The Vintage Reader

My heroes

...are the crack research team at Snopes. Here's just one reason why: Urban Legends Reference Pages: Actors (Crash Course)

Girls, girls, girls

Okay, pinup fans (and I know you're out there; you hit my site all the time. The ones I worry about are those of you looking for "vintage Brownie uniform pinups."): here's a comprehensive survey of pinup artists, very well-written, with beautiful full-color jpegs! Have fun.

~Painted Ladies~

Hmmm...

How many of these do you suppose our Commander in Chief has read?

The rule and the exception

I've always been fascinated when I pick up an old book and someone has underlined passages in it. Once in 7th grade English, a guy named Mark handed me a copy of That Was Then, This Is Now. There were passages underlined in blue ballpoint pen, a concept that was new to me; for one thing, that was the first year we were allowed to use pens in class, and I was mildly obsessed with them. Also, writing in a book with a pen was something I never would have been allowed to do at home. But mainly, I just assumed that anything that was underlined was The Good Stuff. You know: sex, drugs, motorcycles. That kind of thing. It was 1978, and I watched Soap (when my mother wasn't home to make me turn it off) and SNL (after my mother had gone to sleep, with the sound turned down so low I had to sit four inches from the TV, just in case she woke up and wandered in to make sure I wasn't watching SNL). I knew what The Good Stuff was, and this was definitely not it. What the owner of the book (Mark's older brother, as I recall) had underlined was just nonsense; a phrase here, a sentence there. A couple of words. I have a feeling it had been assigned reading and he was supposed to have been reading it in class, so he underlined something every once in a while to make it look like he was doing the assignment. I can still picture the cover: it's that mid-70s paperback edition with the watercolorish only-slightly-psychedelic picture of Cathy on the front, with M&M ("Baby Freak") tripping out in the background.

After that, I quit thinking that anything underlined was automatically The Good Stuff. Unless... the underliner used a straightedge to underline. Seriously, there are people out there who have a ruler or some similar item handy when they're reading books. And when they want to underline something, they park the ruler under the words and make a perfectly straight line, almost always with a fine-point pen, under them. I find it even more interesting that I usually find this in marriage manuals and self-help books, suggesting that there's a certain kind of perfectionism found in readers of marriage manuals and self-help books that might lead them to need help from such books.

Am I overgeneralizing? Judge for yourself. Here are some straight-as-an-arrow underlined passages from Mental Health Through Will-Training, by one Abraham A. Low (that's the author; I have no idea who the underliner might have been).

You may conclude, therefore, that Frank's offer was a polite gesture rather than a genuine eagerness to be of help. But in group life an insincere gesture of generosity and fellowship is far more valuable than an outspoken expression of enmity and a brutal assertion of one's sovereignty.

If the nervous patient is to rid himself of his disturbing symptoms he will have to cultivate the Will to bear discomfort.

I'll tell you this much: I don't think I would have wanted to be this person's wife. Or co-worker. Or daughter, son, sister, brother, or next-door neighbor.

Not too long ago I was in a used book store and found a bunch of old issues of Holiday magazine. I picked one up because the cover was wonderful: a photo of New York, in that crisp and stunning black and white that I'm not sure cameras are capable of producing anymore.

Its previous owner was obviously mentally ill. Not the kind of mental illness that can be overcome by cultivating the Will, either. Nearly every photo of any person was defaced, the eyes scratched out with a pen. Racial epithets of all kinds captioned each one. The margins were filled with the kind of insane rambling that shows up in movies about serial killers when the FBI agents meet with the profiler and they quit exchanging dark quips and start looking serious and panicked. Oh, and then there were the swastikas.

There was a lot of underlining in that magazine. I don't want to know what any of it meant, and I wasn't about to try to figure it out. But here's the scary part: there were about 20 years' worth of magazines in that stack, from the 40s through the 60s, and every one of them was covered in the same kind of stuff. Especially the ones that covered the Kennedys.

Hmmm, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald's undiscovered stash of ephemera ended up at Oracle Junction. Hey, stranger things have happened.

Port of Lonely Hearts

Remember when, instead of meeting faraway folks online, you joined a pen pal club? Life Story magazine's club was the Port of Lonely Hearts. You could write a letter and request pen pals, or you could answer the ones that were published in the magazine. Here are some of them from the October, 1942 issue:

Men in Service -- attention!
We are two attractive girls of twenty-two. One is as dark as the other is fair. Our sole purpose it to chase away the blues and brighten life for the fellows in the Service, especially those between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Come on, fellows, we guarantee a cure for your blues! Carlotta, N.J.

Interesting stories to tell
I have traveled through thirty-eight states and can tell you something interesting about each one. I am a girl of eighteen, five fee four inches tall, with dark red, naturally curly hair, and dark blue eyes. I like outdoor sports, but dancing is my favorite pastime.Melba, Mich.

Snapshots for everyone
I am a single man, twenty-three years of age, five feet eight inches tall, with light brown hair and blue eyes. I like music, swimming, photography, and the movies. I would like to corresond with young ladies of eighteen. I promise to exchange snaps, if so desired. Auery, Ind.

Can you imagine a time when Carlotta's and Auery's letters would have been totally innocent? If Auery posted that in a chat room today, the FBI would be knocking on his door in an hour or so.

As for Melba... well, I'm betting she was a huge hit at parties. I've been to 38 states. How many have you been to? I've been to South Dakota. Have you been to South Dakota? The capitol of South Dakota is Pierre. I've been there. Have you ever been to Oklahoma? It's the only state with a working oil rig at the state capitol! Can you imagine? Did you know that the state flower is mistletoe? Technically, of course, mistletoe is a parasite. I would hate to have a parasite for my state flower. I live in Michigan, where the state flower is apple blossom. Our state bird is the robin.

Authors among us

I love that title. Here's the site:

Authors Among Us: Librarians as Children's Writers

The cost of doing business

Here's what I hate about eBay: all the damned amateurs. I've got one now whining about how PayPal is charging 75 cents on a $5.00 purchase and that's what I'll have to pay. I'm sorry, but even at the highest rate (2.9% + 30 cents) it only comes to 44 cents. This woman is trying to bilk me out of 31 cents! How cheap can you possibly get? Then she's charging me more than four dollars for shipping, because the item is only 99 cents and hey, she has to make up her money on the book she spent a dime on at the thrift shop. I sell on eBay too from time to time, and I use PayPal to accept payments. It's the cost of doing business on eBay. And it's a lot less than the cost of doing business in a storefront somewhere.

Listen, amateurs: grow up. Learn a little bit about customer service. Quit complaining about how much eBay charges and how much PayPal charges. If you don't want to accept a dollar for a book... ask for more than that from the beginning! But don't take it out on the only bidder for being the only bidder.

In the mood for a mystery?

Try a historical.

Hey, I've been there

Looking for Squaresville, which provided me with the original VR graphic many years ago, I found instead The Garment District, a fantastic place to shop if you find yourself in Cambridge, Mass.

Reading in Crisis - backlash

The rap on reading: TV, Internet aren't only culprits | csmonitor.com:

"Is it fair to criticize the American public for its failure to read, when publishers and writers do so little to promote reading, depending instead on Ms. Winfrey's tastes, the media's goodwill, and underfunded public libraries to do the work for them free of charge?"

Caveat Emptor

We took two light fixtures to The Antique Lamp Co. in June. We were told they'd be done in 2-3 weeks. Now, in August, they're "next in line" to be worked on. I'm picking them up tomorrow and taking them to Aurora Lamp & Shade, which did some wonderful work for us in the past, but we were too lazy to drive to this time.

Sometimes, it's worth the drive.

All's Fair

This year marks the centennial of the 1904 World's Fair (a.k.a. the Louisiana Purchase Exposition) in St. Louis.