vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: uncredited sleaze cover work from Nite Time Books for Scott Rainey’s 1964 alternative lifestyle romp Las Vegas Lesbian. The back says: She was a beautiful desirable woman in a gambling town loaded with women. But there was a difference. She wanted to destroy every man—and woman—who wouldn’t play the game her way! Our advice: play the game exactly as she wishes. It would be the only game in Vegas where both sides win.
Loren Beauchamp is known to have been a pseudonym of sci-fi titan Robert Silverberg, but according to the blog vintagesleazepaperbacks Sliverberg himself disavows any association with Les Floozies. Considering how many smut novels he wrote there’s no reason for him deny any particular one, so you’d tend to believe him. But we also learned that the book, published in 1965, is a reprint of a 1962 effort called Hotrod Sinners, which Silverberg definitely wrote. So it looks like what happened here is the book got chopped up by editors and Silverberg decided it wasn’t his anymore. That isn’t an unusual reaction from a writer whose work has been altered. Even so, Les Floozies is pricy for something cobbled together by, well, who knows, really? It’s basically about a couple of call girls and their love triangle with a young, hot-rodding pimp, with the plot moving the principles from dusty nowheresville to New York City, where they rise in the big time sex industry ranks. All very interesting, but it’s actually the unusually attractive cover that interested us. It’s not credited, though, and that’s just the way it goes with sleaze publishers. Quelle bummer.
A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed in Bolivia. In an attempt to make it appear as though he had been killed resisting Bolivian troops, the executioner shoots Guevara with a machine gun, wounding him nine times in the legs, arm, shoulder, throat, and chest.
During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.
The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.
The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).
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.
