Snippets from the April 24-30, 1971, edition of TV Guide

Let's peer inside this defaced, 54-year-old issue of TV Guide for April 24-30, 1971. Specifically this is the Chicago Metropolitan Edition. This is all the stuff that was on TV when I was just 4 months old. Under editor Merrill Panitt, it features articles and reviews by Neil Hickey, Cleveland Amory, E. Joseph Bennett, Dick Hobson, Richard K. Doan, Judith Crist and Bill Davidson, among others. 

In a biography of Walter Annenberg, the website Immigrant Entrepreneurship states: "(TV Guide) Editor Merrill Panitt and (publisher) Walter Annenberg fully understood that television had to appeal to a wide audience in order to be profitable, but they also pressured television networks to raise the quality of programming. For that matter, TV Guide encouraged networks to end the practice of single sponsorship for programs, because giving networks the final say over scripts might improve quality. ... Walter and Merrill Panitt encouraged readers to tune into symphonies, ballets, and public broadcasting. In 1961, they used their platform to petition the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enforce the stipulation that stations air programs 'in the public interest' in order to renew their licenses."

1. Up first is a page from the day-by-day TV Movie Guide. This is what was available to watch. It was still about a half-decade before VCRs began to trickle into American homes and before cable services such as HBO began to be available. So unless you had an 8mm film projector, this represented what you could watch at home, in the Chicago area. It wasn't an awful selection, though! You could start your Saturday with a Blondie movie, watch the Val Lewton-produced western Apache Drums, be thrilled by Hammer's The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb and fall asleep to Laird Cregar in The Lodger. Or maybe something else on Saturday's list strikes your fancy.

2. "Hot Dog" was an NBC documentary series for kids that was hosted by Jo Anne Worley, Jonathan Winters and Woody Allen (!) but ran for just one season. Those few who watched and remembered it seemed to love it. One reviewer on IMDb wrote in 2006: "'Hot Dog' was unlike all the other kids' fare on Saturday. No animation at all. The cast were asked to explain things like 'How do they get toothpaste in the tube?' Woody Allen and Jonathan Winters of course came up with bizarre answers. Then we'd see how it's really done -- a filmed piece set to music, no narration, would take us through the process start to finish. The show was fun, interesting, original and different. Wish I could see it again."

3. The Sunday morning religious shows included "Mass for Shut-Ins." The history of the broadcast is discussed in an article on the website of the Historical Society of Quincy & Adams County. It notes: "The origin of the popular religious program began with casual conversation during a meeting of the Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree in September 1962. Father George McDivott, a Franciscan priest at Quincy College, suggested that the Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree sponsor a televised Mass for nursing home residents, the homebound and others unable to attend weekly services in their churches. ... WGEM-TV, the NBC station in Quincy, agreed to record the Mass at its studio at 7:30 p.m. Saturdays and televise it the following Sunday mornings. The Knights took on the responsibility of designing and building the set. (Bert) Wensing built the altar, and donations provided the crucifix hung behind the altar, along with linens, candles, cruets, hosts and wine the Mass required."

4. This episode of the news show "Cromie Circle" featured some compelling topics, back when news shows were much more intellectual, education and quiet than they are today. According to the website "History? Because It's Here!" Robert Cromie did it all at the Chicago Tribune, handling World War II coverage, sportswriting and book reviews. "WGN television broadcast 'Cromie’s Circle' from 1969 to 1980 and WTTW television broadcast 'Cromie’s Book Beat' nationwide from 1964 to 1980. As a reporter, he was enchanted with people and their life stories and he despised injustices and revealed them through vivid newspaper stories," the website notes.

5. Here's part of an interesting full-page advertisement urging people to invest in full-acre parcels in Meadview, Arizona. "People are moving into Arizona to escape congestion, strife and bad weather," the advertising copy notes. "The U.S. Census Bureau predicts Arizona's population growth at twice the national average in the coming decades." Indeed, Arizona's population was 1.7 million in 1970 and is about 7.6 million today. Meadview didn't quite fulfill its promise, though. About 1,400 people live there today and it's an unincorporated community with limited local infrastructure.

6. Want spooky movies? Here are some TV Guide ads for spooky movies. Strait-Jacket is a William Castle film written by Robert Bloch and featuring Joan Crawford at her Mommie Dearest scariest. The College Girl Murders (1967) is the U.S. release of the West German thriller The Monk with the Whip, one of many Edgar Wallace adaptations. Screaming Yellow Theater was hosted by the famous Svengoolie.

7. Speaking of spooky, the 1970s pretty much belonged to Vincent Price. In addition to his Hollywood movies, he was everywhere else, too: guest appearances on TV shows, talk shows, game shows, commercials, voiceovers and more. Here are a couple items from this issue of TV Guide:

8. Finally, I thought this was an interesting excerpt from an article by Richard K. Doan about the "happy talk" approach (sort of) taken by WABC Channel 7's evening news broadcast in New York City. Whether that was a good development in the long run for TV news is up for others to decide. I suspect it had a mixture of positive and negative consequences, though. We could probably use a bit more good cheer and positivity these days, so long as it's grounded in truth, and not misinformation or gaslighting.

Milkwalker knows where you live

I drank from a lot of milk cartons during my K-12 school days in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida (maybe that's why I've never had a broken bone). But I never came across anything as creepy as Milkwalker. 

Indeed, Milkwalker is real. Or, at least, the milk-carton public service campaign by Darigold that featured Milkwalker was real. When I first came across Milkwalker in one of my social media feeds, I figured it was too good to be true. It had to be a clever fake, because it looks too much like something that someone would invent as Slenderman's weird cousin. 

But Know Your Meme has the lowdown:

"Milkwalker, an anthropomorphic milk carton, was originally created by Seattle-based dairy and agricultural co-op Darigold, Inc. [in the mid 1980s] as the mascot of the company and a public service announcement character that encourages children to remember their full name, address and telephone number in case of emergencies. On November 28th, 2016, over three decades after its introduction, various images of the obscure mascot began circulating online after it was highlighted by the Tumblr blog Heck-Yeah-Old-Tech."

I even found this short article in the June 5, 1985, edition of the Whidbey News-Times of Oak Harbor, Washington (click to embiggen):

Some folks embrace Milkwalker and reject the creepypasta angle of it being just another thing to fear. In a Facebook comment in August 2024, Holly Gee wrote: "Yes, the milkwalker definitely looks like a spooky cryptid, but I like the idea of him being a force for good, protecting the innocent by milkwalking all over the wicked from the shadows. He's terrifying, but terrifies only the deserving."

But while Milkwalker seemingly originated with Darigold in the 1980s, how long has it actually been around? Is it, perhaps, ancient? I'll leave you with this curious excerpt from the March 24, 1876, edition of The Stockport Advertiser in Stockport, England. Interpret it as you wish: 

Book cover: "The Earth Changes Survival Handbook"

Third post in a row with a theme of survivalist literature, in its many different hues...

• Title: The Earth Changes Survival Handbook
• Author: Page Bryant (Born 1943 or 1944. Died July 27, 2017, at age 73.) Her full name was Jean Page Bryant-Guynup. Her other books included The Spiritual Reawakening of the Great Smoky Mountains, Starwalking: Shamanic Practices for Traveling into the Night Sky, The Second Coming of the Star Gods, and Terravision: A Traveler's Guide to the Living Planet Earth. And there's a significant Arizona link to her life. According to a 2017 article on AshVegas.com, "Bryant was living in Sedona when she was one of the first people to identify specific locations there of powerful energy centers that she called vortexes. A vortex “is believed to be a special spot on the earth where energy is either entering into the earth or projecting out of the earth’s plane,” according to visitsedona.com. 
• Foreword: Brad Steiger
• Correlated by: Eva Prang, who is listed in a 1981 newspaper article as one of the founders of SPACES (Sedona Planetary and Cosmic Education Society)
• Illustrator: Scott Guynap (Bryant's husband)
• Publisher: Sun Books, Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Year: 1983 (this copy is the July 1988 sixth printing)
• Pages: 440
• Format: Paperback
• Price: $20 (Converted from 1988 dollars, that's about $54 today!)
• Back cover blurb: "Included are: Cosmology, Initation, Evolution. Vortices. Native Americans. Prophecies. Aspects of Survival. The Need for Balance."
• Excerpt from Steiger's foreword: "Page is not merely giving us her psychic impressions; she is not simply recording the channeled messages from her spiritual contact, Albion; she is also documenting the aforementioned subjective material with objective data from hardnosed scientists. THE EARTH CHANGES SURVIVAL HANDBOOK is not a book to be taken lightly."
• First sentence: The Earth is a 'Pilgrim', weaving its way through time and space in what far too many of us believe is but a mute and aimless experience."
• Random excerpt from middle #1: We wish to bring to your attention a couple of areas of concern to the Brotherhood at this time. One is the place known as Apache Junction, close to Superstition Mountain. This is one of the most powerful spots in Arizona, but its energies have been used negatively. This vortex causes war and destruction. It spurns hatred and fear. It manifests on the physical and emotional levels of consciousness of life forms. This area can erupt and spread an "inky-like" astral substance all over the Phoenix valley.
• Random excerpt from middle #2: The scientific community is certainly in agreement with the notion that the climate is indeed changing. In 1976, a report released by the Central Intelligence Agency, indicated that the Earth is entering into a "mini" Ice Age! 
• Did the CIA really say that? Not really. For the full scientific scoop on what's happening now, check out this 2023 coverage of the work done by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
• Random excerpt from middle #3: You can be a survivalist. Unfortunately, there are many groups around that call themselves "survivalists" that feel that guns and violence are the best insurance one can have. Such attitudes have their pro's and con's, but they need to be considered carefully. It is a common misconception that gun-carrying crowds will descend on those with stored food. First of all, hungry people are lethargic. A hungry person or crowd will not walk for miles and miles to search out remotely located homesteads.
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2015, Randall wrote: "This is a 'bible' of books for me. I loved it. Purchased in the early 1980's it was the telling of what we all felt in the intuitive community that earth changes 'were a coming'. Of course only a completely detached person could deny this phenomena today (2015). I have referred to this treasured book so many times through the years that it has become like an old teddy bear, tattered and worn, pages falling out, but well-loved."
• Rating on Amazon: 5 stars (out of 5)
• 
  Amazon review excerpt: In 2014, Ms. Janicke wrote: "This is an excellent book. One of Bryant's best works, I think. Ties in well with Bryant's book on the Bermuda Triangle. Book contains discussion of Sedona, gardening tips, list of things to have on hand, star travel, direction finding, edible plant testing, and more."
• More reading: For more insights on this topic, there's a 1991 column by the Los Angeles Times' Russell Chandler headlined "Bad Vibes Rock New Age Mecca: Modern mystics seeking psychic energy in Sedona, Ariz., are clashing with conservative churches, American Indians and the U.S. Forest Service." Meanwhile, the history of Sedona, Bryant and vortexes is discussed in this 2024 blog post by Belén Tavares.
• Coming up in the next related post: Orson Welles. Can you guess how he fits in? 

1979 middle school book: "The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401"

• Title: The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401
• Author: Burnham Holmes. He also authored the Contemporary Perspectives book about Nefertiti, plus books about the Third Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, Edward Hopper, Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez and George Eastman. In May of this year, he retired from Castleton University in Vermont. As Emily Ely wrote for the student newspaper, the Castleton Spartan: "After nearly three decades of teaching, mentoring, and storytelling, English professor Burnham Holmes is retiring, leaving behind a legacy that’s impossible to summarize with a single title. 'Oh, a man of all the wonders. He is insane. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met,' said junior Nickels Thomas. That sentiment echoes across generations of students and colleagues who have learned from Holmes, not just about writing or speaking, but about life itself." Holmes is also on Instagram. His most recent post calls poet Frank O'Hara his "Lodestone."
• Cover and interior illustrator: Abel Navarro
• Publisher: Contemporary Perspectives Inc. 
• Year: 1979
• Pages: 48
• Format: Hardcover
• Topic: On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, traveling from New York to Miami, crashed into the Florida Everglades.¹ There were 101 fatalities, including the three cockpit crew members, and 75 survivors. Then came the ghost stories. As Wikipedia explains, "In the months and years following the crash, stories began circulating that numerous employees and passengers of Eastern had reported sightings of deceased crew members ... sitting aboard other [Lockheed] L-1011s. ... These stories speculated that the sightings were connected to the fact that parts of the crashed aircraft were salvaged after the investigation and refitted into other L-1011s. The reported hauntings were said to be seen only on the planes that used the spare parts." There was a 1976 book, The Ghost of Flight 401, by John G. Fuller, and a TV movie in 1978 (starring Ernest Borgnine and Kim Basinger) that helped the ghost stories become even more widespread in the late 1970s, perhaps leading to the publication of this middle-grade book, which I remember reading at the wonderful C.E. McCall Middle School library in Montoursville in the early 1980s.
• 
  Excerpt #1: The heavy clouds and cold air were only the first of many strange incidents aboard the Eastern plane. A stewardess on plane 318 saw something that looked like a cloud. It formed near where she was standing. At first, she thought it was only water vapor condensing. It could have been caused by a change in temperature. But the cloud wasn't like anything she had ever seen before. Little by little, the features of a human face took shape in the cloud.
• Excerpt #2: In none of the stories about the ghost captain and second officer was anyone hurt — in fact, quite the opposite. Some airline people even wanted to work on planes where Loft and Repo had appeared. They felt safe. They felt that the ghosts would protect them from harm.
• Excerpt #3: Very few people today have ever really seen ghosts, but there have been many legends and stories throughout history of people who have. Until Flight 401, never had so many different people — at different times — actually witnessed the appearances of the same ghosts.
• Reviews and memories: I couldn't find any reviews of this book on Goodreads, Amazon, Kirkus, Newspapers.com or Google search. And that's weird, because I know of lot of kids from my generation read this book, and used copies now sell for a pretty penny. I did find a 2022 Facebook post in the Vintage Airliners group. One commenter states, "I was a young guy when I read the book and it totally gave me the creeps." But it's not 100% clear whether he's talking about Fuller's book or Holmes' book. Maybe this post can become the go-to site for folks who want to remember and comment upon Holmes' book. Please comment!
  

My copy was circulated quite a bit at the public library in tiny Duncan, Arizona (in the southeastern part of the state) between 1987 and 2003. So perhaps millennials have some thoughts, too.

Previous Contemporary Perspectives books covered on Papergreat:

• This House is Haunted!
• The Case of the Ancient Astronauts
• Visions of the Future: Magic Boards
• The Abominable Snowman

(Note: Those four books are all Contemporary Perspectives Inc. (CPI) books distributed by Raintree Children's Books, Milwaukee. The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401, which follows the same format, was not distributed by Raintree. Instead, it was distributed by Silver Burdett Company of Morristown, New Jersey. Purely speculative on my part, but I wonder if Raintree didn't want to be associated with such a recent and horrific air disaster and its subsequent exploitation for ghost stories. I held some long misgivings about doing this post for that reason.)

Somber footnote

1. I can't help but connect old books to current events. The 1972 crash site of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 in the Everglades is only about 20 miles from the newly constructed Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp. 

Writing for the Guardian yesterday, columnist Moira Donegan noted: "It has long been a feature of Trump’s regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement’s style of masculinity."

Andrew O'Hehir, the executive editor of Salon, wrote a July 6 column about Alligator Alcatraz that featured the subhead: "Yeah, it's a concentration camp. It's also a meme, a troll and an especially ugly distillation of American history." O'Hehir writes: "To describe this evil little zone of exclusion as sadistic, despicable and insulting, or as a symptom of incipient or actual fascism, is accurate enough. But it’s most definitely who 'we' are in 2025. If we claim that such a thing is 'un-American,' then we’re the ones who haven’t paid attention to history."

And the Miami Herald reported this morning that hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges in the United States are already being held under tents and in chain-link cells at Alligator Alcatraz: "The information ... suggests that scores of migrants without criminal records have been targeted in the state and federal dragnet to catch and deport immigrants living illegally in Florida," the Herald notes.

Greye La Spina, "The Gargoyle" and Spinnerstown, Pennsylvania

Greye La Spina (1880 – 1969) is notable for being one of the relatively few women whose horror and fantasy writings were published in pulp magazines during the first half of the 20th century.

She wrote mostly short stories, but also serials, essays and a couple of novels. Her 1937 essay "On Scaring Oneself into Conniptions" was published in Science-Fantasy Correspondent, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. And I cite it today because it's the first-ever appearance of the word "conniptions" on Papergreat.

"[La Spina] published an incredible number of stories — as many as 100 in a bunch of different genres, including men’s adventure, horror, women’s magazines, etc. In her prime, she was more successful than H.P. Lovecraft, and was very important to the early years of Weird Tales magazine. Readers loved her and clamored for new stories by her. And then, after she stopped writing in the early 1950s, people started to forget her," Michael W. Phillips Jr. told Paul Semel for a 2023 interview posted on Semel's website. 

Phillips had just edited Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, a collection of La Spina's works. You should definitely check out all of Semel's interview with Phillips, which goes into great detail about La Spina's writing career.

Before 2023's Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, others tried to keep La Spina's work in the spotlight over the decades. A significant part of that effort was today's featured 1975 paperback, The Gargoyle. It includes the 1925 serial The Gargoyle and the 1932 novella The Devil's Pool. The book measures 5½ inches by 8½ inches and features a compelling cover illustration by Vincent Napoli (1907-1981).

If you're already intrigued, there are copies on eBay, as of today, for as low as $20. I'm holding onto my copy, because, despite my ongoing downsizing, it's too cool to give up for that low of a price.

This book's publication was the work of (and clearly a labor of love for) Robert Weinberg (1946-2016). According to Fancyclopedia 3, Weinberg was a member of the fanzine community with a huge interest in pulp magazines. That interest led to some big things: "In 1968, Bob began publishing readers guides to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, eventually expanding both to book length and publishing additional guides and books about the pulp magazines and the authors who wrote for them. 1973 saw his publication of WT50, an anniversary tribute to Weird Tales, a magazine to which Bob would acquire the rights in 1979 and help revive. He was editor-in-chief of Arkham House from 2009–16."

For Weinberg's publication of The Gargoyle, the copyright page notes that both of the included stories were reprinted with the permission of Celia La Spina (1900-1982). (She was born Celia Geissler, the daughter of Greye La Spina and Ralph Geissler. After Ralph Geissler died, Greye married Robert La Spina, Baron di Savuto, an Italian aristocrat. According to Geni, Celia married Eduardo La Spina, her stepfather's brother.)

The copyright page also notes that the front cover illustration (Napoli) and lettering (Andrew Brosnatch) are from "the collection of Robert Weinberg." Officially titled The Gargoyle and One Other, this was #3 in Weinberg's series of "Lost Fantasies" and sold for $5 in 1975.

Here's a passage from "The Gargoyle" that perhaps helps to explain why it's subtitled "A Tale of Devil Worship":

"Against this background stood, at irregular intervals, great white crosses before which were sculptured figures in black, figures that made him shudder with uncontrollable horror at their repulsive and abhorrent ugliness. It seemed as if the human imagination had here attained the climax of revolting, horrific distortion and deformity in sculpture and pictorial art. Not a statue, not a painting, but showed the human face and form in such revolting deformity as to send sickly shudders through the observer's sinking frame. The purpose of this ghastly place was obvious ...

"The red light shining everywhere now attracted Luke's attention. It originated in a crystal sphere, hung on almost invisible chains in a shrine just back of the altar."

* * *

One of the niftiest things I came across is that Greye La Spina spent a signficant portion of her life in rural Pennsylvania! An article in the March 10, 1946, edition of Allentown's Sunday Call-Chronicle is headlined "Greye la Spina, Weaves Weird Tales And Tapestries, Finds Life Is 'Fun' Amidst Solitudes of Spinnerstown."

Spinnerstown (new to me!) is a census-designated place in northwest Bucks County. It has a hotel that's been in operation since 1811, and one of the notable (and regrettable) incidents in the hamlet's history is that a massive, 400-year-old chestnut tree was blown up with dynamite in 1919. 

According to the Sunday Call-Chronicle article, La Spina moved to Spinnerstown around 1926, "seeking solitude and peace in the Pennsylvania countryside after the turmoil of life in Brooklyn." 

I love the article's summary of how La Spina's writing career began: "[In 1920] she suddenly got the urge to write down some of her observations on the occult. 'I decided to write a werewolf story, so I sat down, dashed it off and sent it to Street and Smith. They liked it, and wrote me asking for more.'"

She told that newspaper that she planned to remain in Spinnerstown, despite concerns regarding a theory that the East Coast could be turned into a swamp by rising oceans. (My thought: She may have been reading too much Edgar Cayce.)

She also planned to stay there because, in her words, "I have a one-legged cat-bird who comes and sings in the garden. I don't know what happened to his other leg, but I should hate to leave him."

No animals left behind is a sentiment I can get behind, too.

Stubby seemed like the best housecat to pair with this book. It should be known, though, 

that this particular black cat likes belly rubs and purrs very loudly at meal time.

Obscure occult book: "Ghost Detectives"

• Title: Ghost Detectives
• Subtitle: Crime and the Psychic World
• About the subtitle and this edition: I think that was the original title, and that this book was issued twice. First came Crime and the Psychic World, which was published in 1969 by William Morrow and Company. And then Ghost Detectives, with the subtitle Crime and the Psychic World, was published in 1970 in the United Kingdom by The Anchor Press for W.H. Allen and Company.
• Author: Fred Archer. First off, this is not, not, not the Fred Archer who wrote many respected books about history and rural England. This Fred Archer was for 16 years the editor of Psychic News. He also wrote the 1966 book Ghost Writer: A Chronicle of Psychic Experiences. Archer also once went ghost hunting in London with Boris Karloff, according to this 2020 post by Paul Gallagher on Flashbak.
• Cover design: Stanley Glazer
• Pages: 176
• Format: Hardcover
• Dust jacket price: 30 shillings (I think that's about $25 today in U.S. dollars, adjusted for foreign currency and inflation, but someone feel free to check me.) 
• Dust jacket excerpt: "In the cases cited, methods best described as supernormal have solved crimes, have foreseen and sometimes prevented crimes, or on occasion have revealed crimes that no one except the perpetrators knew had been committed."
• Dedication: "To Valerie who likes a corpse in every chapter"
• Epigraph: "For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ" (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, William Shakespeare)
• Excerpt #1: "I have no dogmatic zeal to overturn convictions that crows are black, and it is far from being the purpose of this book to do so. If the reader finds a number of puzzling grey birds ... well, he can suspect, if he wishes, a white raven lurking somewhere around. Tracking him down is the most fascinating detective quest of any."
• Excerpt #2: "Like other writers and criminologists one of the first things I did when I went to live in London was to search for the scenes of the Jack the Ripper murders. Some of the street names were changed — another tribute to the Ripper! — and the whole locality has vastly altered, slum clearance being the only benefit derived from Hitler's bombing."
• What even? "Holy shit," was my reaction to the callousness of Excerpt #2, too. I figured I'd include it so there can be no question of what you might be getting yourself into with this book, in terms of tone and writing style. It is far from the only example I might have selected.
• Excerpt #3: "Algernon Blackwood told me of an occasion when the Moody half of the celebrated evangelical partnership, Moody and Sankey, had his life saved by an inexplicable warning."
• Excerpt #4: "Today even the governments of America and Russia are taking extra-sensory perception seriously enough to experiment with a view to its possible usefulness in war and espionage. If psychic abilities can be conceivably be employed for such purposes then why not in the battle against crime, which every country is perpetually waging?"
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.6 stars (out of 5), for Crime and the Psychic World. There are no reviews.
• Kirkus review of Crime and the Psychic World (the only review I could find online for either of the book's titles): "Mr. Archer certainly does trot out a lot of evidence in his case for psychic sleuths. The editor of London's Psychic News for sixteen years, he has some startling documented stories — including a fascinating look at the man who may have found Jack the Ripper (substantiated by some recently revealed Scotland Yard reports). There are hundreds of other cases in which a third eye of justice has intervened by solving and even preventing crime. They range from horror to farce as in the story of the famous French Inspector who solved a murder only to discover that he was the guilty party in a crime he committed while sleepwalking. (His sentence must be one of the most unusual in history — he was locked up only at night until the day he died.) Mr. Archer is himself occasionally amusing. As in his comments on reincarnation and the spiritualists who claim to be possessed only by the very best — 'Sitting Bull at every seance? One shudders at the thought.' And his contention that the police should start using psychic bloodhounds may well be heaven scent."

Old ad for "The Black Cat" on WBKB's Shock Theatre in Chicago

This nifty old advertisement for 1934's The Black Cat popped up in one of my Facebook groups. Channel 7 in Chicago was known as WBKB from 1953 to 1968. Its "Shock Theatre" was one of many such shows that launched around the nation when Universal sold its syndication package of 52 classic horror films — called Shock! — to local television stations in 1957 (through Screen Gems). 

Thus was spawned the phenomenon of local TV horror hosts. WBKB's version ran from 1957 to 1959 and featured Marvin, his companion Dear and hunchback Orville, along with a band called the Deadbeats. Dear's face was never seen until the final episode, according to Wikipedia. "Shock Theatre" was remembered fondly by one commenter in IMDb.com in 2014:

"For early television played late at night, this show was the best. The goofy music and the scary things on the show scared a little kid like me half to death but I loved it. Especially Marvin's humor. The movies were old time horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein, etc. I wish I could get some of the episodes. I don't know if WBKB in Chicago kept any of them or not. Any show named Shock Theater in any other town just copied what was already done in Chicago. Marvin even took some of the show on the road to local ballparks like Comiskey. His band was great also. It even had a guy playing accordion in the band. I would love to see episodes of Shock Theater, even online somewhere."

Here are a couple stills from The Black Cat, including Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff playing chess, and Karloff leading a pre-Code satanic ritual in a German Expressionist setting.

Book cover: "A Dream of Dracula" — plus other vampire stuff

• Title: A Dream of Dracula
• Subtitle: In Search of the Living Dead
• Author: Leonard Wolf (1923-2019). He was featured in a 2023 Papergreat post about another book of his: 1968's Voices from the Love Generation.
• Dust jacket design: John Renfer, using a 1941 photo that's copyrighted by RKO Pictures.
• Publication date: 1972
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 327
• Dust jacket price: $8.95 (which would a steep $67 in February 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated Bram Stoker on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of DRACULA."
• Excerpt #1: "Meanwhile, somewhere in that field of desire and Coca-Colas, hashish, LSD and old-fashioned, ordinary picnic pleasure, a child is born." [Wolf is writing about the Altamont Free Concert of 1969.]
• Excerpt #2: "Dracula is from the moment that we meet him in Bram Stoker's novel a dry horror, which is a way of saying that he is intelligent evil, unlike the wet, slime-covered things that slide through our instinctive dreams."
• Excerpt #3: "Vampires have even been reported in Outer Mongolia. And if Hollywood is any prophet, they will be found waiting for mankind on planets where our rocket ships have not yet landed."
• Excerpt #4: "Christopher Lee is the best and most famous screen Dracula since Bela Lugosi. I sat in his London living room, which felt as if all of its mirrors, couches, tables and walls had been dipped into a tasteful sea-green dye. Lee had the color television on and was watching an important cricket match. ... He spoke more or less nonstop, in a rich but curiously charged voice. It was at once evident that he took the role of Dracula with great seriousness and had read all about Stoker and the folklore of vampires. He had very clear opinions about his relationship to the role. He pointed out that he had nothing to do with the scripts of the films he made."
• Excerpt #5: "Dracula, then, is a novel that lurches toward greatness, stumbling over perceived and unperceived mysteries: Christianity, insanity, identity, a spectrum of incest possibilities, marriage, homosexuality, immortality and death." 
• Excerpt #6: "The vampire fascinates a century that is as much frightened as it is exhilarated by its rush toward sexual freedom. ... He kiss permits all unions. ... Moreover, his is an easy love that evades the usual failures of the flesh. ... And it stands for death."   
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.68 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2014, Aric Cushing summed it up thusly: "A personal journey through a landscape of childhood dreams, melancholy, and vampire sentiment."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.1 stars (out of 5) 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2004, mirasreviews wrote: "'A Dream of Dracula' is a meditation on the novel 'Dracula' and its 20th century progeny — literary, cultural, and personal — published on the 75th anniversary of Bram Stoker's novel, in 1972. A few years later, author Leonard Wolf would publish the most elaborately annotated version of 'Dracula.' Wolf is one of the world's foremost 'Dracula' scholars, but the novel has touched him more intimately than other academics. 'A Dream of Dracula' is a collection of ruminations on 'Dracula,' vampires, blood, and death, often is a stream of conscious style, all connected, directly or loosely, to the 19th century gothic novel whose popularity is set to survive longer than even its vampiric villain did. The book's ten chapters weave in and out of the past and present."
• Other views: The book is discussed by "Tinhuviel Artanis" in a 2006 LiveJournal post: "This is ... one of the best books on the subject of vampires, vampirism, the folklore of the the vampire, and the vampire's influence on popular culture. Published in 1972, it has that air of revolution, the quest for freedom, and the celebration of the absurd wrapped neatly in its poetry." ... And Alex Bledsoe wrote about Wolf's book on his blog, stating: "Wolf was actually born in Transylvania, and the book is a dive into both the legend of Dracula in popular culture, and into the psyche of Leonard Wolf. One is obviously more interesting now than the other, but even the personal asides and extended vignettes have their entertainment value. Wolf was writing at the end of the Sixties, so some of his interviewees actually use phrases like, 'groovy' and 'turned on.'"

But wait, there's more

I've been keeping some vampiric tidbits tucked away, but they'll never make their own standalone post, so I'm posting them here:

A 2023 tweet:

Mark Hodgson of the website Black Hole wrote in 2014 about 1921's Drakula halála, a now-lost film that predates Nosferatu as an adaptation of Stoker's novel. Hodgson writes: "While the plot doesn't follow Stoker's novel, many situations are familiar from it. Dracula's immortality, his castle, his brides, Mary's suffering health after meeting him, the asylum ... possibly the story elements were juggled to dodge any copyright issue?"

Also in 2014, Hodgson wrote a fun post on Black Hole about visiting Bela Lugosi's former home.

And speaking of Lugosi, here's a photo I took recently of a Lugosi life mask mounted on the wall at Terror Trader, an amazeballs horror-themed store in Chandler, Arizona.

Ruth Manning-Sanders' horror novel

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Answer time! The novel that was the subject of a trivia question in Friday's post was 1930's The Crochet Woman, by none other than Ruth Manning-Sanders. No one guessed right. In fact, no one guessed at all. That may be due to only a couple of people stumbling upon the post. But I digress.

The Crochet Woman, published by Coward-McCann, features as its antagonist the titular and witchlike Crochet Woman. As the dust jacket states, she "works with gossip and innuendo in place of curses and spells. Knotting hatred of youth into her endless pattern, she bestirs herself to bring havoc into the lives of her young neighbors."

Manning-Sanders' opening passage describes her monstrous visage: her evil eyes, "tightly drawn-in mouth," and pinched nose — "all the rest of her face was pink withered flesh with downy white hairs on it."

Beyond the opening passage pictured Friday, we know that the Crochet Woman (she has no name) is a bad person because she spews hateful language toward others — language you would not read in Manning-Sanders' later fairy tale collections for children:

" 'She has a hole in her stocking — the slut,' said the crochet woman, though Betty was still too far off for even a large hole to be seen by those light-colored, watching eyes."

Now, it's my understanding that "slut" wasn't quite the socially unacceptable vulgarity in 1930 that it is today. But it was still a very rude insult. And it's a bit jarring to see it in a book by Manning-Sanders!

Later in the novel we get a bit of flashback to the crochet woman's younger days...

"The crochet woman stood watching and listening. Suddenly thirty-eight years, that were thirty-eight gray-colored and hissing snakes, glided backward over the road, and there was the young crochet woman, in her veil and her orange blossom, stepping out of the church. She had caught her man, caught him by the neat lie that no virgin (for all her orange blossom) might invent, and her feet in their white shoes walked niminy piminy, niminy piminy, down the path between the graves, and her hand gripped the arm of Jan's grandfather as if what she had caught she would hold forever more; and her heart swelled with a malicious pride."

I'm exaggerating a bit in calling this horror, of course. But it's by turns creepy and tragic. All that "gossip and innuendo" mentioned on the dust jacket has the effect of turning happy lives heartbreakingly upside-down. (It might have made for a great Gene Tierney movie.) This comes toward the end:

  " 'Here ... you get out,' said Mounster.

  " 'I will in a minute,' said the crochet woman. 'but I'll tell you first who broke your heart, if it was my last word.'

  " 'I'm not curious,' said Mounster.

  " 'I broke it,' said the crochet woman; and her splatted eye glowed like a new risen star. 'I told Betty about you, and you about Betty; every time you quarreled 'twas I sowed the seed; 'twas I told Betty you'd wed her for a warming-pan; I told her about Lucy Tregeer and Alice Tranter; I turned her baby into a pigsy for her; 'twas I told you of what that Robert was up to every time your back was turned ...'

  "Since she wouldn't go out, the Mounster picked her up and carried her, but she didn't struggle or object, justly stayed stiffly in his arms like a wizened doll, with her shiny black boots dangling, and she went on talking at him in her soft malicious voice."

There's a happy ending a few dozen pages later, though. And the crochet woman must live, in her old and wretched body and mind, with the reality that her nefarious plan did not succeed. Just like all those pouting, defeated villains in the fairy tales that Manning-Sanders would tell in the following half-century.

That's as close as Stubby the black cat wanted to get to the Crochet Woman. By the way, the name at the bottom of that wonderful dust jacket illustration is Elizabeth Cale Toeker (or Toeken?). I can't find a single thing about her online. We have a history mystery on our hands! 

Guess the horror novel

This terrifying opening passage could be straight out of a Stephen King or Daphne du Maurier story. Any guesses regarding the novel and/or author? I'll be back with the answer Sunday. Unless the witch gets me.

Book cover: "The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus" (1967)

• Title: The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus
• 
  Author: John Burke (1922-2011). Burke was a British World War II veteran and prolific author who specialized in the novelization of movies (including many horror films) and stage plays. He also wrote original novels and short stories and created the Victorian-era occult detective Alex Caspian. Especially popular was his novelization of the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. According to Wikipedia: "The book was priced at two shillings and sixpence and contained an 8-page section of photographs from the film. It is the first book in the English language to have the word 'grotty' in print."
• Front and back cover artist: Unknown, sadly.
• Publisher: Pan Books Ltd. (M223)
• Publication date: 1967
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 349
• Original price: 5 shillings, which I think was very reasonable for the time. If my calculations are correct, 5 shillings in the UK in 1967 would be equivalent to about 70 cents in the USA in 1967.
• Contents: The novelizations for four different Hammer horror films: The Reptile, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Rasputin the Mad Monk, and The Plague of the Zombies. I've seen three of those four and they're all excellent. I still need to see The Reptile (pictured on the back cover).
• Excerpt from The Reptile: "Franklyn was the bigger man, but the Malay was possessed by a spirit of destruction. A great hierarchy of vengeful gods stood behind him and gave him strength."
• Excerpt from Dracula: Prince of Darkness: "She screamed. It was music such as had not been heard in the corridors and cellars of the castle in a long, long time."
• Excerpt from Rasputin the Mad Monk: "The flames of hell were damp yet searing. There was a shock of ice and then of devouring fire."
• Excerpt from The Plague of the Zombies: "The creature's mouth opened. It seemed to be laughing, but no sound came. There was only the twitching of the lips in a macabre, vacuous grimace."
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.76 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review excerpt: Just days ago, David A. Sutton wrote: "John Burke has once again made a good effort in fictionalizing these films, and adding more background to the characters. I noticed one or two inconsistencies from the films, but these were very minor, and not worth arguing over."
• Message board excerpts: On "Vault of Evil: Brit Horror Pulp Plus!" one poster wrote this in 2007: "Burke's novelisations were a godsend back in those pre-video three channel days when you had to wait years for your most wanted's to turn up (and hope you could stay awake)." ... Other comments from that 2007-2009 thread: "Burkey's books are like revisiting old friends." And: "There's a good case to be made for Burke as a relatively unsung Brit pulp hero. And I'll gladly make it, if pissed enough at the nearest party." Also on Vault of Evil, there are two pages of forums devoted to Burke and his writings. Happy reading!

We're saying farewell tomorrow to Pengin (left), who is moving back to Washington state.