 Picture the entertainment business a lifetime ago. 
Snap is yet another celeb and film magazine from the mid-century era, the product of the Snap Publishing Company, headquartered not in the usual locale of New York City, but in tiny Mount Morris, Illinois. Back in 1941, when this issue hit newsstands, Mount Morris had a population of only 2,700 people, and even today is home to only 3,000. You're probably thinking it's a really part of Chicago, a suburb within the metropolitan area, but it's actually fifty miles southwest, which was a long way in 1941 over rutted roads in primitive automobiles. Why was Snap based out in Mount Morris? We have no idea. Maybe the owner was inordinately attached to the Illinois Freedom Bell.
Though Snap had offices far afield, its focus was pure Hollywood and NYC., with plenty of celeb action inside each issue. In this one readers got Marion Miller, aka the “Queen of Quiver,” Dale Evans, Lily Damita, Marion Wakefield, Warner Baxter, Rita Hayworth, and many other screen stars and showgirls of the time. Editors also put together a comedic photoplay, notes on recent screen kisses, some kind of cockamamie home health test, and a scare feature on highschoolers going to tourist cabins—i.e. rentals in the woods where they could get laid. We have all that in forty-plus scans below.
                                              
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1941—Williams Bats .406
Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox finishes the Major League Baseball season with a batting average of .406. He is the last player to bat .400 or better in a season. 1964—Warren Commission Issues Report
The Warren Commission, which had been convened to examine the circumstances of John F. Kennedy's assassination, releases its final report, which concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy. Today, up to 81% of Americans are troubled by the official account of the assassination. 1934—Queen Mary Launched
The RMS Queen Mary, three-and-a-half years in the making, launches from Clydebank, Scotland. The steamship enters passenger service in May 1936 and sails the North Atlantic Ocean until 1967. Today she is a museum and tourist attraction anchored in Long Beach, U.S.A. 1983—Nuclear Holocaust Averted
Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov, whose job involves detection of enemy missiles, is warned by Soviet computers that the United States has launched a nuclear missile at Russia. Petrov deviates from procedure, and, instead of informing superiors, decides the detection is a glitch. When the computer warns of four more inbound missiles he decides, under much greater pressure this time, that the detections are also false. Soviet doctrine at the time dictates an immediate and full retaliatory strike, so Petrov's decision to leave his superiors out of the loop very possibly prevents humanity's obliteration. Petrov's actions remain a secret until 1988, but ultimately he is honored at the United Nations.
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