TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY

Cryonics exec claims Ted Williams’ frozen head was roughed up.

Just in time for Major League Baseball’s postseason, a former employee of the cryonics company Alcor Life Extension claims in a new book that Hall of Fame baseball player Ted Williams’ frozen head was mistreated at the facility. Former chief operating officer Larry Johnson writes in his book Frozen: My Journey into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death, that an Alcor official used a wrench as a—well, let’s just say it—as a bat, to knock a tuna can loose from Williams’ head.

According to Johnson, the cans were used as head pedestals, but only after their contents had been fed to the Alcor cat. Instead of praising his coworkers for their spirit of improvisation, Johnson is critical of these practices. To bolster his claims, his book includes a photograph of an upside-down severed head with what indeed appears to be a tuna can stuck to it, though the head pictured is not Williams’. But Johnson did describe the former Red Sox outfielder’s earthly remains, writing: “The disembodied face set in that awful, frozen scream looked nothing like any picture of Ted Williams I’ve ever seen.”

Alcor has responded to the macabre allegations by threatening to sue everyone in this world and the next. In light of that announcement, we’ll just forego joking about company officials making bets about whether their tongues would stick to the heads. “Forego” means to go ahead and do it, right? We better look that up. 

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HISTORY REWIND

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1947—Voice of America Begins Broadcasting into U.S.S.R.

The state radio channel known as Voice of America and controlled by the U.S. State Department, begins broadcasting into the Soviet Union in Russian with the intent of countering Soviet radio programming directed against American leaders and policies. The Soviet Union responds by initiating electronic jamming of VOA broadcasts.

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Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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