Saturday's postcard: The white squirrels of Olney, Illinois

This Genuine Curteich linen postcard shows the famed white squirrels of Olney, Illinois.

The Olney colony, the "White Squirrel Capital of the World" is still going fairly strong today. Wikipedia notes that the white squirrels have the right of way on all streets in the city of 9,100 human inhabitants. 

The city of Olney's website, which offers a detailed history of how the white squirrels came to inhabit the area and thrive, notes that the 2023 squirrel count found 858 gray squirrels, 73 white squirrels and 85 cats. (That cat count was down from 106 in 2022, a decrease that the city termed "greatly welcomed.")

The city report also noted with concern that extinction of the white squirrels there is possible by 2034 if no efforts are made to help preserve the population. But another study estimates that extinction would not occur until 2059. Suggested strategies to help the white squirrels include relocating some of the gray squirrels and providing "generous" food and water for the white squirrels, especially in the winter. Residents are encouraged to plant fruit and nut trees.

Other prominent white squirrel communities are located in Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi and New York. A few college campus also have their own white squirrel populations, which are fiercely protected by the human community.

Postcards of Olney's white squirrels from over the decades are fairly abundant on eBay. In a search, I even came across an image of a nifty QSL card (for the McWilliams family) touting Olney's white squirrel community.

A postcard of Earle W. Cook's house, for some reason

OK, here's a bit of a head-scratching mystery.

Why did Dexter Press produce this postcard of the house of Mr. and Mrs. Earle W. Cook, on its triangular plot of land in Kingman, Arizona?

According to Diane Allmen's Dating Dexter Press Postcards webpage, this card (55990-B) was produced in 1962. Other than the Cooks' names and "Kingman, Arizona," the only things listed on the back are the address — 215 Caminodelascolinas, which should be more properly stated as 215 Camino de las Colinas — and the publisher, Fritz Studio of Kingman.

Based on the address, I'm not sure this house still exists.

Earle Wayne Cook Sr. (1902-1966) died just a few years after this postcard was published, of a heart attack on the Fourth of July 1966. The main item of note I can find about him is that he was a Democratic Arizona state senator representing Mohave County. His businesses included bottling, ranching and mining.

And here's a plot twist the postcard publishers certainly couldn't anticipate: In 1967, Cook's son, Earle Theodore Cook Jr., attempted to murder his wife, Jeanne, by blowing up the airplane she was traveling on.

You read that correctly.

It's 2024, and these miscellaneous old postcards can still take you down some serious rabbit holes, folks.

The first article I came across was in the November 19, 1967, edition of The Arizona Republic. The headline states "Bomb Suspect Son of Mohave Senator." The subhead reads "Earle T. Cook Recalled in Kingman as Bright Young Man."

The first paragraph states: "Earle T. Cook, 37, held in Chicago under $100,000 bond for an alleged attempt to bomb a jetliner, was a native of Kingman and the son of a veteran Mohave County senator who died last year."

The federal trial was incredibly swift. Just a few months later, on February 6, 1968, Earle Jr. was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The details are summarized in a modern-day Chicago Tribune article by Colleen Connolly. Earle Jr. had apparently been trying for a while to kill his wife of 15 years and the mother of his two sons. He contacted a hit man and considering drowning and shooting as other murder methods.

Finally, Earle Jr. took things into his own hands and built a bomb at home.

I'll let the Tribune take it from here:

"What happened next is unthinkable in today’s world of air travel. Cook took his wife to O’Hare and checked her bags while she waited in a lounge, according to a Tribune report. An FBI agent said Cook then removed the contents of one of the bags, placed the homemade bomb inside and handed the bags to an airport porter who checked them. There was no search of the bags whatsoever. Ironically, the same porter who took the luggage without checking it handled it roughly, causing parts of the bomb to dislodge and malfunction, the FBI surmised.

"When the bomb went off in the luggage compartment, it made a loud noise that caught the attention of the pilot and passengers, but nobody realized it was a bomb. The pilot thought the plane struck a downdraft, so he kept flying. It was only when they arrived at their destination in San Diego that the crew found the bomb parts and wreckage in the luggage hold."

Earle Jr. was busted. His likely affairs with other women, conversations with the hit man and multiple insurance policies on his wife didn't help matters during the trial.

According to the Tribune, before being sent off to prison, Earle Jr. said: “I feel that I have been given a trial under a system I believe in. I believe in our form of government. The only thing I am sorry about is that I am innocent. The evidence presented didn’t quite portray my innocence.”

Earle Jr. remarried in 1977 and died in 1981 at age 50. I couldn't find an obituary. All I have is this unused postcard of his parents' house in the Arizona desert.

Late nights and weekend afternoons of horror in the 1970s

There's a long, wonderful history of horror and science-fiction movies, often presented by horror hosts, being shown on television, usually late Friday nights or on weekend afternoons. Today, the tradition continues via streaming platforms and online communities. 

Here are a small handful of clippings on the topic I came across while browsing through Newspapers.com.

First up, this December 23, 1971, article in the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News announces the forthcoming debut of Dayton horror movie host Dr. Creep (Barry Lee Hobart), who would ghoul-rule the airwaves starting on January 1, 1972. Interestingly, though his debut was days away, his host name hadn't been finalized when this article was published. It states that they were considering Frank N. Stein, the Creep, Mortis Macabre and Corpus D. Lecti.

Here are some TV listings from the January 8, 1977, TV page of The (Glens Falls, New York) Post-Star. (I think I applied there after college; I still have all of my rejection letters bundled somewhere.) Packaged between a couple of old pirate movies, Shock Theater is showing 1946's Catman of Paris, which is praised in modern reviews for having a pretty good horse-and-carriage chase scene.

This advertisement is from the October 23, 1975, edition of The (Pottstown, Pennsylvania) Mercury. It's for an appearance by WPHL-17's Dr. Shock at a local Halloween event. Dr. Shock was portrayed by magician Joe Zawislak from 1969 until 1979, when he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 42. There's an hourlong tribute video to him on YouTube. ( The bottom part of the advertisement is difficult to read, but the event location is Boscov's East at the Lebanon Valley Mall.)

Another TV listing, this one from the February 5, 1977, edition of the Asbury Park Press of New Jersey. In this one, Creature Double Feature is packaging one of the worst movies of all time, The Astro-Zombies (Ashar and I can confirm this), with one of the greatest movies of all time, The War of the Worlds.

Finally, here's an amusing reader letter published in the July 16, 1978, edition of The Tampa (Florida) Tribune. "F.G." was tired of the oldies, probably after years of watching Universal films from the Shock! package. He wanted more modern stuff. But, given that these programs had fairly low budgets, if his wish came true, he probably got a whole lot of 1970s fare such as The House of Seven Corpses, The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Bell from Hell.

Today's silly thing I made

Many mornings, neighborhood feral cat Creamsicle (aka Creamball Rally) gets into our fire pit and attempts to hide so that he can stalk the birds that feed near the pit. He gets cranky when I blow his cover. It reminds me of Sadako/Samara coming out of the well for vengeance in Ringu/The Ring. Just an amusing image that I thought would be fun to share. (P.S: Nothing about Creamsicle is remotely spooky.)

Paperback cover: 1969's "The Unicorn Girl"

Posting on a lazy Sunday during which President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 election, the cats are napping and we are awaiting desert thunderstorms...

• Title: The Unicorn Girl
• Additional cover text: "Give your mind a ride on the wildest trip in science fiction!"
• Series: Book 2 of the Greenwich Trilogy, or Greenwich Village Trilogy (more below).
• Author: Michael Kurland (1938-present)
• About the author: The book itself states: "Mister Kurland is a thin, tense young man with wire-rimmed glasses and the perpetually frightened look of a rabbit with an invitation to lunch at the Lion's Club. ... He has worked as a wire-stapler, a barrel-staver, a window-washer, a herring-kipperer, a Scotch-tippler and a peck-of-pickled-peppers-picker. This diversified background has given him the wealth of experience which has so far proved totally useless for writing sicence fiction. He is now living and working on a houseboat on the Dhama river in Northern Thibeth, but will soon be moving back to the United States as he finds it hard to concentrate during the six hours a day in which the boat is submerged." According to Wikipedia, Kurland, 86, now lives in San Luis Obispo, California.
• The Dhama river in Northern Thibeth? I think it's safe to say that's made up.
• Cover illustrator: William Hofmann (1924-1995). The back cover misspells his name and states: "Cover: Hoffman"
• Back cover text: "BLIP! Greenwich Village was a model of decorum compared to what went down when BLIP hit the cosmic fan — and scattered all time, space and sanity to the fourteen dimensions. Mike and Chester — fearless hippy explorers of a thousand incredible worlds — find that even their legendary powers are dwarfed by ... THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE UNIVERSE, THE FIRE SNORTING DRAGONETTES, THE MAGIC HASH PIPE, THE LAST UNICORN, THE MEAN METAL TANKS, THE ASSORTED FREAKS AND FUZZ."
• So, it's the MCU multiverse, but for flower children? Yes.
• Publication date: First printing, November 1969
• Publisher: Pyramid Books (X-1990)
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 159
• Cover price: 60 cents
• Dedication: "To my unicorn girl, who will return to me."
• First sentence: "It was a year after the butterflies."
• Last sentence: "Sir Thomas, if you read this, I can be reached through my agent, Seligmann & Collier."
• Random excerpt #1: "Part two: I had a strong reluctance to give up the contents of my pants pockets. After all, you could never tell when a bunch of credit cards and a set of keys to an apartment that didn't even exist in this time line would come in handy."
• Random excerpt #2: "A bored man in an American flag striped suit stood behind the raised ticket stand."
• Random excerpt #3: "When it was over we had learned certain spells and methods that would be of most use to us. How to disappear. How to blip from one place to another (excuse the word blip)."
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.84 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2022, Neil M wrote: "I first read this book when I was 15 and have reread it approximately every ten years since then. It's basically one of my favourite things in the whole world. Replete with dialogue and situations that live forever in the imagination, if you read it when you are young, I suspect it will never leave you."
• Another Goodreads review: In 2017, Normandy wrote: "I just discovered The Unicorn Girl all over again. Lines from it have been in my head for so many decades. And now, now, I remember where they come from. Still, so wonderfully whimsical."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.7 stars (out of 5) 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2022, Michael J. Atkinson wrote: "It starts with the best boy-meets-girl scene ever written. It has some of the most clever writing I've seen. ... The only science fiction book I have ever read with a mathematical appendix. The mysterious dedication. This book is an indescribable pleasure, one to read many times."

What's in the mathematical appendix? Formulas that I couldn't even begin to assess or verify:

About the trilogy

Book 1 is The Butterfly Kid (1968) by Chester Anderson.

Book 2 is The Unicorn Girl (1969) by Michael Kurland.

Book 3 is The Probability Pad (1970) by T.A. Waters.

Oddly, I found the most concise explanation of the series on the website TV Tropes: "The Greenwich Trilogy is a series of three humorous science fiction novels written by three separate authors, all of whom appear as protagonists of the series. Set in and written during The '60s, the series — especially the first book — was considered somewhat shocking for its positive and reasonably realistic portrayal of the hippie culture of the time."

Writing on PM Press in 2020, Jesse Jarnow calls the trilogy "psychedelic in the sense that the three books were written by, for, and about users of psychedelic drugs." 

They were "minor" and "light-hearted," Jarnow writes, compared to New Wave sci-fi by the likes of Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard. The Greenwich books are more ephemeral and disposable (even if some of the above reviews show how The Unicorn Girl, at least, made a lasting impression.)

Jarnow writes: "At their most basic, the books are artifacts of an earlier media era, when many more eyeballs sought kicks via the printed word. Then, as now, there was a remarkable and nearly infinite thirst for text, and it’s amazing to think of sheer variety of books and magazines that poured out news and lurid coverage of the countercultural explosion, occupying the racks for a few weeks or months as the world tumbled through radical changes. In the ‘60s, probably more Americans sought mind-expansion through textual approximations than LSD itself."

Comments from readers while we melt in this summer swelter

From an America that doesn't much exist anymore. Plus, it's too hot for road trips.

Sharing some reader comments on this sweltering summer day — 113 here in Florence, 117 in Phoenix, 114 in Las Vegas, 124 in Death Valley. Plus two million people without power thanks to a rare early July hurricane in Houston. When I'm done I'll go put ice in the outdoor water bowls for the poor, roasting birds and animals (including community cats Mamacita & Creamsicle).

Saturday's postcard: America House Motor Inn: Anonymous writes: "America House was one of my family’s favorite vacation stops in the early 1970s. So much to do: the beach, pool, game room and observation tower. Perfect for a young person. Food in the restaurant was very good and I loved the grape Nehi, it was a great treat. Years later I returned with my wife and we found the motel run down with rusted doors, etc. The renamed motel now has campers and RVs parked in its spacious grounds and makes me leery about trying it again."

From the Rare Dust Jacket Files: Hucca's Moor by Manning-Sanders: Anonymous writes: "The dust jacket is by the wonderful artist William Nicholson."

I'll take the commenter's word for this. Nicholson lived from 1872 to 1959 and was involved with a lot of book design, in addition to his other artistic endeavors. According to Wikipedia, he illustrated The Velveteen Rabbit, and he designed the costumes for the original stage version of Peter Pan (article, illustrations).

Unfortunate apparel of 1980: The official Star Trek duty jacket: The Canadian author of My Curio Blog writes: "I posted a matchbook which also promotes the same jacket ... at a discount price!" 

Thanks! Good luck with the blog! 

1938 holiday postcard from Leinhardt Bros. of York: Anonymous writes: "I recently was passed a cedar box with items in it. It was stamped on the inside of the top: 'Lane presented by Leinhardt Bros. York, Pennsylvania.' Thank you for posting this information so that I had a frame of reference."

Phonic Talking Letters from 1941: Anonymous writes: "There is a new version available at talkingletters.com."

Cheerful Card Company can help you earn extra money for the holidays: Gary Liljegren of Florida writes: "My story is like so many others. This was my first job as an 8 year old. As I recall, I was plenty successful. That was 75 years ago. ... I'm now 83 and been in sales my whole life. Still am."

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor (1926-2022): Anonymous writes: "This is Queen Elizabeth 11. I am alive and I live in Tacoma WA."

Um.

Queen Elizabeth 11?

Or Queen Elizabeth II?

In either instance, I have so many questions. 

We can start with, "Why Tacoma?"

"Jim and Judy," a 1939 grade-school textbook with a York connection: Anonymous writes: "Tags and Twinkle was the next book in the series, I believe."

A label for Frostie Root Beer (a jailhouse-born beverage): Margaret Harris writes: "I am 82 and have always lived in Catonsville, the birthplace of Frostie Root Beer. I remember when it was made on the Baltimore National Pike, but would l like to know the address of the abandoned jail which became the first home of Frostie. Do you have this information?"

Hmmm. As the blog post I cited notes: "George Rackensperger, president of The Frostie Company, decided in 1939 to open his own bottling plant. Renting an abandoned jailhouse in Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, he used the garage that formerly housed the police wagon for setting up his bottling equipment ... and the various cells were employed to store sugar, crowns, and other supplies."

But despite further Google searching, I can't locate any specific information about the jail or its location. I cannot imagine the building is still standing, but who knows? Can anyone out there, especially Maryland history experts, help Margaret with her query?

Scholastic book: "Spooky Tricks": Anonymous writes: "I was just thinking of this book. Now in my 30s."

It's quite common to think back to the books of your childhood, whether you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s! See the next comment...

Alan Ormsby's 1970s: Summoning zombies and a Scholastic book: Anonymous writes: "I have this book, and, as someone else mentioned, I think in 2nd grade. My mom actually helped me make the paper bag Frankenstein head. I just wish I had a picture of that now. Still have the book in my basement."

Special events booklet from a 1973 VFW convention in New Orleans: Anonymous writes: "Here's a postcard sent in August 1973 by 'Betty,' who had just attended this convention: https://www.ephemerasearch.com/ephemera/5112887"

Great find! Thank you!

Four years ago today...

Time flies ... and warps, distorts and eventually becomes a bullet train.

Four years ago today (May 30, 2020), I drove from Dover Township to the LNP | LancasterOnline newsroom at 8 West King Street in downtown Lancaster for the final time, to clean out my desk. 

No, not that kind of desk cleanout.

It was my first time back in the newspaper office since mid-March, when we had abruptly begun work-from-home protocol because of COVID-19, with no time beforehand to gather anything but the absolute essentials.

By late May, we were granted short windows to return to the office, one by one, and do a more deliberate cleaning and boxing-up of our workspace. We were boxing-up because, even before the pandemic, the plan for mid-2020 was to relocate to a brand-new, state-of-the-art newsroom a couple of blocks away in downtown Lancaster. 

But because of the pandemic, we never got to have an official farewell for 8 West King or a full-staff welcoming event at the new location. 

In fact, I've never been to the current LNP | LancasterOnline newsroom for a work shift.

I'm still working from home (50 months and counting) — only home is now the southern Arizona desert, instead of Dover Township, Pennsylvania. From here, I still do the same job I did in 2020, editing letters and columns about Trump and guns and democracy and public health. I just get up a lot earlier in the morning to start doing it on East Coast time.

Anyway, I took some photos four years ago today for posterity and am sharing them now for this four-year anniversary.

And this is a photo of a very green stairwell at 8 West King that I took in 2018. The building will live only in memories. The site is being turned into Mosaic by Willow Valley Communities, a residential high-rise for active adults ages 55 and over. I hope they include a plaque somewhere about all the amazing journalism that once took place at that location.

A Suspiria/Genesis twin bill? One ticket please!

Someone on Facebook posted this 1977 newspaper advertisement, and it immediately reignited my wish that I had existed as a young adult in England in the 1970s. Playing at a theater on Shaftesbury Avenue in the West End of London were Dario Argento's Suspiria, with that epic Goblin score in "SENSATIONAL 4 TRACK STEREO" and Genesis in Concert.

Genesis in Concert doesn't seem to be very well-regarded as a concert film, with most of the criticism being of the direction and the decisions to keep cutting away from concert material. (It's a live concert, and people want to see the musicians!) But it must still be a great historical document from the band's post-Peter Gabriel era, even if it's only 45 minutes long.

And I would love to see (and hear) Suspiria on the big screen. Ash and I have been going to the "Spook-O-Rama" Thursdays, featuring classic horror films, at a movie theater in Tempe. They've shown everything from The Creature from the Black Lagoon to The Blair Witch Project, with a special focus on cult films from the 1980s. I'm hopeful that Suspiria will be the selection one of these weeks. And we could listen to some classic Genesis on the drive there!