Vintage Pulp

January 21 2013

OVER AND OUT

The correct answer is always: “Why yes, I do want to keep on truckin’.

Above is a January 1978 cover for Australia’s Adam, a magazine you know well by now if you frequent this site. The art here illustrates Terry P. Duval’s story “The Final Run,” in which a hapless truck driver picks up what he thinks is a damsel in distress, but who soon shows she’s a pure femme fatale. Adam began in 1946, and this is the magazine near the end—it folded, looks like, in May 1978. Inside this issue you get the usual literary, artistic and photographic treats, including five pages of Patti Clifton shots, plus skiing Nazis, and a profile of the notorious but misunderstood Tokyo Rose, who we wrote about last year.

Readers also get to visit a Dakhma, aka Tower of Silence, a Zoroastrian structure where dead bodies—considered in the religion to be unclean—are left to be sun baked and picked apart by scavenging birds, thus preventing putrefaction which would pollute the earth. Mmm. Fun! The author visits a tower near Yazd, Iran, and must have gotten there just before the government shut all such structures down permanently. Today, the only towers still used for ritual exposure are in India. So put those on your travel itinerary. And lastly, on the rear page, you get Paul Hogan in another ad for Winfield cigarettes. Forty-seven scans appear below.

Australia, Japan, Iran, Yazd, India, Adam Magazine, Tokyo Rose, Iva Toguri D’Aquino, Patti Clifton, Terry P. Duval, Paul Hogan, Christine Aarons, magazine art, literature, nudity, nazis

Intl. Notebook

March 7 2012

VOICE LESSONS

The name of the Rose.

These two mugshots from today in 1946 show Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who was one of many women who broadcast English-language radio from Tokyo during World War II. The broadcasts were aimed at Allied personnel in the Pacific, and the soldiers referred to all the women collectively as Tokyo Rose, despite whatever they actually called themselves on air. D’Aquino called herself Orphan Ann, and her radio stints were limited to twenty-minute segments on Radio Tokyo. It wasn’t much time, but her low, raspy voice made an impression on listeners. What did she say? History.net answers that question by providing an example of a typical D’Aquino intro:

Hello there, Enemies! How’s tricks? This is Ann of Radio Tokyo, and we’re just going to begin our regular program of music, news and the Zero Hour for our friends—I mean, our enemies!—in Australia and the South Pacific. So be on your guard, and mind the children don’t hear! All set? OK. Here’s the first blow at your morale—the Boston Pops playing ‘Strike Up the Band!’

When the war ended D’Aquino, who was an American citizen, was taken into custody and shipped back to the U.S., where she was tried and convicted of treason. There was no actual proof that she had done anything traitorous—in fact her humor-tinged broadcasts had often undermined her Japanese employers’ intentions—but she neverthelesslanguished in prison for six years. D’Aquino’s legal troubles only ended in 1977, when U.S. president Gerald R. Ford pardoned her after evidence emerged that witnesses had lied at her trial. Cleared of wrongdoing, and the constant threat of deportation lifted, D’Aquino lived the rest of her days quietly and died in 2006 at age 90.

Japan, Tokyo, World War II, Tokyo Rose, Iva Toguri D’Aquino, trial, mugshots

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 16

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanideâ€”not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juiceâ€”resulting in his death in late 1937.

February 15

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

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.