vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Gale Sondergaard, born in 1899 in Minnesota, stands vigil in the woods in this promo photo made when she was filming 1939’s The Cat and the Canary. Sondergaard went on to appear in Appointment in Berlin, A Night To Remember, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, The Spider Woman Strikes Back, and numerous other films we’d like to watch. We did see The Cat and the Canary though, and talked about it last year. Check this link.
June Lang was born Winifred June Vlasek in Minnesota and was on the silver screen by age fourteen, later appearing in films such as The Deadly Game and Wee Willie Winkie. She cultivated a wholesome image, but in true pulp style threw it away by marrying Johnny Roselli—a known mobster—in 1940. Maybe they bonded over the fact that they’d both changed their names—Roselli had been born Filippo Sacco. Lang divorced him in 1943 but the damage had been done, and she worked only intermittently for the rest of her career. The above image of her showing her impressive flexibility is from 1935.
A Minnesota woman has been charged with second degree manslaughter this week after fatally shooting her boyfriend in the chest with a 50-calibre Desert Eagle handgun. Monalisa Perez and Pedro Ruiz wanted to be YouTube stars, and in a bid to increase viewership of their channel about being teen parents had conceived a stunt where Ruiz would stop a bullet with an encyclopedia held to his chest. Perez had posted on social media earlier in the day that it was her boyfriend’s idea, but of course there’s nothing in the posting to suggest she had doubts the crazy idea would work. Firing from a foot away, Perez ventilated her boyfriend as their three-year-old child and thirty neighbors watched.
The couple should have read the encyclopedia instead of shooting it. If they had turned to the entry marked “handguns,” they’d have learned that a 50-calibre Desert Eagle is about as powerful as a sidearm gets, and its round will go through a refrigerator. Turn past the handgun part and there’s an entry on “hearts,” which explains that because it’s one of the body’s primary organs and people generally can’t live without an intact one, any stunt that puts it at risk is idiotic by definition. And beyond that section there’s the entry “hubris,” which would be defined as excessive self confidence, often leading to one looking like an ignoramus. In this instance a dead one. Yes, we know it’s not really a joking matter. But we aren’t joking—there’s real value in reading, and we highly recommend it.
Brian Harwin’s novel Home Is Upriver appeared in 1952, with this Signet paperback arriving in 1955, and concerns the coming of age along the Mississippi River of the orphaned Kip, who finds a home with married couple Buck and Martha, but promptly screws it up by deciding to screw their daughter Storm. The book may be better known these days by its 1959 title Touch Me Not. Brian Harwin was a pen name for author Le Grand Henderson. We know. Why would you change your name from Le Grand Henderson, when that’s as writerly a name as can be, whereas Brian Harwin sounds like a guy from high school who ran a hardware store for a few years then you heard he maybe moved back east? Well, it turns out Henderson actually did make use of his amazing name. He published children’s books as simply Le Grand, and many of those too take place along the Mississippi River. He was actually born in Connecticut, but his love of the Mississippi blossomed after he undertook a yearlong houseboat journey from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This would have been during the Great Depression and we can only imagine that the adventure was le grand. Home Is Upriver was the only book he wrote as Harwin. If you want to see its Touch Me Not incarnation, which has excellent Robert Maguire art, we suggest looking at our collection of swamp, bayou, and river paperbacks here.
Above is the cover of the bawdy humor magazine Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang. The monthly was launched out of Robbinsdale, Minnesota in 1919 by Wilford Fawcett, who came up with the unusual name by combining his own nickname with the phrase soldiers used to describe the sound of artillery shells. Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang began with a run of only 500 issues, had no art or photos, and seemingly never carried revenue-generating advertising save for sometimes on the inside front cover. The content was short stories, limericks, anecdotes, and one-liners, much of which would rightly be considered sexist, racist, or just plain unfunny today. On the other hand, some of it is rather cute. We liked this limerick:
Of Course Not
Carefully she rouges her dimpled knees,
Then adds a powdery sheen,
Do you think she does this little stunt,
If she thinks they won’t be seen?
Well, maybe it isn’t so great. But did you have any idea women once rouged their knees? That just blew us away. Anyway, from the humble seed of Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang sprang the entire Fawcett Publishing empire, which at its height consisted of more than 60 separate magazine imprints and made Wilford Fawcett an international celebrity. Later, Fawcett Publishing launched Gold Medal books, where Kurt Vonnegut and John D. MacDonald, among many other notables, got their starts. This issue of Whiz Bang appeared this month in 1923, and thanks to the website Darwination you can read it by downloading their copy here. As a bonus, below are five more covers that came from MagazineArt.org, where you can see a fuller collection.
Above, a vintage poster for Marajah the all-knowing mystic seer, who appeared at the Auditorium Theater in Stillwater, Minnesota starting today in 1923. Marajah was one of a number of popular seers who toured the U.S. during the early half of the twentieth century, although—let’s be clear—as good as he was, he was no Criswell.
A couple of months ago we wrote about the famous 1967 Bigfoot sighting in Bluff Creek, California, and now this week the elusive creature is in the news again after being filmed in Minnesota. Peter and Casey Pedrowski were staying overnight in their hunting cabin and had set up a motion-activated trail-cam to determine if any game were wandering nearby in the wee hours. And as it happened, something was. When they looked at the photos weeks later, they were shocked see the above image. However, the brothers are skeptical about whether the figure is a Bigfoot. “I still don’t know what to think about it,” said Casey Kedrowski. “I’m still not convinced.”
We have to agree with the wildlife experts on this one. As pulp enthusiasts, we’re just as eager to find a Bigfoot as the next guy, but not to the extent that some hoser headed out into the cold for a piss after drinking a sixer of Moosehead starts to look like one. If the Pedrowskis had aimed the camera thirty degrees right the shot would show a dark figure with steam rising nearby and instead we’d all be talking about whether it was a photo of the Devil. We appreciate the image for what it is—either a good practical joke or a bad hoax. Nothing more.
LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.
A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.
The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.
American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.
The newspaper Pravda is founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles living in Vienna. The name means “truth” and the paper serves as an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991.
An obscenity trial brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the counterculture City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, reaches its conclusion when Judge Clayton Horn rules that Allen Ginsberg’s poetry collection Howl is not obscene.
After a long trial watched by millions of people worldwide, former football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson subsequently loses a civil suit and is ordered to pay millions in damages.
