Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from Golden State thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets.
Pageant Magazine
Date: February, 1951
Discovered at: Old Towne Antique Mall, Pleasanton
The Cover Promises: "If A-Bombs Blast U.S. City." Also: "Homosexuality Can Be Cured."
Representative Quotes:
"When true human relations are obtainable, the person no longer needs homosexual relationships -- which are, after all, only sick substitutes for real friendship and love." (page 90)
"Why hasn't the Great Sea serpent been caught before? Scientists say one rarely comes to the surface, and when it dies, it sinks to hitherto impenetrable depths. But there's an even simpler reason: No one has ever tried to trap the monster." (page 45)
Chuck your history texts and your Rabbit Runs, world. It turns out that the best way to understand mid-20th-century America is to grab any 1950s issue of Pageant, a digest-sized rag crammed to bursting with every virtue and vice that once distinguished this great nation.
There's our can-do spirit (We can catch sea-monsters!), our can-do belief in normative behaviors (We can cure homosexuality!), and our can-do soul-terror about the things we actually can do (We can blow up a major city!).
The feature piece about the atomic destruction of an America city is a marvel. Pagaent contracted Alexander Leydenfrost to "'photograph' the scene in terms of his famous realistic impressions."
The usual Studies in Crap nonsense will follow. First, though, here are Leydenfrost's impressions of catastrophe in "City X":
Yes, these are the storyboards for Children of Men.
Next: More Pageant craziness.
Pageant often took on such existential horrors, as in the April 1951 Cold War piece "What If We Lose?" It also dared to address the pressing issues in American homelife:
The reason American wives were so lousy, according to author Helen Lawrenson:
"Although the foreign wife raises more children, takes care of large homes, and serves bigger meals, it would never enter her head to expect her husband to help her with any of this."Also, what do you think that cover model felt when she saw her face paired with that headline?
Month after month, Pageant would take on a serious fear of white middle America ...
... beneath a swipe at American women. (This one's from 1962.)
Back in the '50s, Pageant sometimes strayed from attacking women on its covers, but still its editors held to two fundamentals: beauty and death.
Speaking of women, here are the jobs they were known to hold in '51:
Today's hardworking women, of course, have bested their ancestry by taking more than one of these. Perhaps you (or some woman you know) can achieve a Bingo!
Next: A completely awesome bonus image of American cities destroyed that may or may not contain a secret message.
And, hey, why not one more image of American cities destroyed? Remember, this comes from when such visions carried some weight, back before they became pretty much the total of summertime entertainment:
If that last one, of the corpses heaped on a bus, were a Mad Fold-In, the hidden answer would be "Pokemon Fever."
Hey, you could do worse than following @studiesincrap or @ExhibitionistSF on the Twitter thing.
The mighty Studies in Crap e-mail list alerts you whenever a new SiC post hits. Sign up at studiesincrap@sfweekly.com
