Edit: Correction, this looks a lot like Diana Dors. Check the second photo here. Moritz made his painting's nose thinner, but it's undoubtedly Dors. We had the photo in our website all along, but forgot. That's what happens when you have many thousands of posts.

When we describe Dynamite as a new tabloid, it's only partly true. It was a new imprint. But its publisher, the Modern Living Council of Connecticut, Inc., was headquartered at the Charlton Building in Derby, Connecticut, which is where Top Secret and Hush-Hush based operations. When you see that Dynamite carried the same cover font as Top Secret and Hush-Hush, and that those two magazines advertised in Dynamite, it seems clear that all three had the same provenance. But unlike Top Secret and Hush-Hush, it doesn't seem as if Dynamite lasted long. The issue above, which appeared this month in 1956, is the second. We are unable to confirm whether there was a third. But if Dynamite was short-lived it wasn't because of any deficiencies in the publication. It's identical in style to other tabloids, and its stories are equally interesting.

One of those deals with Henry von Thyssen, the Dutch born, German descended heir to an industrial fortune, and his wife, Nina Dyer, heiress to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, back then called Ceylon. The von Thyssen family manufactured steel in Germany, including for Hitler's Third Reich, and came out of World War II unscathed, as big companies that profit from war always do. Dyer was a dilettante famed for making bikinis popular on the French Riveria. According to Dynamite, von Thyssen was so desperate to marry Dyer that he allowed her to keep her boyfriend, the French actor Christian Marquand. Society gossips whispered,but both spouses were fine with the set-up until von Thyssen accidentally ran into Dyer and Marquand in Carrol's nightclub in Paris and was forced to save face by starting a fight. The couple soon divorced, but not because of infidelity, as many accounts claim. What finally broke the couple up was that Dyer dropped Marquand. Dynamite tells readers: “[von Thyssen] has ditched his sloe-eyed Baroness because now she's decided she loves him.”

Brian Harwin's novel Home Is Upriver appeared in 1952, with this Signet paperback arriving in 1955, and concerns the coming of age along the Mississippi River of the orphaned Kip, who finds a home with married couple Buck and Martha, but promptly screws it up by deciding to screw their daughter Storm. The book may be better known these days by its 1959 title Touch Me Not. Brian Harwin was a pen name for author Le Grand Henderson. We know. Why would you change your name from Le Grand Henderson, when that's as writerly a name as can be, whereas Brian Harwin sounds like a guy from high school who ran a hardware store for a few years then you heard he maybe moved back east? Well, it turns out Henderson actually did make use of his amazing name. He published children's books as simply Le Grand, and many of those too take place along the Mississippi River. He was actually born in Connecticut, but his love of the Mississippi blossomed after he undertook a yearlong houseboat journey from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This would have been during the Great Depression and we can only imagine that the adventure was le grand. Home Is Upriver was the only book he wrote as Harwin. If you want to see its Touch Me Not incarnation, which has excellent Robert Maguire art, we suggest looking at our collection of swamp, bayou, and river paperbacks here.

Paris Life, of which you see a cover above, was a quarterly magazine published not in France, but in Derby, Connecticut, yet which nonetheless purported to give readers the scoop on Parisian nightlife. Connecticut is not exactly the nerve center of international reporting, but the magazine seems to have had someone working for them across the pond, because there are scores of photos—far too many to be simple handouts. Probably, the Connecticut base was only in name—for tax reasons—and the actual mag was headquartered in NYC. But that's only a guess. Anyway, the cover star here is French-Canadian actress/model/singer Simone Auger, the centerfold is German dancer Dorothea Schneider, aka Dodo, and besides those two you get all kinds of showgirl photos, printed poorly on cheap paper, which is why our scans are a bit rough. We're certain there's a way to avoid those Moiré patterns you'll see on the images, but whatever that method is, we aren't going to explore it on on a Friday, when a bottle of fine red wine is breathing in the other room. Maybe we'll re-scan this one down the line, though that may prove difficult, considering the magazine partially disintegrated as we handled it. Just for the sake of preserving as much of this pile of brittle paper as we could, we made twenty-five scans instead of the usual five or six.

British actress Virginia Field, who appeared in forty films, including 1949’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and the 1950 film noir Dial 1119. This image was made as a promo for the latter film.

Actor Rip Torn, best known for his role as Zed in the sci-fi blockbuster Men in Black, was found Friday inside Lichfield Bancorp, a Connecticut bank, drunk and carrying a loaded handgun. Police arrested the 78-year-old and charged him with first-degree burglary, third-degree criminal mischief, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, first-degree trespassing, and possession of a firearm without a permit. Quite a laundry list. The mug shot here is actually from a previous arrest, but we’ll just assume he looked more or less the same Friday. Anyway, we laid out the rules for American justice in yesterday’s post—the richest person or entity wins. Torn is, one would assume, reasonably well off, which means he’d walk from this crime if he broke into, say, your house. But since he broke into a bank, he’s basically screwed. His only chance is to blame it on alcohol. That’s a lot like shooting someone, then rubbing the gun’s nose in the victim’s blood and screaming, “Bad weapon!” But for some reason, it seems to work for celebs.

A calf was born this yuletide season—but not just any calf. This one has a cross on its head. It was born in Connecticut on the farm of Brad Davis and Megan Johnson. At first, the newborn’s cruciform marking was obscured because his mother Fuzzy had rearranged it by licking the fur on his head. But when the calf dried, his owners beheld the cross and they were amazed. “It was really quite a sight,” Davis told his local newspaper. “The first night that he was here, when we shut the lights out late at night, the only thing you could see in here was that cross showing in the dark. It was really quite a feeling. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, actually.” Co-owner Johnson says Moses will never see the inside of a slaughterhouse. “We’re going to make sure he gets a good life and doesn’t get eaten,” she promised. 

Over on the opposite side of the cultural chasm, an evolutionary scientist would suggest that Moses is not a sign from God but rather a textbook example of natural selection. Because of a pattern that randomly appeared on the calf’s head, he gets to live to a ripe old age rather than end up as a Big Kahuna Burger, which means the likelihood he’ll one day sire an offspring with a cross on its head is fractionally higher. Each time a similar pattern appears, there’s a chance that cow will likewise be spared the abbatoir and will in turn reproduce, which means, given thousands of years, an entire species of untouchable cows might be roaming the American landscape with crosses on their heads. So is Moses an example of divine intervention or Darwinian science? Let the debate begin.

Photos of a fire that engulfed the world’s largest bigtop at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, July 6, 1944. 168 people were killed, but amazingly, no animals.