Vintage Pulp

February 28 2011

FIELD OF VISION

On a clear day you can see 1980.

For your pleasure this Monday, we have another National Informer. Perhaps you thought we had run out of these gems, but fear not, sweet reader—we haven’t. In this issue published yesterday in 1972, Informer’s in-house seer Mark Travis puts his self-proclaimed 85% accuracy rate on the line with a raft of bold new predictions. He tells us Earthmen (his term, not ours) will land on Mars by 1980. Um, no. He also predicts that, by 1980 again, Antarctica will be used as a deepfreeze for the world’s food supply. And he also predicts that half the U.S. population will be on welfare by the year… you guessed it—1980. We don’t know what his fetish was with that year, but in a way, these were clever predictions—since his job was results-based, he couldn’t be fired for at least eight years. But our favorite prediction of his actually deals with the immediate future: “I predict several small children will be carried away by eagles in our Western States next summer.” 85% accuracy? Perhaps not. But at least Travis was entertaining even when he was wrong. Elsewhere in Informer you get peeping Toms, swinging mistresses, sex advice, and some rather curious ads. See all that, and more, below.

National Informer, nudity, tabloid

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

March 18

1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe

Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane.

March 18

1965—Leonov Walks in Space

Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov’s spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod’s airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit’s pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk.

March 17

1966—Missing Nuke Found

Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the deep submergence vehicle Alvin locates a missing American hydrogen bomb. The 1.45-megaton nuke had been lost by the U.S. Air Force during a midair accident over Palomares, Spain. It was found resting in nearly three-thousand feet of water and was raised intact on 7 April.

March 16

1968—My Lai Massacre Occurs

In Vietnam, American troops kill between 350 and 500 unarmed citizens, all of whom are civilians and a majority of whom are women, children, babies and elderly people. Many victims are sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies are mutilated. The incident doesn’t become public knowledge until 1969, but when it does, the American war effort is dealt one of its worst blows.

March 15

1937—H.P. Lovecraft Dies

American sci-fi/horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft dies of intestinal cancer in Providence, Rhode Island at age 46. Lovecraft died nearly destitute, but would become the most influential horror writer ever. His imaginary universe of malign gods and degenerate cults was influenced by his explicitly racist views, but his detailed and procedural style of writing, which usually pitted men of science or academia against indescribable monsters, remains as effective today as it was eighty years ago.

March 15

2011—Illustrator Michel Gourdon Dies

French pulp artist Michel Gourdon, who was the less famous brother of Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, dies in Coudray, France aged eighty-five. He is known mainly for the covers he painted for the imprint Flueve Noir, but produced nearly 3,500 covers during his career.