Back in the days, passing through new doors. Where were you in ’64?
Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com):
When I was about 10 years old (in 1964), I briefly lived in the house my father grew up in. My folks were going through a trial separation (soon to be full blown nasty divorce). The house was now used as a rental. It was vacant at that moment, so my mother moved me and by brother and sister into it to escape my psycho father. These are old stories best left behind, actually.
The point of this little trip down unpleasant memory lane is that I ended up sleeping in the half-finished attic space. Strangely, it was, many many decades earlier, my father’s sleeping chamber.
AC:creepy, eh? (both finding my dad's teenage porn and being all old and stuff.). heh heh....
Since the space was unfinished – it had been converted to the point of raw studs- the nooks and crannies and much of the beams were all exposed. It was a raw loft space. The first thing I tripped across was a picture calendar from 1938 still hanging on the wall. It was in deep shadows, so it had been missed by every occupant of that house since my father moved out of it, god knows how many years before.
I began to search around and started to find all sorts of odd little items tucked away up there in the insulation and under the floorboards. My father had once told me about a secret floorboard in the attic where he hid his crystal radio set. I think i was looking for that (i never found it).
read more:http://www.pulpartists.com/Bolles.html
In along the edge of one wall next to the floorboards (where they didn’t quite meet up with the walls studs) I spotted some paper. I carefully pulled it out and it was some pictures of some near nude women from the 20’s or 30’s. Being ten years old, I was dumbstruck.
I dug a little deeper and pulled out this issue of ‘breezy’ magazine. It’s a classic pulp magazine dealing with taboo subjects like, well, sex. Actually, there’s no ‘sex’ in it, just teases that suggest sex. There, however, is much talk around the edges of sex. Such were the times, ya know? There are nearly nude photos of rather charming young women, but this stuff is so tame by today’s standards, I feel like it could easily be shown to a child without any repercussions at al. An average Saturday morning children’s cartoon show has far more obscenity and sexual abberance and fornication that the entire run of this publication. It’s downright cute.
read more:http://www.americanartarchives.com/bolles.htmThis cover is a “pip”, though. Quite the babe. Never mind the anatomy doesn’t quite work. And how does that brassiere stay on? It’s a charming mystery. It’s from December of 1936. My father was 15.
I found my dad’s old porn stash!!!
---With Eyes of Flesh declares in its title some of the prurient fascination on which these early magazines feasted. The “pulp” market was dominated by Street and Smith (Astounding Stories) and the many magazines published by Frank Munsey (Munsey’s, Argosy, Railroad Man’s Weekly, etc.), but newcomers to the market were having great success in a burgeoning field, including Courtland Young. Young’s Magazine was followed by Breezy Stories and Snappy Stories, and his publications were the chief outlet for Agnes Boulton’s fiction.--- Read More:http://www.eoneill.com/library/abstories/introduction.htm image:http://www.americanartarchives.com/bolles.htm
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