 Everyone knows it's impolite to stare. Well, almost everyone. 
When you look out your window there may be nobody on the street, but The Girl Watcher has come to the rescue with some time killing imagery to brighten your lockdown. Only two issues of this magazine were ever published, as far as we know, with this one coming this month in 1959. Inside you get plenty of photos by lensman Earl Leaf, including rare shots of Mamie Van Doren, Susan Harrison, June Wilkinson, Danish model Elsa Sorenson (aka Dane Arden), and some unidentifieds. While meant to be humorous, this magazine is textbook mid-century sexism, something scholars could use to fuel semesters of women's studies classes. It speaks of women as prey to be stalked, ambushed, and captured, and while it's not meant to be taken anything close to literal, it still carries a powerful suggestion that male desire trumps female self-determination.
In general this attitude has changed for the better since then, with the result that the American mating game has greatly improved. While in general men still look at women almost anywhere, most understand there are unaccepable and acceptable times and places to do so—bars and parties being good examples of the latter. Men look, and always will. Women look too, and always have, more subtly. And increasingly, both look at digital apps—which is not nearly as much fun as in the flesh, but it certainly confers women more power and safety, even if it's inherently restricting in terms of choice. The Pulp Intl. girlfriends would never have chosen us if we'd had to entice them with online profiles designed to sell us as perfect matches, but when randomly thrust into the same social gathering, the concept of perfect did not apply—it was game over folks! Um, forty-plus scans below.
                                             
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1958—Plane Crash Kills 8 Man U Players
British European Airways Flight 609 crashes attempting to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem Airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane is the Manchester United football team, along with a number of supporters and journalists. 20 of the 44 people on board die in the crash. 1919—United Artists Is Launched
Actors Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, along with director D.W. Griffith, launch United Artists. Each holds a twenty percent stake, with the remaining percentage held by lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo. The company struggles for years, with Griffith soon dropping out, but eventually more partners are brought in and UA becomes a Hollywood powerhouse. 1958—U.S. Loses H-Bomb
A 7,600 pound nuclear weapon that comes to be known as the Tybee Bomb is lost by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, near Tybee Island. The bomb was jettisoned to save the aircrew during a practice exercise after the B-47 bomber carrying it collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost, and remains so today. 1906—NYPD Begins Use of Fingerprint ID
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot begins using French police officer Alphonse Bertillon's fingerprint system to identify suspected criminals. The use of prints for contractual endorsement (as opposed to signatures) had begun in India thirty years earlier, and print usage for police work had been adopted in India, France, Argentina and other countries by 1900, but NYPD usage represented the beginning of complete acceptance of the process in America. To date, of the billions of fingerprints taken, no two have ever been found to be identical. 1974—Patty Hearst Is Kidnapped
In Berkeley, California, an organization calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps heiress Patty Hearst. The next time Hearst is seen is in a San Francisco bank, helping to rob it with a machine gun. When she is finally captured her lawyer F. Lee Bailey argues that she had been brainwashed into committing the crime, but she is convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, a term which is later commuted. |
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