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.

The name of the Rose.

Above, two mugshots from today 1946 of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who was one of many women who broadcast English-language radio from Tokyo during World War II. These 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.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1971—Corona Sent to Prison

Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.

1960—To Kill a Mockingbird Appears

Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.

1962—Nuke Test on Xmas Island

As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.
Uncredited cover art for Orrie Hitt's 1954 novel Tawny. Hitt was a master of sleazy literature and published more than one hundred fifty novels.
George Gross art for Joan Sherman’s, aka Peggy Gaddis Dern’s 1950 novel Suzy Needs a Man.

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