Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from Golden State thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets.
People Today
Date: 1952
Publisher: Hillman Periodicals, New York
Discovered at: The amazing Kayo Books, 814 Post Street
Representative Quote:
"From the Imperial Valley, wetbacks, often carrying knives, brass knuckles, guns, or sharpened screwdrivers, hop freight trains heading north."
Of course this feature about a "wetback deluge" is disgusting and upsetting, and reading it is something like letting one of those Minuteman guys vomit again and again inside your brain. What's even nastier, perhaps, is that your Crap Archivist found it in People Today, a mainstream digest of bathing beauties and bizarre sports stories, rather than some supremacist rag. (Look for those bathing beauties and sports stories below, incidentally.)
But what's creepiest about it is how similar it is to today's coverage of illegal immigration.
People Today says:
Just like then, nobody knows exactly how many undocumented workers have journeyed north from Mexico, but that won't stop media professionals from just cold making up some numbers, deeming them threats to national security, accusing them of miscellaneous savagery, and associating them with sewage, disease, and general un-American un-healthiness.
Then as now, the goal seems to be dehumanization:
No joke: if we swapped out each "wetback" in the article with the term "illegal," this thing could run without much stir today.
Anyway, that's depressing, so let's just move on. People Today understood what anyone who enjoys a Fox News blonde can tell you: xenophobia goes down easiest with a slice of cheesecake.
Meet the "superbly enfleshened" Danton Walker.
Yes, her lungs, ponderously mammalian, steadfastly expel the dioxide needed not by such a form made of meat, chastity, and gooseberries. She is a breathing marvel of undergarments and sentience.
Next: Proto-sexting, and "What's Your Wife Worth in Cold Hard Cash?"
Here's another important story from People Today, the important magazine of important stuff. Outraged at all the attention foreign film starlets like Sophia Loren were receiving in the early '50s, a young woman was moved to do what any of us would: snap some swimsuit shots and send them to the media, for patriotism or something.
In the accompanying article, Gladys insists that "red-blooded American girls" are not just "dried-up substitutes" for the international beauties parading through the press. People Today adds that Gladys just turned 18, measures 38-24-36, and -- quite unlike those non-American beauties who dare hail from non-American countries -- contains multitudes:
"Let's see, what rhymes with 'Brigitte Bardot is feebly enfleshened'?"
Shocking Detail:
To the men at People Today, an American girl like Gladys was worth much more than any other. They could even put a number on it, as we see in this illuminating feature titled "What's Your Wife Worth In Cold Hard Cash?" Turns out, a wife's worth is always in inverse proportion to her husband's salary.
Want to be treasured, ladies? Date a broke-ass man!
NOTE TO HUSBANDS: This is collector's value, not street value, based on Near Mint or Mint+ condition. Please bag and board your wife.
Highlight:
Page after page, race preoccupies the publishers' minds. How else to explain this?
Black man, lighter-toned woman, and the caption "Big mouthful"? Sometimes I want to take the 1950s outside and hose 'em off on the lawn.
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