A SOMMER ESCAPADE

Elke escapes the East and probably wished she could have escaped the movie.


Even after seeing hundreds of photos of German goddess Elke Sommer over the years, ocasionally you see come across some and have to hit pause. She appeared on the cover and inside the American magazine Escapade in January 1968, posing for a set of photos taken from her comedy The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, which had premiered in New York City on January 3rd. Sommer plays an East German decathlete who wants to escape to the west, and does so by pole vaulting over the Berlin Wall, which is what the images below depict. Why is she in her underwear? We’ve seen the movie but we don’t remember. We do know it featured Hogan’s Heroes cast members Bob Crane, Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin, and that it uses the Hogan’s formula, replacing improbably bumbling Nazis with improbably bumbling communists. But before you add this one to your queue, here’s something else we recall—it was terrible.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1920—Terrorists Bomb Wall Street

At 12:01 p.m. a bomb loaded into a horse-drawn wagon explodes in front of the J.P.Morgan building in New York City. 38 people are killed and 400 injured. Italian anarchists are thought to be the perpetrators, but after years of investigation no one is ever brought to justice.

1959—Khrushchev Visits U.S.

Nikita Khrushchev becomes the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. The two week stay includes talks with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, as well as a visit to a farm and a Hollywood movie set, and a tour of a “typical” American neighborhood, upper middle class Granada Hills, California.

1959—Soviets Send Object to Moon

The Soviet probe Luna 2 becomes the first man-made object to reach the Moon when it crashes in Mare Serenitatis. The probe was designed to crash, but first it took readings in Earth’s Van Allen Radiation Belt, and also confirmed the existence of solar wind.

1987—Radiation Accident in Brazil

Two squatters find a container of radioactive cesium chloride in an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, Brazil. When the shielding window is opened, the bright blue cesium becomes visible, which lures many people to handle the object. In the end forty-six people are contaminated, resulting in illnesses, amputations, and deaths, including that of a 6-year-old girl whose body is so toxic it is buried in a lead coffin sealed in concrete.

This awesome cover art is by Tommy Shoemaker, a new talent to us, but not to more experienced paperback illustration aficionados.
Ten covers from the popular French thriller series Les aventures de Zodiaque.
Pulp style book covers made the literary-minded George Orwell look sexy and adventurous.

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