vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
U.S. actress Diane McBain had a good career, mostly on television, appearing in such popular shows as Surfside 6, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaii Five-0, and others that didn’t even have numbers in the titles. This image—which probably makes you want a gummy bear—has floated around online for some years, and shows her in a promo for the television show Batman, on which she appeared as a character named Pinky Pinkston in a 1967 episode called, “A Piece of the Action.”
This promo image shows Diane McBain and was made for the television show Surfside 6, on which she played Daphe Dutton in forty-five episodes between 1960 and 1962. Surfside 6 was a hipster detective show about three cooler than cool private eyes in Miami who solved crimes, lived together on a houseboat, and hung out in chic bars. McBain wasn’t one of the gumshoes—she lived on an adjacent yacht and flirted. We may have a close look at this show sometime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.
