AFTER THE DANCE

All's affair in love and show business.


First matter—we met a couple of nice women at the gintoneria in one of our local plazas last night and said we’d mention them today as a way of proving that we were telling the truth about being the makers of this website. So hello, friends, and sorry about all the nudity you’ll find here. Hah—well, not really. Anyway, last year we read Amos Hatter’s (James W. Lampp’s) unusual 1952 titillation novel Island Girl, and since we’re repeat offenders when it comes to authors who intrigue us, we picked up another Hatter—1951’s Backstage Affair. It’s about a dancer and singer named Mitzi West who’s trying earn her first big show business break, but is stuck in St. Louis finding it exceedingly difficult not to become a prostitute to support herself. By now you know the formula with these tales, so we don’t need to explain the plot in more detail. It isn’t as good as Island Girl, but it’s enjoyable enough, and it came with Rudy Nappi cover art—signed by both him and a former owner of the book named Lahoma Hustich. Love your name, Lahoma. 

That centerfielder can really run! Look at her go! It’s almost like she hasn’t noticed the game is over.

Robert Baker and Trudy Jo Baker had just been married, aged twenty-six and seventeen, and were driving across the U.S.’s rolling midwestern states. They were embarked on their honeymoon, but when they saw a soldier named Larry Kirk hitchhiking outside St. Louis, trying to get home for Christmas, they gave him a ride. They later shot him in the back while he was sleeping in the car, robbed him of $12 and his watch, then dumped his body in a weed-choked field near Xenia, Illinois. When the couple was finally caught and tried, Robert Baker was sentenced to 99 years in prison, and Trudy Jo got 30 years at the Illinois Reformatory for Women.

That’s the backstory. This cover of Inside Detective published this month in 1957 uses a model to reenact Trudy Jo’s subsequent escape from prison. As center fielder of the prison softball team, she quickly realized the seven-foot outfield fence would be easy to scale. She soon did exactly that, made her way to Chicago, but realized she had no way to survive except through prostitution. Though new to the practice, she took to it like a duck to water and procured customers, mostly men in town for conventions, via the aid of local cab drivers, as well as what would grow into a collection of seven bellhops at a few of the city’s best hotels.
 
Living this way, she managed to evade capture for four months, and earned $6,000—more than $50,000 in today’s money—all but $60 of which she spent on plush treats like caviar, wine, designer shoes, and a mink stole. She was finally recognized by a beat cop and subsequently captured, and the cabbies and bellhops that helped her were later charged with assorted crimes thanks to Trudy Jo turning state’s evidence against them. Thus the wheels of justice turn.
 

When asked how her time on the lam went, Trudy Jo, who you see above right during one of her many court appearances, replied, “I like wine and caviar and horses. In fact, I like anything that’s a gamble. I’ve been in all the best hotels and in the finest nightclubs. I’ve had the time of my life.” Her one regret? The prison permanently revoked her softball privileges.

Boys, the bad news is we’re totally lost. The good news is, I’ve got a great new recipe to try out on you.

Above, a November 1957 cover of the pulp adventure magazine Saga, with art depicting John Charles Frémont, whose disastrous expedition through the U.S. Rocky Mountains scouting a route for a St. Louis/San Francisco railroad led to deaths, desertion and cannibalism. However, Frémont survived and later became the first ever Republican candidate for president, running on a radical anti-slavery platform. 

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains nearly 2,800 stars.

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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