| Hollywoodland | Aug 31 2018 |
Monroe goes for a joy ride and bums out fifty-one women.
Above is a page from the Japanese celeb magazine Roadshow of Marilyn Monroe having a laugh in the rear of a convertible while acting as Grand Marshall of The Miss America Pageant. The one she headlined was the 1952 event, held in Atlantic City today that year. You'd think all the contestants would have resigned dejectedly after getting a glimpse of their marshall, who was 
pre-superstardom but was still Marilyn Monroe, yet the pageant actually went on and was won by Neva Jane Langley of Georgia.
pre-superstardom but was still Marilyn Monroe, yet the pageant actually went on and was won by Neva Jane Langley of Georgia.A lot of websites get that last fact wrong, which we think is because of Wikipedia. There the pageant winners are listed according to the year they served, not the year they competed. Since the contests were held the previous summer or autumn to choose the upcoming year's queen, most sites say Colleen Kay Hutchins won the pageant Monroe marshalled.
Nope. It was Langley, who beat out contestants from all forty-eight states, plus Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. There she is below wearing her sash, which says 1953, for her reign beginning the first of the next year. But even in victory she's probably thinking, Now that I've seen Marilyn I'm going to lock myself in a cellar for sixteen months and have someone feed me through a slot in the door.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 16 2014 |
Mid-century fiction’s love affair with the East produced scores of virtuoso bookcovers.
It seems time for another themed cover collection, so today we’re sharing some of the scores of Asian styled mid-century paperback fronts we’ve seen. Much of the fiction here is offensive on some level, but then quite a bit of the old literature falls into that category. The art, on the other hand, is somewhat easier to look at dispassionately. So we have thirty-two paperback covers revealing the mid-century fascination with—or exploitation of—Asian archetypes, with art by Denis McLoughlin, Robert Maguire (identically on Ne-San and The Transistor Girls), J. Oval, aka Ben Ostrick, and more. Four or five of these came from Flickr, so thanks to the original uploaders on those.
Ronald KirkbrideKarl EskelundGriffMark CorriganSidney WeintraubMax DauthendeyJerome DenverPaul DanielsStuart GriffinJean HougronCharles PettitDan CushmanStephen BeckerWilliam GroningerBarye PhillipsBen OstrickVivian ConnellJ. OvalRobert MaguireJack ReynoldsRobert R. RoripaughMarcel LetangJ. E. MacDonnellJames WorkmanSimon HarvesterNoel LangleyBrian Coopercover artcover collectionliterature
| Intl. Notebook | Jul 18 2009 |
Walter Cronkite always looked at things from a news perspective.
Walter Cronkite testing out a Reduced Gravity Walking Simulator at the Lunar Landing Research Facility in Langley, Virginia, circa 1968. The photo is from a NASA history site here.
