "pacify" Cuba, sent in Valeraino Weyler, called by the U.S. press "the Butcher," as a strong man to get the job done. Tools he used included public executions, mass exile, and finally the use of what can only be called concentration camps. 300,000 Cubans were moved into camps with terrible conditions and farms outside of the camp areas were burned as any outside of camp areas were summarily killed to put an end to the rebels guerrilla tactics. Up to a third of the islands population died during the period of rebellion. It's understandable, then, that Hearst and others sensationalized the plight of the Cubans. In fact, the papers of the day sensationalized everything. Hysterics, unnamed sources, ginormous headlines, etc. were used in the escalating fight for a growing readership. With the war, there was an issue that united a broad spectrum of Americans. The younger generation had not seen the horrors of the Civil War and were anxious to fight. Roosevelt supposedly wrote (though I'm not sure where) that, ""I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." When the fighting did break out, almost one million Americans volunteered. Old Confederate veterans were appointed leadership positions alongside the Federals they fought against.

Though there was a united fervor for the war, it must be noted that the war also had opponents. President McKinley, who had been at Antietam and knew first hand the realities of conflict, was very hesitant to commit. American business interests as well favored stability in Cuba as much as anything. The sugar industry was very profitable there. It was Spain's prized possession, and America had many interests in stopping the fighting. In fact, America had pressured Spain to make peace by threatening to allow U.S. firms to rearm the guerrillas, and Spain transferred suposed autonomy to Cuba on January 1, 1998. Eleven days later, riots were sparked by Spanish troops in Havana, and the U.S. sent in the USS Maine to ensure the safety of American interests. At the same time the Maine shipped, the rest of the Navy was made ready to attack on all fronts if war were to break out. The Spanish were indignant about being given short notice of the arrival of the Maine. On February 15th, the spark that started the war was ignited when the Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. The cause of the explosion is unknown. At the time, the likely suspect was a Spanish mine. Much later, investigations pointed to an internal explosion in the coal room. Computer modeling is inconclusive. Conspiracy theorists point to it as a possible false flag operation. Whatever the cause, 266 American sailors died, and many who had opposed the war ceased their opposition. By mid-April, McKinley asked Congress for the authority to send troops to make peace in Cuba. Added to the resolution by Senator Henry Teller was the Teller Amendment, passed 42-35, disclaiming any intention to annex Cuba. The Teller amendment was later weakened by the Platt Amendment which allowed the U.S. the right to intervene militarily and granted us lease of Guantanamo Bay. Who knows when we'll let that go.

The war, in Cuba at least, proceeded fairly smoothly. At sea, America's modern navy made short work of the Spanish ships that were operating with inferior coal. On land, Americans employed superior numbers and brash tactics to defeat a Spanish force that fought well with modern rifles. In the end, disease was the biggest threat that faced the Americans, and we sped up the withdrawal of the bulk of our troops because of the hazards of the tropical climate. I will go ahead and today's first scan tell the tale, a newspaper from a man most known for his dime novels today, Frank Tousey. Tousey sells this issue as giving the readers what they want, more pictures. Pictures tell the tale, he writes, far better than any correspondent. If the last paper I presented, The Days' Doings shows the move towards engravings, today's first issue shows the move towards the use of photographs. The paper is 16 pages long with a colored poster insert. I'm going to go ahead and post the whole thing up here, but, as I so constantly harp, remember - the images in the scan are superior to what you get filtered through the image hosting service. And before I forget - big thanks to my main man McCoy for sending me the raws for this issue from his collection for me to edit. Page 1 is at the top of the post as the cover, the rest follow...

Scrollable Image

The philosophy of the paper is given in the bottom right hand corner.

Scrollable Image

I don't know exactly what type of gun this is/ I'd say it's a Gatling but I'm unsure how useful that would be mounted on a deck like this. The Gatling gun was key in finally winning The Battle of San Juan Hill, the battle which forever cemented Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders as American icons.

Scrollable Image

New York volunteers, Michigan volunteers, in camp.

Scrollable Image

Battleship Texas, Battleship Indiana

Scrollable Image

Cruiser New Orleans, Cruiser Yankee

Scrollable Image

The centerfold, artist's (Hoppe?) depiction of Rough Riders at Santiago. Many great American artists depicted the war including Frederic Remington and Howard Chandler Christy.

Scrollable Image

Commander Cole and sailors of Cruiser Topeka

Scrollable Image

Foldout poster in color of the Bombardment of Santiago. The artist (W. Schattner?) did a series of color paintings of the war, some of which I think you can see digitally at the LOC (no name listed, though). I swear I've seen a printed collection of paintings by the artist from the war, but I'm unable to track down any particulars. I left this at a whopping 8000 pixel width in the scan since it is four pages wide, so you could probably print up a fairly nice sized image without losing quality (though I'm not terribly fond of the thing myself).

Scrollable Image

Marines on Cruiser Topeka, swabbing the guns on Monitor Nahant.

Scrollable Image

Two pages for the Hospital Ship Solace. Before hostilities, I take it.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

These two pages have generated the most commentary when I've shared this scan previously. John P. Holland and the Holland Submarine Torpedo Boat.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Again by Schattner, the sinking of the Collier Merrimac by Lieutenant Hobson. The idea was to scuttle the hobbled ship in a fashion that would block the channel. See here for details.

Scrollable Image

Next time, hopefully tonight, I'll continue a discussion of the Spanish-American War and turn to the action and aftermath in the Philippines - where the war did not go so smoothly - and present an issue of Collier's. If I've glossed over the after-effects of the Spanish-American War in Cuba in saying it went "smoothly," I'd better also point out American involvement did not end with the war. Under the Platt Amendment, Cuba could not sell land to any other country than the U.S., could take on no foreign debt that could not be met by guaranteed revenues, solidified trade agreements whereby the U.S. would support Cuban sugar and U.S. goods would be favored in the market, and stated the U.S could intervene in Cuban affairs when it deemed fit. U.S. troops returned as early as 1906. The Platt Amendment remained in place until F.D.R.'s good neighbor policy removed it in 1934, though the lease of Guantanamo Bay was solidified. Cubans did appreciate America's help in the revolution but resented a "big brother" relationship. By the time of Batista, America and American business and crime interests were seen as co-conspirators in supporting a corrupt regime. How would Cuba be different today if America had not assisted in its liberation? I can't really hazard an answer to this question to be honest. Cuba had struggled against the Spanish for so long and had just barely been granted some autonomy right as the war broke out. Could Cuba have eventually cast Spain out without our help? Were we destined to intervene in Cuba no matter what? If human beings have the right of self-determination, do they also have they also have a corresponding responsibility? Is self-determination really possible when foreign powers are constantly meddling in a country's affairs? These are tough questions with no easy solutions, and over 110 years later, America does not seem very much closer to the answers. But more of this next post on the Philippines when America quickly learns that empire ain't all it's cracked up to be.

The Days' Doings, March 20th, 1869

2011-11-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

I thought I'd take a little detour this weekend and take a look at a couple of 19th century illustrated newspapers. Today's paper is The Days' Doings, an illustrated newspaper somewhat akin to The National Police Gazette, a subject which I've blogged on back here and here. The Days' Doings does have its own flavor, though, and I very much enjoyed reading through this issue - this was one wild paper. Though he did not advertise the fact, The Days' Doings was published by Frank Leslie who had his first job in New York engraving woodcuts for P.T. Barnum's Illustrated News. Leslie took his skills and innovations in the rapid creation of wood engravings and applied them to a number of illustrated papers over the years (You may recall a WWI era issue of Leslie's Weekly I posted here, the magazine continuing on long after Leslie died in 1880). Leslie was a pioneering engraver but not much of a business man; nonetheless, he managed to circulate a great number of periodicals to the people of New York, and the giant (and often gorgeous) engravings in his publications appealed to even the unlettered, though my personal take is that a publication like The Days' Doings has a little something for everybody, even if it does apparently tend toward the sensational. In some ways, the paper reminds me of New York by Gaslight, which I haven't read since college, a fairly exploitative exploration of the seedier side of Gotham in which reader's might peek into from the safety of their reading room. But from what I've read here, Leslie's paper seems to mix in levity and at least some broad-mindedness into the exposes of urban life as well. The middle and upper classes do not go unscathed, either, as all segments of society are fair game for satire in this publication from the dawn of the Gilded Age, there is something democratic in this journalistic form, even as it engages in some very undemocratic mud-slinging. Or maybe this paper is just ugly theater, hrm. Feeding the Christians to the lions and all that...

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

After watching the array of 5 televisions in front of the elliptical trainers at the gym today which go CNN, NBC, ESPN, HGTV, FOX, I indeed felt like I was leaving the Colosseum by the time I walked out of my workout, heh heh. Apparently, not too much changes in news and entertainment as the centuries stroll by, only the medium of delivery.

There's a very nice essay on the The Days' Doings here by Joshua Brown in which Brown describes the evolution of the paper which carried the more lurid engravings and subjects that Leslie's more mainstream Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper deigned not to carry. Beginning in 1867 as The Last Sensation, the paper changed names to The Days' Doings in 1868 not long before the publication of this scanned issue, eventually ejecting some of the more objectionable material and ultimately becoming New York Illustrated Times in 1876. The notorious publication was sold when Frank Leslie died in 1880, when his widow would re-organize his publications and at last make them profitable. Apparently, Leslie's feminist widow was all too eager to get rid of this paper that seemed to spend so much ink on engravings of the fairer sex and women of loose morals. The new owner would operate the paper for four more years.

But on to a closer look at some of the articles and stories in today's issue... I'll probably be posting images of more of the non-fiction material, but I'd note that a bulk of pages are stories, a fact found surprising. The fiction is a good mix of genres, and I was particularly annoyed that the one leaf missing from the paper contains the conclusion to a gothic horror story I was rather enjoying regarding a lovely but dangerous black widow type who seduces the wealthy protagonist, Arthur Lovell, in "Three Dead Men." Lovell encounters the ghosts of the widow's past lovers, and I'd love to know how the story ends. If by some slim chance someone out there could scan me the missing page or send me the page from microfiche (assuming it exists), I'd very much appreciate it and would include it in the archive here .

The issue begins with the cover story on heathenism in New York, dividing it's examination among the Chinese, the blacks, and the upper class pagan revivalists.

Scrollable Image

It's interesting to note here that the writer saves any real scorn for the upper class whites here dabbling in paganism. The sacrificial goat cover surely turned some heads. Of the Chinese, the author notes, "It is by no means complimentary to our boasted Christian civilization, but it is nevertheless true, that although the Chinese may theoretically be Pagans, they are, so far as their lives are concerned, better than the average of the Christians - at least the Christians of the Fourth Ward. Only one murder has been known among them, and although they will not hesitate to cheat when they have the chance, they seldom figure in the police reports, even as sneak thieves or perpetrators of petty larceny. They are inveterate gamblers, but they only play among themselves and after their own peculiar fashion; so that, on the whole, if they are an insignificant, they are also an inoffensive part of our population. They peddle or work all day, as other men, and at night they return to their families or their boarding houses and devote themselves with assiduity to cards and opium." Hardly a ringing endorsement, but at least they won't murder you where you stand like those damn'd Irish. The discussion of the superstitions of blacks that follows is similar in that the author points out that this group does not figure largely in the crime problem either, "The negroes of New York are waiters, or caterers or white-washers, or plasterers, or washerwomen, or stewardesses, and are generally quiet and inoffensive. In fact, in a police point of view, they are an unexceptionable class. In comparison to their respective numbers three arrests are made of white men to one of a colored man and brother, and considered by themselves, the negroes of the metropolis are by no means the most disgraceful or dangerous element of its population." Blacks may be a superstitious lot, but the author forgives any extreme superstitions as holdovers from African religions. Even the author's description of the sacrifice of a sheep in a secret chapel on Madison Avenue depicted on the cover doesn't seem to damn the pagans as much as stand in amazement that such a thing would happen in modern New York. I'd have expected more outrage towards all three of these groups - surely in other types of publications there would be more vitriol for this lot.

If descriptions of pagan rites aren't shocking enough, the might trump that scene with the engraving that accompanies "Whipping in the North."

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

50 lashes certainly seems mighty severe to me for a little lark, and the secrecy of such discipline adds to what I might imagine as sadistic glee on the part of the administrators. The naked breast in the illustration shocks, for certain, but such a story affords the opportunity for a bit of nudity that The Days' Doings would seize upon when possible. Oh my.

But all of the paper's engravings aren't out to shock in some sort of salacious manner, many of the illustrations seem to revel in the display of extraordinary events and the powers of this new graphic technology. I particularly like the depiction of the animal reaction to a frontier forest fire on the page below. I'll post the full page, as the article on the bottom half on crossing Broadway is a hoot and a reminder of the perils of simply crossing such a large street.

Scrollable Image

Notice the lines in the animal engraving - by dividing an engraving into smaller sections and assigning each section to a different engraver the work might be completed more quickly. Some of the engravings used in The Days' Doings were reprinted from Leslie's other papers, though the more salacious or taboo engravings were unique.

One last illustration, of an alligator loosed in the theater, what a scene.

Scrollable Image

And finally, the ads at the back. This is where you might send away for French postcards or other outrageous materials or get addresses to correspond with potential mates. It seems that much faith is required for many of these advertisements. You are expected to send off money without even knowing what you are getting in return! Amazing, but the gullibility and desperation were, are, and will be part of the human character.

Scrollable Image

Big thanks to McCoy for his edit work on this scan! The paper was in sorry condition to say the least, and he had made it look very nice and took the time to repair the tiny font here and there where it was damaged. He's often a miracle worker in these things when it comes to making old pages presentable, so loud praise for my silent partner in so much of my scanning work.

After coaching a basketball practice, watching a soccer game, and hitting the gym already this morning, I might have rushed to finish this post a bit, but I hope you all enjoy this newspaper - I know I did. If I'm not mistaken, it's the oldest scan so far here on my blog. I plan to post another paper tomorrow, a relic from the Spanish-American War that I edited for McCoy, perhaps a turning point in American foreign policy.

EDIT: After looking through this post, I notice that much of the very small text has been rendered nearly illegible by the resizing and image compression performed automatically by my image host (perhaps because of the newspaper-sized length of the images). The text in the scan, as small as it is, is much more readable than what is appearing here. So do yourself a favor and reduce eyestrain by reading from the original width images in the scan itself...

Pulp Magazines Project Launches!!!

2011-11-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

Pulp fans ans scholars should be very jazzed to find out about a new internet archive and resource that has just launched, The Pulp Magazines Project aka pulpmags.org. It's a developing project that promises to be an excellent source of information on pulp magazines, and, even better, a place where anyone the world over can read pulps online. In my post earlier in the week on Frank Munsey's re-invention of Argosy as a pulp magazine, I generalized about the early pulps, but at The Pulp Magazines Project you can see the real deal as The Pulp Magazines Project already has many issues on display. The issues in their archive can either be downloaded as .pdf or (this is the cool part for the not-so-tech-savvy) can be read online in a flipbook format that is true to the feel of reading an actual pulp (minus the odor). Already online in the project archive are sample issues of Adventure, All-Story Weekly, Amazing Stories, The Argosy, Blue Book, Breezy Stories, Cavalier, Detective Story Magazine, Ginger Stories, Green Book, New Story Magazine, The Popular Magazine, Short Stories, Snappy Stories, Western Story Magazine, Wonder Stories, and World Fiction. And there's more to come, as the proprietors have many plans for adding titles and more issues in the future. I've contributed an introduction for Ginger Stories, and other contributors have written introductions for the various magazines as well.

Also, the site has a great pulp bibliography page listing the best secondary sources on pulp mags and a great list of links to many of the great resources out there web regarding pulp magazines. Connected with the project is the PulpMags Blog that updates information added to the project as well as a Facebook page (the one internet phenomenon to which I'm apparently the only holdout). Heading the project is David Earle who has also put together a cool website I keep in my blog links to the right, the 1925 newsstand, in which he has students scan and contextualize magazines from the Summer of 1925. Magazine lovers or those interested in the roaring 20s should check that site out as well.

Kudos to David and Patrick for getting the site going and to all who have contributed to the site so far. It has great potential as a site for the study and enjoyment of pulp fiction where readers the world over can have access to these disappearing magazines.

More Pumpkins / The Quirt, October 1921

2011-10-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

I promise a short post tonight. Perhaps in part due to my ode to the qualities of pulp in my last entry, just now I've performed a very quick and light edit leaving the pulp plenty visible on this little magazine while chomping on miniature candy bars and otherwise pilfering my kids' plastic pumpkins where they stashed the evening's booty. I was looking for something appropriate to share for the holiday, and the cover above reminded me of the Bolles pumpkin girl from the Spicy Stories two posts back. Here is this issue of The Quirt with a Halloween-themed cover (one in a series of holiday-themed covers from that year). I've found exactly zilch concerning this little humor mag on either the net or in my magazine indexes. It's a Capt. Billy's imitator from right across the river in Minnesota started not long after Fawcett got his mag up and running, but, from the first 20 pages I read before bed last night, I find it not nearly as much to my liking.

Of course, the publisher, F.M. Near, who I know absolutely nothing else about, would later challenge the state of Minnesota in Near v. Minnesota, one of the bedrock cases regarding the 1st Amendment, which was the result of state censorship dealt out in reaction when one of his scandal rags published articles making light of the Minneapolis police force's penchant for corruption:

http://lawbrain.com/wiki/Near_v._Minnesota

I plan on reading the rest of the issue tonight, probably while I grit and grind my teeth from all the sugar I've consumed. Hopefully it will get better. I have a few more Quirts that I'll make sure and get scanned in the future, as it seems a very scarce publication in need of preservation.

Pulp

2011-10-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

It wasn't so long ago when I found myself asking a couple of guys in the Digital Pulps Preservation group, "So just what exactly is a pulp, anyways?" My brother-in-law asked me the same thing during a visit last week, and I've been meaning to meander on the subject for a while now. And it's no wonder that I'd wonder what a pulp is. I swear you'd never see the real deal unless you went looking - and in the right place. Ask about pulps in most comic shops, and you'll get some sort of blank stare. If the guy behind the counter is old enough, he'll tell you that he's got a couple of issues of The Shadow at home but that he hasn't had any pulps in decades. I like to scour antique malls, flea markets, used book stores, estate sales, and any other place I might find vintage magazines, but finding genuine pulps when I'm gumshoeing about is rare indeed, and if I do find them they're most likely falling to pieces. I gave my dear old granny that aviatrix-covered love pulp I scanned during my series on WWII-era pulps, and she pretty much gave me a strange look like what the hell is this. Largely, any conception of what a pulp magazine actually is/was has completely disappeared from our cultural consciousness.

On the other hand, ask the modern reader what pulp is, and you'll most likely get a vague genre definition - "hard-boiled" "action-packed" "sleaze" - something like that. And to be fair, this is completely understandable in that the explosion of cheap crime and sex paperbacks (which are one of the forms that replaced the pulp magazine along with comics and the boob tube) are also referred to as pulp and loom more recently in the popular imagination. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is surely the touchstone usage of the word for my generation, and a writer like Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiassen gets the word used in a good portion of their book reviews as nearly interchangeable for "noir," another descriptor that gets bandied about often without too much meaning. Certainly much of the fiction in the pulp magazines was indeed fast-paced as part of the formula, but, pick up an early pulp, and you might find the pace not nearly as fast as you imagined. And equating "pulp" with detective or crime fiction seems to ignore the other 80% of the pulps - the westerns, the science-fiction pulps, the love pulps, the sports pulps, the adventure titles, etc. The early pulps encompassed a whole range of genres, and the pulps to come had something for every interest, even if we seem to remember only the red-blooded variety today.

So. Before I get to my own personal definition of pulp, I'd better give the standard or strict definition with a traditional version of the origin of the pulps. The pulps originated in the same decade that saw an industry-wide revolution in magazine production and consumption in America, the 1890s. As the century was about to turn, a number of happenings in American life converged to allow for a wider magazine readership. Prior to this decade, there were some excellent American periodicals, and they did indeed contain fiction. Century, Harper's, and Scribner's are a few that stand out, and the outstanding Making of America project at Cornell has actually made these magazines digitally available here. I have issues of Century with Mark Twain, issues of Harper's with Walt Whitman, or issues of Scribner's with Joel Chandler Harris, but it's fair to say that on the whole these magazines weren't exactly geared toward the masses in content or in price. These magazines were aimed at an idealized genteel reader of means and reflect that old bothersome inferiority complex about America's place in the arts. Theodore Peterson writes in Magazines in the Twentieth Century, my 1964 copy being very outdated and yet the best book on the magazine industry as a whole that I've had the pleasure to read, that the monthly magazines, "in retrospect seem curiously remote from the dramatic changes then taking place in American life. Literature, art, manners, travel, and history got their attention, and their editors often seemed to have had their eyes more closely on Europe than on America. Thus the reader of Harper's, skimming his copies for 1890, could settle down to subjects as remote from the contemporary American scene as Edwin Lord Weeks's "Street Scenes of India," "The Social Side of Yachting," Prof. F.B. Goodrich's "The Young Whist Player's Novitiate," and "Agricultural Chile."" Between the price and the content (don't get me wrong, these magazines are beautifully printed and often greatly interesting), it's no wonder that the circulation c. 1890 of the nation's most popular monthlies was at about 100,000 copies. On the other end of the fiction spectrum, were the cheap weeklies, story papers and dime novels. Petersen notes, "Between there were few magazines of popular price and general appeal."

But if there was a gap in the content being offered in the national periodicals, there were also other forces at work in creating new possibilities for the American magazine. A truly national infrastructure had emerged concurrent with the industrial revolution. America completed its first transcontinental railroad in 1869, and the octopus of rail grew ever larger with new tentacles as the century unfolded with 5,000 miles of new rail being laid a year as at the turn of the century. The system of roads and waterways that had helped the north win the Civil War expanded elsewhere, and local and regional markets were hence subsumed by emerging national markets. The number of rural delivery mail routes grew from 44 in 1897 to 4,000 in 1900 to 25,000 in 1903. The average factory, between 1850 and 1910, increased its capital more than 39 times, its number of workers by 7 times, and the value of its created goods more than 19 times. National markets meant the emergence of name brands and the birth of the psychology of advertising. Signs and handbills and local papers could no longer meet the advertising needs of American companies trying to reach a national audience. Indeed, whatever appetite an increasingly educated populace had for reading material might not have been sated if the interests of the advertising beast had not worked together with the well-being of a new type of magazine publisher. Largely, revenue from advertising is where magazines made their money, even in the pulps that did not carry as much advertising as the slicks (the absence of advertising in the pulps is largely a misnomer, particularly in the early years, as the pulps of the first decade of the 1900s might easily have 60 pages of ads, most often printed on a slick stock of paper and placed in advertising sections at the beginning and end of the magazine). It was this fact that sparked an enormous growth in the circulation of the American magazine which only occured when publishers had the foresight to realize that if they were to lower the price of their magazines far enough and get their publication in the hands of enough Americans, there was a killing to be made through advertising revenue.

The man who would first revolutionize the industry and who would quickly thereafter birth the pulp was Frank A. Munsey. In the late 1870s, Munsey had worked as a manager of the Western Union Telegraph Company in Augusta , Maine, and had seen the success of magazine publishers there (Peleg Vickery's Fireside Companion and Edward Charles Allen's People's Literary Companion) and had been convinced by talks about publishing with Allen in Augusta House that there was money to be made in the periodical business. Munsey's first venture into publishing was the story paper, Golden Argosy, targeted toward the juvenile market. For five years, Golden Argosy did not do very well. Munsey was often in debt and would write material himself when he could not afford to buy it. The magazine did begin to prosper in 1887 but must not have done too terribly well, as Munsey changed the format to include non-fiction and wider areas of interest in late November of 1888. Perhaps some clue as to why he did this can be found in the group of publications I'm about to put up. My Czech friend, Ufikus, truly an interesting individual as well a scanner specializing in earlier pulp and pulp antecedents has scanned a number of issues of Golden Argosy from right before the format change, and even though it might break my train of thought here, I'll take the opportunity to put the scans up on my blog here for a wider audience to get to. I haven't looked very closely at these issues (except at the illustrations, I'm bad like that), but I have noticed that the first issue I'm posting contains work by Horatio Alger as well as part of a serial written by Munsey himself. My big thanks to Ufi for these scans (and to the donator of the material if these were sent to him - I can't recall). Ufi has given me much technical advice since I started scanning old paper. I hate to put these up without any discussion of the contents, but have at them, and perhaps some of you out there might find cause to explore the stories within on blogs or classrooms or writings of your own.

Golden Argosy v006n16 (1888-03-17)(ufikus-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Golden Argosy v006n18 (1888-03-31) (ufikus-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Golden Argosy v006n19 (1888-04-07) (ufikus-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Golden Argosy v006n20 (1888-04-14) (ufikus-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Golden Argosy v006n21 (1888-04-21) (ufikus-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

Golden Argosy v006n36 (1888-08-04)(ufikus-DPP)

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan here.

By the time the depression of 1893 struck, Munsey found himself with $100,000 in debt. In dire straits, Munsey announced that his other failing magazine Munsey's, a mixed-content magazine that began in February 1889 as a weekly and that had converted to a monthly in October 1891, would be dropping in price from a quarter to one thin dime, a decision that changed the magazine industry forever. Munsey took out a full page ad in The New York Sun on a Monday morning in October proclaiming that the magazine was dropping it's subscription price fro $3 to only $1 a year. The September issue of Munsey's also proclaimed the news:

At ten cents per copy and at a dollar a year for subscriptions in advance, Munsey's will have reached that point, a point below which no good magazine will ever go, but to which all magazines of large circulation must eventually come. The present low price of paper and the perfecting of printing machinery make it possible to sell at a profit a magazine at these figures - as good a magazine as has ever been issued, provided it is not too heavily freighted with advertisements.

Of course, the American News Company, which distributed the bulk of the country's magazines stood in the way of Munsey cutting their profit, so he sold directly to newsstands. He'd sent out letters and handbills by the thousands to newsdealers to take his magazine, but the real motivator for these merchants was when the requests came pouring in from all directions from customers for Munsey's magazine. The first ten-cent issue sold 40,000. The second sold 60,000. By the fifth ten-cent issue circulation was 200,000. By April 1895, circulation was 500,000. By March 1898, Munsey claimed his magazine had the largest circulation of any magazine in the world, and he followed in 1901 with the boast that Munsey's circulation was double the combined circulations of the old guard, Century, Harper's, and Scribner's together. In 1890, the biggest magazines circulated in the neighborhood of 100,000 readers. By 1900, the circulation of the top magazines, many of whom had dropped their price as Munsey predicted, neared 1,000,000. That's a ten-fold increase in magazine readers in a single decade, a true revolution in American magazines. Thus, writes Theodore Peterson, Munsey:

vividly demonstrated a basic economic principle of twentieth-century magazine publishing - a principle which McClure, Waker, Curtis, and others were discovering in the late nineteenth century. It was simply this: one could achieve a large circulation by selling his magazine for much less than its cost of production and could take his profits from the high volume of advertising that a large circulation attracted. For not only did Munsey, like McClure and the others, make his appeal to a large mass of hitherto ignored readers; he also made his appeal to a large and untapped class of advertisers, advertisers as eager for inexpensive space rates as readers were for inexpensive magazines. Not long after his announcement in the Sun, advertisers knew him for his famous rate of $1 a page for each thousand of circulation.

Publisher after publisher would eventually figure out that you might even lose money in the production of your magazine and yet turn a profit. If the print run of your magazine is high enough, and advertisers are paying for page space based on circulation, you can lose money during the manufacture and distribution phase but make much more back from advertisers. Hence, much of magazine publishing became an exercise in mass production. Making this mass production possible and production costs low enough was the birth of the rotary press, capable of printing ten times faster than a flat bed press. Century Magazine would employ a rotary press in 1886, and other magazines would quickly improve upon that basic press in the 1890s with new rotary technologies that allowed for halftone illustrations and multicolor printings. The pricey engravings or even hand-colored art that only the established or high-end magazines at one time afford were then replaced by much cheaper photoengravings. Magazines like McClure's, The Saturday Evening Post, and the newly re-imagined Cosmopolitan would make great use of these new technologies. while Munsey would take his second magazine, his Argosy, in the opposite direction, down the avenue of pulp.

Munsey followed the changes he made to Munsey's with a revamping of Argosy in 1896, converting it to an all-fiction magazine printed on a rough-wood paper that sold for a dime with the boast on the cover, "A Dollar's worth of reading for Ten Cents." Printing for the first time on low-grade paper, Munsey was banking that his reader's valued a fistful of fiction more than the paper it was printed on. The oft-cited predecessor to the pulps, the dime novels, could not receive second-class postage as a single publications, but periodicals could be sent cheaply through the increasingly large and efficient mail system. Part of the pulp revolution had to do with the stories themselves. In George Britt's Forty Years - Forty Millions: The Career of Frank A. Munsey, Munsey lays out what he thinks the emerging audience for fiction in the magazines was looking for, "We want stories. That is what we mean - stories, not dialect sketches, not washed out studies of effete human nature, not weak tales of effete human nature, not weak tales of sickly sentimentality, not 'pretty' writing....We do want fiction in which there is a story, a force, a tale that means something - in short a story. Good writing is as common as clam shells, while good stories are as rare as statesmanship." I think it is fair to say that Munsey's prescription for fiction was being followed by the new style of magazine in the 1890s; it was not peculiar to Argosy. Indeed, many of the pulp forbears in terms of genre fiction appeared in the slick magazines of the period. Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure yarns might appear in McClure's. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories ran in The Strand. Rudyard Kipling was in Cosmopolitan. H.G. Wells' "scientific romances" appeared in Pearson's. The stories in the early pulp magazines had at least as much in common with what was happening in the new effort in the slicks to appeal to the middle class as with the fare in dimes and story papers that are most often pointed out as the predecessors to pulps. The anthology fiction of early pulps like Argosy, The Popular Magazine, All-Story, etc. was not "low-brow" fiction, in fact many authors operated in both realms. Stories that did not meet the standards of the slick editors (whether it be for supposed literary merit, story formula, tone, or whatnot) landed in the pulps, and this was true for many authors for the duration of the pulp era. Later on, as the pulps expanded and splintered into more and more titles in the golden age of the pulps in the 20s and 30s, the influence of dime novel type of stories might have become more pronounced as the markets merged and titles like Nick Carter would become Detective Story or Street & Smith's Wild West Weekly would go from dime to pulp format. Even in that era, though, there were pulps for every taste and written to various segments of society. Lumping all of pulpdom in together is rarely an effective exercise.

Which brings me to the pulp paper itself and the mode of manufacture, perhaps the most effective way to identify a pulp magazine. Munsey correctly believed that there was an audience out there that cared more about the stories themselves than the paper they were printed on. By keeping production costs low (cheap paper, cheap ink, authors paid in pennies per word or even less), publishers could give readers hours and hours of reading for a dime with fewer advertisements (though I'll repeat my caveat that the early pulps did indeed have many advertisements, if often for down-market goods, just ask the guys that scan 80 pages of ad sections in the course of an issue). I'll quote a bit of Ed Hulse's Blood 'N' Thunder Guide to the Pulps, which you can get here - I also recommend his now quarterly publication on pulps by the same name:

The average pulp measured approximately seven by ten inches...Successful pulp magazines earned plenty of coin for publishers because they were so easy to produce, The paper was crudely and economically manufactured. First, wood chips were pulverized in to tiny fibers. These were poured into a slurry of acid, which was incompletely neutralized as the bleached mixture was spread into large sheets, quickly dried, and rolled up in large spools. (Close examination of woodpulp paper will reveal tiny, embedded slivers of wood that weren't fully dissolved in the slurrying stage.) The rapid production prevented thorough neutralization of the acid, and it's the acidic content that causes pulp paper to degrade as it ages - a process invariable accelerated by continued exposure to heat, moisture, and sunlight.

It's this decaying paper that I think of first when I hear the word pulp. I've read somewhere that smell is the most notable of the senses when it comes to the way memory works, and for me the thought of pulp brings to mind a beautiful, melodious odor that wafts into the house anytime I get a particularly ripe bunch of old magazines off of eBay or, to a lesser extent, every time I open up one of the bags I keep a pulp in or each time I walk into my walk-in closet in the master bath, the ignominious home of my magazine collection. I was surfing through the Life collection of images hosted on Google looking for an introductory picture for this post and found a number of great lumber industry and pulp mill pictures in their archives, and I'm going to go ahead and put them up as a visual aid. A couple of guys with my family's Cub Scout troop who work in town here at International Paper put together an activity where the boys made their own paper last year, but here are some vintage photos of the process writ on a far grander scale. These pictures are from facilities in Canada (where most of the NY publishers got their paper from), Eastern Europe, and Georgia, and are probably include pictures of the making of newsprint or other stocks):

A sea of logs

Scrollable Image

Love this one

Scrollable Image

Mountains of trees to feed America's reading appetites

Scrollable Image

Wood chips being digested

Scrollable Image

Stevedores loading wet pulp

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

The pulp is quickly dried

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

and rolled

Scrollable Image

So much industry (and so many trees!) goes into all the paper we read and otherwise consume, sometimes it's easy to forget.

Regarding the printing of pulp magazines, Ed Hulse continues :

Printed on massive presses that emptied the large paper spools at frightening speed, sixteen pages "signatures" - four folded sheets, each covered on four sides with text - were stacked in groups and stapled together...Four-color wraparound covers, most printed on lightweight coated stock were then glued to the stapled signatures.

The majority of pulps were not "finished," i.e., trimmed. Rotating saw-toothed blades left serrated edges on pages cut from the paper spools, and by skipping the step of trimming the stacked signatures, publisher were able to save time and money. This economy also led to covers being slightly larger than the "text block" of stapled signatures. The cover draped over the block, and those overhanging edges became subject to creases and tears owing to the way pulp magazines were bundled and handled.

Ed allows for a number of exceptions in this definition. Some pulps experimented with a "bedsheet" format at different periods where the paper dimensions grew, usually as page counts shrank. During the war, as paper shortages would cause many publishers, particularly the ones without good political contacts, to cut down on the number of titles, some pulp titles converted to digest size (and some would go back to the larger format later). Magazines that began their life in the pulp format, Hulse continues, might be considered pulps even in their digest format. Included in a strict definition of what a pulp magazine is the caveat that the pulp magazine is almost all fiction.

Two items I tend to associate with the pulps, but which were by no means universal, are the painted covers and the interior illustrations. These covers ranging from skillful and subtle to outlandishly garish are the images internet writers put up when discussing pulps, but not all pulps had painted covers. Argosy began with a very boring cover scheme not that far removed from the time when magazines like Scribner's or Century would run the same static cover for an entire year. Here's the issue checklist from one of the best internet resources on pulp out there, Galactic Central so that you can see what I mean. In 1905, Argosy moved to line-drawn and painted covers to keep up with magazines like Street & Smith's Popular Magazine. Here's a bigger look and the earliest scan of Argosy I have in my files, raw scans and cover edit by Cimmerian32 with interior edits and the purchase of the pulp coming from Ufikus, thanks, fellas.

Argosy v058n04 (1908-11.Munsey) c2c (Team-DPP)

Scrollable Image

contents for the issue

Scrollable Image

The full scan is available here here.

Off the top of my head I recall the reprint pulp Famous Fantastic Mysteries started with text covers and that the Trojan line of pulps from Harry Donenfeld and Frank Armer ( Romantic Detective, Candid Detective, etc) featured photo covers as well. We've seen 10 Story Book here at Darwinscans before which ran photo covers mixed with some line art for it's duration, and I'm sure there were other pulps that eschewed the art covers, too. As for the interior illustrations I always associate with pulp magazines, those largely didn't show up until the 20s when they began to appear in the magazines and grew in frequency from there. They add much character to a publication, and I admit I'm often a little disappointed when I find out a pulp contains no drawings.

A group of magazines that often have the painted covers and the illustrations but that purists exclude are the digest magazines of the 50s. Classic magazines like Manhunt or Galaxy science fiction of digest size aren't pulps, some argue, because of their dimensions or paper stock even though authors who wrote in the pulps also wrote for those magazines and artists that did covers and illustrations in the pulps provided the art. Not included as pulps, either, are the "true" genres. True crime, true story, confessions mags or the post-war men's adventure (sweat) mags are all excluded from pulpdom by many even though many of the stories were undoubtedly entirely fabricated by staff writers. And yet, when you read novels and other material from the time period, it is not uncommon for any of these types of magazines to be referred to as a pulp magazine either because they were printed on the same type of paper and sold from the same stands as the all-fiction mags or as a way of pointing out their low stature, it's not exactly clear to the modern reader. Last weekend, reading Cleve F. Adams' second novel, And Sudden Death, originally serialized in 1939, I came across this bit, "In the conversation which brought the meal to an end, McBride discovered that Mr. Carmichael was in the sand and gravel business. Miss Smythe, whom McBride had thought might be a department store buyer, was, it developed a writer for something she called the love pulps. She said she wrote under the name of Beulah Poindexter." To be sure, the writers and editors who worked for the pulps did use the term (among others) to describe this category of magazine and differentiate it from the slicks, and you see it in their personal letters and in letters back and forth from writers to the editors. Harold Hersey, who edited for Street & Smith, Clayton, MacFadden, and went on to own his own pulp line before the depression wiped him out, named his 1937 autobiography Pulpwood Editor. Recently, I was surprised to find his name as editor on Charlton's Hit Parader in the mid-40s. Similarly, western scribe Frank Gruber entitled his 1967 memoir The Pulp Jungle. You can find the term pulp used in the writer and publisher trade magazines of the day as well. I get the feeling that wider use of the term within the industry didn't really take hold until the 30s, but I'm unsure of this.

After all this roundabout pontificating about pulp (half of this post was written in a late night fugue state and the other half tuckered-out after a particularly busy weekend), I'm entirely sure that I haven't been entirely clear in my definition which I suspected would happen in the first place. And yet this post is goin' up as is, dammit! That pulp has become a blanket term for lowbrow and sleazy genre literature is a misnomer. For some, calling a piece of art or commerce mere pulp means it's a gutter-rat daydream, basura, below consideration. For other writers and for some seedy counter-culture types, pulp is to embraced as gritty and exciting, authentic and dangerous, delightfully taboo. That much of the fiction in the pulp magazines themselves, and especially the early pulps, was solidly middle-class is lost to the ages, I suppose, and I admit my personal definition of pulp reflects this as well. To me there are the narrowly considered class of pulp magazines I hope I've delineated, and then there is a broader, printed pulp-medium. The pulps are pulp. True crime magazines are pulp. Confession magazines are pulp. Comics are pulp. Sweat mags are pulp. Pocket mags are pulp. The mass market 25 cent paperbacks that shouldered out the "true" pulp mags are pulp. Music and monster and exploitation mags are pulp. Anything printed on cheap pulp paper qualifies, trimmed or no, and plenty of mags on slick paper are pulp, too. Pulp pulp pulp pulp pulp pulp pulp.

The source for the statistics above regarding American industrialization and for the history of Frank Munsey's magazine can be found in the Theodore Petersen book.

I'll return to many topics I've touched on here in the future to take a closer look with full scans. In particular I plan to visit the 1890s slicks at one time or another (I just love McClures). I'll get to some Hersey-edited issues of Hit Parader in a future series on music magazines, and I absolutely mean to explore fully every corner the "true" pulp mags, my next planned project in that department being a series on the pulp Western. But first, the girlies (and a couple of non-pulp projects, hold yer horses, pardners)! Next time, same pulp channel.

I'm Back! / The Birth of the Girlie Pulp

2011-10-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

A somewhat unrelated image to what follows, but hey - what good's a post with no pictures, eh? An almost untouched image from a pristine batch of Spicy Stories and Gay Parisienne I recently acquired, some of which will no doubt be showing up here. Probably more for Thanksgiving than Halloween, but still, pumpkin! Enoch Bolles is the artist, Spicy Stories December 1934, Donenfeld Magazines. I'll put the whole issue up when the scan is completed.

It's been a while! It seems I've taken a prolonged siesta from blogging here at Darwin Scans, but my fascination with scanning and old magazines never rests, so let's just chalk it up to percolation and see what bubbles up here, shall we? I was in the middle of writing a post on editing techniques which I never did finish (I'll finish it one of these days!) and apparently lost my will to type. It's back, though, so on with the program. I've long mentioned a planned series on the birth of the girlie pulp, and I'll proceed in that direction directly. Or indirectly.

The girlie pulps are something of a bastard class among many pulp collectors and scholars, referred to as "not quite" true pulps and otherwise relegated as below merit for serious study or appreciation. Perhaps it's the fact the girlies are antecedents to what would become easily dismissible as pornography or the fact that the fiction within doesn't appeal to the red-blooded smash-em up tastes of the largely male remainder of pulp fandom that excludes the girlies from inclusion within the mainstream of pulp appreciation. Art collectors and pin-up aficionados seem to make up the bulk of collectors of these magazines hunted largely for their cover art by the likes of Enoch Bolles, Earle Bergey, Peter Driben, H.J. Ward, and Norman Saunders, which is quite understandable as the covers and interior art in the girlies remains instantly appealing. But there is so much more to these magazines. Most noticeably, these magazines contain a unique brand of fiction.

To the modern eye, the stories within might seem mere filler or trite, off-blue bits of titillation between the naughty illustrations, the risque jokes, and photo inserts of naked and semi-naked flapper beauties. Indeed, a number of fellows whose opinion on pulps I respect very much don't think too highly of the stories in the girlie pulps. Ed Hulse in his fantastic The Blood 'N' Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps (which I wish I had read when I first started collecting and would recommend to anyone interested in where to find the most notable stories in the pulps as a first resource) explains in his introduction regarding what material he chose to cover, "And we've excluded from detailed consideration the various girlie pulps whose appeal rests more on their provocative covers and "art photos" than on their fiction, which ranges in quality from acceptable to execrable. The exceptions - the "Spicy" titles published by Harry Donenfeld and Frank Armer - are covered in sections devoted to their respective genres." (Beyond Ed's dismissal of the stories, I'd note that the Spicy line from Culture/Trojan are not in my estimation girlie pulps - the terrorized damsels in distress on those covers are wholly inconsistent with the inviting lasses that adorn the traditional girlie pulp covers, and the brand of fiction within those titles are more accurately of the detective, western, adventure, science-fiction or, more sinisterly, weird menace genres with a little sex appeal thrown in than of the type of fiction more commonly found in the girlies). Francis Smilby dismisses the fiction as having "no literary merit". Or my pal Jack recently commented on his Enoch Bolles blog regarding an issue of Stolen Sweets, "The interior of the magazine was peppered with naughty drawings, spiced with girls peeled of heir nighties, and stuffed with overripe stories featuring endless variations of the male conquest-all equally unappetizing. Of all my attempts I've never been able to shovel through more than a couple paragraphs." But it was exactly this fiction that proved most popular and appealing in these magazines and led to the explosion in their numbers in the mid to late-20s (specifics on this later), and I hope to help redeem some of the authors that wrote in these mags in my series here. Many of the stories are exercises in screwball, romantic comedy and quite inventive or fun in their use of slang to describe the never-ending battle of the sexes, so I'll be selecting some of the good ones for closer examination. And beyond the fiction, I also want to consider whether the girlie pulps represented a path not taken in the evolution of the girlie magazine. Most of the editors were women. Many of the writers were women. Many of the letters from readers were from women. Is it possible that these risque magazines catered to a more-inclusive audience than the gentleman's magazines of today? That this medium didn't preclude the girls and embodied a wider sexual revolution of the day?? But before I get to the first girlie pulps, I want to look at the soup they came out of, both in terms of the cultural zeitgeist of the roaring 20s (the highpoint of the American magazine - Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow notes that early in the decade there were over 2,000 mags in print at one time) and in terms of their magazine predecessors and contemporaries - the stage and film mags, the humor mags, the flapper guides, and the art photo pubs of the day. In the process, I also want to give some adoration to two great books on the subject of the girlie pulps, Doug Ellis' Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulp, an incredibly well written and researched book on the subject, and Francis Smilby's Stolen Sweets, an aesthetic appreciation of the art of the girlies. I'll start my series with the Smilby book and a look across the pond at La Vie Parisienne and the girly mags of France, the so-called cradle of erotica.

But before I get down to the birth of the girlie pulp and better defining just what is a girlie pulp, I want to do a post on the broader question of "just what is a pulp, anyways?" Next time...Tomorrow in fact -

Confidential v01n01 December 1952

2011-04-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image
Get the full hi-res scan of this issue here.

So, I'm still at work on a post on editing tips for scans, but in the meantime I'm going to put up another outstanding new scan from my pal McCoy, another key issue in the history of the 20th century magazine, the first issue of perhaps the most scandalous magazine ever, Confidential. Some might know Confidential from its reference by James Ellroy's novel, L.A. Confidential (actually regarding Hush-Hush, one of Confidential's many, many imitators), and the very successful Kevin Spacey and Russel Crowe staring film based on the book. But until you read some issues of the prime era of Confidential, you probably won't realize exactly how outlandish this magazine was, an outright bull in the china shop of any imagined propriety in Hollywood. I was completely floored the first time I read an issue, and I guess most people who haven't will feel the same way.

Sure, the Hollywood of the 1920s was a veritable symbol of sin and wickedness, but William Hayes and his Motion Picture Production Code had done much to reform the image of Hollywood in the interim, and the studios did their best to control the behavior of their stars and portrayal of their moneymakers in the major media outlets and the motion picture magazines. Any bad press in the movie magazines on movie stars would mean being cut off from the studios, as the front offices wanted no interruption in the fluff pieces that the publicists were feeding the public. Veteran girlie magazine publisher, Robert Harrison (see an issue of Whisper and a little info on his girlie mags here), no paragon of virtue himself, thought of the secret, undercover world of Hollywood during the enormous interest in the Kefauver hearings on crime (or so the story goes), as Hollywood, too, was full of colorful personalities with glamorous lifestyles and dirty little secrets to be exposed. A fun history of the magazine came out just last year, Henry Scott's Shocking True Story, which I would definitely recommend to those with an interest in learning more. Scott's book is a concisely written account of the rise and fall of the magazine that is written so that each chapter covers a famous scandal exposed by the magazine intertwined with some great information on Harrison and how he ran his publishing outfit (run mostly by his many sisters) and how he managed to dig up his information. Harrison's many Hollywood snoops were able to acquire so much dirt on any given star that those featured were often scared to attack Harrison because he always had deeper facts on a celebrity they were scared he might reveal. An interesting side story tracks the career of one the magazine's editors, rabid red-hunter Howard Rushmore, who sought to use the magazine to curry political favor and further the anti-communist cause. The way the book manages to tie together the paranoia of McCarthyism and the nuclear age with the fear of Harrison in the Hollywood underbelly is an interesting feat. My one complaint is that the book seemed too short, even at 240 pages - but that's often the way it is with a good read. Shocking True Story is probably the best recent book on magazines behind Mark Adams' absolutely brilliant bio on Bernar MacFadden, Mr. America, which I plan on reviewing when I get to some posts on the MacFadden mags. An interesting corollary here is that Harrison began his career as a writer for MacFadden's New York Graphic, certainly belonging alongside Harrison's magazine as tabloid pioneers. I sure wish I could find some examples of the New York Graphic to scan - I hate that such a notorious and worthy publication for scanning is so ghosty...sigh.

But back to today's issue! The cover is plenty catchy, although it hasn't gone to the blue, red, and yellow color scheme that was so successful (and which not coincidentally were the main colors used on men's pulps during the first half of the century). Even in this first issue, you can tell Harrison has a success on his hands. This issue had a print run of 150,000, and I've never seen it for sale, so HUGE thanks again to McCoy for landing it and for the beauty scan. By August 1953 and issue number four with its Marilyn cover and Joe DiMaggio expose, the magazine had a print of 800,000. The numbers for peak circulation I've seen range from a staggering five to nine million copies. Coupled with the claim that every issue was passed around to an average of ten persons, it is quite apparent that the magazine was an absolute sensation and that Harrison was making a boatload of money on exposing the private lives of others. Humphrey Bogart said of the magazine's popularity, "Everybody reads it, but they say the cook brought it into the house."

Contents and mission statement. The lid is off! The truth without any trimmings. Every story 100% true! The first issue just shows glimmers of what is to come as far as celebrity dirt goes, but it's already full of fun, ridiculous, disturbing, and not-so-PC content.

Scrollable Image

The first story speaks to supposed origins and the immense interest in the Kefauver crime hearings. But - Hot Springs, Arkansas, hub of organized crime?!?! "You can get anything you want in Hot Springs from a reefer or an entertaining blonde to a $10,000 bet, just by asking in the right place!" The Sheriff says, "We'll enforce the law here --- just as much as the people of Hot Springs want it enforced. They want an open town." Hmm...this doesn't quite sound like the Hot Springs where I've vacationed a time or two, nyuk nyuk.

Scrollable Image

The second article would demonstrate a tactic that turned very succesful for Harrison, the buttering up in the upper-right corner of gossip columnist and McCarthy-ite Walter Winchell who would give the magazine some crucial hype during its formative era on his still very successful radio show and in his print columns. An article on the changing nature of prostitution, and emergence of the call-girl.

Scrollable Image

Scott's book notes that the following article is entirely fiction. With sensational photos for certain.

Scrollable Image

Love the disclaimer on the author. Good luck tracking that guy down, heh heh. Many Confidential writers took many aliases during their tenure at the magazine.

Ah, here's a bit of the fact-dropping and innuendo that would make the magazine so famous, an article on showman Billy Rose, best remembered for "Me and My Shadow" and one of my Tin Pan Alley faves, "It's Only a Paper Moon". All sorts of wild bits in this article. For a magazine that delivered the straight dope, there is a very careful and skillful use of words for innuendo and insinuation. Many Confidential writers were very skilled at making outrageous claims without making outrageous claims if you know what I mean.

Scrollable Image

I've heard of boats going out to international waters for gambling but never of gambling in airplaines. Still, this plane is probably more comfortable than all the neon and noise in the modern casino, which is one of the reasons I always prefer the poker room...

Scrollable Image

My goodness. The U.N. hating crowd at Fox News would just eat this article up! International affairs, indeed.

Scrollable Image

To me, the most interesting article in the issue, on passing. Gents like Billy Rose might Americanize their name from Rosenberg (Harrison himself comes from a Jewish background), but blacks had to go much further in order to "Americanize", and here's an article on passing as white. McCoy and I had different takes on the article. It struck him as pointedly atrocious, while I found it very possibly subversive. Harrison never shied away from race, and, indeed, he used the scandal of miscegenation to sell many a magazine by associating stars like Mae West, Lana Turner, or Sammy Davis, Jr. with lovers of another race. I'll post the entire article so you can judge for yourself, I'm still not sure if the article is just playing on paranoia or making the very true statement that we Americans are more mixed stock than some would care to admit.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Lastly, OMG, a gay wedding. Shocking, I know. Henry Scott says Harrison staged this Paris wedding in his New York office, LOL. It's sixty years later, and Americans still get worked up over the subject, pshaw, and plenty of media hucksters still sell copy by riling up the rubes regarding all those evil sodomites. Harrison seems to have a special hang-up with homosexuality and relished outing gay stars. From what I gather, Harrison had his own peculiarities in the bedroom along with a promiscuous nature, but that never stopped him from exposing the boudoir activities of others.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And while I'm at it. I'll go ahead and share some more issues from McCoy of Confidential so you can see the magazine in its prime before it was tamed down by lawsuit (one of these is from after Harrison struck his deal to tone down the mag). Five more issues, all credit goes to McCoy for the excellent scans. Much has been written about this magazine, but there is no substitute for sitting down and reading the original issues. As Henry Scott quotes Camile Paglia in Shocking True Story, "the tabloids, with their twin themes of sex and violence, tell the lurid pagan truth about life."

Confidential v02n03 (1954-07)

Scrollable Image
Get the full scan here.

Confidential v03n05 (1955-11)

Scrollable Image
Get the full scan here.

Confidential v04n02 (1956-05)

Scrollable Image
Get the full scan here.

Confidential v04n06 (1957-01)

Scrollable Image
Get the full scan here.

Confidential v08n10 (1960-12.By-Line)

Scrollable Image
Get the full scan here.

And McCoy, busy beaver that he is, has also scanned a number of Confidential copycats. And per usual, the words copycat or imitator aren't always fair, as magazines inspired by the success of another magazine will often nonetheless have their own flavor, and many of the magazines that followed on the heels of Confidential are great reads, too. In here, you can find examples of Hush-Hush, Suppressed, Uncensored, Exposed, and The Lowdown. As other scans of these and other magazines of the sort follow, I'll update this folder. Outstanding work, McCoy, thank you.

Johnson Smith & Company Catalog No. 148 (1938)

2011-04-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

As promised, another McCoy scan for y'all today, and, boy, howdy, is it a load of fun. I've shared this another place or two without much response, but I think there are a whole lot of people out there that will get a big kick out of this cool novelty catalog. At 581 pages, it's a big file (not to mention a big scanning project, thanks McCoy!), so I couldn't host it at mediafire like I usually do, but you can get it at Hotfile here.

I can hardly imagine the glee a child (or impish adult) experienced thumbing this great selection of novelties. Alfred Johnson Smith was born in England in 1885 but moved to Brisbane, Australia, at the age of 2, and as a young man he began a small mail-order service selling rubber stamps through magazines and circulars. In his early 20s he moves to Sydney and expands his business to include a whole range of imported novelties. In 1914, he comes to Chicago to make his mark in America and starts afresh here be selling whoopee cushions from the trunk of his car and begins his American publishing career with a 64 page catalog. By 1922, Smith's catalog expands to 400 pages, and he employs 150 people. In 1923 the catalog is 576 pages long with a print run of 100,000. This large catalog would continue to be produced until wartime pressures in 1941 put an end to the period of the classic catalog, so this 1938 example McCoy has scanned is a late example. Comic aficionados probably recognize the company name from ads that have run in comics through the years (including on the inside covers of the first issue of Superman - here's the inside back cover as reprinted in DC's Limited Collector's Edition 61):

And, indeed, the company still sells novelties today. You can visit their websites and see their family of catalogs here. A wiki with a fuller timeline on the history of the company is here.

In my hometown, we had a toy store that had a nice selection of novelty items, and I dropped many a dollar in there for items similar to the ones within this catalog, I'd have loved to come across a big catalog like this There's a little of everything in here, and I'll try to put up a nice selection of samples. The organization of the catalog is actually very efficient, and like items are grouped together in a very sensible manner. The first pages include some cartoon sorts of drawings, and this one sort of hops out at you:

Scrollable Image

It's hard to tell what's going on here with the racial humor, but maybe there is at least a smidgeon of pathos involved. There's no point in whitewashing the past, though, as some items in the catalog are flat out offensive to the modern reader. It may be hard not to giggle at an item like this one:

But some of the other items are cringe-inducing.

The realm of humor is a very complex area in understanding race, admittedly. Race humor at its best seems to be a bridge towards understanding each other or cutting through the bullshit with satire (Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, etc.), but it can also a vestige of backwards attitudes. My own experiences clearly demonstrate that there are those that will propagate backwards ideas in racial jokes that they'd never just come right out and say. Speaking of this tradition of race jokes, there's some ads in the catalog for a line of novelty books that seem to spread the ball around as far as targets of racial humor go:

Scrollable Image

I'm pretty sure these are books from the Wehman Bros' Handy Series, odd, itty bitty books of jokes for a dime. I've got some examples (not all the books are racial humor, there are also books of magic, monologues, society jokes, etc.) I'll post when I get around to scanning them. But enough on the racial unpleasantness - I guess I post this stuff just because it jumps out at me.

Beyond the chameleons, there's other critters for sale. The monkey in a cup is always one of my favorite comics ads

I guess this is how the myth (?) of alligators in the sewers of NY started, eh?

Scrollable Image

Turtles and frogs as childhood pets I've heard of, but here's one you can get with your name painted on the shell...

Scrollable Image

or the old standard, ants!

Scrollable Image

And speaking of standards, how about the variety of novelty that you share with friends? Some of the items in here will never go out of style.

Scrollable Image

Rubber food, nyuk nyuk. Want a banana?

Scrollable Image

I recall putting an exploding charge in the end of one of my ma's cigarettes once. Once.

Scrollable Image

In the age of the fear of terrorism, I'm not sure if this one is such a good idea...

Scrollable Image

How many different ways can you use the surprise snake gag? Hmm...

But in addition to animals and gags, there are so many other items in this catalog. I'll briefly try to lay out the spectrum.

There's a wide variety of instruments and "learn to play" booklets and tools. While some of the instruments within are strictly junk, there are some that look playable enough. Many of the blues greats got their first instruments out of Sears catalogs and the like, one of the only ways to get an affordable instrument shipped out into the middle of Mississippi.

Scrollable Image

Two harmonicas in one! 8 inches long??

Scrollable Image

Kazoomania, possibly the most annoying instrument ever created

Scrollable Image

Hillbilly music! The sweet potato?!

Scrollable Image

And not just the instruments themselves, there's also a wide variety of instructional material. You too can learn piano - in just 30 minutes!

Scrollable Image

I'm running out of typing time tonight, but trust me there's something in here for everyone. There's a variety of costumes and disguises

Scrollable Image

and smoking accessories - lighters, pipes, rolling implements, ash trays, smoke smoke smoke

Scrollable Image

and bows, knives, and guns for the kiddies! The guns are air guns and blank guns. In the back of the pulps you could get the real deal for super cheap. Hard to beat the classic daisy in a first bb gun.

Scrollable Image

Jewelry

Scrollable Image

Information on communing with the dead o.O

Scrollable Image

C'mon. the whole family can do it.

Scrollable Image

Cameras of all stripes, even spy models.

Scrollable Image

You, too, can be an artist

Scrollable Image

There are also watches, belts, billfolds, pens, typewriters, printing implements, adding machines, accountant's tools, stamps, key chains, hosiery, custom badges, licenses, and certificates, exercise equipment, photographic accessories, projectors, 16mm films, binoculars and surveillance equipment, telescopes, microscopes, shavers and razors, cash registers and safes, puzzles and games, lamps, perfumes and incense, cards and fortune telling items, magic tricks, books of many, many stripes, sheet music, any so many other items it boggles the mind. Damn, I'd love to of had this sort of thing as a kid...Thanks to McCoy for scanning it for me now! One of the fun things about the hobby is when something you haven't thought of scanning shows up - I love it.

One last image - the back cover - great colors!

Scrollable Image

EDIT: While I'm in here replacing a dead link, let me offer up a few other vintage catalogs, thanks to the scanners. I'll try and stick any neat old catalogs in here as I come across them:

here

Click February 1938 v01n01

2011-04-10T21:49:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

It's been a long, busy week, and I've just gotten back from the final home game of the Memphis Grizzlies, but I've got a little time for a short post tonight that's a follow up to the post a couple back on Look and the emergence of the variety photo magazine of the late thirties. My pal McCoy has just scanned a key issue in the canon of the 20th century American magazine, and it needs sharing with a wider audience! It is a fine scan of Click v01n01 from February of 1938 with Dorothy Lamour adorning the cover, and the full scan is available here.

If Look was some sort of counter-balance to Life in its inclusion of entertainment and sensational material, appealing to a wider audience, then Click took this notion even further. Too far, some believed, as Steven Lomazow's American Periodicals: A Collector's Manual and Reference Guide notes that Click was at times deemed obscene enough to be banned by Canada and the Catholic Church. Indeed, I was a bit flabbergasted to find a couple of artfully done nudes in the issue, as I tend to think of the mainstream magazines of the mid and late 30s as having totally abandoned the free-wheeling spirit that permeated the magazines of the roaring 20s. I'd note that the gallery photos in this issue are in no way obscene and many have artistic qualities. And perhaps they seem more so in contrast to the shocking character of many of the articles. But let's put up some pages so you can judge for yourself, eh?

What makes kosher meat kosher? Err, there's more here than I really needed to know. Ah, well, modern society is awfully out of touch with how food gets on our table, so seeing such things is a healthy reminder of where our meat comes from. Not that our modern automated process mirrors the old school approach taken here...

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Whew, looking into the workings of this grisly business makes you feel like a voyeur, at least you aren't like THESE PEOPLE, oh my. Surely, the irony here isn't lost on the magazine creators - Click certainly seems a wholehearted experiment in peeping...

Scrollable Image

And if the perennial subject of peeping toms doesn't excite you, the next article should, as the subject of WHITE SLAVERY sold many a magazine and must have been some sort of great fear for many an American for many years of the 20th century as the subject seems to pop up from the illustrated newspapers into the pulps and variety mags and into the sweat mags spanning a good majority of the century as a hot topic for the tabloid-minded. This issue devotes a whopping 6 pages to the subject, I'm only going to post the first.

Scrollable Image

And following the article on white slavery, blood-thirsty Nazi youth! Is this the old-school equivalent of backyard extreme wrestling?

Scrollable Image

From Violence to Sex? How to Sleep with a Stranger?!?

Scrollable Image

Hey! Damn misleading headlines, grumble, grumble. A fun article, though. I sure hate sharing a hotel bed with anybody but my wife - family, friend, stranger, or no...And a couple of samples from the gallery/cartoon pages. Carole Lombard, what a beauty...

Scrollable Image

Click contained a handful of color pages which add charm. Usually it's the cartoon pages that get the color treatment, but not always.

Scrollable Image

The last sample pages I'll put up from the issue are both pages from an article on Washouts or the type of women that men don't like to date. Most of these behaviors are indeed irksome, though I admit I find a number of these supposed turn-offs rather endearing and I imagine I'm not the only one...

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Also included in the issue (there's no contents page) in addition to cartoons and gallery photos are articles on pain and hypnotism, driftwood art, baby photos of stars, the secret of Jeanette MacDonald's popularity, nose-bobbing, women doing a man's job, Mae West and a dummy, a Zulu wedding, entertainment news, bee stings: a cure for rheumatism?, and more. Big thanks to McCoy for scanning this key issue! While I'm at it, here's a couple more of this title that he has scanned, thanks for all your hard work, bud.

Click v02n02 March 1939

Scrollable Image
Get the full issue here.

Click v02n05 June 1939

Scrollable Image
Get the full issue here.

Tomorrow! Another McCoy scan from last week, a fantastic novelty catalog I just have to get up here....And later this week - how to edit - some technical tips and some thoughts on presentation...

Matt Baker's Romance Covers: Graceful Titillations

2011-03-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

So I've tried to focus on magazine material here on my blog, but today I'd like to post some of the comics I've been working on recently from the St. John line and take a minute to talk about perhaps my favorite artist of the golden age, Matt Baker. I posted an issue with one of his covers and a story (along with some recommendations for further reading) back here but today I want to diverge from my normal pattern a bit and post a number of issues focusing mainly on the covers. The issues I'm posting today all come from the collection of Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., who my the readers of my blog who are fans of magazine illustration might know as publisher of Images, containing lavish printings of classic and re-discovered art from 1880-1922, or from his most excellent collaboration with Everett Raymond Kinstler on the artist's life and work. Comics fans might know Jim from his contributions to so many works in comics scholarship, as he is widely recognized as the go-to-guy for help with artist identification and as the premier indexer of golden age comics. Jim has been generous enough to loan out comics from his amazing collection to a number of scanners working at the golden age comics sites with the goal of archiving the entirety of the golden age that rests in the public domain. So big thanks to JVJ for letting us scan his often-valuable and scarce comics (along with priceless index information that accompanies each issue) and to all the donators who have helped in the costs of shuttling the comics back and forth. Thanks also to my scanning partner on the project, Twobyfour, for his dutiful work in handling and producing the raw scans of Jim's books which I'm editing. Having an instantly available library of golden age comics is such an incredible boon for comics fans and researchers, so thanks to all involved in the project and the scanning of golden age comics in general.

But back to the man of the hour, the inimitable and enigmatic Matt Baker. I first became aware of Baker's work in my initial forays into the golden age, as his good girl art in the Fox and Fiction House comics instantly stands out from many of his peers. And then I came across his covers for the St. John Romances (which I think most would agree represent his greatest achievements), and I was hooked. Doing my first bits of research, I learned something that I found utterly surprising which added to my curiousity. This master of titillation and the female form was a black man, and quite a handsome fellow at that.

Scrollable Image

This photo is from John Benson's short-but-thrilling and absolutely informative Confessions, Romances, Secrets, and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics, companion to his Romance Without Tears, a reprint collection of selected stories from the St. John line (many by Baker). There's another great photo of Baker in the book together with Archer St. John in front of Grauman's theater standing by Jean Harlow's footprints, these being the only two photos of Baker I've ever come across. Benson's book along with Alter Ego #47 has helped clear up some of the mystery surrounding Baker's life. One nice online biography on Baker can be found here, and American Art Archives has a nice little gallery of varied Baker covers along with a couple of magazine illustrations here.

That Baker was a black man shouldn't matter, of course, but I readily admit I find it adds to his mystique and my curiousity. I've since learned that there were indeed a handful of other minorities and women in the business, but the idea of such a prolific black artist in the medium is surely surprising in a field that was dominated by white men. A black artist circa 1950 drawing a scene like this?!?! Very cheeky, I'd say. Taboo upon taboo:

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

Drawing blondes and redheads behaving badly?! Oh, my. Teen-Age Temptations is perhaps my favorite title for a romance comic, and some of the issues seem to have particularly spicy covers. But surely many of the players don't look like teenagers, heh heh. Another cover from the series:

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

Sure it's sleaze, with taglines like "Flirtation on Wheels" or "The Powerful Story of a Trailer Girls Love" the cover is meant to play with scandal (the Estrada story within the cover goes with however is actually a thoughtful examination of stereotypes and class bigotry). I even catch the connotation that maybe she's preggers, scandalous! But there's also a subtle artist at work here. Her hands gripping with tension, the agonizing but thoughtful look on her face, the sort of smarmy smirk (a Baker trademark) on her suitor. And the whole scene is flushed out with depth and detail. I love the old trailers and the good ol boys working on the car in the background. Who could resist pulling this off the newsstand? It's no wonder that he penned over 220 covers for St. John during his tenure for the publisher.

One more from the series, more drama, and another fully-rendered scene. Many of the Baker romance covers have a great sense of perspective and are packed with little details. With main players, bystanders, and a feeling of depth, the reader as voyeur can slip right comfortably in and feel unobtrusive...

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

Despite the sometimes sensational aspects of his covers (perhaps dictated by market necessity or St. John himself, the mid-50s covers with the approach of the comics code are downright wholesome - not to mention breath-taking), if I had to associate one word with Baker's art it would be grace. He makes it look so easy. I've seen stories of where another artist would be talking with him and sit there and watch him draw out an entire splash page without using the eraser once. There's a flow and an economy to his his art in the St. John period that is just so appropriate for a romance and for drawings of the female form. He had a reputation as a ladies' man, and you can certainly see in his work an understanding of the female form and facial expression that's just a wonder to behold. The cover I started my post with is perhaps unique among his covers for the close-up perspective, and I can see why John Benson used it for a cover for his book. And here's some more covers from the longest running St. John title, Teen-Age Romances.

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

Scrollable Image
full issue available here

I love to work on these covers, but it is definitely a labor of love. I'd say the average cover from the golden age takes me about 15-20 hours. Here are a couple of the before and afters side by side for those of you that are interested in the digital restoration out there to check out.

Teen-Age Romances 14 before
Teen-Age Romances 14 after

Teen-Age Romances 12 before
Teen-Age Romances 12 after

Admittedly, much of the finer detail I seem to obsess about gets lost at screen size, but still I think the proof is in the pudding one way or another. The image I share is much compressed in width as well as quality, so I make sure and always keep my working files in case there's ever a need for the bigger image. Not to mention, some covers are done to a higher standard than others, and I might always return to some of them some day. You can check out an example of the large working tif files for this last cover here for a much closer look at what goes into erasing the tears, flaked inks, stains, page bleed, etc. on one of these covers. I try to always keep textures and printing patterns as intact as possible and avoid anything as tacky as bucket fills or re-drawing. Most of the work is done with the clone stamp at various opacity settings. Even though I'm "restoring" the cover, I like to keep the feel of the original printing methods. A reminder also that the picture hosting site compresses these images before they relay them, so the images in the scan files will be of greater width with less compression and artifacting.

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and share my folder for all the scanned issues of St. John's romances. A reminder that these and many more golden age comics can be found at the Digital Comics Museum. The St. John romance scans are a work in progress, and many, many issues are left to be scanned (I figure less than a quarter currently scanned). They tend to be pricey and scarce, so it's great JVJ has let us scan his, and once those are done there will still be issues in need of scanning. Some interesting titles to check out are the Adventures series packaged by Leonard Starr and Warren King in a cool, slightly oversized format along with Hollywood Confessions, packaged by a young Joe Kubert for St. John. The scanned St. John issues are all in here, and I'll try and keep those folders current. Big thanks to all scanners represented. There's a hot off the presses batch of Diary Secrets scanned and edited by my pal Snard from the JVJ collection in there, so enjoy those romance fans.

I'll be returning to Matt Baker's art at some point in the future with an update on the JVJ project along with a high-resolution collection of some of his illustrations for men's adventure magazines and crime digests which should be fun for those that haven't seen Matt at work in that sort of format before.

National Sputnik Monroe Day / Memphis Heat Premiere

2011-03-24T22:43:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post tonight to say that I attended the world premiere showing tonight at the Malco Paradiso of Memphis Heat, and IT WAS KICK-ASS. I made it to the 9:00 showing, and it was standing room only - an electric atmosphere for certain. The line to get in snaked outside, and you could hear fans sharing all sorts of crazy wrestling memories.

Jimmy Hart introduced the film, co-executive producer Sherman Willmot had a silver Sputnik-streak in his hair, and Jerry Lawler had a special video-intro for the crowd since he was in Florida shooting for a movie. You could tell the hometown crowd really appreciated seeing all these special wrestling memories, and my hat goes off to the filmmakers for a job well done. The editing, the audio, the soundtrack, the story-telling were all top notch, and fans of Memphis wrestling owe it to themselves to catch this with other Memphians while it's in the theater (it's playing down on the square and also at the Southaven Malco Desoto 16 for the coming week).

I personally really loved seeing some interview footage of Sputnik and Billy, and the story of carnival wrestling and their feud kicks off the film as sort of "the rise of Memphis wrestling". From there it doesn't slow down one bit, and a whole parade of vibrant characters play out the colorful history of Memphis wrestling, a town where Saturday morning wrestling held a completely astonishing 80 percent market share for years. It was great to see Rocky Johnson, Bill Dundee, Jerry Lawler, and many others, but the guys who really steal the show interview-wise are Jackie Fargo and Jimmy Valiant. Jackie's so full of shit, but you can't help but smile when he starts to dish it out. And, Jimmy, what a sweetheart, his positive attitude is contagious. The film concludes with the Lawler-Kaufman feud (with some absolutely fantastic clips I'd never seen before) and the following Hart-Lawler feud and Jimmy Hart going to the WWF. You can't really blame Jimmy, but it does really serve as a nice instrument in showing how Vince and cable really took the air out of the local promotions. If I have any gripes, it'd be that some of the archival footage video quality is rough, but so it goes with old wrestling footage, and the filmmakers have done a service to gather what is available before anything else gets lost. Hot damn, I want to see the movie again just thinking about it - I must be excited to be typing about it 1:00 in the morning the night of - don't miss out!

Did I mention the awesome soundtrack? All Memphis and all awesome. As Don Poier, sportscaster for the Grizzlies, used to say, "Only in the movies, and only in Memphis."

*For a couple of my past posts on Memphis wrestling, click here for a post on the career of Sputnik Monroe or here for a short review of Ron Hall's book that inspired the movie.

Look, January 18, 1949 / Stanley Kubrick as Photographer

2011-03-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

Get the cover to cover scan here! Big thanks to McCoy for his edit work on this issue.

A short detour from planned posts today, let's take a gander at a key issue of Look, a magazine often quickly dismissed as an also-ran competitor of Life though it was hugely successful in circulation and possessed in my opinion a fun and distinct flavor (a bit more sensational, more entertainment-oriented) from Life. Life debuted in November of 1936, and Look started with v01n02 in February of 1937, and PIC actually beat both of them off the block with its first issue in May of 1936. All of these magazines were on an over-sized paper stock and capitalized on printing advances that made the publication of photographs much more affordable, ushering in the photo-dominated slick magazine and the end of the golden age of illustration. Look was founded by Gardner "Mike" Cowles (Executive Editor of the Des Moines Register) and his brother John and began as a thinner magazine (44 pages) subtitled "The Monthly Picture Magazine" with very little text. The captions often told the story or the text would just be a paragraph or two, and there was no advertising whatsoever. The magazine was monthly for its first five issues but quickly moved to a bi-weekly format. In January of 1937, Time published an article describing the origin of Look and and its founders and gives a description of the first issue's sensational contents aimed, the article says a bit condescendingly, at a "lower, broader" audience than the fledgling Life. Doc Lomazow has a nice, big scan of the cover for this first issue over on his blog on a post here. Within weeks, demand for Look soared to over a million copies. Peak circulation was 7.75 million, and it was the second highest selling mag after Life and sold more copies than The Saturday Evening Post. In 1971 when it closed its doors, it still had a circulation of 6.5 million, not too shabby.

My man McCoy happens to have scanned one of the 1937 issues (August 3rd), and I'd be doing a disservice not to post it here in the conversation so that you can get a fuller picture of the magazine's early character.

Scrollable Image

Get the cover to cover scan here! Thanks to McCoy for sharing the issue with us. All sorts of oddities in here - an elephant steps on a man's head, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini pay for babies, catching a polar bear, rope dancers, tidal waves, teaching the deaf to speak, what makes fighters punch drunk, a new treatment for freckles, April Fool joke becomes fashion rage, an extended pictorial on the rise of Gary Cooper, and much more...

But back to the 1949 issue, by which time the magazine has moved to a format that the modern reader is more familiar with at 100 pages, plenty of advertisements, some color(though on alternating qualities of paper stock), and articles more in-line with what we think of when we think of Life or other weekly magazines. If you plan on scanning any of this type of magazine, you'll most likely want to use an A4 scanner, as the pages are much too big to fit on a standard scanner, and merging two scans for each page is very labor intensive. Look, from what I've seen on eBay, isn't collected by too many folks. You can find issues fairly cheap there, and the circulation was so wide that it's one of the titles that you can sometimes find at flea markets and antique malls. It's not a magazine I go out of my way to collect (the cover design in later years is not very attractive in my opinion), but I do keep an eye out for issues with cool content. Like the publishers intended, the magazine has broad appeal, and readers today will find all sorts of interesting material in the historical and political issues of the day along with plenty of entertainment and lifestyle topics as well as great vintage advertising.

The indicia page for the January 18, 1949, issue:

Scrollable Image

So, I picked this issue up, as you no doubt quickly deduced from the post title, because I'm a fan of Stanley Kubrick and was interested in seeing some of his early photographic work in context. Kubrick grew up with a dark room in his home and was only 16 when he sold his first photograph to Look. He joined the Look staff as a full-time photographer just as soon as he graduated from high school. Fans of his cinema will no doubt be unsurprised that he began his career as a photographer, and the extended article/pictorial in this issue "The Prizefighter" served as inspiration for his first film, "Day of the Fight," which also centers around the life of boxer Walter Cartier. Day of the Fight is public domain and available at archive.org or you can download and see some screencaps and a little more description here. Be warned, though, the video quality at archive.org (and on the other two much larger rips I've found on the web) is truly awful and detracts from enjoying the film. The little doc seems solid enough and would give him the name and footing he needed to further his career. I recently re-watched perhaps my favorite of his films The Killing and saw for the first time Paths of Glory, both films which already have him in great form just five years later. A friend mentioned to me that he wondered if Scorsese's Raging Bull was influenced by "Day of the Fight" and the Look pictorial, and I'd say you can see how the day to day details shown of Cartier's life might have influenced that later film. There are book-length collections of Kubrick's photos out there, and Look donated their photos to the Library of Congress, and there are about 100 Kubrick photos available online here for your viewing pleasure. Many of them are quite good, though some of the negatives seem to have deteriorated. Kubrick is a great example of one of the many luminaries who began their careers in American magazines. For your reading pleasure, "The Prizefighter":

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

There are plenty of other neat articles in here, too, I'll put up a couple more articles I enjoyed. First, here's an article a Herbert Hoover commission on the size of government which might almost be considered quaint in light of 60 years of expansion, "Is Our Government Too Big" by William B. Arthur. It's right after the war, and Americans had a pretty positive view of Uncle Sam, so there's really not too much anti-government rhetoric in here, but you can tell there's some skepticism about the expanding role government was taking in our lives. I, like most Americans I'd guess, have mixed feelings about big government. It's certainly a tool for bettering society and checking wanton corporate behavior, but at the same time, the inefficiency and cost of it all can be maddening. The recent report that comes to mind is the one talking about all the layers of duplicate bureaucracy in the Dept. of Homeland Security (which I'd say we could just about do without altogether, I'm sure others would say things about entities I appreciate such as the DOE, etc). One thing for certain, though, rolling back government to the size of operations in the 19th century is an absolute pipe dream - at some point I feel like it's far healthier for the republic to adopt a mindset of management and responsibility for your government instead of viewing it as the enemy and that goes out to personages on both ends of the political spectrum...

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And here's an article on post-war Japan I found very interesting, "The Strange Case of MacArthur in Japan" by Hallett Abend. After reading much on WWII last year, this is an interesting look at Japan 4 years later, still having a very rough time of it. MacArthur is one of those figures in American History that gets almost deified by many, so I was surprised to see the critical stance the writer takes. In light of how quickly Japan would eventually recover and in light of some of our more recent attempts at nation-building, I've always thought of our work in Japan as ultra-successful; it's a subject I really ought to look into more, as I would suppose this was a critical period in the forging of a new way of life and a new national identity. The author seems to foreshadow coming events in Korea and is eminently concerned with the operations of communism in this faltering Japan, the Cold War is at the forefront of his concerns. Anyways, as usual, reading an old magazine has disturbed some of my pat ideas on History, so I'm inspired to do some digging on the subject. But here 'tis:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And some little odds and ends I enjoyed, more on this stuff in the complete scan. Kiss Me Kate, Cole Porter makes a comeback.

Scrollable Image

A fun ranking of stars' money-making power for 1948.

Scrollable Image

From a nice article on Elizabeth Taylor. After ogling at the pics I was a little embarrassed to read she's only 16 here, oh my.

Scrollable Image

In theaters now. I saw Yellow Sky last week and really enjoyed it. If not for the poor climax and aftermath, it'd be a classic.

Scrollable Image

An article on women in homebuilding I enjoyed, as my stepmom has always been involved in my pop's homebuilding ventures.

Scrollable Image

Schlitz...

Scrollable Image

Buddy Rich!

Next time - back to our previously scheduled programme. How to scan pt.3, editing.

Inside Wrestling, May 1969 / The Toughest Bout I Ever Had

2011-02-22T10:59:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

OK, mat fans, up for your reading pleasure today is the last in this series of wrestling posts, a fun issue of Inside Wrestling from May 1969 in which a number of legends of the ring disclose "The Toughest Bout I Ever Had" in their own words. If that Weider Wrestling magazine from a few posts back was a dense read, Inside Wrestling in this era was quite the opposite with big type and a fast pace. I've picked up a few early issues of this magazine from this era, and they're a real hoot.

Get the full scan here!

Contents Page

Scrollable Image

The letters page in a magazine is always a draw for me and is often a good indicator of who is in fact reading a publication. In this issue, there's a whole page dedicated to divisive issue of inter-gender wrestling which I found pretty surprising, thinking that the subject didn't really come up until Andy Kaufman used it to kick off his career as despicable heel. But, indeed, there was some precedent apparently:

Scrollable Image

The bottom right letter mentions a "mixed match," wowsah, I'll have to keep an eye out for that issue to learn more. The first three letters reference some letters from early in the year, so apparently it's a subject that inspired a number of readers to write letters. I like these girls that are certain that they can lick the boys and find just as entertaining the men that insist such a thing isn't possible and are more than willing to prove the fact. Maybe a young Andy Kaufman got the idea from reading in these old magazines. A fun film regarding Andy's bizarre time in wrestling (which was terrible for his career and relationships, he must have been an intense personal desire to be a wrestler) is I'm From Hollywood (1989), check it out. Here's a couple of pertinent youtube clips. Probably the most famous clip regarding Andy's battling women, Kaufman baits Jerry Lawler as part of their famous feud with words and actions bound to incite:

And here's another clip I discovered this morning -not from I'm From Hollywood, I'm not sure where it comes from - but Andy reveals a little bit of his motivation and the ideas behind his career in wrestling:

Apparently, there's a whole book of letters from women written to Kaufman during this time, I guess he cherished them as keepsakes, oh my. Just this week, controversy surrounding inter-gender wrestling came up in high school competition in Iowa and made the national news. I pretty much applaud the behavior of all involved in this for doing their own thing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/joel-northup-cassy-herkelman_n_824649.html

Hell, I might even prefer if my little girl wanted to wrestle to her latest activity, cheerleading, but we don't get to pick our kids' pursuits, eh?

But on to the meat of the issue! After wrestling thousands of bouts, I can understand why it would be hard to pick just one, but a number of the wrestlers could pick a match immediately, while others might have made more sentimental or symbolic picks.

The set-up.

Scrollable Image

Edouard Carpentier had no troubling picking out his toughest match against Killer Kowalski who I wrote about a couple posts ago.

Scrollable Image

Carpentier, "The Flying Frenchman," died in October of last year. He is remembered as one of the first wrestlers to adopt the acrobatic style that is so popular in modern wrestling, especially among the luchador types, and he had a long and successful career in international wrestling. Greg Oliver wrote a nice obituary for him at SLAM! Sports which you can find here. The article also links to a nice photo gallery as well as a second article in which other wrestlers remember Carpentier. If you want to see some of his somersaults in action check out his finishing moves against Mike Valentino in this bout on youtube, good stuff:

Or here's Bobo Brazil's toughest bout, against the dastardly Fritz Von Erich, beware the claw!!! Von Erich ran a very succesful promotion in Texas, Big Time Wrestling which would switch to the name of World Class Championship Wrestling around the time the elder Von Erich retired in 1982.

Scrollable Image

And one more of these toughest bouts, an infamous match in the career of Gorgeous George and The Destroyer, Dick Beyer. "Mask vs. Hair" - if George lost, off went the golden locks, if The Destroyer lost, he'd be unmasked, equally terrible for a concealed wrestler.

Scrollable Image

The Destroyer has an excellent site here, order your Destroyer mask today - I am! The kids will love it (I think I'll have to go with the Dr. X incarnation). What a class act Beyer is, as evidenced by his choice of toughest bout and his explaination of it. It was a tough bout for him, you can tell, because of his reverence for George. And you can see him emphasizing how good of a technical wrestler George really was, sentiments I've seen echoed by Lou Thesz, Sputnik Monroe, and others. Watch some of George's youtube clips and you'll see some fantastic moves along with superb "selling" of the action. He was a very energetic wrestler and he could really broadcast what he was doing to the back rows as well as the TV audience through physical comedy and action. John Capouya's bio on George, which I've mentioned on my blog before, spends some time on this bout and casts it as George's swan song - a sad, yet brilliantly conceived, end to George's career, and it's apparent Beyer saw it this way too. George had a severe drinking problem, and by this point in his life, he was on the way out of the sport, his business (a bar) was failing, he had spent 10 days in the hospital for liver failure in early 1962, and two marriages had ended very badly for him. Desperately in need of money, George approached Beyer for the match even thought he knew that it meant losing his hair and quit drinking for the match's preparation and was back in old form in the build-up for what was a fantastic bout. The frenzied crowd grew quiet in the end, though, as Frank and Joseph, George's famed hairdressers, clipped his golden locks, and some fans even left the building, unable to watch proud George lose his hair. His fall would hasten in 1963, and he died destitute on Skid Row on the day after Christmas. Beyer had a long and successful career in the states as well as in Japan and went on to teach P.E. in public schools in New York and coach football, wrestling, and swimming. He's still around and inducted Gorgeous George into the WWE Hall of Fame on March 27th, 2010.

But, though the match above does seem a fitting swan song, it is fair to note that there was a rematch a month later (which was indeed George's last match) and also that this wasn't the first time George had clipped his hair. I'm in the middle of Joe Jares' most excellent and sadly out of print Whatever Happened to Gorgeous George? (which actually covers many topics of interest to the fan of old school wrestling, there is only one chapter on George), and Jares describes a series of matches in Toronto against Whipper Watson in which George put up his hair in 1959 and even has photos of the aftermath in which George seems able to still ham it up and is not as sullen as after the '62 bout. At first, George lost and welshed on the bet, enraging fans, but he would finally get his head shaved the following week after losing again. His second wife, Cherie, even underwent the same indignity, screaming all the while, when George bet her hair to Watson after having lost his own. Perhaps because these matches were in Canada, they are not as well known. It was much easier to re-use story lines in different territories before the sport went truly national with cable in the 80s.

And I can't resist posting another fun article from the issue. Remember folks, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. An article on Pedro Morales and his experience tagging with midget wrestler, Lord Littlebrook (the small wrestlers had gimmicks, too, and were lords, indians, cowboys, etc). In our PC age, we don't allow such things, but midget wrestling was loved by fans and children and was a staple of the sport for many years. Morales seems sincere in his adoration of Littlebrook, and indeed these little men (and women) were capable of mighty feats of athletics and entertainment.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

A couple more samples from the issue. Say it isn't so, Brenda!

Scrollable Image

Eye-gouging is a standard tactic for the heel, but this article describes the horror up-close and personal, egad.

Scrollable Image

Well, that's it for wrestling magazines for now, I hope you've enjoyed it mat-fans. At some point in the future, I'm bound to write more on wrestling and have really enjoyed typing these posts for y'all, but I've got to move on to other topics of interest. Coming up!!! - a definition of pulp, editing tips, my long-promised series of posts on the birth of the girlie pulps, a series on Bernarr MacFadden's earliest magazines and then his success and varied magazines of the 20s, the art of Matt Baker's romance covers, confession magazines, Western pulp, Jim Thompson and Master Detective, the circus!, The Youth's Companion and The American Boy, Dashiell Hammett and The American, The Chicago Seed, The East Village Other, a selection of magazines from the roller derby, McClure's and the turn-of-the-century magazine, hobo publications, and much, much more. I better get off my ass and type more often! Big thanks again to my man McCoy for the edit on today's issue. He did a fantastic job with this magazine considering the many, many joins and the uneven inks. He may be a silent partner here, but he works just as hard as I do on all this stuff, so it is appreciated!

Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets / Memphis Wrestling History / Memphis Heat!!!

2011-01-31T23:06:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

I've got no magazine scans for this post, but I wanted to follow up my last entry with a short post recommending a recent book (front cover above) that probably nudged me to put that last post together, Ron Hall's Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling. I'd done some research back when Sputnik died for a comix project that I never quite got to, so I'm happy that Hall's book sparked me to do a little something with what I'd gathered. I always keep an eye out for Sputnik material on eBay, but somehow I'd missed Ron's book until stumbling across it on Amazon last Fall. I picked it up excited to find a book with Sputnik in the title. Though Sputnik's certainly in the book, he's not really a focus, as the book is pretty much of a scrapbook of Memphis wrestling all the way from the early days on into the late 70s, and, boy, it's a lot of fun, not only for Memphis fans but for fans of old school wrestling in general. Hall assembles a whole cast of wrestlers I've never heard of (along with many I have) in a photo-heavy celebration of wrestling in the bluff city, both the local heroes that you think of when you think Memphis wrestling as well as national stars that visited. Here's the back cover, and what better pitchman could you ask for than the undisputed Mouth of the South, Jimmy Hart:

Scrollable Image

and the promo video which has some previews of the photos within

The book gets an introduction from a Jerry Lawler, Memphis citizen and ambassador for Memphis wrestling, which is entirely appropriate. The King talks about his early days fresh out of Memphis State (you still hear old-timers calling the University of Memphis by that name) when he was a DJ for Eddie Bond and the time he asked Tojo Yamamoto on the air whether wrestling was fixed - never a smart question to ask a wrestler. Lawler shows up again in force in the last chapter of the book on the 70s, and there's an entire parade of characters between. There's not much text, which usually is a minus in my book, but Hall really does such a great job arranging the photos and interjecting scans of programs and clippings, that the photographs tell the story quite effectively without much narration. The book opens with what might just be my favorite chapter, a selection of fantastic (and very well-printed) photos from Robert W. Dye, an amateur photographer better known for his photos of Memphis entertainers. Dye's wrestling photos taken in Ellis Auditorium during the 40s and 50s are fantastic, he really had an eye for it, and they've not been published elsewhere. At the end of the Dye Collection, there's a photo of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill playing in the wrestling ring in 1955 that rounds it out nicely. Apparently, Elvis was a big wrestling fan and even dated wrestler Penny Banner for a while. Hall then moves on to a non-stop parade of photographs of wrestlers that graced the mats of Memphis including many of the biggest names in wrestling - Lou Thesz, Gene Kiniski, Gorgeous George, Antonino Rocca, the Blassies, Red Barry, Pat O'Connor, Buddy Rogers, Farmer Jones (there's a great two page spread of Robert Dye photos of Gorgeous George taking on Jones, I bet George was awfully indignant when Jones brought his pig in on a leash), and many more national stars. But Hall doesn't focus on the big names too much, the real wonder here is the enormous and varied cast assembled. There's a chapter on "Krauts, Japs, Indians & Arabs," a chapter packed with gorgeous lady wrestlers, a chapter on the "Mighty Mites" that wrestled here, a chapter on Memphis' black wrestlers, a chapter on the masked wrestlers; the variety is what's so cool.

And there's also a bonus CD, Sputnik hires a band?!?!

You can order the book direct from the good folks at Shangri-la Records and find more info and reviews here. Ron Hall keeps a blog for the book here. I looked at it again yesterday and discovered some exciting news. The film inspired by the book, Memphis Heat, is complete and is going to be out in March, check out the sweet poster.

a little bigger

And the trailer

This movie looks completely awesome - all of it - the stories, the wrestling, the soundtrack. The premiere's at the beautiful new Malco Paradiso in Memphis on March 24th (which they're calling Sputnik Monroe Day) and will play on the square for the week following. I've got the words MEMPHIS HEAT written in red on my calendar. I am stoked! On Ron's rasslin blog I linked above, you can see a number of teaser clips to tide you over.

I also want to take the time today to point out an incredible resource for learning about Memphis wrestling, the Memphis Wrestling History page which you can find here at memphiswrestlinghistory.com. This site was put together by author and wrestling historian, Mark James, and I really applaud what he's done for wrestling fans. There's a great photo section here with galleries of photos and clippings for Jerry Lawler, Sputnik Monroe, Jackie Fargo, Tojo Yamamoto, and others. The scans of the photos and the clippings are very well done (I appropriated a few in my last post), James has done a real service making all this available. Just today, I found another section of the site I hadn't noticed before of cards and clippings for each decade here that's got an amazing amount of information available. I'm going to love going through there looking for bits on Sputnik (and no doubt will wish I'd read it before I did a post on the guy). In addition to all this meticulous work Mark James has done on this impressive site, I see he has a wrestling yearbook for Memphis in 1982 out right now that details that year in Memphis under a microscope. I sure plan on checking it out, as I'm very interested in the Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry Lawler feud - both in terms of what "real" rasslin fans thought about it as well the whole thing as piece of theater. Both Kaufman and Lawler are pretty damn brilliant if you ask me.

Next time! One last scan to post for now on wrestling magazines before I get back to some of my other projects, a special issue in which wrestlers give their own account of their toughest match...

Sputnik Monroe / Sports News 647 & 649 (1961)

2011-01-29T19:19:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

My favorite photo of Sputnik Monroe, image from the University of Memphis Special Collection and scanned/hosted by the memphiswrestlinghistory.com website, links and props to those guys a bit later.

Well, it's been a few weeks since my last post, as I've been poring over materials on today's subject, a wrestler brimming with an ornery exuberance, one of the most memorable heels of wrestling who turned out to be an unlikely hero here in Memphis. You might say I've become a member of Sputnik's fan club, and I hope to inform the web a little bit about this unique character. I've never even seen footage of the man wrestling, but from interviews and what others say about him, I've become endeared to the guy, so sign me up right now.

Some more pictures of The Sweet Man. Sputnik - rude and tattooed, "220 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal," with a body "women love and men fear." Jim Dickinson (musician and producer who recently passed on in 2009, RIP) said that compared to the 'roid boys of modern wrestling he looks like an overweight truck driver, but as a young man, he looked pretty damn tough and even handsome before decades of brutal combat. I'd sure run the other way if he was coming at me in a dark alley. The distinctive silver streak in his hair was supposedly where he'd been hit by a chair, and some thought it looked like a bolt of lighting while others said it made him look like a skunk. Jerry Lawler and others were known to sport a similar streak at one time or another.

from University of Memphis Special Collection/memphiswrestlinghistory.com

Scrollable Image
from University of Memphis Special Collection/memphiswrestlinghistory.com

from smokebox.net from an article that originally appeared in Lurch magazine. I'd love to have an original photo of this one or at the very least a bigger image. I'm unclear whether this is the photo I've heard about from shortly after he got to Memphis that's either where Billy Wicks gave him a black eye in the final match of a TN title bout (Sputnik's version) or where a cowboy at the Mid-South Fair decked him for talking rude in front of ladies (Commercial Appeal version). It looks glossy to me (maybe even with an inscription on it?) and the newspaper clippings I've seen of the incident don't seem to include the photo, but it matches the description I've heard about, so I dunno...

Scrollable Image
Sputnik in the mid 60s, from the March 1967 issue of Wrestling Revue. They still publish a retro-rasslin mag which fans of the stuff I've been posting on old school wrestling should check out here.

A glossy promotional image scavenged from eBay - I think this must be the 70s.

As a child, I'll admit, I was a little Hulkamaniac who cheered for the good guys. Hulk Hogan told us all to work hard, say our prayers, and take our vitamins. Hogan would pose in front of the flag or come into the ring waving it around, ready to do battle with whatever sort of baddies would besmirch the reputation of old glory, grandma, apple pie, etc. As I've grown older, my preference has shifted away from the babyfaces and I prefer the heels (and in modern wrestling things really aren't quite the same, there are more anti-hero types that sort of blur the line, an all-American now might in fact be the heel - I'm thinking of guys like Steve Austin as the anti-hero or Kurt Angle, who I've always liked, as the gold-medal wearing, flag-draped heel). In the golden age of wrestling, as we saw on the last post, the roles of good guy/bad guy were more black and white, the villains were easy to recognize. Or were they? If the values of a society are misplaced, is the misfit then the true hero? In the land of the unjust, might the underdog actually be righteous? Read on to find out.

Sputnik was born just before the Great Depression in my beautiful home state of Kansas in Dodge City as Rocco Monroe Merrick - which was his father's last name. I've seen his given last name as DiGrazio, too, but from an interview with georgiawrestlinghistory.com I gather that DiGrazio was a name also in his family line that he used on his Navy application so he could get in earlier. Dodge City was once known as the most wicked town in all of the west, and apparently his family lived up to the rough-and-tumble connotations, as Sputnik's mother's father, Andrew Jackson Gosee, was a bare-knuckle boxing champion. Just two months before his birth, Sputnik's father was killed in an airplane crash which I gather pretty much devastated his mom, and Monroe spent his his formative years living between grandparents. Gosee chose Rocco as the only one of his grandsons he'd train as a boxer and began teaching him the sweet science when he was only five years old. His mother remarried when he was a teen, and the family moved to Wichita. His stepfather officially adopted him at age 17 (the year he joined the Navy), so Sputnik took his stepfather's last name of Brumbaugh. In 9th grade, Sputnik joined the wrestling team because there weren't many boxers around and perhaps because he'd met pro wrestlers at his local YMCA and admired their fancy clothes, big cars, and hot gals.

When Sputnik and a friend attended a carnival in Wichita, Monroe learned he could earn 5 dollars if he could stay in the ring with the hulking carnival wrestler (Bill Ely) for 5 minutes, and his pal talked him into the challenge. Monroe was small and fast compared to Ely and quickly leg-dived him and cross-barred his arm for the submission win. This made an impression on the promoter who was forced to pay him off. This promoter, Jack Nazworthy, who Monroe remarks was a very tough guy himself, ran a successful line of "athletic shows" in the long tradition of carnival wrestling where show wrestlers would fight marks from the crowd and also take on staged plants or talk trash to the gawkers to stir up business. Nazworthy convinced Monroe to stay on at the carnival but warned that if he ever lost he could just pack his bags and leave. Many of the techniques of showmanship as well as the catch as catch can combat styles from these carnival shows would be the basis for what would become wrestling as we know it in the 20th century (The Golddust Trio I wrote about a couple posts back being a prime mover in this process), and this is where Sputnik would learn to talk the talk and his techniques of crowd manipulation and become the truly tough, loud-mouthed mofo he was, claiming that he never lost a match in his five years as a carny fighter with up to 30 bouts in a day. He'd work in a 40x60 tent with no chairs, so the crowd would be bellied right up to the 16x16 ring, and if the wrestler got too close to the ropes and the crowd didn't like what was going on, they'd burn the wrestler with cigarettes. Monroe would sometimes insult a guy's girlfriend to get him in the ring or even just hit a guy to stir the action. "Marks" (the locals) would often be the referees for such matches and wouldn't count their buddies out, so the carnival wrestlers depended on submissions for victory. From Ron Gordon's 2001 book, It Came From Memphis,

"I started in the carnival athletic show, meeting all comers," (Monroe) explains. It was nearly half a century ago, when half a sawbuck and plenty of machismo could get you five minutes in the ring with the strong man and a chance at fifty bucks. "Whoever wants to do their thing, however they want to do it," he says. "I had shovel fights, rope fights, pickax-handle fights, wrestled, boxed, one hand tied down, whatever their specialty was. One time I had a guy turn his back to me and hook me by the head, and I realized he'd seen something on TV and wanted to flip me over his back. So I let him flying-mare me. I got up and staggered around, and let him do it to me again. The people cheered and he did it again. And he did it again and he did it again and then he puked and fell over. I never let anybody get out of there a winner."

In an NPR interview, Sputnik recalls, "I took knives away from guys and cut them on the arm. I had one babbling and crying like a baby because I just slowly dragged it across his throat. It was a pretty sharp knife; it cut him a little bit. Scared the pee out of him." I can only imagine the sorts of farmhands and roughnecks he was fighting around Kansas and the Midwest at the time. It would require a staggering amount of confidence, but Sputnik had it in spades and relished a good fight, in or out of the ring, and this and the contacts he would make with other wrestlers and promoters in the region is what prepared him for his wrestling career and for a lifetime enraging crowds. In the process, he went from a being a 170-pounder when he left the Navy to a hardened fighter ready for the professional ring. There's a nice article on how these athletic shows operated and created a sensation from town to town at the bottom of the page here at www.1wrestlinglegends.com.

Monroe began his career as Pretty Boy Roque (sounded out as "Rocky", Rock and Papa Rock were names that friends and family called him) when a Gorgeous George copycat by the name of Mel Peters got hurt and Monroe bought his wardrobe. Pretty Boy Roque wrestled on cards around Kansas in places like Topeka, Salina, Dodge City, Wichita and St. Louis working for competing promoters Orville Brown and Max Bowman, going from territory to territory every six to eight weeks. His hair was permed, and he played the Hollywood dandy in an all-pink get-up. For NPR, Monroe recalled of this period, "I got arrested on time. It was 1951, I had long hair, pink tights, pink shoes. I was helping set up the Ferris wheel, and a lady called in complaining there was a woman with no bra on the Ferris wheel. The police came out and I had long hair. You know what you do with long hair in 1951? Every time you stop the car you have a fight. Whenever you want to fight you just stop the car. Nobody had long hair (chuckles)." (BTW I'd love to see photos of Monroe's earlier characters if anybody out there's got any). From St. Louis, Monroe went to Toronto still as Pretty Boy and then to Louisville where promoter Frank McKenna thought he looked like Elvis and gave him a new name, Elvis Rock Monroe, who I believe Sputnik played as a babyface. An alternate story is that Sputnik picked up this name after a stint at the Louisville fairgrounds as a decoy for Elvis. After a concert, Monroe would be dressed as Elvis and run to a waiting limo while screaming lady fans chased him to the getaway limo while the actual Elvis would sneak out another way. After St. Louis and Louisville, Monroe would spend time in Toronto then Minneapolis then Salt Lake City then Seattle (wrestlers were really on the move in those days going from town to town while there was interest), and somewhere in here he caught the chair to the head in Chicago that would give him a deep splinter followed by an infection that left silver streak where the wound healed. In the late 60s the streak started to turn a yellow color, and Sputnik would bleach it out to keep up his trademark look.

Coming from Seattle on a cross-country trip to Mobile, Alabama, Monroe picked up a black hitchhiker to help him drive on a day that would earn him the nickname he'd use for the rest of his career. In an NPR interview, he described the situation, "I pooped out in Greenwood, Mississippi. I couldn't drive anymore, and I pulled into the station. There was a little guy there, a little black guy with a suitcase, in Citronelle, Alabama. So I asked him if he could drive, and he said, yeah. And I said, okay, drive me to Channel 2, to the TV station and after it's over and I'm woke up, we'll go rock and roll with the ladies on the street." In an interview at georgiawrestling.com, he gives an extended version of the story which is the best I've heard him tell it,

"Nobody stayed in a territory like they did later, like I did in Memphis, I was there a year - probably fifteen, sixteen months. But after Salt Lake, I was in Seattle, then I went from Seattle to Mobile, Alabama, and I pooped out. I left on Thursday to be there on Saturday, and I drove as far as I could drive, and then I'd sleep, and then I'd drive, and then I'd sleep. And I finally got where I was---I had a thermos of coffee, and I would get out and walk around the car, and then get back in and drink a little coffee and go on down the road a little further, sometimes 8 or 10 miles before I'd get on the nod again.

And when I got to Greenwood, Mississippi, I was really plumb out, and there was a little black guy hitchhikin', and I asked if he can drive, and he said, "yeah," and I said "okay", and I told him to be very careful because I'm a wrestler and I'll break your legs if you get wild. So he had to take care of business, and I'll take a nap. So he drove me to the TV studio, in Mobile, and that's where I got the name.

An old lady called me a "nigger-lovin' son of a bitch", and this really blew up, and when we got in the arena---the TV studio---they had bleachers on one side and curtains on the other side of the ring, and I'd open the curtains and act like I was kissin' the little black guy and that old lady would just raise holy hell.

And finally Security told her if she kept cursing he was gonna have to put her out, and she says, "What he really is, by God, is a damn Sputnik." The Sputnik had just went up, I didn't know what the hell it was. And everybody took up on it, the announcer and the commentator started calling me "Sputnik" on TV in my first match in Mobile, and then everybody picked up on "Sputnik", like, you know, it was a big deal. But, finally, maybe a month later, I figured it out that it was, Russia had beat us into space with a "Sputnik". And my middle name, Monroe, fit right in there."

I really love that story. How many white guys would pick up a black hitchhiker in those days in the first place? And I really love the stories of these old grannies that would go to a wrestling match and get all worked up but would probably act perfectly polite the rest of the week. This dirty wrestler had the nerve to have his arm around a black man, and here amid the cold war hysteria the worst thing she could think of to call him was a damned communist. And Monroe took the label as his own, a slap in the face to America, a bizarre-looking satellite blasted into the stratosphere, way out there in orbit, freaking out an entire nation. The crazed reaction Sputnik got here as a man with the nerve to kiss a black man on the cheek gave him some direction and the a powerful tool for maddening southern audiences, and when Buddy Fuller, the promoter and wrestler who ran the Alabama territory, bought the Memphis territory, he brought Monroe with him and Monroe immediately went about stirring up shit by developing a relationship with the black community. Sure, there was a big element of self-promotion in this, but there's no doubt that Sputnik was always a rebel and identified with the underdog. A relationship with a black nanny in Kansas might have played a role, too. Sputnik says of her, "I grew up with a nanny. She had the patience of God, an old colored lady that was just outstanding. And I thought, `Boy, what a great people,' you know?" Just as soon as he got to Memphis, Sputnik headed down to Beale Street, where blacks from all across the South came to party. Monroe recalls, "When I arrived in Memphis, I went straight to Beale Street where the blacks hung out and from there straight to jail...They charged me with 'mopery and attempted gawk,' that's an old southern vagrancy thing they made up. I was on Beale Street every night for the first six months. I got arrested three or four times until that didn't work anymore and the cops left me alone." The University of Memphis special wrestling collection has some articles from the paper from when this happened that memphiswrestling.com hosts:

I can just imagine the shock on the judge's face when Monroe walked in with a black lawyer, the very idea of a white man being defended by a black man must have been contemptuous and mind-boggling (Sugarmon would go on to become a General Sessions judge and is now retired). In the tribute article in the local paper after Sputnik's death, Sugarmon says, "In those days Beale Street was segregated, but he would go into the restaurants and bars and drink with the people. And one night the police ordered him out, and they wouldn't go, so they arrested him. He called me and I got it dismissed, and we were friendly with each other from then on." Billy Wicks, Sputnik's main opponent in Memphis at the time, remembers, "He was...kissing little black babies, and doing things like that was not accepted. He liked the challenge of doing certain things society and culture didn't want him to do. He was going to do it his way." Or as Jim Dickinson says put it, "People in Memphis liked to ignore what was going on, and Sputnik wouldn't let them do it...Elvis was just implying it, Sputnik was verbalizing it and talking about it. And you were definitely not supposed to do that." He and a black friend went into Dillards, refusing to take off their homburgs, letting the patrons know that any trouble would mean a fight with Sputnik. No one took him up on it. Wrestling fan Jim Sellers says, "Sputnik decided to identify with a group of people who sort of were there but had no one to champion. So he says, `Hey'--and it sort of became a `He's our man' thing." Even though Memphis was supposedly desegregated at the time, blacks at the wrestling matches in Ellis auditorium were still forced to sit up in an area referred to as "the crow's nest," and this is the crowd that Sputnik played to and fought for.

Pre-Sputnik, Ellis was in a sag with an average of maybe 300 patrons, but Monroe changed all that and packed them in the seats. Before matches, Sputnik would go down to Beale and hand out coupons for discounted entry to his black fans, and the whites of Memphis were clamoring to see this rooster get a good ass-kicking. When Monroe entered the auditorium, he wouldn't even look at the crowd around him, booing him and baying for blood. Eventually, the boos would die down, and Sputnik would raise both hands in the air, and his black fans up in the nose-bleed section who'd been quiet through all the whites' boos would go wild in adulation. When he was victorious or strutted around with an opponent laid out on the mat, he'd play to this crowd, and they loved him for it. Guston Davis says of those days, "You could hear the whole neighborhood yelling and hollering while wrestling was going on. And at the time, you thought he was defeated, he was down, he wasn't going to get back up, you'd be sitting there, like, staring at the TV. And he'd jump up and he'd shake his head like the Three Stooges does, and he'd stiffen both legs and he'd do that Sputnik walk, and, hey, it was on, man. After the wrestling was over, that's what we did. We went outdoors and everybody was just wrestling and doing the Sputnik walk, you know, doing that thing." But Sputnik wasn't satisfied and used sneaky and then direct means to end segregation in Ellis. Jim Dickinson explains in It Came From Memphis,

"The way they would cut off the black audience...they had a guy counting the white door and a guy on the black door. And they knew how many blacks the section could hold. Sputnik paid the guy who counted the blacks to say a low number every time he was asked, so when the boss said, 'How many have you let in?' he would say 'Twenty-five,; or whatever, and there was five hundred people up there. Finally the audience got so big and so heavily black that they had to integrate the seating. That is really how integration in Memphis started. There's no other single even that integrated the audience other than the wrestling matches and Sputnik paying the guy to lie."

When the promoters caught on to what was happening and objected, Sputnik threatened to leave. From the Commercial Appeal, "[Sputnik] was carrying the big stick because he was drawing so huge,' says famed wrestling manager Jimmy Hart, then a teenager selling Cokes in the crowd, 'And he went to the promoters and said if these folks can't get in and sit with everybody else then I'm out of here. They couldn't afford to refuse him." After he integrated Ellis, he continued to fight for desegregation causing ripples throughout Memphis society. When black leaders were coming together to figure out how to protest a car show that was whites-only, Sputnik called the sponsoring dealership and told them thanks for their attitude, he'd open up a blacks-only car business and make a killing. That night's evening news announced that all were now welcome at the show. Judge Sugarmon contends that Monroe's stand at Ellis had a domino effect in integrating other aspects of Memphis life, "I remember trying to go to the theater with my wife, and we got to the box office and they wouldn't sell us tickets. The committees that were working on those things said 'Well, we have to integrate these things slowly; we don't want to upset the unwashed masses.' And we said, "Well the unwashed matches are getting along quite fine sitting alongside each other at the wrestling matches!"

Blacks in Memphis to this day remember Sputnik and give him a special place in the history of the movement. Fanny Gardner says, "He was the chosen one, you know, so nobody knows from what day or what year or what time, who's going to be the one to step out, and I think that with his heart, you know--he was a kind person, you know, a gentle person, although a lot of people feared him. He just had a way of bringing somebody out to pave the way for other people." From the memorial article in the Commercial Appeal,

"Just last year, we were Downtown, and [Sputnik] wanted to go to Beale Street, " recalls Monroe's friend, longtime Memphis deejay and television personality Johnny Dark. "and we parked at Peabody Place and walked, and on the way down there at least four young black kids walked up to him and hugged him and told him their parents had his picture on their wall of their house growing up, they they knew who he was and what he had done...[Years after Sputnik's heyday], when Johnny Dark was a deejay in Louisville and Monroe was wrestling in the area, the two went out after one of Monroe's matches. Dark recalls, "This black lady walked up to him with tears in her eyes and said, 'You don't know me but I used to live in Memphis, and I just want to thank you for getting us out of those buzzard seats in Ellis Auditorium,' And I looked over there at that big 230-pound man," says Dark, "and he had tears in his eyes as well."

But it wasn't just the blacks that were the fans of Monroe, he had plenty of young rock 'n' rollers that came to appreciate his anti-authoritarian ways and message of inclusion as well. More from It Came From Memphis,

"You're talking about separate water fountains, you're talking about back of the bus, " Says Jim Blake, who managed wrestler Jerry Lawler in the 1970s, and whose Barbarian Records recorded several heroes of the ring. "I went through my whole twelve years at school having never been able to share an experience with a black, and I was starting to resent this, because I was also listening to radio and Dewey Phillips and hearing all these great black records and realizing that these were some talented artists, this was another culture. Where at first we'd gone to the matches hoping to see Sputnik get beat, we started to realize that he was pretty fucking cool. He had his audience and he never played down to 'em, never talked down to 'em. He became a role model."

Sputnik would probably laugh at the idea of himself as a role model and bristled at being called a do-gooder, but there's no doubting his popularity at the time in Memphis. "If you would have had some kind of election about who was the best known face in Memphis at the time - Sputnik, Elvis, and the mayor - Sputnik would have been real close to Elvis," says Johnny Dark.

At the peak of Sputnik's popularity, he wrestled in an a title match against Billy Wicks at Russwood park with Rock Marciano standing in as referee with 20,000 fans in attendance. The wrestlers were paid $500 each, and the winner got a Cadillac. The story made the front page of The Commercial Appeal, and I gather the match ended with Marciano feeling the need to knock Sputnik out and the victory and Caddy going to Wicks. At some point during the day, Monroe says he was surfed on hands over the giant crowd.

I came across this photo on a neat page about Russwood Park on Scotty Moore's official website that talks about its history as a baseball stadium and has a number of pictures of Elvis playing there in the mid 50s and links to Billy Wick's website where the pic came from that has an interview with Wicks (who became a cop shortly after this, retiring from wrestling, I believe) as well as some history on catch wrestling which has seen a resurgence in popularity due to its use in Mixed-Martial Arts more commonly known as ultimate fighting.

Sputnik would soon try and duplicate the success he achieved in Memphis in other territories in a bid for a greater national fame. The first place he went was Houston, and during this time he also made return trips to Tennessee, mainly to Nashville, I gather. The scans I've prepared for today are two issues of an arena publication for the North Side Coliseum out of Fort Worth, Texas, in October of 1961. Both feature Sputnik, and there's mention that he was the current holder of the Texas Heavyweight Championship which he'd won a couple weeks before in Houston. Monroe probably worked a number of Texas cities, and I'd guess he did well there, as his rough style was the kind of wrestling Texas is famous for. These arena publications are a lot of fun and mainly recount recent matches and hype what's to come the following week. There's a lot of wrestling history in this sort of publication, so to the rasslin fans out there, scan 'em if you got 'em, it's a good way to preserve, share, and celebrate the history of wrestling. In these two four-page papers, you'll find Sputnik talking some serious trash per usual on how the ladies of Texas are so excited about his visit while the men are quaking in their boots as well as news on other wrestlers working Fort Worth at the time including Buddy Rogers, Iron Mike, Ciclon Negro, Sam Steamboat, Shag Thomas, Mighty Yankee Nos. 1 and 2, Johnny Kostas, Duke Keomuka, the Dalton Boys, Fran Gravette, Pepe Gonzalez, John Paul Henning, and the Russian Angel. There's also a bit of roller derby news which reminds me I've got some vintage roller derby scans I'll skate out here one of these days. I'll go ahead and post all four pages of both issues. Remember you can get higher quality images with much wider pixel width by downloading the full scans if you ever need to print or blow up any of these pictures or articles, as the image host shrinks them on down which can result in moire and .jpeg artifacts.

Sports News 647 (1961-10-27.North Side Coliseum, Ft. Worth TX)

Get the hi-res scan here.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Sports News 649 (1961-11-10.North Side Coliseum, Ft. Worth TX)

Get the hi-res scan here.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Sputnik's career in the 60s never really took off in a national way like he'd hoped it would maybe because of his reputation for unpredictability. Opponents say he didn't mind hurting a guy (or himself) in the ring, as he sure loved the roughness. Wrestlers could get paid more for bloody matches, and Sputnik had plenty. While some guys might use the blade, Sputnik preferred to get there the old-fashioned way - by getting pounded on by his opponent or by maybe bashing his head into the post. Here's a photo (I think it was on eBay) of a bloody Sputnik (tagging with Tarzan Tyler)

Sputnik really took some abuse in the ring over the years, netting probably thousands of stitches and the scar tissue to match. He was also stabbed by angry fans on numerous occasions. There's a flat-out hilarious story about Sputnik's battered mug (and his tumultuous relations with women) I can't help but link out of Jimmy Valiant's biography (which I'll be reading for sure, I love the way this bit is written) that a blogger has posted here. It's little wonder that some wrestlers were wary of getting in the ring with the guy and that promoters might shy away from letting him in the ring with their stars because injuries were bad for keeping a steady schedule. Sputnik himself thought that maybe the fact he was an old carnival wrestler (sometimes thought of as con men) might have contributed to a bad reputation.

But that's not to belittle the further regional successes he had in the south in the 60s and early 70s, as he did headline in many regions and manage to acquire some titles. For a while he even included a family cast of "Monroes" who wrestled with him at various times during the 60s. There are some photos and bios of the other Monroes at georgiawrestling.com here. His biggest success of the 60s was in 1964 when he beat Dick the Bruiser in a Cadillac tournament to become the first Georgia Heavyweight Champion at the Atlanta Raceway. Dick didn't really work the area, so they brought him in as a big name. Sputnik says that The Bruiser really worked him over, almost like a shoot, and that the promoters were greatly impressed with the match. I'm guessing Sputnik no doubt got his ire up with some pre-match trash talk - the wrong guy to get worked up. I'd sure love to see the tape of that one. Sputnik held the Georgia title for about a year and would spend a lot of time working Florida later in the decade.

One story that sparks the imagination about Sputnik in this period is from a match from 1964 he was in for the prisoners at the Atlanta Penitentiary. Here's a cool photo of Wildman Phillips, Lenny Montana, Sputnik, and Charlie Carr walking into the prison:

From a forum thread here at WrestlingClassic.com.

Sputnik says of the match, "I really got over there. I didn't wanna go there to start with. I said, "I ain't goin' there," and [Buddy] Fuller said, "Yes, you are, you S.O.B." So, I thought "how the hell are you gonna entertain a buncha killers and rapists and all that?," and then I snapped. I was wrestlin' Greg Peterson and I took him down and pulled his tights down off of his butt and went to fumblin' with myself and they tore the bleachers down. They thought I was gonna screw him right there in the ring. I didn't get that far, he hit me in the eye, eleven stitches worth." Sounds like a near riot, heh heh.

One last Sputnik story to share is from his triumphant resurgence Memphis at the beginning of the 70s with a new ploy that reminded fans of his days pushing for integration. Once again, here's an extended quote from Robert Gordon's It Came From Memphis, fantastic stuff:

Randy Haspel, whose band the Radiants was one of the first post-Beatles Memphis Bands and one of the last recording acts on the original Sun Records, remembers an encounter with Sputnik in the early 1970s. "I was sitting around Phillips Studio with Skip Owsley, this black conga drummer from my band, and Sputnik came in. He wasn't as active in wrestling as he had been, and he was saying, 'I don't know what to do anymore. I used to be able to tell 'em their wimmin were trash, or I'd shake my ass and them broads would flip out and the guys would want to fight. I can't get these people to hate me like they use to!' This was during the hippie heyday, and we said 'What people hate now are longhairs. If you talked about love, Sputnik, they'd probably hate you.' Skip, the black guy, said, 'You need to find you a black wrestler and tag team with him.' So two weeks later Sputnik appears on TV with Norvell Austin, and he's dyed a blond streak in his hair. They're beating up some designated opponents, and they tied up one guy's arms in the ropes. Sputnik goes over to the corner and gets a bucket and pours it over this guy's head. It's a bucket of black paint. And then Sputnik and Norvell go over to the announcer and Sputnik says, 'Black is beautiful!' and Norvell says, 'White is beautiful!' and Sputnik held up hs arm with Norvell's and he said, ' Black and white together is beautiful.' Next time I saw Sputnik he's real excited and says, 'They hate me again!'"

How great is that. The duo would even spread the rumor that Norvell was Sputnik's son which just adds to the deliciousness of the ploy. Sure, they might have been heels, but the message WAS beautiful, ya know?

I want to include some notes on sources here and some places to look for those who'd like to find out more about the man. I first learned of Sputnik and his importance in Memphis history on the occasion of his passing at the age of 77 back in 2006. Bob Mehr wrote a very nice article in our local paper, the Commercial Appeal, that made me hungry to learn more about this character. I photocopied the article but wish I'd kept it or scanned it, but I hadn't gotten into scanning it back then - you can get the text from the website, but the big page-tall photo leading off the Metro section is what sucked me in). In the article, Mehr mentions that NPR did a piece on him on Morning Edition back in 2001, and, though it's not streaming, you can still download it on the NPR page here. Absolutely priceless, hearing the old guy's voice and stories really brought it all to life for me. Sputnik was a great story teller and bullshitter, and it's no wonder that other wrestlers would often try and catch rides with him just so they could hear him tell stories. When he died, NPR's All Things Considered looked back at the original interview and included some additonal bits of audio of the man as well as a remembrance of how much they were touched by knowing the guy. You can hear that, streaming, here. The text of another interview I just recently found with Monroe can be found at georgiawrestlinghistory.com here . That interview is super-informative and had me laughing my ass off,and I read a lot of stories in it I'd never heard before. The interviewer, "Crimson Mask," does a great job digging from an insider's perspective into some particulars and untold stories in Monroe's career (including an alternate take on an oft-told story that made the papers here of an incident at the mid-south fair where Sputnik purportedly went to start a fight with Bat Masterson and allegedly ending up elbowing a horse and getting beat up by a cowboy), so I'm very appreciative to have found it. Probably the best source for understanding Sputnik as a rock 'n' roll phenomenon and his role as desegregation agitator for which he is most well-known can be found in Robert Gordon's fantastic book, It Came From Memphis, in which he devotes a chapter to Monroe and deftly places Sputnik into a wider context of what was going here in the Mid-South at the time. One great story I didn't mention here that Gordon brings out in that book is how Sputnik deftly promoted Jerry Phillips, son of Sam Phillips of Sun Records fame, at the age of 12 as a midget wrestler (in spite of the fact he was just a normal boy). That is until things got a little too hot to handle. I'd recommend that book to just about anybody, rock n' roll and wrestling fan or no. It's a great take on the Memphis story which digs up all sorts of side characters you might never have heard of but who are very worth of remembering. Also, Greg Oliver and Steven Johnson's 2007 book for the ECW press, The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heels, has an excellent entry for The Sweet Man and is a fantastic read in general, one of my favorite books on my wrestling bookshelf. And while I'm on some good sources, Oliver and Johnson did a nice obit for Monroe at SLAM! Sports which can be read here and Danny Goddard (the kid in the Sputnik Monroe FC picture above, heh heh) has done a very nice bio page for Sputnik at georgiawrestlinghistory.com here. Reading through all I've gathered again for this post, I'm very much reminded of Monroe's saying that "Any story worth telling is worth embellishing" because time-lines and the exact nature of certain incidents in some of this material I've posted is a bit murky. But, hey, life would be very boring without a little bullshit, eh? If Monroe stretched the truth sometimes, it's counter-balanced by all the people out there who have an 100% authentic love for the guy and by he stuck up for the those that needed a champion here in Memphis. Damn it, the world needs heroes, even one that's a heel. There's long been word of an HBO biopic in the works, though I'm not sure what's the hold-up. I do really hope it comes to fruition. There's much material in Sputnik's life that might be mined for excellent cinema, and his is an absolutely enthralling American story.

I'll leave out with a youtube clip, a memorial to Sputnik from Memphis Wrestling. Usually I shudder at the choice of "My Way" as a soundtrack, but surely it's appropriate in this case. As Billy Wicks said when he died, "I can tell ya this: They ain't gonna make any more like Sputnik Monroe." You can also find some personal remembrances of the man from those he touched in the comments on a memorial page at cantstopthebleeding.com here.

Next time! A quick follow-up post on Memphis wrestling. I want to point out a local book or two as well as some web pages on the rich wrestling history of the bluff city. Monroe was just one of many colorful characters that have wrestled here over the years, so I want to flush the scene out a little bit as well as hype an upcoming film on Memphis Rasslin', hot damn.

Wrestling Life, May 1957 and April 1960

2011-01-10T22:09:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan here!

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan here!

In a continued tour of the golden age of Wrestling, I've picked to post today two issues of Wrestling Life which began as a sister publication to Wrestling As You Like It, a magazine I've previously posted two issues of on blog posts on Gorgeous George (Wrestling As You Like It 1950-11-04 and Wrestling As You Like It 1954-07-10). Wrestling Life is monthly and 36 pages long, whereas Wrestling As You Like It, which I believe ceased publication at some point in 1955, was a mere 16 pages long and published weekly. The 1957 issue is approximately golden age comic-sized at 7 1/4 inches wide by 10 inches tall, and the 1960 issue has shrunk to digest-type size of 6 inches wide by 9 inches tall. The stock on both is a nice slick paper, and the dot matrix photos are a bit grainy, but well printed. Continued thanks to madman McCoy for both of tonight's edits. He's done a fantastic job with these, and the images closely represent the feel of the magazines.

I very much enjoy Wrestling Life, a classy production out of Chicago (with mostly local advertisements that give a nice portrait of Chicago-land restaurants/hotel/commerce in the 50s) with well-written articles on matches from the Chicago area and on the wrestling stars of the day. I'm going to go ahead and mix up my commentary on the two issues, because there is lots of overlap in subject matter.

Tonight's two issues have a number of articles that point to an aspect of wrestling that is none-too-PC but that's been central to much of the drama in wrestling since there has been wrestling (and indeed much of sport in general) and that is the centrality of racial and national identity in the stories that propel the sport. Ron Hall's most-excellent recent book on wrestling in Memphis, Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets (which I'll give more time to in my next post), points to what I'm talking about with his chapter title, "Krauts, Japs, Indians & Arabs." That is, that racial and national types have (and do) play a large role in wrestling soap operas. All varieties of stereotypes are used by both heroes and heels to incite fans to root for and against wrestlers and pack the stands. Farmer or Hillbilly types might swig on the moonshine, go barefoot, and sport overalls or bring a leashed-pig into the ring with them, while the proud Irish wrestler might wear a kilt and be accompanied by bagpipes. Luchador types might wave the flag of La Raza in front of cheering Latinos and jeering rednecks while black wrestlers like Booker T might up the street-talk factor or put up a black fist. After World War II sneaky Japanese characters would chop the heroes while the ref wasn't looking, or Germanic types might gouge and punish beyond the limits of decency. While the high-minded might see all sorts of negative in the use of types, I think there might also be an honesty or at least a dialogue somewhere in this farce that is wholly refreshing or at the very least entertaining. And there is also some play with ethnicity and nationality that might confound or not be so easily categorized - like the Dudley Boyz, perhaps the most highly decorated tag team in pro wrestling, sharing the same traveling salesman father, though Bubba Ray is a pasty white and Devon is a dark shade of black. Or like Chavo Guerrero's turn in whiteface as golf cart-driving Kerwin White (which I thought was pretty funny).

Certainly, though, despite all the attention given to race and creed, if you go into a wrestling event's locker room, you will find a camaraderie among wrestlers perhaps unique in sport that speaks to how much of this show is kayfabe for the rubes, and, on some level, most of us rubes know it too. But on to some of these dirty, foreign villians, eh? In the current atmosphere of Islamaphobia, this first article might be a little hard to laugh at, but let's take a look at the lead story in the 1960 issue on The Sheik, the original cruel and underhanded Arab, who others like Abdullah the Butcher or the Iron Sheik (who I remember vividly from my childhood days of wrestling, tagging with Nikolai Volkoff - another imitator heel, I'll get to the original Nicoli in a minute) would copy in later years. Darren Aronofsky even uses an Ayatollah character as Mickey Rourke's foil in the great 2008 film, The Wrestler (which opens with spreads of wrestling magazines after my own heart)

Here's the article, guaranteed to rile the honor of the red-blooded American male. Why - that dirty dog would hit a woman!!! The Sheik sure looks lean and mean as a young man.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

This ornate pre-match ceremony very much reminds me of Gorgeous George's antics wherein his valet would spray the mat and George would make the crowd wait. I just recently came across a youtube clip of Ali talking about what he'd learned from George, and I think The Sheik might have emulated him a little, too.

But unlike George or Ali, The Sheik (real-name Ed Farhat, born in Michigan and WWII veteran) was not a talker, he would only yell (mock?) Arabic phrases in the ring and let his managers do the talking for him, he was a foreign menace, and his central contribution to wrestling was not even this Arabic persona gimmick but the brutality he brought to the ring. He'd sneak objects into the ring that often ended up being used on himself, and he'd push the limits as far as self-mutilation and punishment so much so that he's widely acknowledged as the forefather of what we now call "hardcore" wrestling. Many fans remember his fireball (some sulfurous substance stashed in his pants) that left more than one wrestler singe and fans coming back for more. His skills included promotion as well, and he ran a profitable NWA circuit out of Detroit with the "Big Time Wrestling" TV program from 1964-1980. After his popularity had waned in the states, The Sheik had great success in Canada and Japan as well where he wrestled his last match in 1998 after almost 50 years in the ring. My favorite story about Farhat comes from his page at obsessedwithwrestling.com where David Whiteis writes:

I always loved The Sheik as a kid, for the same reason I loved horror movies -- he was scary enough to be thrilling, yet just cartoon-ish enough to not cross the line into nightmare-inducing.

In more recent years, I've discovered a new reason to respect him. The following anecdote comes from a tribute to The Sheik that was posted on the website devoted to him:

"In a Texas arena, during those pre-civil rights era days, black fans were seated in a balcony behind chicken wire. Farhat got to the ring, and saw this seating setup. A very real-life Edward Farhat got very upset, and in full Sheik gimmick, he climbed up 15 feet and ripped down the wire.

"He got back in the ring and locked up with a shocked Brazil, who asked Farhat, 'What the hell did you do?' Sheik told Brazil that the local promoters were racist @$#$@$#s, and to hell with them. So the 'hated enemies' were in a clinch in the corner laughing at what a real-life Edward Farhat had done, and could get away with in the segregated South...simply because he did it as 'The Sheik.'

A few links for more on Farhat:

A great article by Steve Slagle at wrestlingmuseum.com on The Shiek and his legacy

A nice obit from the NYT on The Sheik

The Shiek's WWE Hall of Fame page

But if The Sheik might be the perfect heel in today's atmosphere of Islamaphobia, the cold war offered another set of likely villains, those dirty rooskies! The 1957 issue has a feature with Nicoli Volkoff and the 1960 issue has an article on the new tag team that Nicoli has formed with his brother, Boris. It's amazing how masterfully these guys play on cold war feelings. I'll post both articles, starting with the first. The editor's caution here that Wrestling Life doesn't want to provoke is a hoot, and I love the article title - sure to have the red-haters fuming:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

I'm tempted to try out the table back exercise as a move I've never tried before, but it does look pretty crazy. The editor's caution in printing this article acknowledging the disdain coming from the fans for Nicoli is backed up by a paragraph from the 1960 issue in the article "Why Wrestling is the World's Most Dangerous Sport," as at least one fan was riled to violence by Nicoli's act:

Indeed, baiting the fans was great box office, but dangerous at the same time. I've seen many stories like this where fans have actually attacked heel wrestlers, crazy.

There's not much I can find out about the original Nicoli (real name Steve Gobrovovich) but he wrestled for a few years before striking it big with the idea of teaming with his "brother" Boris as an all-Russian tag team. Steve might have been Russian, maybe Croatian, and he came to team with Boris AKA Francis Zela, of Polish descent who was a Merchant Marine in WWII and who ran a bodybuilding gym where Bobo Brazil and Dick the Bruiser had trained. There's a bit more on Boris here at the Online World of Wrestling and more on both here on a Slam! Sports obituary for Zela. Here's the article from the 1960 issue that creates their back-story complete with denigrations of the state of U.S. society, fond remembrances of Russia, and purported ties to the Motherland. All especially funny in light of the bit on the Slam! page of how Nicoli would yell in Russian and Boris would respond in Polish, a profitable ruse all-around, heh heh, naive Amerikanskis

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

One of the things I like about Wrestling Life are the ads for the Chicago eateries, this one in the 1957 issue instantly caught my eye.

Scrollable Image

I'd never heard of Paul Bunyan, and this little photo had me wondering about who this enormous wrestler might be. I was pleased to find some photos of him in a pictorial later on in the issue which I'll put up in its entirety here.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Incredulous at the vital statistics given for Paul Bunyan here and curious about his career, I did a little sleuthing and turned up some very interesting bits of biography about the big man who prior to his wrestling career worked in Hollywood (in Invaders from Mars and Killer Ape) and would later become an Evangelist. His height and weight seem to vary according to different sources, but he was so big I can understand how there'd be so much variance - you just don't have any perspective looking at a guy like that, he just dwarfs any and everybody around him. Palmer was stepfather to Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer who played 20 years for the Orioles. A few photos culled from the web.

I saw somewhere that he quit basketball because his size just made things too unfair.

From thetallestman.com, I'll give a link in a second.

From sideshowworld.com.

From lpcoverlover.com. More on the recording here. He didn't mind using his size to spread the gospel.

Again from thetallestman.com, I find this photo very romantic. I always think there's something awfully sweet about a couple so varied in size.

You can find more information and many more photos and articles on Palmer here at the tallestman.com. There's a handful of wrestling clippings there including a bit about a tag match with Palmer teamed with Sputnik Monroe against the Corsica brothers in a 1960 match at Ellis Auditorium that Bunyan and Sputnik would lose, unfathomable. I'll have some material in my next post on Sputnik Monroe who was really quite a character who is remembered very fondly here in Memphis. You can also see some personal remembrances of Ray Palmer here on a thread for some site pertaining to Clarksdale, Mississippi (I keep meaning to take a weekend trip down there for some blues sightseeing - The Crossroads, Riverside Hotel, Delta Blues Museum (which supposedly has Muddy Waters' Stovall Plantation cabin within), Dockery's Plantation, etc). Lastly, there's a bit of information on Bunyan here at obsessedwithwrestling.com.

Whew, I've been typing for hours on this little post, but I'll keep going. It's amazing how much there is to explore in even a single vintage magazine and how I get off on unexpected tangents, but I learn so much each time I post and I post so seldom I should make the most of it. One last article, a fun/disturbing one, on teaching your child how to defend themselves from perverts. Female wrestler Ada (Ash) Szasz introduces her daughter Joyce's self-defense lesson. There are a couple nice self-defense moves here. If I ever can find an affordable copy of the issue after this I'll make sure and get the continuation up.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And lastly various images from the two issues. From the 1957 issue, the contents page. There is no contents page in the 1960 ish:

Scrollable Image

Dick the Bruiser, a bad, bad man. The Ron Hall book I mentioned earlier has an article from the day after a match between Pat O'Connor and The Bruiser during which Dick was thrown from the ring and beat on some Memphis cops during the ensuing fracas and was arrested for disorderly conduct and assault and battery. He certainly was a sensation.

Scrollable Image

Edouard Carpentier, a French Canadian who stunned crowds with his acrobatics.

Scrollable Image

And a few misc. images from the 1960 issue. Dr. X! Oftentimes wrestlers might revitalize their career by donning a mask. Sometimes wrestlers would even wrestle twice at small venues, once with a mask and once without. Unmaskings could be major events filled with intrigue. This Dr. X was Bill Miller! There's an article on a Miller Brothers tag team in the 1957 issue, but I don't think that ever went over. Bill would return to life as a veterinarian after his wrestling career. The most famous masked wrestler of all time, The Destroyer (Dick Beyer), would later wrestle as Dr. X as well.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Bearcat Wright says he won't shave his mustache until he gets married. Somebody should tell the guy it's easier to get a girl with a clean shave.

Scrollable Image

I've never heard of these guys, but every Hoosier deserves a good beating, and these guys look like they could use one, nyuk nyuk.

Next time! Some arena publications from Texas, Sputnik comes to town! A god-damned Memphis hero.

Wrestling, March 1951 / Yukon Eric / Ed "Strangler" Lewis

2011-01-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

Get the cover to cover scan of the issue here! Big thanks to Madman McCoy for the great edit on this issue.

Happy New Years, scanfans! Sadly, a nasty respiratory infection followed by an extended Christmas vacation has kept me from my blog, but I'll struggle off the mat here and get another wrestling publication up for you fans of the golden age and promise to have a few more magazines on the subject before I move on to any other topics. I'm completely unsure how many issues of this jam-packed Wrestling magazine Joe Weider was able to publish, but I think probably just about six. A very unique and interesting format, Wrestling was published on slick pages with the addition of orange colored inks, has artists' illustrations and photos, and contained some ambitious graphic design in many of the layouts. One might venture a guess that this magazine was too sophisticated for wrestling fans (small type, 3 columns?!) or perhaps lacking focus (all articles are continued at the back, a jumbled layout), but nevertheless it is well worth tracking down, as this title packed issues with mucho information on wrestlers of the day and on the wrestlers and matches of earlier eras as well.

I'm not clear whether this was Weider's only venture into the area of wrestling publications, but his magazines in other areas (and indeed his health and fitness empire in general) were incredibly successful over the decades. During this c.1950 surge in the interest in wrestling (and the concurrent move of wrestling towards entertainment and away from some felt were the purer sporting aspects), wrestling's defenders felt compelled to point out the proud history of the sport and the merits of its athletes, and I think Weider probably fell into this camp. Indeed, bodybuilding and physical culture had long been tied to the sport (Bernarr MacFadden even had a room in his publishing offices where he could go and wrestle during the work day, grappling being excellent exercise, after all), and in his introduction and the first article we see Weider taking aim at any stereotypes of the wrestler as dunderhead. Here's his lead article (which I'll go ahead and include with the contents, since they are on the same page) which concludes with Eugene Sandow's addage with which MacFadden would certainly agree (and appropriate, heh heh), "a healthy mind in a healthy body:"

Scrollable Image

I love his sign-off, Strongly, brilliant.

But if that one article isn't enough, Weider strongarms the point with a follow-up in the lead editorial, again combating dunderhead conceptions of the wrestler. Weider mentions Mike Mazurki from our last post, the yearly salary of Gorgeous George, and various other tidbits in his entreaty not to judge these men too quickly:

Scrollable Image

But on to the star of the issue, from the great white north, a mountain of a man, Yukon Eric! Eric promoted himself as a clean-living outdoorsman and went with a "giant" persona. Other wrestlers might be quicker or more acrobatic or smarter, but he'd simply absorb the punishment and keep on stalking his prey. Some pictures of the gentle giant, always sporting pants in the ring tied Jethro-style and at times with a lumberjack's shirt. In his prime, he had a massive chest and used the bear hug to subdue opponents.

Scrollable Image

This one comes from Billco's Old School Wrestling, a fun photo blog with tons of great pictures.

This one comes from Eric's son, Erik Holmback, at the Slam! Wrestling Canadian Hall of Fame which has an excellent page on Eric with a good bio and some great personal recollections on the man that reveal his tender character through his love for children and dogs.

More cool pics of Eric can be seen here at the Online World of Wrestling.

Yukon garners the lead article in today's issue, and I'll post it in its entirety (lots of neat pics as well as lots of info on Yuke). You can tell through the article what legend Eric was going for. The line between fact and myth is blurred a few times within, but such is the nature of kayfabe. In particular, I enjoy the story of Eric licking a whole bar of roughnecks after they ridicule his choice of beverage, milk. This bit was used in the A-Team movie recently regarding B.A. Baracus (the Mr. T character, and the milk is later drugged after the fight to put him to sleep so that he might be put on an airplane). I wonder if anybody out there knows the first use of this gag. I recall Shane ordering a soda pop and Bob Hope ordering milk "in a dirty glass" in Paleface, but a google search didn't turn up what I was looking for, the first use of a bar fight started over milk (in a Western, I'd guess). The (err, questionable) splash art is from Peter Poulton who worked for Weider for at least a couple more years and has art on display in the bizarre men's adventure/muscle mag hybrid American Manhood as well as another Weider title, Mr. America (you can some of Poulton's work and sampleage from these magazines over at the always excellent and always manly Men's Adventure Magazine's Blog here.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

The end of the article alludes to an imminent showdown between Eric and Wladek Kowalski. Their meeting would become wrestling legend, earning Kowalski the label of "Killer" and costing Yukon Eric an ear. During the match, Kowalski missed a leap from the top rope and came down wrong, severing Eric's ear. If the world needed assurance that wrestling was "real," here it was, and Kowalski's attempt at a hospital apology would forever cast him as a heartless villian. An account of the story made the Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Issue, and it's online here, "Kowalski Tears Ear Off...Laughs". I can't help but chuckle at the article either. Kowalski would use the incident to further his career as one of wrestling's greatest heels. Just look at his NY State Athletic Commision License from 1959, what a creepy mug!

A nice obituary on Kowalski, who died recently in 2008, can be found here.

The rematch between Eric and Kowalski was the first televised match in Canada, and I believe I've found it on Youtube. I'm guessing this disappointing match was just a build-up for a more-epic match, but that's just my gut feeling, I haven't seen anything to back it up. But for what it's worth, here's the 'tis (you can see Eric's hairdo to cover the missing ear, yikes!):

The other article in here I'll post in it's entirety is on Ed Lewis who with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey formed the trinity of sports stardom and excess in the American 20s. The article is pretty neat because it's made of an interview by Joe Weider of Toots Mondt who together with Lewis and Billy Sandow made up the Gold Dust Trio who were responsible for bringing wrestling into the 20th century by combining showmanship, long-running feuds, and the modern wrestling card with many fights of interest leading up to the main event. You can feel Toots' sincere admiration for Lewis in the article, and I like his pride in the story he can't help but tell where he talks of fighting Lewis to a standstill in a quickly organized barn-room bout.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And, what the hell, I've got all the room in the world here. I'll include a third full article on the first meeting of George Hackenschmidt and Frank Gotch. Gotch's brutal (and apparently downright dirty) tactics were too much for an injured Hackenschmidt, marking the decline of the famed English wrestler and bodybuilder - cursed yanks!

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And some other images from the issue of wrestlers I like, starting with two of Antonio Rocca, the most popular wrestler of the day who was known for his wild-flying kicks and footholds.

Buddy Rogers, a female favorite, in spite of his slave girl.

Gorgeous George with his golden locks disheveled. The fans loved to see George get his, though he most often managed to escape the victor.

And lastly, Hatpin Mary, one of those grannies that loved to heckle.

Next time! Two issues of Wrestling Life, the successor to Wrestling As You Like It.

P.S. It seems like my imagehost, Tinypic, is compressing images even more than usual recently. The smaller images on this post are showing a lot of artifacts, but the scrollable images are much more readable. When I upload to the host, they alter the image, so remember the images in the scan itself will always be sharper than what is displayed here...

Official Wrestling, August 1951 / Mike Mazurki

2010-12-11T15:28:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan here!

OK, mat fans, you've persistently asked for more posts on the golden age of wrestling, so I'll get right to posting a handful of mags between now and Christmas. I don't really have any coherent theme I mean to follow, so we'll just see what happens as I thumb through the scans McCoy and I have prepared for all you wrestling fans out there. Tonight's classic issue is the August 1951 edition of Official Wrestling, a most excellent publication that would soon become N.W.A. Official Wrestling. I picked this issue up because I just can't resist a good catfight cover. Pictured is Mae Weston who has fiery redhead Carol Cook in an "Adam's Apple" hold as referee and boxing legend Jack Dempsey tries in vain to keep the fight fair.

Dempsey's wildly successful career began in the 1910s on small circuits and with Dempsey challenging all takers for the purse in ballroom brawls and would extend into the twenties as Dempsey participated in some of the biggest, most famous, and most well-promoted (not to mention well-paying) matches in boxing History. His last two matches would be against Gene Tunney, who was, as luck would have it, the Chairman of the Board and lead Editorial writer for this very magazine. Their last match, the infamous "Long Count" fight, would be Dempsey's last bout (wiki for Dempsey here and wiki for Tunney here). Dempsey had an involvement in pulp magazines right after his retirement as well as with at least one slick magazine in the 40s, was a successful restauranteur, and penned a couple of books on self-defense, How to Fight Tough, a paperback from Hillman in 1942, and Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense from 1951 which purportedly would influence later fighting books from the likes of Edwin Haislet and Bruce Lee. And I can't help but add on the topic of my previous few posts that during World War II Dempsey was of great service to our country. He was a huge fundraiser in the bond drives, and he would help prepare physical fitness programs for our armed services. Amazingly, as a 49 year old, he would even see active duty. In 1945, he was on the Attack Transport Arthur Middleton at Okinawa. Roger Kahn writes in his 1999 biography of Dempsey, A Flame of Pure Fire:

One of Dempsey's units was assigned to move in with the landing parties storming Okinawa. As the young warriors climbed into small boats for the assault on April 1, 1945, a line officer said, "You stay here with me, Jack, we can't afford to lose you."

Dempsey said, "Sir, I trained these boys and they look up to me. I go where they go." Which is how Jack Dempsey hit the beach at Okinawa when he was forty-nine years old.

"You know," he told me with great seriousness, "in World War I, they said I was a slacker. In World War II they said I was a hero." A hard look. "They were wrong both times."

Dempsey had purportedly been deemed unfit during WWI and received all sorts of slanders for it, so he felt his service in WWII was a sort of vindication.

Dempsey was interested in all forms of hand-to-hand combat, and it's not surprising he would show up as a referee during this immensely popular time for wrestling (the inside front cover points to the popularity of wrestling in that WOR-TV in New York was broadcasting the sport a whopping three evenings a week during prime time, astounding!). Dempsey weighs in on the topic of female referees in the lead article, “Dempsey Thumbs Down on Women Referees” written by Lou Thesz. I’ll go ahead and post the whole article. In this new phenomenon of women’s wrestling, which was accepted with some skepticism by male wrestlers and society at large (the article points out there were states where it was illegal, including NY, though it seemed to take off pretty well), Dempsey and Thesz argue that women would have no respect for women refs. I think it’s fairly ironic that, in the photo shoot, the ladies don’t really seem to pay much heed to Dempsey in the role of ref either.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

By the end of the article, Thesz is pretty much ready to admit that ladies’ wrestling is here to stay with all its broad appeal. Further insight into the emerging women’s wrestling scene is given by Marj Heyduck in a truly charming article by this female reporter who the byline claims is the “country’s only woman wrestling editor”. I’ll put up the entire article of this one also because I like it so much. Marj writes well, and I simply adore her description of taking a girls group of wrestlers out to a society club in New York and how the girls begin to wolf down appetizers, main courses, and multiple deserts as the upper crust looks on in astonishment. There’s something entirely sexy about a woman that knows how to eat a proper meal.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Great stuff. Here’s also a larger cutout of the Maurice Tillet picture.

I posted a page with Tillet back on my post of The Wrestling Scene from 1950 because of his unique mug and fascinating story. I recently found a great thread on Tillet with many more pictures that makes a convincing comparison of Tillet to Shrek (who my kids are crazy for). Check it out here.

I’ll highlight one more article, “Mat or Movie: He’s Moider”, on grappler and movie star Mike Mazurki. Born Mikhail Mazurkhevych in the west of the Ukraine, Mazurki would come to America and find success both on the mat and on the screen. The article:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Film Noir fans will recognize a few of the movies mentioned as classics. His role as the tough softie Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet (1945) (tied for my favorite Chandler adaptation with The Big Sleep) is unforgettable, and he has a part as a strongman in another noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947). Comix fans should check out Spain Rodriguez’ adaptation of the William Lindsay Gresham novel that the novel is based on (screenplay by the great Jules Furthman). Of course, mat fans will take the most interest in Mazurki’s turn in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), perhaps the greatest wrestling movie ever made. A friend recommended it to me a couple of years ago, and besides being a great film in its own right, it features two great wrestlers, Mazurki and Stanislaus Zbyszko (who like Tillet was a multilingual man of culture - though when Dassin tracked him down for the part, so many years after his fame, he was farming chickens in New Jersey). I’ll wait and blog on Zbyszko some other time (hopefully I can find some pub from the earlier part of the century that will inspire me), but in the meantime check out his utterly fascinating wiki here. I’ll go ahead and embed the Mazurki vs. Zbyszko scene from the film from youtube here, but, please, if you have any desire to see the original movie whatsoever skip this and view it in its proper context. Their match takes on a deeper meaning in the movie as part of the drama and as a conflict between older and newer wrestling styles and is best appreciated as part of the larger film. Still, against my better judgment, I’ll include it here (and cross my fingers that I can figure out how to embed):

A fantastic scene, a fantastic film, seeing it now makes me want to watch the movie again.

I find it remarkable that the article on Mazurki notes that he had wrestled some 1500 bouts in the twelve years prior to publication. Mazurki’s IMDB page shows how busy he was in Hollywood in the 40s after he was discovered by the great Josef Von Sternberg in 1941, incredible he had time for all of that! He would go onto a long career in movies and TV and wrestled as long as he could and was a referee even after that. He would also co-found and become the first president of the Cauliflower Alley Club, a fraternal organization of wrestlers that helps share memory of the sport and supports needy wrestlers with scholarships and a helping hand for wrestlers and their families who have been hurt on the job. His own ear is featured in the club logo:

What a guy. Two nice web pages on Mazurki

Mazurki page at Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame

Mazurki page at SLAM! Sports

But on to the rest of the mag. I’m going to post the contents and then I’ll post a bunch of photos. I discovered the stats tab here on blogger the other day and was completely and absolutely dumbfounded at how many hits I am getting. Thank you, readers. I had no idea there was such interest in the arcane stuff I’m putting up, and I am truly flattered. Anyways, I noticed that a lot of my hits are coming from image searches which reinforces my belief that it is very important that we bloggers get good images (and big images!) out there. It’s often amazing how sad the results are on even the most common of topics when I do an image search, and there’s no reason that it needs to be this way. It’s our internet, people, so let us fill it with the good content and drown out all the spam! Putting up a picture near any text that will identify it makes these searches more fruitful, and I repeat an offer I’ve made before that bloggers are welcome to use whatever images they please from any of the scans here at Darwination Scans they like for any not for profit uses that meet their needs or fancy.

Contents:

Scrollable Image

And I’m done blathering on, picture time!! Frank Sexton battles Maurice Tillet and “Red” O’ Malley

Scrollable Image

Newcomer from Greece, John Kostas

Scrollable Image

The centerfold, Gorgeous George breaks a full nelson, fantastic

Scrollable Image

A Lancaster, PA, Fan takes a kick at Tony Sinatra (don’t you love how the fans all came out in their best clothes to see the matches?)

Scrollable Image

Big Bill Miller

Scrollable Image

Mars Bennet puts an un-ladylike move on Lillian Bitter

Scrollable Image

Phil Zimmerman and Pete Gentile in a technical article on holds

Scrollable Image

Tom Jenkins, old-tyme wrestler, held the title for 15 years before losing it in 1905 to George Hackenschmidt

Scrollable Image

Rounding out this post, “The Golden Dozen,” the top female wrestlers of the day

Scrollable Image

Much more material within, fan letters, etc. What a cool mag!

And, lastly, from the back cover, Blatz Beer??!!?! Who’d drink something called Blatz? Of course, I shouldn’t talk, I probably drank a king’s ransom of Schlitz in a previous life…

Scrollable Image

Spectacular Features Magazine 12 (1950) / Flags of Our Fathers

2010-12-06T14:13:00.000-08:00

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan of this Fox comic here.

It's been a couple weeks since my last post, as I've been happily sidetracked by a book from a friend. I'd planned on wrapping up this series of World War II posts with the above comic on Iwo Jima. Dude (or Duder or The Dude, my grandfather I wrote about a couple of posts ago, a name I gave him as the first grandchild unable to pronounce granddad, but a fitting moniker nonetheless) was at Iwo Jima, so I felt it a fitting tribute, and the iconic flagraising on the cover is an image thoroughly seared into the American imagination and suitably patriotic for a series of scans in honor of our veterans. In the meantime, I received a gift from a friend of Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley and have become much more intimate with the details surrounding the image. Here's the cover from my own copy which shows the flagraising (or the replacement flagraising, rather, but more on that in a bit) in black and white :

Bradley's book (which was made into a film by Clint Eastwood) focuses on the lives of the six marines (well, five marines and one Navy Corpsman, John Bradley, James' father) - their childhoods, their training, their experiences in the war and at Iwo Jima, and, for the three who managed to survive, the way their lives were affected by being in the the photograph which is the only photo to win the Pulitzer Prize in the year of its publication as well as being possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time. I'll get to the comic in a bit, but after finishing Bradley's book yesterday, I'm compelled to write a little about it, as I learned much about what my grandfather must have gone through on that itty bitty island that was the site of so much bloodshed and perhaps why he didn't really share much in the way of battle stories.

Bradley sets up the story of the flagraising by taking a look at the youth of the six flagraisers, all very different but all with depression era childhoods which he notes were probably more similar to the way children were brought up in the nineteenth century than the way their own children would be brought up. James' dad was one of five children coming up in a very Catholic family in Wisconsin. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be a funeral director and was very mature and straight-laced for his age. He joined the Navy to possibly avoid ground combat and wound up assigned as Corpsman with the Marines. By Iwo Jima, the Japanese were training their soldiers to target medics (one medic could save many other soldiers after all) to the point where Corpsmen avoided drawing attention and would not wear a red cross. Also in the flagraising picture are Harlon Block, a Texan from a Seventh-Day Adventist family and a star football player whose entire football team volunteered together, Ira Hayes, a quiet and distant Pima Indian who wrote proudly of his accomplishments in the Corps to his family back home on the reservation, Franklin Sousley, an outgoing and jovial boy from Kentucky known to keep his unit in stitches and who had helped his mother keep her farm together after his father passed when he was nine, Rene Gagnon, with the looks of a movie star and a French Canadian mama's boy from a single-parent family from the textile mills of Manchester, New Hampshire, and lastly Mike Strank, leader of his unit a Czech-born Pennsylvanian who was a born marine and leader of his unit who had seen combat at Pavuvu and Bougainville. Ira and Franklin idolized Strank, a man that led by example, looked after his men, and always ate only after his soldiers had been seen to.

Each of these guys lives follow such different paths but the war brings them all together for extreme training at Camp Pendleton in California. Under constant drill and supervision, the Marines were taught to depend and look after the guy next to each other in preparation for some unnamed battle for which the U.S. war machine is gearing up towards in long preparation. I recall my grandpa talking about some training in California, so he must have been there, too. I remember also my granddad describing shore leave in Honolulu the last stop after being stationed at Camp Tarawa on the big island of Hawaii which was the next staging area these Marines gathered at after Camp Pendleton. Soon, the Marines would head out in a naval convoy 70 miles long towards an "Island X," revealed two days out of Honolulu to the soldiers as Iwo Jima or "sulfur island" in Japanese.

I've seen at least a little debate about the strategic importance of Iwo Jima, but it is readily apparent, at least, that both sides viewed it a crucial piece of real estate. For the Japanese, this island was sacred ground and part of the Japanese homeland, part of of the original mythical creation that spawned the Japanese islands from an eruption of Mount Fuji. Emperor Hirohito personally chose General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, head of his palace guard, and a very able commander to lead the island's defense. For the Americans, F.D.R. himself asked Holland "Howlin' Mad" Smith to lead the attack force at Iwo. For the Americans, Iwo represented a huge obstacle to the bombing of mainland Japan from recently acquired strips in the Marianas because it was halfway between Tinian and Saipan and the mainland and boasted two airstrips (construction had begun on a third) as well as a radar station that gave the mainland two hours warning of B-29 Superfortress attacks. Small Japanese fighters could launch from Iwo to attack these planes both coming and going causing unsustainable Air Force losses. Additionally, after the war, the Army Air Force concluded that Iwo-based planes had destroyed more B-29s on the ground in raids on Tinian and Saipan than were destroyed in all of the bombing efforts over Tokyo. In U.S. hands, the island would serve as a vital base for emergency landings of our bombers as well as a launch point for escort fighters.

In preparation for the attack, the Army Air Force bombarded the island with strikes from the air for seventy-two days in a row, the longest consecutive bombardment in the Pacific Theater, some 5,800 tons of bombs from 2,700 sorties. Amazingly, this seemed to have almost no effect as the Japanese hunkered down under ground, and the land defenses continued to grow. Howlin Mad noted, "We thought it would blast any island off the military map, level every defense, no matter how strong, and wipe out the garrison. But nothing of the kind happened. Like the worm, which becomes stronger the more you cut it up, Iwo Jima thrived on our bombardment." Indeed, the underground network continued to grow during the bombardment. Nearly 23,000 Japanese soldiers, most veterans of the war in China, were entrenched on the island in pillboxes, caves, and an enormous system of tunnels and caverns. A cool aerial photo can be seen here and a most excellent large image of a contour map showing the myriad defensive installations on the island prepared by the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Area is on display here. Only two miles of coastline were suitable for landing, and the Japanese had heavily mined these beaches and trained various weaponry on the landing areas with calculated patterns of crossfire. When James Bradley visited the island for his book, he could still see markings on the cave walls where Japanese mortar crews had written trajectory angles to hit certain spots on the beach. None of the Japanese soldiers expected to get off the island alive. Their duty was to fight valiantly and kill the assigned 10 Americans for every Japanese soldier.

So Bradley sets up the Battle scene beautifully, and I knew that a brutal description would follow, yet I still was not prepared for the account of the battle, and I'm not going to try and reproduce it here. I'll only say that I've read no more horrific description of war and that I am truly awed at the bravery our Marines showed in looking out for each other and that human beings should never have to commit or experience such horrors. The first attacking waves were almost completely wiped out. The first four days at Iwo Jima killed more Americans than at Normandy and more than in five months at Guadalcanal. In the entirety of World War 2, only 353 Americans were awarded Medals of Honor. Marines would receive 84 of these decorations with an amazing twenty-seven awarded for just one month's action on Iwo, a record not beaten by any other battle in U.S. history. Bradley writes of a number of situations that garnered these medals, each one an account of almost super human bravery and selfless action. Many of the winners would die in the action that earned them this highest honor.

The flagraising itself was something of an anti-climax, greatly misrepresented in the press. The New York Times would describe the ascension of Mount Suribachi as some sort of raging battle, but the truth is far more surreal. After four days of monumental losses and fierce fighting, two patrols were sent to scout a path to the top of the volcano. Almost inexplicably, the many Japanese still housed in the networks of tunnels under the mountain did not attack, as the patrolmen were in dire fear for their lives. As the patrol that was able to scout a path to the top hurriedly came back down the mountain, Colonel Chandler Johnson decided that he would risk a larger force and send a platoon of 40 men to the top. Just before the forty man patrol left to climb the mountain, Johnson handed the patrol leader, Lieutenant H. "George" Schrier, something from his map case, an American flag, measuring fifty-four by twenty-eight inches. The colonel told Schrier, "If you get to the top, put it up." The key word being "if," as every marine in that platoon felt truly exposed and suspected the Japanese had just been waiting for a larger force to try the ascent before opening up. As the unit snaked up the mountain, all eyes on the island and even on the boats at see took notice. Doc Bradley was one of the forty and he'd later say "Down at the base, there wasn't one out fo foruty of us who expected to make it. We all figured the Japanese would open up from the caves all the way up to the crater," and his main concern was how he, as Corpsman, was going to be able to get the casualties down the mountain. When the group reached the top after a tense but strangely serene forty minute climb to the top. In one of my favorite passages from the book, two Marines could not resist the impulse to take a piss down the crater, and one said, "I proclaim this volcano property of the United States of America" Then orders were made to find a pole for the flag. Sergeant Louis Lowery would record the event for posterity in a staged photograph that's been largely forgotten as the "real" flagraising.

Scrollable Image

As this shot was taken, a rumble of shouts and whistles rose from all the men on the island and the ships at shore. This was one of the more striking moments in the book for me, because I faintly recall that my grandfather once told me that he was one of those voices and that he saw the flag go up.

Bradley writes, "Thousands of Marine and Navy Personnel had been watching the patrol as they climbed to the volcano's rim. When the small swatch of color fluttered, Iwo Jima was transformed, for a few moments, in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Infantrymen cheered, whistled, waved their helmets. Ships offshore opened up their deep, honking whistles. Here was the symbol of an impossible dream fulfilled. Here was the manifestation of Suribachi's conquest. Here was the first invader's flag ever planted in four millenia on the territorial soil of Japan". Great prose, just a sample of the great language that brings the story to life.

Just moments after the flag went up, the mountain came to life, and Japanese snipers began to pop out of their holes. The photographer would tumble down the crater of Suribachi in the fight and break his camera, but thankfully the film made it. As the platoon worked for the next hour with flamethrowers and grenades to take control of the summit, the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, was coming ashore to witness the final stage in the fight for the mountain. He was so struck by the moment that he dcided he wanted the Suribachi flag as a souvenir. Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with Chandler Johnson who quickly decided that he would take the flag as a piece of battalion history and put together a group of soldiers just returned from a patrol to take up a much larger replacement flag (which happened to have been rescued from a sinking ship from the battle of Pearl Harbor). Mike Strank, Harlon Block, Ira Hayes, and Franklin Sousey made up the group sent to the top and were joined by Rene Gagnon who was a runner for Captain Dave Severance, leader of Easy Company from which all the flagraisers (replacement flagraisers, that is) would come. They were followed up the mountain by a pair of Marine photographers as well as a wire-service photographer named Joe Rosenthal. They met Lowery on his way down who informed them he had already taken pictures and almost turned around but kept on up when told of the amazing view. The photographers got to the top just in time to find Strank's group looking around for a replacement pole which turned out to be a long section of pipe weighing 100 pounds. The soldiers wanted to put the new flag up right as the old flag was taken down by the original flagraisers. The flagraisers of the replacement flag struggled to find a good spot and the other boys hopped in to help them. It happened so fast that the photographers almost missed, and indeed Rosenthal's famous photo was a stroke of luck. He and another photographer were politely trying to stay out of each other's way, and by the time he realized the flag was being raised, he reeled around his camera for split-second shot, not even able to check the frame through his viewfinder. So it's a small miracle that we even have this image, what Bradley comes to term The Photograph:

Scrollable Image

To the guys in the photo, and indeed to to all the Marines on the island, this moment meant nothing. It was just a replacement flag being put up, after all. Rosenthal gathered the Marines together afterward for a posed shot (versus The Photograph which was often dismissed as a pose though being whole spontaneous) which, having read about a lot of the guys in the picture, I like even more than the iconic image:

or this one from one of the other photographers which captures Rosenthal in the action of taking the previous picture.

When The Picture made it back to the states, it became instantly popular. Special editions were printed, color printings, frame-able printings - the public loved it as a symbol of victory and the indomitable American spirit. The reality being, however, that after 4 days of fighting, the struggle on Iwo Jima was far from over. Three of the flagraisers in the iconic photo would not make it off the island, and Bradley pulls no punches in describing the fighting that would go on for a month and pushing our soldiers beyond their limits. Easy Company of which the flagraisers were part would suffer 84% casualties. In all, America would suffer 26,000 casualties and all but 100 of the Japanese defenders would never leave the island (many of which killed themselves by holding grenades to their stomachs). A slaughter which would leave behind the Pacific's largest graveyards. To think that my granddad was there and that he would later also get through Okinawa indeed makes me feel so, so lucky that he survived and that my own father, myself,and, in turn, my own children even exist.

The later part of the book describes the travails of the surviving flagraisers, hailed as heroes and recruited into a huge bond sales campaign, would suffer as their fame threaten to eclipse their rest of their lives. Each of those guys knew that the raising of that flag meant nothing compared to the other happenings on Iwo and there was no reason beyond dumb luck that they were still around while so many of their buddies were not. They'd seen the worst that war had to offer, and back then there was no such diagnosis as PTSD. Largely, that generation kept it all bottled up, heroic and tragic at the same time. The story of each of the survivors is different and masterfully told.

Anyways, I give the book my highest recommendation and think it belongs on bookshelves and classrooms the nation over. I've ordered a copy for my pops for X-mas (the copy I received as a gift stays with me), and I hope he'll like it as much as I did. Vital and touching History, bravo, Mr. Bradley and eternal thanks to all those young Americans who served and serve their country.

But back to the comic I scanned for this post. I almost feel a little silly having a comic share space with such a classic as Flags of Our Fathers, but comics and pulps and other popular pubs are the prism I choose to view history through here on my blog and are not given their just due, so I don't know why I am even adding to the trend with such an apology. I don't blog too much on comics here on Darwination Scans mainly because comics are so well represented on scan sites and in the blogosphere compared to pulps and magazines. Still, I promise I have an equal love for the four color form and their value as texts for study and appreciation. The war comics of the golden age were often written by men had been there, and it's not fair at all to dismiss them as fluff or merely kid's stuff. The war comics of this period have taught me about battles of which I did not know and often have moments of pathos that could only come from artists and writers who saw the horrors of war firsthand. Great war comics like EC's Two-Fisted Tales or Frontline Combat or Warren's Blazing Combat (or even modern titles like Garth Ennis' War Stories or Jason Aaron's The Other Side) are not hollow endorsements of the glory of war but show war for what it is - brutal, senseless, sacrificial.

The frontispiece for today's issue from Fox, not a top-tier publisher from the golden age, though I do find many of their comics charming. I got this issue from a seller in the Philippines in an order with a couple of other much more scarce and pricey scanning-grade comics at a great price with the downside that they'd been bound into a four ring binder type of setup and were yet very dingy. The binding holes were pretty much right on the edge of the spine-side columns, so the issue required a lot of repair, but I'm pretty happy with the end result for what I started with. The pink inside front covers on the Fox titles is a nice touch that adds character to their comics:

Scrollable Image

Ah, much deserved shore leave for the battle weary. In Europe, there was London and Paris, and in the Pacific, if a soldier was lucky, there was Honolulu or Australia, or maybe even a quick trip home. I like the writers use of the word "fattened," a little bit of leave before being thrown into the oven. This issue has an extended story (clumsily broken up by a short and out of place text feature on Robert Louis Stevenson and "Jarhead" a rather poor comedic piece) on a veteran's experience leading up to and during the battle of Iwo Jima. Like many seasoned Marines at Iwo Jima or Okinawa, our protagonist must adapt to the loss of a commanding officer and the tension between fresh recruits and those who had already faced the tests of battle:

Scrollable Image

This relationship between the new officer and the veteran protagonist makes up the heart of the story, though the cover promises romance which arrives after this leave is granted. The hero, Rod, is a tough nut to crack, but Janet here knows how to play a Marine - call him out against those Army punks:

Scrollable Image

Can love blossom in a time of war? Is this dame, such an obvious operator, for real or just looking for a good time? Love will have to wait because, before the two lovers can come to any conclusion, Rod is off to war. Island X revealed! The Navy, like the Air Force before it, thinks there will be nothing left for the Marines with all that ordinance they've launched onto that small island:

Scrollable Image

But the going is indeed rough. One fresh recruit cracks up, and this new Captain Langly doesn't seem to be able to take it, either. Why, it's insubordination!!!

Scrollable Image

Can the Captain pull it together? And what about love?! All questions answered in this issue of Spectacular Features. The story is a bit clumsy, but I did enjoy it, and, in its way, the comic addresses some of the themes of the Bradley book.

And before I leave the topic of WWII, a few more quick links. First, Here is a very cool little publication, The Battle of the Aleutians - A Graphic History 1942-1943, I stumbled upon while looking up a bit of info on the net on the often overlooked war in Alaska, an illustrated pamphlet put out by Army Intelligence and penned by Private First Class Dashiell Hammett. No doubt, my crime fiction readers are familiar with Hammett (I've got a great Hammett-related scan I'll get up one of these days), and I was delighted discover the existence of this booklet. A little more info on the publication and Hammett's experience in the war is here. The scan comes from here. Many thanks to the gentleman who donated the publication and to the gentleman who scanned it and has hosted it, a real gem.

And another quick link. This comes from a friend whose father was also at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but in the Navy aboard the U.S.S. Bunker Hill. Here scans are available of many issues of the ship newspaper, The Monument. With features on sailors, war news, cartoons, fiction, and more, this is a very neat scanning project they've done which offers an intimate view of life on that vessel. Kudos!

Well, this ends my series on WWII scans, and I've enjoyed typing about my grandfather and the war very much, but I'm going to take a much needed detour into some lighter material over the next week or few before I get back to my series on editing scans, the nature of pulp, and finally my long-promised series on the birth of the girlie pulp. In response to the many emails I've received requesting more posts on 1950s and 60s wrestling, get ready to rumble...

Wartime Pulp – Adventure! New Love! Complete War!

2010-11-19T01:28:00.000-08:00

A nation at war was a nation hungry for stories of war, and tonight I’ll share a few examples of wartime pulp fiction. I’m not very aware of the particular pressures paper rationing had on the specific titles I’m sharing tonight, but publishers juked, jived, altered page counts, and ultimately delivered readers the action they craved. And many of those readers were in fact our fighting men “over there.” I’ll lead with a truly fantastic cover, from Our Navy, April 1945.

Scrollable Image

Adam Parfrey leads with this cover in the excellent book on the sweat mags from Feral House, It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps, and I’m happy to have found an image of it on the web. Thanks to RNRobert for putting it up, and you can see more cover images from his collection of these magazines here. I love newsstand pics (as you can tell from the fact I’ve had the same image at the top of my blog for quite some time now), and the look on the sailor’s face is truly priceless. I find it comforting that although these soldiers were surrounded by horror and the most “grown-up” of situations they might still find solace or escape in the comics and pulps of the day. I’m on the hunt for this issue now, as I’m most curious about what the article might have to say on the four color menace.

Tonight I’ll share a few pulps from my collection that sat on racks just like the one above, so that you, too, might enjoy some of these yarns of battle and life in a time of war.

First up! Adventure, October 1941.

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan here!

I bought this issue because of the strong cover from artist Albin Henning (not to mention the fact that Adventure is probably my favorite of all the pulps). I’m drawn to the gaze of the soldier in the forefront and the way he is looking right at the reader with a steel resolve. Salvation shines from the skies, but this isn’t some sort of heavenly intervention – rather it is a very human undertaking. But what exactly is going on here? Is this the Big Red One? The patch on the shoulder points toward that direction, but it's not the patch actually worn by the 1st Infantry (besides the fact that that unit wouldn't have been parachuting?). Adding to the puzzle, McCoy (who is responsible for the excellent edit on the issue) astutely observed that this issue came out two months before we even entered the war. Hmm...

Contents

Scrollable Image

The pulp kicks off with a George Surdez story of a legionnaire leading a motley assortment of soldiers in Norway and under constant air assault by the Nazis. Surdez was a longtime contributor to Adventure (which I promise to do a more in-depth post on at some point in the future) and other pulps like Argosy and Bluebook. They’ve got a partial bibliography over at the Pulprack on Surdez here. I’m adding a link on my sidebar to that site which has some excellent articles on the writers of Adventure and other worthy topics. I’m not sure how I hadn’t linked them up to now or if the site is currently active, but it is a great web page.

I finished this story earlier tonight and really, but really, enjoyed it. I’ve never looked into the German advance on Norway or heard of the battle described within, but it’s quite an interesting setting. Early in the war, Narvik held strategic importance because it was a Winter departure point for Swedish ore that the Germans needed for the war effort as Swedish ports would freeze during the Winter. At the same time, German control of the ports meant a location from which naval operations might better sever the shipping routes between England and the Soviet Union. As Britain decided they would mine the waters off of Norway, Germany launched a land assault and met with little resistance in the initial push. The allied push to retake Narvik involved the French foreign legion and various other troops. There was much miscommunication between the British and these forces, but against the odds they were able to turn the tide and offer the Germans their first defeat on land of the war along with a moral victory in that, yes, those Nazis can be licked after all. A wiki on the battle is here, though I’d suggest reading it AFTER you read the story.

Still, in some respects, the details of the battle are unimportant and are a minor part of Surdez’ story. The real trick is the way he gets at the character of his protagonist, Lieutenant Debourg. Like many Legionnaire stories, Debourg has a checkered past. He’s an Austrian from a wealthy family that has fallen from grace (just as Germany has become corrupted) and is now pitted against his onetime countrymen. The decisions he makes during his fall and the decisions he faces when forced to grapple with his past are remarkable, and the way Surdez allows you to understand these weak and simultaneously strong actions is a little marvel in storytelling. But don’t take my word for it, check it out.

Samples. Story art on “They Can Be Licked” by pulp journeyman Hamilton Greene

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Here's the splash page for the story by W.C. Tuttle, also illustrated by Greene. Tuttle was incredibly prolific and wrote hundreds of stories in the pulps as well as writing for the screen during the silent era. It seems like I see him mostly in Western pulps, so I’ll be interested to read this baseball story, as Tuttle was a semi-pro player in his youth and later was President of a left coast baseball league.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And lest we leave out the ladies, here’s my edit of the issue I scanned the other night, New Love from March of 1943. Adorning the cover is a charming aviatrix:

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan here!

While I’ve scanned these magazines as a way of remembering the war and our veterans’ service, I want to also mention the sacrifice made by the spouses and families of our fighting men. I can’t imagine the stress of having my loved ones in harm’s way, and many husbands or fathers never came home. So I thank the families of our veterans in the same breath.

As for my family, My grandmother met my granddad after the war when the GI Bill allowed him to go to college, but she confided in me once that she wrote a couple guys during the war. She says she wasn't crazy about either of them but that it was the least she could do. How sweet is that. This pulp contains a few stories of romance during wartime along with many great ads of the era including promotions where you could send GIs their favorite pulps on the front. I'll give my grandma this issue at X-mas. I wonder if she remembers these magazines. They are most definitely not the same as the "naughty" harlequin romances I've caught her reading over the years, heh heh.

I’ve scanned a number of these love pulps now and hardly get any reaction at all from scan fans, but I will keep at it. I’m comfortable enough in my manliness to admit that I enjoy the stories, and I certainly feel there’s a lot to be learned from their study about the feelings and pressures on women through the decades of first half of the twentieth century. It’d be a real shame if this once thriving mode of fiction for women were to fall into obscurity. Big thanks to fellow scanner Twobyfour for sending me a few of these in a care package, spread the pulp!

Contents and Samples:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Support the troops on the front line, send pulp! Careful, though. If you mark the "Love" box, the other soldiers are likely to tease…

Scrollable Image

Yawn, I’m up way, way past my bedtime but will get this last one up, dammit! Here’s Complete War Novels Magazine from March of 1943. This issue is sporting a bloodthirsty cover like many of the war pulps of the day. You’ll even see some of the covers labeled as "jingoistic" in Bookery’s pulp guide which is probably not the word I would choose. You fuck with the bull, you get the horns, eh? :

Scrollable Image

Get the full scan here!

This issue is a pulp from publisher Martin Goodman who really does not get enough attention for his central role in pulps and comics history. Discussions of Marvel Comics usually begin with Stan Lee in the 60s and ignore the role that Goodman played in establishing the company. Timely then Atlas comics were ventures that Goodman entered after he’d already been at pulp publishing, and he was selling a dozen different men’s adventure magazine titles after the comic scare and distribution problems had relegated his comics division to employing only Stan Lee and a secretary. Another topic for another future post, perhaps. Maybe I can track down some of the Red Circle weird menace pulps from a genre which just might be the forbear of the modern horror film. Thanks to McCoy for another excellent edit on this issue.

Contents/samples. Some, err, rough art in this issue…

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

And a couple of ads to round it out. A martial arts ad to reinforce what I mentioned last time re: the CO-EDS article and also a wartime admonition…

One more entry in this series on wartime pubs to follow next time, a comic!

CO-EDS August 1942 / WWII Pin-up Girls

2010-11-13T16:30:00.000-08:00

After the heavy post last time, let's lighten it up a bit with some cheesecake and a peek at the war era pin-up. The death of the girlie pulp in the late 30s meant the loss of painted covers, sepia nudes, and frolicking line-drawn lassies, but I must admit that the replacement is growing on me. The pin-up girl of the 40s has an everywoman appeal and real personality on display in addition to her more tangible assets. These are women you'd be proud to bring home to mama and who will behave themselves chastely while you cower in some miserable foxhole with c-rations for dinner. In the ever-changing undulations in trends in appreciation of the female form, this was a good time to be a leg man, as tall girls with legs for days hung on barracks' walls from the boot camps in the states to the bunkers of Europe to the battleships of the Pacific. The lass on tonight's cover most certainly caught my eye, and, in my own lascivious fashion, I just had to scan her. The curve of the bow set against the curves of the female form makes for a nice composition.

Scrollable Image

Get the scan here!

The contents page names the angler as Kay Paige of the University of California (the sort of detail I like to include so that a googling senior or family member might one day get an unexpected shock). This bow fishing sure looks fun. I'm a catch and release sort of guy, but I'd be willing to give it a try for pan-fish like bluegill (aka brim to you southerners or sunfish to you northerners) or mangrove snapper and the like. I seem to recall seeing gents fishing (hunting?) this way from atop towers over the outboard from the position where a guide might pole from in flat fishing. Maybe I even remember seeing some sort of bow with a reel attached, though it's hard to imagine much of a fight after one of these large, specialized arrowheads strikes. I'll include the pages from the article. Damn, girls who fish are sexy ;)

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

The contents page for the rest of the issue:

Scrollable Image

I'll snip out and highlight the column at left:

My 5 year old girl asked me this week in conversations about WWII whether any girls fought. I said no but quickly followed with the story of Rosie the Riveter and all her sisters of which she heartily approved. I also told her that now there are indeed women in our armed forces which she also approved of. This is one of those areas where me and my granddad disagreed, but you better believe if my girl wants to fight I think she should have the right (though the thought of either of my kids in the military scares the hell out of me) along with any other American ready to lay their life on the line for my freedoms. I get a kick (hi-yah!) out of this article, because you know the boys over there liked the idea that their girls could fend for themselves while they were away (and no doubt ward off unwanted advances). On a side note, and perhaps I'm blowing smoke here, but I've got the notion that the explosion of interest in the martial arts in the U.S. dates to exactly this time period. Granddad always liked to show off a lethal trick or two he'd learned from his Marine instructors, and I think Americans did not like the idea that our enemies might have a leg up in hand-to-hand combat. I'll go ahead and post the whole article which includes pictures of Florence Fitzgerald and Paul Zippel.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

A very fun issue, certainly a ray of sunshine for all those soldiers reading it in not-so-friendly climes. Once again, big thanks to scanmeister McCoy for his edit work on this issue, it's appreciated every single time I get help on an issue, bud. Back next time with wartime pulp! But before I go, here's one more page for all you leg men out there.

Scrollable Image

Thank You Veterans / WWII Era Scans

2010-11-11T22:26:00.000-08:00

My grandfather passed away in early 2008, and I find myself thinking about him often around Veterans Day. I feel a bit strange that it's not Christmas or Thanksgiving or the other family holidays that makes me constantly reminisce about him but so it goes. When he died, I certainly wasn't able to eulogize him at his funeral, as there is no way I could have kept it together. A couple of years have passed, and maybe I'm just now able to deal, but then again how does one ever really grieve properly. I called up my grandmother today to be of comfort in case she was feeling sad, and she wasn't home. Instead, I heard my grandfather's doddering voice on the answering machine. My grandmother still has not changed the message since he died, and I found myself sobbing like a baby, maybe because I've been thinking about all this for the past couple weeks. I used to always wonder why she left it on there, but now I guess I find it strangely comforting.

He was 82 when he died and was pretty much a shell of his former self by the time he gave up the ghost. I'm very thankful that he hung on long enough to be around for the birth of my two children, but by the end he was pretty vacant. He'd witnessed all his friends die before him, the prize of the long-aged, and years of smoking cigarettes had taken their toll. Still he had my grandmother, and it is hard to let a loved one go. He led a full life, and I hate to view his existence only through the lens of his military service, but in many ways I think it made him the man he was. And even though there are many strong men in my family, there will never be another one remotely like him. If the shrapnel that damaged his hearing during the war had been a little more effective, no one in that side of the family including yours truly would be around to tell the tale.

He was a proud Marine and served in the Pacific Theater during most of WWII. Trained in some sort of secret radar which he never used, he would go on to serve as a gunner of various small aircraft and later in the war was on the ground at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and many other islands in the Pacific. He did like to talk about the war, but he almost never talked about specific battles. He'd talk about taking all those pigeons for all their pay in some enormous poker game, or his time on shore leave, or getting terribly sunburnt playing tennis all day on some slab the military had poured on some little island, or of the strange and beauteous cultures of the islanders he encountered. My grandmother's mentioned a few times that she's awoken with his hands around her neck with him screaming in some flashback to terrible events clearing those islands of Japanese soldiers, but like most of that generation, he kept those horrors to himself.

The two things I loved most about my granddad, I think he picked up in the war, the first being an amazing level of comfort in talking with other people. Whether he was shooting the shit with doctors and lawyers at the golf course or joking around with a rural farmer at Wal-Mart (two groups I might admittedly feel out of place around), he was always at ease, and I think this might be something he picked up during the war. All those boys from all over America came together for a common purpose, and after meeting all these guys he was cowed by or surprised by no one. Born a master bullshitter, he could make anyone smile. When he'd take me on a fishing trip or wherever we might be headed, he eschewed the highways in favor of the backroads and relished getting out there in the nooks and crannies of America. This would suit him well in his long and successful career as an advertising consultant for mom and pops furniture stores in small towns all over the country.

The second thing I think he took away from the war was an indomitable spirit, a can-do attitude that was infectious. That generation pulled together and stepped up in the face of enormous odds, protecting the liberty of the American people and as far as I'm concerned the liberty of the globe. After that, what can't you do? I recently watched the excellent HBO miniseries The Pacific and it really made me realize how tough those guys had it in the Pacific. He told me once that after surviving the war, it's all gravy, and the positive and joyful way he lived his life was convincing of the fact.

We didn't always see eye to eye on politics and other matters, but we always had a great time talking about just about anything. He had some bass ackwards views on certain things, but I think in the past decade I've come to realize what an asset that generation was to our political discourse. When I was a teen, I'll admit to having the thought that, well, once all these old-timers are gone with their conservative views, America will be a better place. I was wrong. Sure that generation might have in some ways operated against what I'd call social progress, but they were civil, reasonable, and possessed common sense. When I talk to elder seniors about politics or current events, I'm almost always impressed with how informed they are and with their wisdom. After 30+ years of the culture wars and what I view as a breakdown in the traditional media, America is heavily lacking in many of the qualities that that greatest generation brought to the table. Whether we are fighting the combined war machines of Tojo and Hitler or massive debt and a plundered economic system and heartless plutocracy, we're still all in this together, and I wish we'd act like it. Ah well, enough of that.

My granddad rests at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery in KS, and, though we never really thought of him as a military man (except he did shave every day of his life and ran a tight ship),our family is happy to have him rest with his brothers in arms and appreciated the military ceremony when he was laid to rest. He loved meeting other Marines and dishing out friendly insults to the oldtimers he'd meet from the other services. I know he went through hell out on those islands, and I thank him and all who have served in our military.

Anyways, I've been thinking about the guy and reading a little WWII History, so I thought I'd put together some scans from the era, my way of reaching out and touching the past. Beyond working with books and magazines of the era, there are all sorts of rewarding digitization projects in WWII History. The time is now while there's still some of these guys around because there's not many left. I've seen some amazing photo albums from WWII veterans, and if you've got one in your family, you might consider putting it on the glass. Instead of just having one person in your fam as the holder of the photos, scan them, and every single person in your family or who will come into your family in the future will have the chance to have that unique tie to the past. I know I'm going to ask my grandma about scanning my granddad's flight book with the record of all the places he went during WWII and while I'm at it I hope to scan the whole damn family album. Our ties to History should be nourished, and we've got more tools to do that in the digital age with the ability to easily capture and share images, audio, and video. Hop to it!

It's late, and though I did manage to finish all but one of the scans I had planned for today, I'm just gonna post one and keep the others coming over the next few days.

American Library 02 Guadalcanal Diary (1943.McKay)

Scrollable Image

Get the scan here of this interesting illustrated adaptation of Richard Tregaskis' Guadalcanal Diary. This publication is listed in the Overstreet comic guide, but besides it being in the pamphlet format, I certainly wouldn't think of it as a comic. It follows along and takes excerpts from the book and is adorned by a nice cover and illustrations throughout by Edgar Franklin Wittmack who had a long career working in both the slicks and the pulps.

The American invasion at Guadalcanal was our first big push back at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and other Japanese aggression in the Pacific and was meant to prevent Australia from becoming isolated by Japanese forces. We landed our troops safely and caught the Japanese off guard, but they would try mightily to retake the island. Tregaskis was a volunteer correspondent and his book became an immediate success and was made into a film the following year:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035957/

Because of Tregaskis' description of the camaraderie amongst Marines, the USMC still makes Guadalcanal Diary required reading for all officer candidates. I wasn't terribly thrilled by Tregaskis' style, but I plan to add the full book to my WWII reading list. You can most certainly find a copy in your local library or Google Books has it available digitally online here:

Guadalcanal Diary at Google Books

A Map of the area and the title page:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

I really like how Tregaskis makes a point to give the hometown of every soldier he writes about. This page immediately jumped out as me because this soldier is from my hometown of Lawrence, KS, and is a fellow Jayhawk. Amerine's account seems too incredible to be true, but he was indeed awarded the Silver Star for his travails and would go on to lead fighter squadrons and a career in the military after the war. I don't recall going to school with any Amerines, but it sounds like they'd have been some tough sonsabitches:

Scrollable Image

and a couple more art samples from Wittmack:

Thanks to my man McCoy for his edit of tonight's scan, and we'll be back next time with more magazines from wartime. Again, thank you veterans, your sacrifices are not forgotten.

How to Scan! Pt. 2 Put That Sucker on the Glass

2010-11-10T12:45:00.000-08:00

Today I’m going to type a little about the actual process of scanning a book or what we scanners refer to as “rawing” a book (however the hell you are supposed to spell it). By this I mean the part of the process in which I prepare the book for scanning and produce the raw images I will later be editing and processing into the files I share here.

First things first, get comfortable! Set up your scanner so that it is easy for you to operate and so that you have plenty of room to move about. I like to put my scanner on a piano bench adjacent to my desk, so that I never have to lean too far to operate it. I’ll be putting up pictures of my setup as I go here to make this all a bit more clear and because a post is much more fun with pictures.

The scanning stage of the process is really my favorite step. I sit down to scan, put on an album or maybe click on a ballgame or a documentary (nothing that requires my full visual attention) and just zone out for a bit. The mundane task of flipping pages kind of allows me to zone out in a half-assed variety of meditation that I find very relaxing. This step goes most quickly if I avoid distractions. Surfing the web, reading scans, e-mailing, etc. can turn a 15 minute scan into an hours long scan, so I try, not always successfully, to keep a steady pace going.

First, you will want to set up your scanning software to send your images to a certain folder you set up on your computer, I’ve got mine named “scanner incoming” and all of my various scanners send their images to this single folder. When I scan a magazine or a comic, I do not want to fuss with the images as they come in because this is very distracting and inefficient. I might check my results in the first few pages just to make sure I like what I’m getting, but beyond that I only check from time to time that I haven’t skipped any pages.

What I want in my raw scans is an unadulterated image that looks exactly like the page it is coming from. Sure, you can set up your scanner software to alter the images as they come in, but this is often like using a hacksaw instead of a scalpel. Photoshop (or whatever image processing program you are using, more on this topic later) is a far superior tool for adjusting images than your scanner’s software, so I try to minimize alterations or automatic adjustments. For some scanners' software this will mean adjusting the pre-scan settings or auto-leveling. Most often this means tweaking down the brightness, contrast, and even saturation until the raw scan looks uniformly like what you see on the page itself. Sometimes it will even be necessary to adjust the white, black, or neutral in levels.
At this stage, you will want to pick a file format and dpi setting for your scans that you are comfortable with. The raw scans that you get directly from your scanner should be of the utmost quality, and the raw images we work with are much, much larger than compressed images that go out in the final scan. Personally, I like to go with a lossless format and scan to .tif. Other scanners I know scan to .bmp or .png, but at the very least I suggest going with an uncompressed .jpeg. While the size for a single image you get here might seem very large, I feel that it’s worth it, and an average computer will still slice and dice these images in the processing stage fairly quickly. I like to keep all of my raw scans for perpetuity in case I want to revisit a scan for a new or different edit and just to have an unadulterated archive around. Sure, this can take up a lot of room, but even a large scan might take up .25 or .50 worth of hard drive space, and, if I care enough to put a scarce or valuable book on my scanner that no other soul might ever care to scan again, this seems like a very small cost indeed. Other guys I know, though, will just toss their raws when they’ve gotten a final product and there’s nothing wrong with that especially for common publications. If you have the desire to revisit an old scan, often a fresh scan with a newer machine and up-to-the-minute techniques gets the best result.

As for dpi setting, there’s considerable debate on the optimum setting. Many professional or archival scanning guidelines I’ve seen suggest a 600 dpi setting, while there are many good scanners that get great results with settings as low as 200 dpi. 600 dpi most definitely is greater than the original printing setup of vintage (or even modern) material, but it also insures that line work is captured accurately and that small fonts are perfectly legible. Of course, scanning at 600 dpi yields an image of a much greater pixel width than the screens that scans will be viewed upon. Some scanners feel that scanning in higher dpi leads to a “grittier” look than is achieved with a smaller setting or that such a high setting is overkill. They might be right. On the other hand, if you scan at too low of a resolution, you are increasing the risk of moiré in the scan and can end up making small fonts illegible or making fine line work blocky. These days, I scan at 400 dpi (in the past I’ve scanned at 300dpi which is probably sufficient) which I find to be a nice compromise between speed and image quality. One other factor to consider here is that most OCR programs are going to work best with at least 300 dpi.

Moving on (geez I ramble), let’s continue to the scan itself. The number on enemy of a good scan is failing to get the page flat on the glass. Spine shadow is awfully annoying, and even the slightest curvature and waviness in the raw scan can make text illegible or distort artwork. When I told McCoy that I was doing a how-to, his first response was “tell em to pull the staples!!!” And while this no doubt makes most collectors cringe, it is indeed the best recipe for a good scan. But please do not let this stop you. If you have a rare book and are willing to scan it but do not want to destroy it, please do scan it even if you are not willing to take it apart, it’s much appreciated no matter what. Just make sure that you are using a heavy book or weights on the scanner lid to get your book as flat as possible. I’ve personally come to the conclusion that for most material, pulling the staples is the best way to go. In fact, for cheap pulps or squarebound magazines, sacrificing the book is really the logical choice. Even for valuable golden age comics, I find pulling the staples is the best choice. Besides yielding a flatter image and more page space to work with, the stress on a spine of folding it back and forth 36 times or pressing down on it with the scanner lid is greater than the risk of snapping a staple in the process or enlarging the staple holes. When I first started deconstructing books and magazines, I would sweat bullets in this stage, but really I do enjoy it. And because I’m something of an anti-collector (paper is only a vessel – unless we are talking about my girlie pulp collection :D) this comes naturally to me.

I scanned a pulp last night (which will be showing up here on Thursday, hopefully!, in a series of scans McCoy and I are doing for Veterans Day) and took some pictures of the process to show that you can do this with minimal damage to your pulp if you are careful. Let me make a disclaimer here that this works better with pages that aren’t so brittle. A pulp can look great, but if the pages are brittle, it’s not going to fare well in this process. This is one reason I’m skeptical of much of the grading that goes on with comics and pulps. I’ve gotten mid or high grade pulps that look really nice, but if the paper is brittle, I’d rather just have a well-read, browning-but-supple beater copy.

So this particular pulp is probably an issue that I’d normally be far rougher with, but I plan on giving it to my granny when I go home for Xmas (as it was given to me by a fellow scanner to have my way with) and I was thinking of this post, so I went through the process of pulling staples and reassembling. But before you start to take anything apart, get some scans of the covers and spine, just in case they suffer damage in the debind process.

The victim:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

A nice, solid reading grade pulp and pretty much the condition I like for a scanning copy. The cover is complete with a little creasing and tattering about the edges. The spine is near complete. The pages are browning but supple. Of course, we often have to go with the most affordable copies we can find, but a copy like this is going to come out of the other side of the process about like you see it here. High grade pulps usually don’t fare as well. But don’t let me talk you out of it! By any means necessary, I say, paper degrades, glory is forever! :p
Cough, but on with the program. Pulling staples can be a bit delicate, but just go slow and take your time and the patient will be O.K. First I open up the back cover so that I can get to the backside of the staples, taking care not to bend the back cover over too much.

Scrollable Image

Next, I use a set of needle-nose micro pliers to carefully bend the staples straight.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Then I turn the magazine up so that the front and back cover are lying flat. Now I can pull those puppies.

Scrollable Image

This step can be tricky. Sometimes, the staples come right out. Other times, they take some coaxing. You can use the micro pliers to push carefully from the back side or to grab them from the front if you aren’t able to manipulate them out by hand. Go slow and be patient, you can do it!

Set aside the staples in a manner so that you remember exactly how they came out of the book. For comics in particular this is important so that the staples go back in easily. If the staples are rusty, this is a great chance to spray them with a little WD40 and prevent further damage to the book. A caveat here on rusty staples, they sometimes snap! If a set of staples is really rusty on a pricey comic, you could skip the debind. If a staple snaps, I’ll usually replace with an extra staple of a similar vintage…

Now, you can pull out all of the loose pages, leaving only the pages that are actually glued in at the spine.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Now the book is ready to scan. The pages still attached to the magazine are a little trickier and may not end up perfectly flat, but there will be no spine shadow encroaching on any text in the scan. I use a book placed atop a thicker backer board to assist in getting the page flat.

Scrollable Image

Scanning the loose pages will go very fast and the images will be perfectly flat. In the second pic, you can see how I have one set of pages on the left of the scanner and that as I scan them I have another pile on the right. When I get to the middle leaf of each section, I move the pile from the right over to where the pile from the left was and continue as before. BTW that white strip you see on my scanner bed can help on some models make a scanner’s auto-leveling more even. Some scanner software levels every page by picking the lightest and darkest points, so having some true white on the bed can aid in getting truer colors.

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

When you are done, it’s time to reassemble, though you’ll want to double check that you have all of pages for your scan in hand. It is truly frustrating to put a book back together and realize that you’ve missed a couple of pages. When you put the sections back in the appropriate place in the book, you can use a backer board placed in the center of the section to help get the pages all the way to the spine. Re-inserting the staples can be a little tricky in a pulp, but with a little patience it’s easily done.

Here’s the old girl post-scan. Minus some pulp flakes here and there, she’s in exactly the same shape as when I started. I could almost say, in mock indignation, one of my granddad’s oft-used lines - “I never laid a hand on the broad!”:

Scrollable Image

The mention of pulp flakes reminds me, you will need to clean your scanner bed often when working with pulp, especially a brittle issue. I use a lens cloth from a camera store, but there are a variety of microfiber products out there that won’t scratch your glass. Keeping the glass clean is very important, one prominent but unnoticed smudge or hair can ruin a whole scan. Periodically, you will want to give your glass a more thorough cleaning with isopropyl alcohol. Be wary of using conventional glass cleaner because the ammonia can react with coating on some scanner beds. More occasionally than that, you might need to clean the underside of your glass as well as that damn pulp gets everywhere.

And I might as well post what one of these raw pages looks like. The raw 400 dpi .tif I get weighs in at 35.1 MB (the end result I will end up sharing will be probably about 800kb so you see the enormous size difference). I’ve got to shrink the thing way down just to get it hosted, but this pic will give you some idea of the color I’m after:

Scrollable Image

Once you have all of your raws for the issue you are working on, put them in a folder unto themselves. I use a renamer program to then tag each image with the page number and the issue it came out of. Some scanner software lets you do this pre-scan, but if you miss pages, have to rescan pages, etc., this is more trouble than it’s worth. Most renamer programs will let you name all of the files in a folder numerically, even when there are gaps in the sequence. Having each page named well is good archival policy and it prevents the possible loss of pages should many files with “image 0001” get thrown in together by accident.

And while I’m thinking about it, here are some links that are of using in the debinding process for newer glue-bound publications, thanks to these scanners for sharing their helpful tips:

http://hem.bredband.net/pnyxtr/scanning/iron_debind.html

http://193.170.75.13/~e0225705/rebinding.html

I hope this has been a fairly coherent post. After a four hours of typing away, I’m not so sure I’ve kept my focus - a common occurrence after my time at the keyboard, nyuk, nyuk.

I will continue with this series on how to scan very soon with an installment on image processing and some different editing options a scanner has to choose from, but tomorrow I'll interrupt this series with some WWII material that I’m scrambling to get done in honor of Veterans Day.

How to Scan! Pt. 1 Picking a Scanner

2010-11-08T17:44:00.000-08:00

Well, well, well. I take my eye off the ball, look up, and see it’s been three months since my last post, my apologies. Last time I promised an exploration of the term “pulp”, and I will get to that sometimes murky question soon, but today I’ve set aside an hour or few for something I probably should have done long ago, a post on how to scan a magazine. I’ve received numerous inquiries into my methods, and I am more than happy to share some thoughts on the scanning process. I will try and keep it simple and stick to the basics, but please excuse if I geek out here and there. Also please remember, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and opinions vary widely on the best way to produce a great scan. Let me preface all this, also, with the caveat that scanning is a very strange pursuit and will not be for everyone. Most people who do it really have a passion for the material they scan or for the idea of sharing their books because they have enjoyed reading scans from others. And then are those strange characters who, like me, enjoy the process and find it a relaxing pastime.

The Machine

Most people that decide they want to try and make a scan will just use whatever machine they have on hand, and that’s a-ok. But if you are going to be scanning often, it is worth a little time in choosing the right scanner to suit your purposes. If you scan for long enough, you will likely figure out that scanners, like many electronic devices, are basically disposable. The cost of servicing a scanner (replacing the bulb and tuning-up) with shipping costs is usually about as much as just buying a new one. Some signs of a dying scanner are red or yellow lines (which can be just a sign that a fiber has gotten stuck to your bulb and that the bulb and mirror need to be cleaned by using compressed air or a swab with a bit of alcohol on it), fading or uneven blacks, or prominent moiré patterns that were not there before. If your scanner is dying, getting a new one is preferable to the editing gymnastics necessary to fix the image, and some raw scans just cannot be helped. Put that lame horse out to pasture, eh?

There are basically four options I’d consider when picking a scanner. A standard flatbed, an “edge” model, an A3 (oversized) flatbed scanner, and a photo scanner.

A4 flatbeds are by far what most of the scanners out there are using. As a general rule, I’d stay away from all-in-one units (scanner plus printer), as I had a rough time with my first HP all-in-one, and the raws I’ve seen from all-in-one units generally are lower quality than a standalone scanner. The main two brands that scanners use are Epsons and Canons. For a majority of my scans, I use the Epson v300, and, when it dies, I will probably check out the v500 (which is faster). The v300 is the scanner that I am recommending as the best all-purpose scanner. The pros: long-life (McCoy is still on his first v300 and I’d guess closing in on 1000 magazine scans), sharp raws, software that is very compatible across operating systems, the option to scan film, and an affordable cost. The cons: pre-scan settings require a lot of tweaking and the scanner glass is sunk in to the unit a bit making a ridge than can crease pages when the lid is closed if you are scanning loose leafs.

“Edge” scanner - Here I’m talking about the Plustek Opticbook 3600 which I assume has the patent on the edge design, otherwise other manufacturers would surely be using it. The edge scanner is built so that a book can hang off the edge, so that you can scan books without spine shadow with little damage to the binding. A pic so you can see what I’m talking about.

You do lose about 1/8th to a ¼ of an inch of the page at the spine, but this is really a great feature for scanning books and especially for minimizing damage while scanning pulps. I’m on my second plustek and use it when I need the edge feature (I use it mainly for the high grade or expensive pulps). The pros: besides the edge design, this scanner sports a blazing fast speed of seven seconds for a full sized page at 300 dpi. You will be hard-pressed to keep up with the thing. Also, this machine gives perfect color on your raws every time. No pre-scan tweaking is necessary, and I think the software is generally marvelous (though, I have heard that finding the right driver for newer operating systems can be a pain). The cons: cost and durability – Almost every single scanner I know who has bought one ends up seeing lines in their raws at a year or before, so the bulb life is a big problem. The scanner costs about $250 bucks, so this is pretty much unacceptable. Add to this that their customer service is poor and the turnaround on getting a machine serviced is often months (and they don’t even always get it right the first time), and I tend to warn people away from this machine. That said, I know a few guys that have bought another after their first died out of warranty (1 year). An incredible but flawed machine.

A3 Scanners are a good choice if you are going to be working with over-sized magazines or will be using your scanner to scan in canvasses and the like. Pretty much the only affordable A3 is the Mustek USB 1200 (@$150, the next step up is about a grand). Pros: it’s an A3, you can scan big mags or tabloids or two pages at a time on smaller publications. Cons: Clunky software and driver, lack of a scan button (you have to use a graphic interface on your computer), middling image quality, slow speeds. Despite these cons, I like having a Mustek. I do not recommend it as a primary scanner, though, unless you will be scanning large items.

Camera scanners – I’m not very familiar with these, but here’s what they look like. This is a picture of a professional-make (there are at least a couple of companies that make these, this is just the first one I could find, I make no recommendation having never used it)

And here is a DIY model:

You can find out more about these DIY makes from this site which has all sorts of designs and is where people come together to talk about new designs. Though I probably would never move away from my flatbed scanners, I think what these folks are doing is very cool.

Pros: Blazing fast speeds, no damage to the book. Cons: Image quality, problems with curvature and glare, the professional makes are expensive. The scans I’ve seen made with photo scanners are almost uniformly of a lesser quality, though I have seen a scanner or two achieve excellent results with their own makes.

My blogging time’s up for today, and I’ve hardly covered any ground, surprise, surprise. Back tomorrow with more “how to”…

Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945)

2010-08-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

Scrollable Image

Clyde Prettyman is the artist.

Get the scan here!!!

A fantastic find, tonight's edition is hot off the scanner, can you dig, daddy-o? Bound by a single staple, and a little bit larger than the pocket mag of the 50s, here's your travel guide into the land of jive. The thought of translating jive brings to mind these guys from Airplane:

Which just might not be too off-base, as editor Lou Shelley writes on the inside cover of the lure of black slang. If you don't read this book, you just won't know, Jackson, so get hep.

Scrollable Image

And to back up the hepcat cred, the dictionary pages are punctuated by photos of R&B, jazz, and swing musicians, somewhat crudely printed, but a fun who's who of the music world of the day, contents and photolisting:

Scrollable Image

A couple of photo samples, beginning with one of my faves, the Nat King Cole Trio. Nat King Cole was always smooth as silk, and Oscar Moore was a fantastic guitarist, ahead of his time and definitely one of the pioneers of jazz guitar. And if you want jive cred, you can't forget Satchmo:

Scrollable Image

Scrollable Image

Before I talk about some of the fun words inside, though, I think it's good to talk about this funky little pub as part of a broader movement that was really picking up steam in the 40s (I'm thinking comic/magazines like Miss America, Keen Teens, Teen Life, etc) with the emergence of the modern youth market, that is, publications and advertising were for the first time directed exactly towards teens and the youngest adults (which has grow over time into the behemoth it is today). I remember in Bradford Wright's 2003 book, Comic Book Nation, Wright takes an askance look at oft-vilified crusader against comics, Frederic Wertham. At the base of Wertham's oft-absurd claims, says Wright, is a real concern for the fact that publishers are now selling books directly to children and the publishers see this market ripe for exploitation instead of an audience to be cultured (essentially an anti-capitalist argument?). The publishers were out to make a buck and meant to give the kids what they wanted (horror! cheesecake! crime!) instead of what they needed (literature without pictures that will make them good adults). And certainly many comics from he golden age ARE unsavory to the point where I wouldn't want my kids reading them. But Wertham was aware of what much of society didn't really catch on to, that is, that publications were now being made for sale directly to children and many parents never even thought to look at what might be inside. Society was now affluent enough and printing now cheap enough, where a kid could afford the dime a comic or pulp would cost, and the kids were crazy for them. For a more on Wertham and when this all comes to a head, I highly recommend David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague. It's not only of interest to golden age comic book fans but is also insightful as a broader history of the paranoia and congressional hearing circuses of the post-war era. Much of the book comes from interview material, and it's great to hear what the kids who were there at the comic burnings have to say today on the subject.

But back to the dictionary - a cool look at the state of slang over 60 years ago. I doubt most words in here were ever in common usage, but who knows. Some slang phrases hit a tipping point and catch on nationally only to be discarded a few years later, while some bits of slang are practiced only by the outcast groups that use them and passed down through the decades like a sort of musician or druggie or hipster's code. Of course, today, we have the Urban Dictionary online to help us out, truly an invaluable resource when it comes to slang. Who says the web's good for nothing, eh? Warning to the PC crowd, there are offensive words for racial and social groups included in the dictionary, but they seem to be equal opportunity about it, and when you go digging around in old pubs - you will find dirt, so there it is.

I'll just mention a few groups of words from the first section. Here's a series of words that are now in common usage, still going strong:

This second group are some I'm not familiar with or that aren't used too much in these forms, but I like. I wish they'd survived. Maybe it's not too late!

And a small group of words still in usage but with different meanings today. Take note, misinterpretations or misuse on many of these counts could spell trouble

And dare I forget to mention, big thanks to McCoy, an alreet fellow and strictly solid, for doing the edit work on the scan. It was cut poorly with bits of text missing, but he fixed it right up for hard drives everywhere.

Next time! Sticking with the dictionary theme - a definition - just what is "pulp" anyways?!

Ballyhoo, February 1934 - Mae West Number

2010-07-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

An issue of a classic American magazine up for your enjoyment, Ballyhoo!

Scrollable Image

Get the scan here.

Ballyhoo was the brainchild of editor Norman Anthony who had pitched the idea to George Delacorte at Dell for a magazine without sponsors, indeed for a magazine that that lampooned Madison avenue and the burgeoning advertising industry. Anthony had been in humor magazines for years and is remembered for always wanting to push the envelope. He'd been an editor for Judge but felt that there was too much pressure from advertisers about propriety. In his short run as editor for Life, he radically altered the magazine, discarding much of the traditional content. With Ballyhoo, he finally got the chance to really change the mold of the American humor magazine

Here is an article in Time from May 11, 1931, in which Delacorte expresses his reservations about the "freshness" of the magazine (Anthony supposedly tried to have some of the initial issue's 150,000 copy pressing wrapped in celophane, but I'm unsure if any issues were actually shipped this way). Delacorte's reservations quickly evaporated, I'm sure, as the first copy sold out quickly. The magazine was a complete success, exploding in popularity. Theodore Peterson's excellent 1964 book, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, says, "Although the circulation figures are unreliable, the first issue of 150,000 copies was said to have sold out in five days; the second issue sold 450,000 copies, the third 675,000, and the fourth more than 1,000,000. In a few months circulation exceeded 2,000,000." Within a couple years, the circulation would drop back down to about 300,000, but it's 2 million plus circulation mark would not be passed until the 40s with Life and Woman's Day. Advertisers soon pleaded for page space and ads were introduced. It says something that at times it can be difficult to tell between the real and the parody...

The rocketing onto the scene of this magazine seems unique in that it begat a whole craze. Mimicking the readily identifiable patchwork colors of the cover design, clothing makers rushed out dresses, ties, scarves, etc. with the Ballyhoo theme. A book from Simon and Schuster, greeting cards, games, songs and more were produced on the theme, and Anthony even wrote a musical show titled Ballyhoo (which introduced a youn Bob Hope to the stage). A neat piece of trivia for you pinball fans like me out there, the first pinball game had a Ballyhoo theme. You can see it here if you scroll half way down the screen. I can't tell for sure, but it looks like the Bally game company stuck with half of the name of this first machine. And all this talk of faddishness and cultural saturation leads nicely into our covergirl or cover woman, rather, as labeling Mae West as anything but just won't do.

A few nice pics of West, my kind of gal. This first one (a pic of Mae on trial for obscenity for her Broadway show "Sex" in 1927) is taken from a nice review of She Done Him Wrong (1933) over at Lolita's classics (she's also got a review of I'm No Angel also from the year previous the publication of this Mae West issue). The other two, more in a pin-up vein - Mae West had curves in all those places flappers didn't.

You get a sense in this issue of how big of a sensation West was. She was just everywhere. Here up-front sexuality and disarming wit took the nation by storm and single-handedly had decency groups up-in-arms. And like most fads, perhaps seeing Mae everywhere did get tiresome.

Scrollable Image

On the other hand, what's not to like? The gag men break out the breast jokes en masse for this issue, bawdy humor being a specialty of Ballyhoo . The crude audacity of Ballyhoo is a great surprise, but I think it's done with such a wink and a smile that they were able to get away with much more than other magazines might have.

Steady, men, steady.

Scrollable Image

Oh my...

Scrollable Image

The centerfold, notice the Minnie parody in the bottom left.

Scrollable Image

The photo gags in here are pretty funny, you can see how this magazine might have influenced later pubs like Help! and National Lampoon. This page takes aim at the haterz

Scrollable Image

And also tonight, a bonus issue from the following month, March 1934 - The Clean Number. Involving many plumber's jokes, a lost genre of dirty joke?

Scrollable Image

The scan's here.

Big thanks to scanmeister McCoy for the edit work on both of tonight's issues. I've got a few more of these I mean to work into my scanning rotation, so you can check back here from time to time for a fresh scan.