Around here we often debate whether to post something, but generally believe that as a sort of history site, it’s always a bad idea to hold back. Today we have an issue of Midnight, published October 24, 1966, that goes over the top with gore. It isn’t the woman whose face has been eaten off by rats that particularly worries us, nor the cop that supposedly had his eyeballs ripped out. We’ve posted those. No, it’s the autopsied infant that gave us pause. We sometimes prattle on about refusing to self-censor, but when we say that, what we’re referring to is sex and nudity, not vivisected one year-old babies. We want you to enjoy the site, not scroll down the page cringing at what gore will leap from the jack-in-the-box. So long story short: eaten face—okay; ripped out eyeballs—hunky dory; autopsied infant? Hellz no. We have our standards, though Midnight didn’t.
Anyway, you do get some interesting articles in this issue. Of special note is William Holden answering questions about a guy he ran over and killed on a highway in Geneva, where he was living to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The Swiss sweated Holden for a while, but in the end he escaped with an eight month suspended sentence for manslaughter. What’s especially intriguing about this story is that an online search uncovered no links to this Swiss snafu. Instead, we learned that Holden had been convicted of vehicular manslaughter not in Switzerland, but in Italy, where he had rammed another car while drunk and killed the driver. But in the Midnight story, Holden is said to have run over a hiker. Asked whether he was under the influence, his response is: “No, I wasn’t drunk—not this time.”
So did William Holden kill two people with his car in two separate incidents? We tend to doubt it, but on the other hand, how could Midnight get everything so wrong, with the accompanying quote: “not this time”? Sure, Midnight made things up, but as blatantly as this? We think it very likely that the editors simply tried to write about the Italian accident, but were working on the fly and mangled everything. They probably assumed the accident was in Switzerland because Holden lived there, took his “not this time” quote out of context, and—somehow—saw the phrase “second automobile” in all the other accounts and wrote it as “hiker.” Anyone could make those mistakes, right? Yeah, anyone could. But Midnightdoes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
