vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Some femmes fatales are a bit evil but devilish Judy O’Day is in a category all her own. And just to push the point further, this photo was a centerfold in a February 1957 issue of Satan magazine. It was one of her first magazine appearances, and one of her few, because she didn’t model for long. However, many archival photos have appeared over the years, so there are scores of shots of her out there now, all of them nice. You can see another example here, and we may share more later.
Above, popular model Judy O’Day, who appeared in dozens of magazines during her career, seen here in a Technicolor lithograph entitled “A Good Connection.” O’Day, normally a flaming redhead, is said by various websites to have been a burlesque dancer. But among the scores of photos we’ve seen of her none have shown her onstage. We’ll dig and see if we can confirm some sort of dancing career. This print is from 1957.
In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.
The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.
