Highway to Your Heart

Or, First-Grade "driving" metaphors.

You can't get more lovable than a puppy.

I notice a trend of  "old-time" imagery.  Above are 1920s-1930s outfits ...

And doggie crossing guard is decked out as if in a Laurel-and-Hardy short.

Nothing old-fashined about love, though.  I hope you have some!  See you Monday for the final round of this year's MY SIXTIES VALENTINE!  Dare we say it --- It's a DATE!

  

Two Soo-Zees

Both are from Kindergarten.

While I don't know the last name of "Susie," we can agree that a grown-up signed the above card.

On the other (fencing) hand, I am completely charmed by the authenticity of "Suzie."

See you on Thursday!

  

Mushy First-Graders

I got these in Mrs West's First-Grade class.  Sure, they were probably bought in bulk by our parents, but that doesn't mean my six-year-old manliness wasn't affrighted by such mushiness.

I mean, I didn't want to be anybody's "Queen of Hearts"!

See you on Monday.

  

From the Family and the Teacher

Above is the valentine I received from Mom and Dad in thew year I was in Kindergarten.  That's 1962.

And above is the valentine from our Kindergarten teacher, Mrs Pickell.  Since there were between 15 and 20 of us in that class, I bet she got writer's cramp addressing and signing them all!  Can any classmates confirm if we all got the same one?

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you buckaroos and toots!  See you Thursday!

  

Fallin' in the First Grade!

I received all of these for Valentines', 1963.

Maybe the sailor boy was on a rolling deck.

Ice skates can be tricky too.

But roller skates can lull the unwary to big ol' ouchies.  Unlike the previous two tumblers, this guy acts awfully happy about it.

See you on Monday!

Kindergarten Kapers

Above is the pouch I made in Mrs Pickell's Kindergarten class, for my democratically distributed valentines.

For the life of me, I can't recall who "Ellen" is.

However, "Franky" is Mrs Pickell's son Frank, doomed to be stuck with me due to our coinciding ages.

See you Thursday with more back-time flashes!

   

Welcome to a Month of Paper Love!

That's right, February will feature scans of Valentines I received in 1962 and 1963 -- that's Kindergarten and First Grade.

In those olden days, everybody gave a valentine to everybody else.  Each kid made an envelope out of construction paper and decorated it.  Our teachers sent home a list of all the kids in the class.  It was up to the kid's mom and dad to buy enough valentines for distribution.  

The pouch above is from the First Grade.  That's the class of Mrs Lorene West, at Will Rogers Elementary, in good ol' Bartlesville, OK.

As you'll see, sometimes an adult hand wrote.  But I personally treasure the ones with shaky kid writing.  That's how I still write, you know!

That's Mary Ann Gragson, who lived a few doors up the hill from us.

Above are a couple more first-grade missives.

See you on Monday!

  

To the Bat-TV! Quick!

This is from the July 1992 issue of Amazing Heroes. That's issue #203.

See you on Thursday for the beginning of a month-long feature I'm gonna call MY SIXTIES VALENTINE.

  

Time and Tech Stumble Onward!

All of these ads are from the April 27, 1981 issue of Time mag.

The company Compucorp still exists as Compuco

Kodak exists and wants you to tour its smart factory

Pioneer's LaserDisc, like the postmodern CD, used a laser to read digital info.

In contrast, RCA's VideoDisc was a magnetic storage system.  

A comparison of the techs here.

And 40 years later, all of these functions are in the phone in somebody's back pocket.  Progress?  You tell me.

   

Maybe These Folks Gave Up on New Comics, Too

This is from the January 1, 1993 Oklahoman.

It took a few decades, but several years ago I gave up on new comics. I was a DC fan, and I was tired of being jerker around by reboots and gigantic crossover events. Give me the silly Silver Age, when there were only a dozen or so Earths!

I wonder if any of these youngsters are still reading "new" comics?  What about you?

  

Is It a Silly Place?

Camelot 3000 was DC's first maxiseries. I bought its original run. Written by Mike Barr and drawn by Brian Bolland, IT WAS EPIC!

This preview ran in Amazing Heroes #14, its August 1982 issue.

Man, those aliens always made me think of big bugs.  And if you think that ol' Merlin was a bit of an SOB, you ain't alone.  Yet as a hopeless Anglophile, I was suckered in.

Compare it, if you wish to a segment from Twilight Zone '85 called "The Last Defender of Camelot," based on a Zelazny tale.

See you Monday!

  

The New Yorker Surveys Tolkien Fever

This is from the January 15, 1966 issue of The New Yorker. 

Fifty-six years ago, they were on the pulse of fantastical delights.  You are free to argue that, having published Thurber and Addams, they were already there!  See you Thursday.

  

Tales of the Hollow Earth!

This is the text of an article from the zine Bizarrism, issue 6. I also inserted the illos from the article into the text.

Tales of the Hollow Earth

by Chris Mikul

from Bizarrism #6

I’m all for commonsense - in certain situations, but I’ve always got time for a bit of wild, uninformed speculation. And what better to speculate wildly about, from the comfort of your armchair, than the vast, unexplored interior of our own planet? Sure, boring scientists tell us that the earth is solid, that there’s nothing down there but rock and a lot of rather frightening red-hot magma, but then, to borrow the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, “They would, wouldn’t they?”

Such was not always the case. Cosmological theories involving a hollow earth were part of orthodox science until the late 18th century. In 1692 British astronomer Edmund Halley - he of comet fame - in an attempt to explain variations in the measurements of the North Magnetic Pole, proposed a world made up of four concentric spheres, one inside the other, each separated by an atmosphere, and all turning about a common axis but at slightly different speeds. In a speculative mood, Halley went on to wonder whether each of these spheres might support life, just as the outer sphere supports us. For Halley, as for many of the early hollow earthers, one of the reasons for such speculation was a simple one if somewhat puzzling to us today - economy. God, they reasoned, would surely not waste the vast interior of a planet by filling it up with rock. (This reminds me of the doddering old Christian Brother I once had as a history teacher, who solemnly told us that the pyramids were so big the Egyptians would not have wasted them on just one pharaoh each.)

Advances in physics and geology soon made theories like Halley’s untenable. That left the business of promoting a hollow earth to enthusiastic amateurs, the first and most enthusiastic of them all being an American named John Cleves Symmes. An ex-soldier and frontier trader, Symmes retained Halley’s concentric spheres separated by an ‘aerial elastic fluid’ but added his own idea of twin openings at the poles (the one at the north pole being 4,000 miles in diameter). These holes were joined so that the earth was in effect shaped like a doughnut, and it was possible to sail into the openings and reach the inner world.

In 1818 Symmes distributed a circular throughout America outlining his ideas and requesting funds to mount an expedition - to be led by him - into the northern opening. Undeterred by the ridicule with which this was generally met, the single-minded Symmes spent the next few years lecturing and hectoring, picking up some prominent supporters along the way (no less than nine petitions advocating Symmes’s expedition were debated by Congress). After his death his work was carried on by his son, Americus, who was big on the idea that the interior world was inhabited by the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Other hollow earthers followed in Symmes’s wake. One of the more indefatigable was Marshall Gardner, a sewing machine manufacturer whose masterpiece, A Journey to the Earth’s Interior; or, Have the Poles Really Been Reached? appeared in 1913. Gardner kept Symmes polar openings but jettisoned the system of concentric spheres, believing instead in the earth as a hollow bubble equipped with an interior sun. Gardner, in Jules Verne mode, wrote vividly of an internal world bursting with lush vegetation and roamed by animals such as mastodons which were thought to be extinct. As with many of the early hollow earthers, one of Gardner’s main themes was that here was a vast amount of land ripe for colonisation by the United States.

    Gardner lived long enough to see both north and south poles reached - in 1911 and 1913 respectively - but went to his grave believing that instead of reaching the poles (which of course he did not believe in), the explorers had simply wandered aimlessly around the rims of his vaunted polar openings.

            Meanwhile the theory of a hollow earth had been given a novel twist by the social visionary Dr Cyrus Teed. He too postulated a hollow earth warmed by a central sun, but then went on to suggest that we are actually living inside such a globe. This is what is known in Hollywood as a ‘high concept’.

Teed, who was born in 1839, was a doctor of what would now be called alternative medicine and a dabbler in ‘electro-alchemy’. One night he was sitting in his alchemical laboratory in New York, pondering the mysteries of the universe, when he had a strange and erotic vision. A beautiful, golden- haired, purple-robed woman appeared who told him he had been reincarnated many times - once as Jesus Christ - and revealed to him the secrets of the cosmos. Teed (as Vernon Howell of the Branch Davidians would do many years later) adopted the name of Koresh (Hebrew for Cyrus), and began preaching his revelation to his patients, most of whom thought him unhinged. Undaunted, he moved to Chicago and during the 1880s acquired a large number of - mostly female - followers, attracted by the man’s magnetic personality.

There was a lot more to Teed’s ideas than an eccentric cosmology. Like many 19th century idealists he dreamed of setting up a utopian community, a New Jerusalem, the capital of the world. His opportunity came in 1890 when a German settler In Florida was persuaded to sign over 320 acres on Estero Bay to the Koreshans. Teed moved about a hundred of his followers there and set up the Koreshan Co-operative and Communistic Society, run, as its name suggests, on communist lines. Alcohol and tobacco were forbidden and celibacy was recommended for the community’s upper echelons. Women occupied an exalted position in Koreshanity. The community was ruled by Teed, his longtime companion Anna Ordway, whom he had renamed Victoria Gratia, and a council of seven women representing the seven planets. (The fact that the majority of Teed’s followers were women led, not surprisingly, to allegations of sexual impropriety on his part, but for once these seem to have been unfounded). Teed’s community prospered, with its population reaching 200 by the turn of the century.

According to Teed’s cosmology, the sun, moon, stars, indeed everything we can see is inside the earth and outside there is - nothing. It was all quite literally a return to the womb - that of the earth goddess, the beautiful girl of his vision. Teed nevertheless continued to think of himself as a scientist, and cast about for some proofs. To this end, a device called the Rectilineator was constructed out of large T-squares, and over several months in 1897 experiments were carried out with it which proved that the earth was indeed, as Teed’s theory required, concave. A large sign above the entrance to the Koreshan community proudly proclaimed “WE LIVE ON THE INSIDE”.

Teed’s mistake was to go into politics. Growing dissatisfied with the Democrats, for whom he had previously instructed his followers to vote, he formed the Progressive Liberty Party, which began to look like it might do well in the 1904 election. The tensions this caused led to a public brawl between Koreshans and some locals, during which Teed was beaten about the head. He never fully recovered from his injuries and died three years later. His followers, expecting his body to undergo ‘Theocrisis’ (i.e. disappear in a flash of electro- alchemical light), laid it in state and watched, only to see it decompose. Eventually the health authorities forced them to bury it, and the community Teed had founded went into a slow decline.

While soon forgotten in America, Teed’s ideas had a second lease of life in Germany when several issues of a Koreshan magazine fell into the hands of an ex-WWI pilot, Peter Bender, who was so taken with them he came to believe he too was a reincarnation of Koresh. He began to promote the ‘Hollow Earth Doctrine’ or ‘Hohlweltlehre’ vigorously, aided by the fact that he was friends with several high-level Nazis including Herman Goering. In 1933 an engineer named Mengering, who lived in the city of Magdeburg in Prussia, conceived an experiment to test the theory. His idea was a simple one. If we indeed live inside a hollow sphere, then a rocket launched vertically from Germany would, if it travelled far enough, eventually land in somewhere like Australia. Mengering obtained financial assistance from the city council and the help of several rocket experts from Berlin. Unfortunately rocket technology in 1933 wasn’t quite up to this experiment and when, after several test flights, a projectile was launched on 29 June it travelled vertically rather than horizontally (it must have provided a good day out for the locals though). The Hollow Earth Doctrine was put to the test at least once more ten years later. With Germany desperate for new weapons to win

the war, the Naval Research Institute financed a study into the theory’s naval applications (the idea here being that, if the surface of the earth is concave, objects at a distance - including enemy ships - might be detected by pointing a sufficiently powerful telescope at the sky.) When the results of these experiments proved less than promising, the Nazis apparently lost patience with Bender, and soon afterwards he and his family were carted off to a concentration camp where they perished.

In 1959 Ray Palmer, who had made quite a stir in the ‘40s by publishing Richard Shaver’s stories about an underworld race of evil, hypnotising dwarfs called deros (See ‘Of Teros and Deros’ in Bizarrism #5), began to promote the idea that flying saucers came not from outer space, but from the interior of the earth. His chief piece of evidence for the existence of polar openings - from which UFOs emerged - was the claim that famed polar explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd, in expeditions in 1947 and 1956, had flown over the north and south poles and found lands ‘beyond’ them, facts which Palmer claimed the government had suppressed. Byrd had indeed been on expeditions in these years (although they had in fact both been to the south pole) but the tale of polar openings seems to have been made up by one F. Amadeo Giannini, who wrote about it in his book Worlds Beyond the Poles. This tale has proved to be an extremely tenacious one. What was purported to be Byrd’s uncensored log of the north pole trip was published as a book in 1990, and excerpts from it continue to pop up in alternative and conspiracy magazines. In the log, Byrd describes flying over rolling green hills and spotting what looks like a mammoth. Suddenly, flying saucers appear, emblazoned with swastikas! Byrd’s plane is forced to land and he is met by several blonde, German-speaking men who take him to a glowing ‘crystal city’. Here he meets the ‘Master’, who says that they have been observing ‘our race’ and warns Byrd that we are on a path to atomic destruction. (Byrd had obviously wandered into a variation of the idea that a group of Nazis - usually including Hitler - had escaped Germany in secretly developed flying saucers or ‘fluegelrads’ and were hiding out beneath the Antarctic.)

    The Nazis are also linked to the hollow earth via a cluster of stories about Agharti, a legendary underground city somewhere in Central Asia which is said to be the home of a race of superior beings. Basically a corruption of certain Buddhist ideas (in particular the story of Shamballah, a hidden city which is sometimes thought of as a real place) the legend originated in the writings of a 19th century French political philosopher, Joseph-Alexandre Saint Yves, who advocated an authoritarian system called ‘synarchy’ - as opposed to anarchy. As an example of a society run along such lines. Saint Yves wrote about ‘Agharta’ (which he claimed to have learned about through telepathic communication with the Dalai Lama). With the spelling changed to Agharti, the city was popularised by a Russian exile, scientist and explorer, Ferdinand Ossendowski, in his 1922 blockbuster Beasts, Men and Gods. According to Ossendowski’s account, he was travelling through Mongolia when a succession of monks and lamas all told him the same strange story. In 1890, they said.

A personage with the grand title of the ‘King of the World’ had appeared to them to deliver a great prophecy - a tale of coming wars and tribulations which would only end when the King and his subjects emerged from Agharti to bring about peace. Variations of this story have been kicking round for years. In the Nazi version, the city becomes the home of evil Tibetan monks who helped Hitler in his rise to power in the ‘30s.

The supposed polar discoveries of Admiral Byrd figure largely in Dr Raymond Bernard’s The Hollow Earth (1963), which is the best-known book on the subject. Bernard - a pseudonym for Walter Stieglitz - was a health food crank and confirmed celibate who had been warning people of a coming nuclear holocaust since the ‘50s (he lived on an island off Brazil which he claimed was outside fallout range). He also dreamed of a super race of females who reproduced parthogenetically, and came to believe they lived inside the earth. Bernard’s attempts to sell land on his island were seen by some as little more than a real estate scam, but it seems that Bernard genuinely believed in the interior world, and himself suffered at the hands of conmen who claimed they could show him a way into it.

Whatever science may say about it, the hollow earth is such a neat and satisfying concept it’s unlikely to ever disappear. A recent story doing the rounds of the New Age press told of a 1991 international expedition to the north pole led by Danish scientist Edmund Bork, which had passed through a polar opening and found a land of tropical vegetation, lit by its own sun, with a warm shallow sea and a peaceful population of humans - the ideal holiday destination in fact. Let’s face it, we live on the skin of a large rock hurtling at unimaginable speeds through a vast, cold, mysterious and potentially dangerous universe. Wouldn’t it be nice to go inside?

*** end ***

Wasn't that fun?  See you on Monday.

  

The Adventures of ... Ampersandman!

Direct from the May, June, and September 1991 issues of National Lampoon, here are his B&W one-page adventures.

If you're like me, you didn't even know that NatLamp lasted that long.  At least, until I bought the complete issues on CD a decade or so ago.  Wow!

See you Thursday.