A JOYFUL OCCASION

Moments like this make the long years of medical school and crushing student loan debt all worth it.

A Girl Called Joy, which caught our eye because of its playful George Gross cover art, was published in 1951 by Cameo Books and belongs to the love novel sub-genre, but which most collectors just call sleaze. The story deals with nurse Joy Durling, hired by rich John Sanford to care for his paralyzed wife Elva, who shows no physical symptoms that would prevent her from walking. So what’s her problem? Psychosomatic paralysis, due to a terrible shock. What was the shock? That’s supposed to be a mystery, but you’ll figure it out right away. Joy has already bedded Sanford by the time Elva suggests that, being unable to function sexually for her husband, Joy should take her place. But Joy cuts John off at that point due to growing a conscience—plus her eye has been drawn by the Sanford family doctor. And on it goes, messy stuff, as usual in a sleaze—er, we mean love—novel. This one was about par for the course.

Cameo Books, Gene Harvey, Jack Hanley, George Gross, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 14

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

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.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

February 12

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

February 12

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

February 11

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.