"Creepy" Comics (1964-1983, Warren Publishing on Internet Archive)

Good afternoon!

How was your weekend, kiddlings? Anything exciting on the home front? We had an action packed (ish) weekend-- my dad and I hit the sales on Saturday (natch), Matthew and I went to a baby shower that night for two good friends who only has a little while left until we get to meet their daughter (so exciting!!), and as a married unit, we spent all day Sunday playing old CD-ROM scary video games and eating way too much General Tso's Bean Curd (which doesn't sound as appetizing as General Tso's chicken, but TOTALLY IS). As for this workday, I am ragged but I'm right!

What I'd LOVE to clue you in to today...the find of the century, as far as I'm concerned, for a penurious vintage horror comic lover...INTERNET ARCHIVE HAS OVER A HUNDRED ISSUES OF CREEPY. No, I am not kidding. Creepy fans, rejoice!

I'm a member ! Are you? (source)

Creepy was one of the first and best horror comics to come out of the post Comic Code Authority era. Similar to the film industry's 1931 Hayes code crackdown on Filmland "indecency", the ire of America's concerned parents and civic leaders was raised in the early 1950's by horror comics' shock-til-you-drop aesthetic. Your average horror title of that time managed to fit in a dizzying array of horrible, hideous, and hilarious fates for their characters with an economy of storytelling and excess of splattery gore that delighted its readers, both young and old. We're talking grave robbing ghouls, accursed shrunken heads, witches, goblins, decapitations, immolations, premature burials, zombies, gypsy curses...pretty much anything a Cramps or X song of the late seventies' would be about, Tales from the Crypt (in its original incarnation), Crime Suspenstories, and Vault of Horror had you covered. When William Gaines's EC comics, the parent company of each of those titles, was effectively shuttered by censorship, many of the industry's best artists moved on to satirical comics like Mad magazine, which held their own subversive (but code-approved) sway over the nation's youth. But what about us bats-and-moonlight loving spookies-seekers? That's where Creepy comes in.

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Founded by Russ Jones in 1964, the idea behind Creepy was to round up some of the best comic book artists in the business back into the job that brought a lot of them to the field in the first place-- scaring the pants off people through beautifully executed, imaginatively rendered horror story panels. Sure, some of the issues may showcase familiar terror classics like Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" or Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing" (hey! They're in public domain, do you blame them?), but outside of your own imagination, I assure you, you haven't seen it done quite this well. With an average of seven individual tales, along with features like "Loathsome Lore" (an illustrated page of panels featuring "true" horror stories that actually do have some basis in fact) and "Dear Uncle Creepy" (where the magazine's mascot fields questions, comments, and brickbats), you are getting a lot of bang for your horror buck! The magazine ran 145 issues, and even had two sister publications in the horror genre, Eerie and Vampirella.

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Look. At this Frank Frazetta. Cover. Is this real life? In terms of depth, skill, and creativity, these are to the horror comic what, say, N.C. Wyeth was to children's book illustrations. Meaning: the rest of y'all go home, a gold standard has been set!

See how each panel has about thirty-times the usual amount of attention to detail you would get in a similar comic book of the time? I can't get over the shading and the shadow

While I do miss the "people getting their heads grafted onto other bodies" and a "grave robber with a Frigidaire full of human cold-cuts" storylines of the fifties' pre-code EC output, and it's still technically my favorite type of scary comic, there's a calmer, less-hysteric feeling to these sixties' issues of Creepy while still keeping the wheels of one's imagination turning. The content reminds me less of a Stephen-King-edited-horror-anthology, in tone, and more of say the publication Weird Tales, with a mix of sci-fi and fantasy thrown into the mélange and not just horror. Take, for example, the popular Adam Link series that featured prominently throughout two years of Creepy. Link was actually a reboot, originally appearing in the pages of 1930's-era Amazing Stories. The titular character is a robot whose self-awareness predates Star Trek: TNG's Data and even Asimov's I, Robot (with which it actually shares a title in one installation) by some distance, and asks the same questions about how much humanity you can fit into a tin can, when that tin can can grow human emotions along with its steely, super-human strength and agility. I'm a fan, what can I say.

An example of the "Loathsome Lore" feature from issue 11 (source)

Anyway, I have to scoot back to work, but if you're into horror comics, profitez tout suite, avail yourself IMMEDIATELY to this online archive of full-page scans, there's no telling how long they will or won't be available (while Internet Archive is a totally above-board website, I worry about the nebulous copyright issues surrounding who-owns-what with regard to the Warren Publishing oeuvre). Start with issue one via this link, then scroll through the Warren entries (which are kind of jumbled up with others) via this one. And don't get too scared! Or if you do, come back and we can commiserate about how I have to check my chifferobe for ghosts at least once a calendar week because of my steady horror-intake. :)

Have a great Monday! See you tomorrow!

Spacemen (1961-63 Atomic Age Space/Sci-Fi Fan Magazine)

Good afternoon!

Ugh, it's so bright and beautiful outside I hardly wanted to come back inside after lunch! The temperature in this library workroom is glacial for some reason-- probably good for storing furs or preserving wooly mammoths in ice, but not so much for poor little library workers with S-U-M-M-E-R on the brain (cue Antonio Carlos Jobim soundtrack here). Ah, well. I'll be free soon enough! In the meantime, why not journey into midcentury space with me?

AAAAH, right?! I left you yesterday with a digital pile of Hollywood magazines from the thirties' and forties'...today's Internet Archive spoils include seven issues of the sci-fi fan magazine Spacemen. I even went through and selected some choice cuts from the crazy illustrations and articles dedans. Interested? Of course you are! I can palpably sense your atomic age excitement from across the computer screen! Take a look:

Spacemen was a short-lived Warren Publication in line with Famous Monsters of Filmland, sharing an editor and a general sense of ghoulish zany with that magazine. Forest J. Ackerman, arguably one of the earliest and most prolific sci-fi/horror collectors and proponent of the genre, oversaw the production of eight issues of this magazine...which was long enough for him to receive a fan letter and story submission from a fourteen year-old STEPHEN KING (check out his precious pre-teen typewritten letter here). And no wonder! In those lazy, hazy pre-Google, pre-Youtube days, if you were a sci-fi fan, the entire run of Eerie covers or the last scene of King Kong weren't only a mouse click away. If you were interested in Flash Gordon or giant gila monsters in prehistoric settings, you were going to have to do a little leg work-- or at least subscribe to one of the many monster and movie and monster-movie magazines at your local newsstand or Piggly Wiggly.

I am a big fan of, oh, EVERY PAGE OF THESE OLD ISSUES. Think about being a space-mad twelve year-old and wrestling with the Sophie's Choice like decision of keeping your latest issue in mint condition for your collection, or cutting out one of these photos to look at on your bedroom wall before you go to sleep at night.

Doesn't this one remind you of Mr. Goodbody? PS does anyone remember Slim Goodbody?

 It's a Gila monster's world, we're just livin' in it.

Most of the content in these issues has to do with a few key topics: sci-fi or space travel movies, past and present; speculation on the possibility of real-life space travel and or the probability of meeting intelligent life out there; and MOON LOOT. The number of space tie-in toys and memorabilia is surprising, considering it was only 1962. What I like to think about in this golden age of interest in our solar system was how NOTHING HAD BEEN PROVEN OR DISPROVED ABOUT SPACE. The first human space flight, by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Garagin, was launched in 1961, and it would be another seven years before Armstrong and Aldrin made good on slain President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon. Who was to say what was out there? Captain Kirk really could meet space babes and weird rubber-prosthetic races of men on distant or not so distant planets...at this point, it was all a matter of finding out HOW to get up there. Not how to get over our disappointment that there were just moon rocks on the moon instead of, say, little green men. Think of what an age of imagination it was.

Lou Reed: "How d'ya...speak to a...how do you speak to Martian space man... You say HELLO..."

 I somehow don't think this is a "real" photo....

File this under #hellyesraybradbury. As a precocious little bookworm, I spent about an entire summer between sixth and seventh grade working through the complete Ray Bradbury body of work as owned by the Nashville Public Library, supplementing any gaps with musty paperbacks from Book Attic in Rivergate. I could still give you credible plot summaries of almost anything he's written-- the stories stick with you BUT GOOD. While I like Richard Matheson and Cornell Woolrich and Charles Beaumont and lots of other "speculative fiction" writers, Bradbury was the man. Here he poses, contemporaneously, with some of his creations.

I like to think of this next panel as a laugh-track sitcom of a giant lizard/turtle hybrid who just can't get it right. "Varan! Did you forget to pick up your kids from school....AGAIN? You're unbelievable! Varan, did you go out on a date with that moon monster and then never call her? UNBELIEVABLE." I crack my own self up.

The aforementioned "moon loot" is really one of the neatest parts of the magazine-- I can feel a vestigal twitch of childhood excitement looking at the ads, even though grown-up me knows FULL WELL sea monkeys and mail-order treasures in general are never, never, never what they're hyped up to be on the ads.

With the exception of maybe this space map-- I actually saw this on the wall of an estate sale once! It was in battered conditioned (obviously, if I had one of these things I'd be tracing space patterns on it every chance I got) and THIRTY DOLLARS, unframed, for some reason. Siiiiigh. Maybe I'll find one for cheap on the internet some day (Ebay shakes it weary head at me with more $30 examples...wth?).

Ok, ok, and THIS WEATHER BALLOON. Oh my God, I could seriously get one of these and have my own Rover of The Prisoner fame. And die happy.

Creed Taylor was a bandleader known for importing the sounds of several Brazilian artists in the sixties (SUCH AS the aforementioned Antonio Carlos Jobim and Astrud Gilberto...what a weird coincidence!), but he also brought into the world these intriguingly titled albums of "weird music and chilling sound effects" known as Shock and (I can't get over this) Panic: The Son of Shock. Shock is on Spotify, and ISN'T THE WORLD A RICHER PLACE FOR IT. The first track, "Heartbeat", features a man breathing heavily (in a less sexy, more spooky way) over a soft jazz soundtrack that eventually culminates in screaming. I could listen to junk like this ALL. DAY. Spike Jones in Hi-Fi: Spooktacular in Screaming Sound is also available on Spotify AND features song titles like "Monster Movie Ball" and "Teenage Brain Surgeon"! I love this modern age we live in sometimes....that is going to save me a lot of digging in record bins for this oddity.

GIVE ME THIS, I WANT THIS. I would wake up and see that thing in the dark and have my hair turn white, but the heart wants what the heart wants. And in this case, it apparently wants to have a heart attack.

How not-like-the-picture do you think this thing would be in real life on a scale of 1 to 10? I would say about a 30.

 How did you know EXACTLY what image I would project on the wall?

 Just...some weird plants?

ALSO very cool though I know I don't have nearly a scientific enough brain to do Frankenstein, even in plastic form, justice...

I would answer the first line of the ad, "Is it a bird? A plane? No...it's a flying vampire!" with "Try again, Buddy, I'm pretty sure that's a box kite you've kind of put batwings on but-not-really."

Pick on somebody your own size, human! I'm siding with the lizard here:

And last but not least, who's been reading my dream journal? My kingdom for one of these shirts. Can you get over how they just superimposed the logo on a photo of these unsuspecting, blank t-shirted kids?

Ok, ok, I've gone on and on at the mouth about these magazines...it's time for you to get a load of them yourselves! There's a living ton more where this came from. Check it out here:

• July 1961
• September 1961
• April 1962
• July 1962
• October 1962
• January 1963
• September 1963

What do you think? Are you a sci-fi fan of the classical mold? Which of these crazy retrofuturist images are your favorite? Do you have any space age interests or collections of your own? What's something that really appealed to your little imagination as kid? Let's talk!

That's all for today but I'll see you back here tomorrow with even more. Have a great Wednesday! Til then.

Skelebuddies with Matthew (2013)

Good morning!

In a change of pace from the vintage news articles and items-I've-picked-up, I had a cache of original drawings from this weekend that I just had to share with you. While my now-husband Matthew considers himself a video game connossieur, a composer, and a tech geek, in that order, I think he often leaves off his list of accomplishments how good he is at cartooning. One of my favorite games to play as we while away a lazy Sunday with me watching old movies on Youtube and him working his way through the Castlevania series for the umpteenth time is to think of a hypothetical scenario and have him cartoon it out in his own quirky, cute style.

Portrait of the artist as a young Bab

1) Backstory: I was watching a bunch of old Dick Cavett clips on the Sunday in question... last week when I caught the Bette Davis interview, I was delighted to see another thirty or forty segments from his talk show and with celebrity guests I want to know more about! Truman Capote interrupting Groucho Marx (and vice versa!). Janis Joplin making dirty comments over Gloria Swanson. Bill Cosby talking about his jazz aspirations with Jack Benny. Katharine Hepburn literally moving the furniture on set to better suit her capricious mood. Magic! So I asked Matthew to do a drawing of a skeleton interviewing Elvis (sadly, Elvis never appeared on the Cavett show, but Cavett has never been a skeleton to date, so accuracy is not in the foreground here). Matthew got frustrated five minutes in going, "I can't draw Elvis!" I countered, "If it looks bad, you can just say it's Andrew Dice Clay!" Matthew: "No, that would mess with the punch line...here, I'm just going to do my best." A couple scribbles and scrabbles later, his efforts yielded:

I love that the host has is own "SKELETALK" proprietary mug, and the closeup of the second "panel". Also, "SKELVIS". You can laugh now. Being a little outsider artist myself, and completely horrible at anything but faces and dead-on angles, I can't get over how "human" the little body languages come across.

2) Backstory: Still Youtubing talk shows, I watched as a feather trimmed Lucille Ball seemed to get in a sideways dig at Cavett's diminutive height (he's 5'6'') during one clip. "You're a little short handed," she says in that gravelly, Lucille not Lucy voice, and leveled her cool blue eyes at her host. That exchange caused me to google Lucille Ball's height. Ah! Also 5'6''! Or possibly as tall as 5'7''. The Internet can't seem to make up its mind on the former Arnazes. Desi, for example, is somewhere between 5'6'' and 6'', according to fluctuating Google accounts, with some Desliu obsessed boards pointing out visible lifts in Desi's tassled loafers. This prompted me to ask Matthew to draw two skeletons that are both the same size, with one crabbing at the other for his perceived "shortness". Matthew came up with this:

THE TINY SKELETONS ARE SO CUTE. THEY ARE SO CUTE. The enormous skull head coming out of nowhere was a nice touch, as well. This reminds me of some of the bosses in old arcade games (there's definitely one in Altered Beast, but there are others I'm not thinking of because it's before I've had my coffee this morning).

Last but not least:

3) Backstory: Matthew was listening to me tell him all about Eartha Kitt and her career after I read this heartbreaking article on DailyMail about her fruitless search for her real father. I reminded him of  Kitt's holiday single "Santa Baby", her tenure as Catwoman in the old Adam West Batman tv series, and her small but memorable role as Madame Rena in Friday Foster. "Oh yeah!" he intones. "I remember the Friday Foster thing." (I made him watch a LOT of Pam Grier movies when we first dated, it's a mercury test for whether or not we'll get along...and we did!). Moments later, Matthew stopped to ask, "So what has she been up to lately? Has she been in anything?" Me: "Uh, no, as she died in 2008." Matthew: "Ugggh! I thought she was alive this whole time!" 

A semi-literal interpretation of Matthew's delayed reaction to EK's passing:

Me: ((laughing)) Why does she look like something out of Tales from the Crypt?!" Matthew: ((chuckling to self)) "Grow another butt. Get it?"

Do you have any daydream doodles you like to come up with when you're bored? What kinds of things do you look up on Youtube on a boring afternoon off work? What other scenarios involving skeletons would you deem appropriate to go through Matthew's idea hopper? Let's talk!

I gotta get back to work, but I'll see you tomorrow with more vintage stuff. Take care! Til then.

EC Horror Comics (1950-1955)

Good afternoon! Things have been hectic this morning, but that does not at all mean I don't have plenty of things to go on at the mouth about. Specifically? Comic books. Suprised?

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File this under "Things You May Not Have Known About Me" but I am a hu-u-u-uge old school horror comic fan. HUGE. I thank the popularity of the Goosebumps series and the SNICK tv show Are You Afraid of the Dark which temporarily made it plausible for elementary school age kids to be into the kind of Eddie Munster, harmlessly macabre stuff I was into, or I'm pretty sure my permanent record would have been red-flagged for school library checkouts alone. I remember specifically saving up money in the fourth grade or so to buy copies of the Randomhouse Books For Young Readers (no joke!) series Tales From the Crypt. What the slim, young adult interest volumes did was take old EC plot-lines from the comic books and create short, "novelizations" of them, so that the majority of the book was text, with one or two particularly gruesome panels excerpted just for fun. I had about five of them, which sat on a special shelf in my room, and were actually dogeared by the time I got to middle school. Add that to the House of Mystery  and Unexpected comics my uncles left in two huge cardboard boxes in my grandmother's garage, and I spent a lot of time reading just mind-warpingly terrifying horror stuff as a bab. AND I LOVED IT!

Imagine my deeeeelite when I saw these old Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, and The Haunt of Fear comics, nineties' reissues to coincide with Tales from the Crypt's massive popularity, at the Great Escape on Charlotte a couple months ago. Against my better (cheaper) judgement, I paid nineties' cover-value, minus a 25% sale discount, for a heapin' helpin' of mid century gruesomeness. And I'm not sorry!

Each of these softcover volumes contains between three and five original issues of the series. I spent most of this Sunday holed up in Matthew's video game den, sloshing through buckets of blood. SPOILER ALERT: Just try these storylines on for size:

• STORY SYNOPSIS: Man meets woman in Mardi Gras celebration, in which she's masked as a haggard old woman in spite of her Jayne Mansfield curves. They run off, get married, consumate the marriage (somewhat obliquely, but also somewhat straightforwardly). The man had a horrible dream that he tried to take the woman's mask off and it was her real face! He wakes up in a panic, tries to take the mask off his new bride's face, and it comes off with a wet, slithery smack! Last frame, woman with no skin on her face, all eyes and teeth, saying "I... never... *gurgle*... wore...a mask...Howard...", while dude is holding her face-skin like some used Saran Wrap in his hands. AAAAaaaaaAAAAaaaah!!!
• OMG FACTOR: **** out of *****.
• GROSS FACTOR: ***** out of *****.
• IMPLAUSIBILITY FACTOR: ** out of *****. Can a guy really rip a ladies' face off? I'm not sure. Is it ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING for a last-panel illustration? Indubitably.

Source

• STORY SYNOPSIS: A doctor is (wrongfully? rightfully? I can't remember) barred from practicing medicine by a panel of five professionals who revoke his medical license. While drowning his sorrows, he wanders into a vaudeville hall and an act of performing seals, from which he draws the inspiration for his REVENGE. He takes in five dogs from the pound, then systematically kidnaps the five members of the panel. He takes out the dogs' brains and replaces them with the human panel-member's brains. He puts them through a vicious series of routines that prepare them for a wildly successful vaudeville act of their own, from which the doctor makes all kinds of money. One day, he foolishly leaves one of the dog crate doors ajar! The lead dog lets the other dogs out, they rush the doctor...one of the dogs has a hypodermic needle in its mouth! Later, somehow, you figure out that the dogs' have put the doctor's brain into a horse and they chase him around everyday as the horse draws a delivery carriage. 
• OMG FACTOR: ** out of *****.  
• GROSS FACTOR: *** out of *****. 
• IMPLAUSIBILITY FACTOR: ************** out of *****. Oh, as if it weren't crazy enough that a man could successfully transplant a human brain into a dog's head, where the human would then be sentient as the dog, let's go ahead and assume that a dog could take a human brain and put it into a horse. Sure! Why not! My friend Anna, on hearing this story: "They don't even have thumbs!" Lisa: "But the dog had a hypodermic needle in his mouth! See! It can be done!" We've been drinking on this story for like two weeks.

• STORY SYNOPSIS: Told from the point of view of a burial plot (ya heard?), the empty grave is lonely because no one's in it. Other graves laugh at the empty plot, brag about having people cry over them, love having a person to "make them whole" etc, etc. Some kind of weird child-having/childless metaphor is beaten across the narration with a subtlety stick for several panels; you get the picture. Later, a spinster aunt, swindled and murdered by her dead beat adopted son/nephew and his trampy girlfriend, Erna (who, in spite of my good nature, I kind of like...she's all raven hair, ruby lips, and skin-tight wiggle dresses ), is buried in the grave, and tells the grave the whole story about how she loved Ronald or whatever the kid's name was, in spite of all his faults, and in the end, she was left alone. Get it! Just like the grave! So one day, the spinster aunt slash now decayed corpse wraith demon, crawls out of the grave and the grave itself is all upset, worried about being alone again. Never to fear! Spinster Aunt Wraith returns with Erna and Ronald, dragging them by their hair into the grave, whereupon she/it effectively buries them alive. Now-- the part that's weird? Spinster Aunt doesn't JOIN them. Apparently, she's still out on the loose somewhere, probably turning up in someone's back yard to turn their hair white, while the grave is all excited, because she has not one, but TWO occupants now; making her exult her double status to all the other "single" graves.
• OMG FACTOR: ***** out of *****. The panel where Spinster Aunt Wraith (and she is NASTY with decomposition) drags the two young people back to the cemetery is for-real scary. It was one of the stories excerpted in that YA book I was telling you about, and I'm still bothered by it all these years later.
• GROSS FACTOR: ***** out of ***** (see above).
• IMPLAUSIBILITY FACTOR: **out of *****. If graves can't be self-aware and spinster aunt corpses can't walk the earth seeking vengeance, then I don't want to know

I'm actually excited to go home and read some more of these completely over the top stories...did I mention the artwork is gorgeous in most of these? Hey guess what...the art work is gorgeous in most of these. Being accustomed to the "sexy girls in pantsuits" illustrations from the aforementioned seventies' horror comics of my uncles' pooled collection, you can imagine how blown away I was by some of the vampin' mid-century gals and ghouls, not to mention the si-i-i-i-ick factor of some of these gruesome finales. Sadly, in 1954, juvenile delinquency hearings that targeted the violence and horror elements of comic books brought a quick death to what was one of the most flourishing periods of scary comic books. Le sigh. You can read about it here on Wikipedia, but I almost don't like to!

Do you like horror comics? New ones, old ones, in between ones? Or do shy away from the gross-out stuff in a lot of these ghouls and goblin rags?

If ARE into the scaries, check out Karswell's blog The Horror of It All, which features full story scans of horror comics from the golden age. IT IS GREAT.

If I don't get too spooked, I guess I'll see you guys tomorrow!!

Open Highways (1966, 1971)

One of my favorite things about McKays Used Books, CDs, Movies, and More is the buying policy. Specifically, the good purveyors-of-books' decision not to take textbooks, visibly worn or yellowed books, or books mildly damaged in any way, in favor of (rightly enough) stocking their shelves with more sellable items. These rejected books are often left at the location by the person who has unsuccesfully to hock them, at which time McKays tosses said selections into three huge wooden bins outside marked "FREE BOOKS".

You do not have to tell me twice, Free Books sign.

Last weekend, I had a pretty lackluster "vintage movie star bios/50's suspense stories anthologies/old cookbooks/rare MGM movies not yet on DVD" run (which they're usually so good about having!!), but as I left, I thought I'd take a quick peek into the bin, which turned into a heartstopping moment of luck. Twenty or thirty early 60's young adult books! Donna Parker! Some knock off Hardy Boys esque titles! Nancy Drew! As I sidled up between two women who were having some long, loud conversation directly in front of the box, ABOUT the books in the box, I began to surrepetitiously pick books out of the mountain and hand them to Bab, who soon had a fifteen volume high stack to which I was still adding. The women caught wind of this, eventually, and began grabbing books for themselves, but I'd already taken the lion's share and passed them into Bab's helpful hands (he really is the best accomplice). Greedy? Yes. Happy? Also yes.

Amongst the titles I scored was a fifth grade textbook, originally published by Scott, Foresman and Company in 1966, but reprinted for this edition in 1971. The result was a strange melange of MCM illustrations and early 70's illustrations, the highlights of which I'll take you through story by story.

Above and below, these illustrations went along with the text of "Ernestine and Substance X". Unusual feminine versions of masculine names! Why aren't there more Ernestines and Bernadettes and Claudines these days? Ernestine Rosario and her friend Rosalie attempt to earn extra credit in fifth grade science class by inventing an "invisibility formula". Dialogue:

"For our experiment, let's try to find a substance that will make things the color of air!"

"But air has no color at all!" said Rosalie.

"That's right!" said Ernestine. "Now let's get started on our experiment."

Puzzling, but I guess true? I'm obsessed with the color and print of Ernestine's dress, by the way (the girl to the right). AND THE FLIPPIN WALLPAPER. Give me this wallpaper.

Ernestine's mother, Mrs. Rosario, comes home, and obviously Substance X, made up of household items of every kind, was not quite the hit it was meant to be. Slathered as it as all over a kitchen chair, the chair itself was still pretty visible. Mrs. Rosario, your tapered skirt, matched cardigan to trapezoidal purse, and lovely chignon are a perfect 10! I'm sorry about your kid's lack of scientific skill. Chalk this one up to experience.

A zoo theme carried through several selections... above, a boy and elephant bond of a shared love of an audience. Below, the illustration from an article about how zoos acquire animals (loan/trade from other zoos, buy from other zoos, buy from animal collectors). Included in the article, a 1965 price list for animals:

Royal Bengal Tigers, 1-2 years old.......$1200 each
Baby walruses..........................................$5000 each
Baby giraffes.............................................$4000 each
Polar Bears................................................$1200 each
Elephants (full grown).............................$4000 each
Hippopotami...................................$1500-2000 each
Dromedary Camels........................$1200-1400 each
Kangaroo males (full grown).............$700-800 each
Jaguars.................................................$400-450 each
Spider Monkeys (golden and black).$40-50 each

So, as a zoology investor, I guess spider monkeys would be your best deal, whereas a giraffe, elephant, or walrus can really set you back a few. How much is an ocelot or an otter? Inquiring minds want to know. Which one would you shell out the most for?

Speaking of Walruses ($4000 = $26915.30 in today's money, btw...worth it?), take a look at "Ookie", the subject of a short feature on his species.

This...gal's....mug....is....so....UG. It comes back around again to be cute. Almost. "Ookie is a walrus who likes people," the article begins. Beware, apparently, for if this is one of her defining personal characteristics, what does it say of others of her brethren? That they hate people? Ookie was scooped up at the tender age of "a few weeks old" in the ice fields of Alaska by a Dr. Carelton Ray and some Eskimo fishermen he had hired for the purpose of collecting specimens for the New York Aquarium. As this is a true story, you can see Carelton Ray's University of Virginia faculty page here (he's still working! Forty five years later!).

Settling in at the aquarium, Ookie was noted for her love of, you guessed it, mealtime. "Ookie drank almost three gallons of clams, cream, and vitamins each day. No wonder she gained more than a pound a day!" This goes on for some time until they try to wean Ookie from eating with a a trainer to eating by herself. She wasn't having it, at first. Listen to this weird passage: "Ookie didn't eat anything all day. But she was already so fat that the aquarium people knew it wouldn't hurt her to go without food. So they just left her alone." What! I'm glad you guys are aquarium-ists and not child service specialist. Jeez Louise.

Some pretty weird photos of poor Ookie trying to get into the seals' pen for some company. She jumps out of her pool, waddles up the wall, stands on her flippers, and flings herself over. The aquarium people keep making the wall higher, and Ookie keeps jumping higher, until finally the wall is built seven feet high and Ookie's climbing days were through. This is okay though, because of the coda added under the last photo: "But Ookie isn't unhappy. Lots of people come to see her, and Ookie is a walrus who loves people." Good to know.



Just like today, textbook authors in 1971 were obviously trying to "hip" up their source material by adding two passages written and illustrated in comic book style. The story about Frank "Bring Em Back Alive" Buck was done particularly well... love the colors and the action shots. Hold that tiger! As with any of my posts, click on any of the pictures to see a larger version.

Wasn't that thrilling?

"Earthquakes in Anchorage" had photos of the fallout from an earthquake that took place March 27, 1964. May I point out to the gentle reader that the school building below is split IN HALF. It's as if the ground beneath it were a huge blanket someone took by the corners and just shook in the air. Look at that car inside the house on the right!! Exciting stuff for a fifth grade textbook.

Cuuuute midcentury modern scribbly illustration of Indian maids and misters. From the first sentence of this selection: "Once there were six pretty Mono Indian wives. Each wife had a husband who was a mountain-lion hunter." Now THAT'S a day job. Eesh. The men are holding their noses as the story detail their wives' discovery of the cooking applications of wild onions. The women just keep compulsively eating onions, to the great dismay of their menfolk. "That night the husbands made their wives stay outdoors because the onion odor kept them awake." At one point, the odor is so strong from being AROUND the women that the men scare away the mountain lions with their onion stank. Later, the women lasso a cloud and traipse around in the sky, letting their onion loving flag fly high. Eventually, the husbands wanted them back, onions or no, but the women wouldn't come out of the sky. "All agreed they would rather be alone in the sky". Nice. Then the men and the women turned into stars, the grouping of which is today called "The Pleiades". WHAT. KIND. OF. STORY. IS THIS. I understand that folk tales can be way out there, I'm a huge fan of magical realism, but how in the hello did we get from eating onions like they were going out of style to flying up in the sky and getting star-divorced? How did the 1966 fifth grader take this?

Some particularly pretty space illustrations, probably leftovers from the 1966 version. I love the watercolor look of these. The bubblegum pink one on the right is from a story about kids in space in the future. As it was written in 1957, it comes with a 1966-1971 space age caveat in the introduction: "Look at the bottom of the page and see when this story was written. Since then, many facts about space have been discovered. After you read the story, ask yourself if any of the things imagined by the author are accepted as being true now. Are there any things that you know are not true?" A thoughtful question about space and science fiction for a fifth grader.

Hope you enjoyed the excerpts and the scans, there will be more where that came from, if I get up the gumption to process this mother lode of material.

Are there any stories from your elementary school textbooks that you still remember? My favorite was a sixth grade literature book that included the entire script from the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (the link provides the self same script in pdf, possibly from that text book). Did my parents and I construct a kid sized cardboard car for the penultimate scene, complete with flashlight headlights? Did I get the important role of Charlie, as originally portrayed by Jack Weston? Was this or was this not COMPLETELY up my alley, in terms of all time greatest classroom assignments?

You be the judge. :)

See you next time!