Kroger Babb and exploitation

Howard W. "Kroger" Babb
December 30th, 1906 to January 28th, 1980

Thanks to Kroger Babb Ingmar Bergman found a USA distributor.

Summer with Monika

Two things make the world function...commerce and sex and Kroger Babb exploited both. A man from a distant era who knew how to market sex and make a few bucks.

"Kroger Babb's Roadshow"

How a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education.

by

Joe Bob Briggs

November 2003

reason.com

"ONCE IN A LIFETIME Comes A Presentation That TRULY PULLS NO PUNCHES! Now YOU Can SEE The Motion Picture That DARES DISCUSS and EXPLAIN SEX AS NEVER BEFORE SEEN and HEARD! THE ONE, THE ONLY, THE ORIGINAL...MOM AND DAD...Truly The World's Most Amazing Attraction! NO ONE UNDER HIGH SCHOOL AGE Admitted Unless Accompanied By Parents!! EVERYTHING SHOWN! EVERYTHING EXPLAINED!"

If you lived in a small town in the 1940s or '50s, it was virtually impossible not to know about a film called Mom and Dad. Sooner or later a flamboyant publicity man would drive into town, the ads would appear, and the tempestuous debate would begin. Plastered on every available storefront, barn, bus bench, and shoeshine stand was a poster seducing you with an attractive couple in mid-kiss and black bold-faced ballyhoo exploding all around them. And in a black box in the lower left-hand corner:

"Extra! IN PERSON: ELLIOT FORBES, 'THE SECRETS OF SENSIBLE SEX.'"

Alarmed letters to the editor would appear in the newspaper. Clergymen would express opinions from the pulpit. If you were Catholic, you'd be banned from attending. In some towns the police would send men to check the film for violations of the obscenity statutes. And as soon as the first women-only matinee was screened, at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, the town would blaze with Mom and Dad gossip. Though all but forgotten today, Mom and Dad was so heavily promoted that Time once remarked that the ad campaign "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life."

But this was not Hollywood promotion. In fact, Hollywood spent 20 years campaigning to get rid of movies like Mom and Dad. This was the last wave of the 19th-century medicine shows -- part biology lesson, part sideshow, part morality play, part medical "shock footage" -- and to this day many old-timers regard it as the purest and most successful exploitation film in history. It played continuously for 23 years, still booking drive-ins as late as 1977, and grossed an estimated $100 million.

Kroger Babb, who billed himself as "America's Fearless Young Showman," ruled over a vast army of Mom and Dad "roadshow units" from his headquarters in Worthington, Ohio. He used a form of exhibition that has all but disappeared today, called "fourwalling." Instead of booking his film into theaters for a percentage of the box office, he would simply rent the theater outright and take it over for the week or, in smaller markets, just one or two days. He would pay for all advertising and promotion, put his own banners and marquees out front, and turn the theater into a midway attraction, complete with lobby curiosities designed to lure customers. But because he was a pariah in Hollywood, he had to use independent mom-and-pop theaters that weren't part of the big chains like Paramount and RKO, and he had to fight censorship boards, police forces, judges, clergy, and outraged newspaper editors everywhere he went. The film was in 400 separate court proceedings during its run.

The Blowoff

Babb was an expert at creating a kind of mob psychosis that peaked at the moment the projector started to roll. Watching the film today, it's all but impossible to recreate the atmosphere of a capacity audience waiting breathlessly to see things they knew were forbidden and probably shocking. It was Babb's peculiar genius that he was able to evoke the emotions of a horror movie using what is actually one of the blandest, most formulaic stories ever concocted.

When the opening titles come up and the lush strings of the orchestra play the Mom and Dad theme music, the first thing you see is a type crawl:

"Foreword. Our story is a simple one! It happens every night, somewhere. It is the story of Joan Blake -- a sweet, innocent girl growing up in this fast moving age. The temptations which she faces are as old as Time itself. But Joan is no better fortified against them than was the girl of yesteryear, because her mother -- like many mothers -- still thinks that ignorance is a guarantee of virtue. 'IGNORANCE IS A SIN -- KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.' In this modern world Youth is entitled to a knowledge of Hygiene -- a complete understanding of the Facts of Life. Boys and girls of today aren't bad! But millions of them are becoming sexual delinquents and the victims of venereal disease, simply because they do not know the Full Truth about these subjects. This problem is a challenge to every Mom and Dad. If our story points the way to a commonsense solution...and saves one girl from unwed motherhood...or one boy from the ravages of social disease...it will have been well told! THE PRODUCERS."

This had two functions: to lessen the chance of obscenity prosecutions, and to make the film palatable to women. In fact, women tended to like the film more than men, who were often a little disappointed by the lack of sex and nudity.

The first hour of the movie was devoted to showing how a sweet and pretty young girl like Joan Blake could easily have her life ruined by pregnancy. She goes to a local dance, where she's swept off her feet by a handsome and worldly pilot who steals a kiss as they walk outside. They hold hands and make eyes at each other while watching a jitterbug contest, a torch singer, and a teenage acrobatic act -- all the usual padding found in exploitation films of the period. The next night he takes her to a smoky night club in his roadster, overwhelms her with sweet talk on a moonlit lover's lane, and convinces her that two people as much in love as this should definitely go all the way with it. Slow fade as the young lovers descend into the front seat.

Shortly thereafter the handsome pilot has to leave town on business, but he continues to write to her. When he mentions in one of his letters that it's been four weeks since he left, Joan suddenly becomes concerned. She checks her calendar and is obviously worried. She goes to her mother and asks if she has any "hygiene books," but her parent is flabbergasted by the request. "You're not married yet," says Mom.

A short time later Joan's father notices an article in the newspaper: A young man named Jack Griffith -- the pilot who took her virginity -- has been killed in a plane crash. Joan drops a dinner plate when she hears the news, goes to her room, tears up the love letter she's just written, and puts her head down on her desk.

At this point the film would stop entirely and the house lights would come up. Elliot Forbes, an "eminent sexual hygiene commentator," would stride onto the stage and deliver a 20-minute lecture on the need for openness in sex education, the morality of the times, the biology of the body, and what the community can do to avoid the ruination of its youth.

If anyone checked the credentials of Elliot Forbes, he would have discovered that the speaker was the busiest man in the history of the lecture circuit, appearing 78 times a day in cities scattered from Maine to Oregon. There were actually 26 Elliot Forbeses, one for each roadshow, and Babb hired most of them from the ranks of retired or underemployed vaudeville comedians. They knew how to work crowds with a combination of earnestness, humor, and downhome "just folks" patter that would always crescendo at the moment when they held up two paperback books -- one called Man and Boy, the other called Woman and Girl -- and made a spiel for "a set of these vitally important books to be read in the privacy of your own home." Two women in nurse uniforms -- supposedly stationed in the theater to take care of people who fainted or had heart attacks -- would then pass among the crowd collecting money and distributing the volumes.

The books themselves were rehashes of venereal disease and pregnancy information that could be obtained at any public health agency. The Elliot Forbes speech was what is known in the carnival world as a "blowoff," long used in 10-in-one freak shows to hustle additional money from people who had already paid an admission price. In any good blowoff, there's the constant implication that the "good stuff" is in the attraction you haven't paid for yet -- in this case, the book. Forbes' main job was to sell the books, which frequently augmented the box-office take by as much as 50 percent. In 1957, for example, at a four-week showing of Mom and Dad in Baltimore, the box-office gross was $82,000, but 45,000 copies of the books were sold, resulting -- after deducting printing and expenses -- in a $31,000 additional profit.

The Busybody Villainess

After Forbes had left the stage and the money had been collected, the film would resume with our heroine sick to her stomach, sleeping late, and discovering that her clothes no longer fit her. (The actors never use the word "pregnant.") After a few scenes of dramatic desperation -- including an off-screen suicide attempt -- Joan's brother forces her to tell him the truth. Knowing he can't trust their straitlaced parents, he seeks advice from Carl Blackburn, a kindly teacher who was fired from the high school for teaching sex education and now sells insurance. After a night of agonizing, Blackburn calls on Joan's mother and informs her that "your daughter is going to have a baby."

The mother has been the busybody villainess of our story all along. As the member of a women's club that constantly crusades against public lewdness and drinking -- the same club that got the science teacher fired -- she believes that sex should never be discussed in the home. Her reaction to the news: "Who was the boy? I'll have him arrested."

"They didn't tell me his name," replies the defrocked teacher. "After all, why blame the boy?"

The hysterical mother demand to know who Blackburn would blame. "I'd blame you, Mrs. Blake," he replies, "you and every parent who neglects the sacred duty of telling their children the real truth. Why were your children afraid to come to you in their trouble? Why did they have to come to me for advice? Remember this, Mrs. Blake, when your children have to go to someone else for advice, you've fallen down from your job."

In the next scene Joan and Mrs. Blake are riding the train to Boston, where Joan will finish her pregnancy in secret under a doctor's care, but the grim faces of mother and daughter tell us all too plainly that their lives will never be the same.

Pickles and Beaver

At this point the story is, for all practical purposes, over. There's one point of minor suspense -- will Joan be OK and what will she do with the baby? -- but very little is made of that. In fact, the whole first 90 minutes has been a set-up for three films-within-the-film that everyone will remember long after they've left the theater.

With wife and daughter packed off to Boston, Mr. Blake is suddenly roused out of his blasé attitude and tells Blackburn that he intends to go to the school board and get him rehired. Now more than ever, "They need that class in social hygiene!" Cut to the principal's office where, in one of the more forced segues in screenwriting history, the returning teacher tells the principal, "I was talking with Mrs. Hayworth yesterday. You know, she's the sister of the famous Chicago specialist Dr. Ashley. She tells me he has some wonderful films explaining childbirth. But best of all, she says he's due here for a rest in October!"

"Do you suppose we could get him to talk to a small group like ours?" asks the principal.

"Well, I'll ask her to write to him about it. You never know until you try!"

In the next scene Blackburn is introducing Dr. John D. Ashley, an obstetrician, to a class of high school girls. Dr. Ashley has been kind enough to bring along some films made in his hospital. The first one is called The Facts of Life: An Explanation of Sex Cycles. An authoritative narrator begins: "Every girl should know the functions of the female body." Charts are revealed, showing the female menstrual cycle, drawings of the genital organs, how ovulation occurs, how spermatozoa impregnate an ovary, time-lapse depictions of the growing fetus, and then suddenly -- almost without warning -- graphic footage of a live birth!

The umbilical cord has scarcely been snipped before the second film commences: Modern American Surgery, in which a "famous American Surgeon" will perform a Caesarian section on-camera. In an operating theater full of white-masked attendants and spectators, we watch as the incision is made ("from pubis to umbilicus"), as layer after layer of the skin and womb are cut open, as water and other fluids spray wildly, and then as the baby is removed with forceps. The film lingers for the sewing up and a few injections "to relax the mother," followed by an encomium to "one of the great miracles of modern surgery."

But wait! There's more! Two scenes later an expert on venereal disease named Dr. Burrell addresses an all-male class. And now comes the piece de resistance. The third film-within-the-film is called Seeing Is Believing, and it's every teenage boy's nightmare, showing grainy footage of syphilis victims struggling to walk, blinded, horribly scarred, teeth rotting, their bodies oozing with chancres and open sores, and, in one case, a fleeting image of a person whose feet have been eaten away by disease. Throughout the film there are silent-movie-style caption cards: "Millions learn these facts the hard-way...by bitter experience!" "The Price of Ignorance!" "Self-Styled MORALISTS Would Like To Keep These Facts A Secret!!!" "Is The Gamble Worth the Price?" The audience sees crippled and blind crying babies, horrible pox-ridden arms and legs, a festering sore where someone's eye used to be, and the big payoff, introduced by the title card "Doctors and Health Officials Agree -- These shocking pictures of infected genital organs will awaken you!" What follows are fully naked bodies, but so bruised and disease-ridden that they're anything but attractive. The film concludes, oddly, with images of track and field athletes, healthy young swimmers, and the U.S. Army marching in formation, as though to say, "This is what Americans should look like."

Joan's story has three more brief scenes, concluding with a doctor coming into a waiting room where the nervous Blake family is pacing and praying, to say "It's all over." Joan has a good chance of recovery. And the baby? In the version I saw, the doctor says the baby has just barely survived -- presumably to be adopted by a childless couple -- but I've also seen accounts by Mom and Dad viewers who claim the baby is stillborn. The fact is, there were dozens of versions of Mom and Dad, including some that didn't have any films-within-the-film, so that the movie could still play in markets with strict obscenity laws. Babb was not above showing his "cold" version to local authorities and screening the "hot" version in the theater. He also always carried with him a "square-up reel." In cases where he was forced to show the "cold" version, he would sometimes be faced with an angry audience that felt cheated by the absence of what they felt they had been promised by the advertising. To appease them, he would quickly rack an additional reel of what the carnies called "pickles and beaver" -- footage of full-frontal nude bodies. Remarkably, it worked. The audience left feeling they had experienced at least a little of the "good stuff."

There's one additional piece of film after the story ends. The final screen image is Kroger Babb himself, sitting at his desk and speaking directly to camera. "And now, friends, you've seen the entire production," he says. "If you agree that these pictures have been bold and shocking enough, that you've learned a very worthwhile lesson from them, I wish you'd show the management your appreciation at this time. By your applause." And of course the theater, so prompted, would erupt in applause, thereby cutting down on the possibility of anyone ever asking for his money back.

Clap Operas

This brief coda is actually the essence of Babb's shell game. He says "if you agree that..." and then includes two reasons to like the movie -- that it was shocking, and that it was educational. But he speaks as though they're the same thing. An astute student of human nature, he knew everyone needed both -- you bought the ticket because you wanted to be exposed to the forbidden, but you told yourself and others that you had no choice but to be educated. It was a movie that could be marketed with a straight exploitation campaign if it played in grindhouses and all-male theaters, or an "educational" campaign that would have entire high schools buying tickets for its students.

Although syphilis and gonorrhea had periodically ravaged America throughout the 19th century, the subject was not addressed on stage or screen until 1913, when Eugene Brieux wrote a play called Damaged Goods. In it, a young lawyer gets syphilis from a streetwalker while drunk at his bachelor party. Ignoring the advice of his doctor, he marries his fiancée in order to collect a dowry, thereby infecting his wife and baby. The drama avoided censorship by being sponsored by a medical organization and exploiting a common fear of the time -- that the upper classes were in danger of strange diseases brought to America by the hordes of lower-class immigrants. When the play was made into a Mutual Film in 1914, it took in $2 million at the box office, a virtually unheard-of amount at the time.

Damaged Goods marked the birth of the sex-hygiene film. A ripoff called A Victim of Sin came out almost immediately, and there were at least 20 more films about VD before 1920. But the real birth of what producers would come to call the "clap opera" occurred at the end of World War I, when a man named Isaac Silverman purchased two films that the armed services had used to train soldiers about the dangers of venereal disease. Fit to Fight, the story of five young men in army training camp, and The End of the Road, the story of two women in trouble, included explicit medical footage showing the ravages of gonorrhea and syphilis, complete with pus-filled open sores.

What could be better for a film-hungry public constantly in search of new sensations? Silverman booked the films all over the country, where they played to capacity audiences, including 12 weeks (!) at the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn. They also attracted the attention of local morals crusaders, who managed to get them banned in many cities. The Catholic Church, upset by the films' advocacy of "chemical prophylaxis," organized a pamphlet campaign to stop the films.

The Outlaw Studio

From that time forward, a new kind of film exhibition would arise. Silverman showed his films to "adults only" (no one under 16), a phrase that would become code for titillating subject matter, and he also segregated the screenings by gender. Babb would later codify this tradition in every contract he ever signed, specifying that the words "Adults Only" must be on all advertising and barring any distributor from showing Mom and Dad to mixed audiences. Women would be too embarrassed to watch a sex hygiene film in the company of men, so he would have two women's-only screenings per day, one at 2 and one at 7. The men wouldn't be allowed to see the film until 9, and by that time they were so overwhelmed with curiosity, wanting to know WHAT THE WOMEN WERE TALKING ABOUT, that his late-night males-only screenings came to be called "The Thundering Herd."

The sex hygiene film contributed greatly to the notorious Production Code that would muzzle Hollywood studios for decades to come. The first motion picture censorship law had been passed in Chicago in 1907, and by 1921 seven states had censorship boards, with new ones sprouting all the time. In an effort to head off government control of movies, Hollywood adopted "Thirteen Points or Standards," forbidding such things as the on-screen exploitation of sex, white slavery, nakedness, "illicit love and vice," narcotics use, vulgarity, ridicule of authority, miscegenation, profanity, and disrespect for religion. This list evolved into the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" of 1927, which specifically added sex hygiene and venereal disease, childbirth scenes, and children's sex organs. And all of this was consolidated into the Production Code of 1930, after which 98 percent of all movies released were judged and censored.

But there was still that 2 percent of movies made outside the Hollywood system. They not only defied the Production Code, but used it as a sort of manual for subjects that could be exploited. There was a boom in exploitation films dealing with crime, white slavery, and drug addiction -- not to mention nudist-camp movies. Mainstream Hollywood despised these films, mainly because they feared they would lead to more censorship, but in their efforts to run the exploitation producers out of business they had to argue against what were always presented as educational films. Remarkably, the Production Code Administration eventually issued policy statements saying that the purpose of motion pictures should be pure entertainment, and that education has no place in theaters!

The carnies on the exploitation circuit -- guys with flashy names like S.S. "Steamship" Millard and Howard "Pappy" Golden -- eventually banded into a sort of informal trade association. Calling themselves the Forty Thieves, they essentially became a vertically integrated outlaw studio, using something called the "states rights" system. In the 1890s, licensing for the Kinetoscope and Vitascope had resulted in the United States being carved up into 32 exhibition territories, and this system of sub-distribution lasted well into the '80s. Hence a producer could sell his film territory by territory, allowing the local "thief" to market it any way he knew how. He could re-edit the film, shoot additional scenes, design his own ad campaign, and create any kind of come-on. (Lobby displays of drug paraphernalia were common in the '30s.) One of the most foolproof gimmicks in the business was live birth footage. No one knows exactly where the footage came from -- some say medical training films, some say it was paid for overseas -- but within the world of the Forty Thieves, it was constantly recycled into movie after movie.

In 1936 Surgeon General Thomas Parran initiated a public information campaign to stamp out venereal disease, making Hollywood look more and more silly as it tried to ban the films. The studios were especially incensed in 1937 when a film called Sex Madness showed up as the second feature with Shirley Temple's Wee Willie Winkie, but by the following year the government had filed an antitrust suit against them -- the famous Paramount case -- and they pretty much abandoned their crusade against the exploitation films because it made them look like monopolists.

By the time Kroger Babb came along, the formula for a sex hygiene movie was so well established that all he did was incorporate every element of every sex hygiene movie in history into a single film. But in search of even better profits, he changed the rules slightly. Many of the old sex-hygiene films had played in grindhouses or marginal theaters or even bars and restaurants. He wanted to break through to the biggest theaters in the country.

Howard W. Babb had gotten the nickname "Kroger" from the name of the grocery store where he worked as a boy growing up in Lees Creek, Ohio. Born in 1906, he was a sportswriter, a newspaper reporter, an ad manager, and, by his late 20s, publicity manager for the Chakeres-Warners theater chain, where he distinguished himself with publicity stunts such as having a man buried alive in front of a theater. He got the exploitation roadshow bug when he hooked up with an outfit called Cox and Underwood, which was peddling an aging sex hygiene film called Dust to Dust that was actually a 1935 film called High School Girl with a live-birth reel slapped onto the end. Proving that he was born to be in the business, it's the same plot Babb would use in Mom and Dad. (The Forty Thieves frequently quarreled over territories, but they never sued for copyright infringement. Of course, many of them were carnival men, who regarded all cons as ancient and passed down from generation to generation, but they may also have simply sold stories the same way they occasionally sold sideshow acts.)

Anxious to go out on his own, Babb got 20 investors to put up the money to make Mom and Dad. The script was written by Mildred Horn, who would later become his wife, and who would also write Man and Woman and Boy and Girl. To direct he hired William "One Shot" Beaudine (so named because he never did a second take), who dated back to the Bowery Boys serials and had made over 200 B movies. He made the whole film in six days in 1944.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Babb did was to give his film such a bland and praiseworthy title. Who could object to a movie called Mom and Dad? This wasn't a movie about crazed sex maniacs or loose women or pregnant girls or the vice rackets. It was a movie about the education of all the moms and dads in the world, and, in fact, he wanted every mom and every dad to see it. His principal weapon, when he came under attack, was the very ordinariness of his story.

End of the Hygiene Era

Babb was not just prepared for the inevitable censorship battles he would face. He egged them on. He stirred up the Catholics at every opportunity, capitalizing on the church's "C" rating (for "condemned") of his film. He wrote fake letters to the editor in advance of the film's arrival in town, hoping there would be controversy. His most successful letter was supposedly written by the anonymous mayor of a small town. The "mayor" explained that he had opposed the showing of Mom and Dad in his town, too, but then the 17-year-old daughter of a local churchgoing couple found herself "in trouble." He saw Mom and Dad with a friend, and as a result had the courage to tell her parents about her predicament. They were shocked, but forgave her. The girl gave birth to a healthy boy, which was adopted by a childless couple. The girl then completed high school and is now engaged to a fine young man. The mayor goes on to thank Babb for having the courage "to tell young people what their parents didn't." And the letter ends: "P.S. That girl was my daughter."

Babb's company, Hygienic Productions, sent out an advance man to place letters like this, buy advertising, do mailings, and hold screenings for town fathers and religious leaders. (If the town's leaders liked the film, a "soft" campaign would be used. If they didn't like it, a "hard" campaign, advertising it as "the movie self-styled moralists don't want you to see," would be used. Both campaigns worked.) The advance man would be followed a week later by a crew of four -- including "Elliot Forbes" and two "nurses" -- to actually manage the film during its run. The crews would stay on the road for 20 weeks at a time. Babb even had one all-black crew for black theaters, with Olympic champion Jesse Owens substituting for Elliot Forbes.

As the Mom and Dad exploitation scheme evolved over time, it attracted imitators. By 1950 there were so many sex-hygiene roadshows that they were starting to get in each other's way, and after a town was "scorched" by a promotional campaign, it would be spoiled for any film arriving later. So four of the films -- Mom and Dad, Street Corner, Because of Eve, and The Story of Bob and Sally -- banded together to form Modern Film Distributors, carving out territories and agreeing not to steal markets.

But the genre's days were numbered. The irony of the sex-hygiene explosion is that it depicted a world that didn't exist. The communities in the films had more in common with turn-of-the-century towns than with anything more modern. Millions of young men had already been exposed to venereal disease films during World War II, and millions of women had been touched by out-of-wedlock births, abortions, or abandonment. Perhaps the films succeeded because they gave a comforting message to panicked moms and dads, promising that, with just a little more education, these things could be eradicated. But many of the problems already were being eradicated, first by penicillin, which had made new syphilis cases virtually unheard of by the time Mom and Dad came out, and then by more sophisticated forms of birth control that gave young girls more control of their sex lives.

The biggest irony of all is that the public schools actually did follow Kroger Babb's example and start showing sex-education films not unlike The Facts of Life: An Explanation of Sex Cycles. And once the information was available in schools, Babb was out of business.

The immediate cause of Babb's declining box office, though, was the burlesque film, which showed up in the early '50s. Crudely made movies filmed in aging burlesque halls, featuring strippers and comedians doing what they'd been doing for decades, these offered titillation and a hint of nudity without any of the scarifying disease subtext. By the time the second wave of nudist films came along, in 1959, it was all over for sex hygiene.

Kroger Babb died January 28, 1980, in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 73. And now, friends, you've seen the entire production. If you have been shocked and educated, please show the management your appreciation. By your applause.

Kroger Babb [Wikipedia]

Here's a sample...

Child Bride
[trailer]
1938

Child Bride feature

You might be interested in these classic exploitation films...

Reefer Madness [1938]

Sex Madness [1938]

And something from the 60s...

Dr. Sex [1964]

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe..."Dr. Heidegger's Experiment"

"The creepy Nathaniel Hawthorne story Edgar Allan Poe loved"

June 26th, 2011

Los Angeles Times

Nathaniel Hawthorne is best remembered today for his moralistic novel "The Scarlet Letter." In his day, however, he was a well-known writer and essayist whose new work was lauded with a feverish attention. It was that hubbub that led a skeptical Edgar Allan Poe to write, "We had supposed, with good reason for supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent cliques which beset our literature." Poe added, with an element of surprise, "we have been most agreeably mistaken."

That tale is told today by the Library of America, which as you might guess republishes classic works by American authors, from Herman Melville to Philip K. Dick. The work in question is Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales," a collection of short stories, which Poe reviewed five years after its publication in 1837. Poe singled out one story, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," as being "exceedingly well imagined and executed with surpassing ability. The artist breathes in every line of it."

Though contemporary readers might think the story has something to do with the famed German philosopher, it was written more than 50 years before he was born. Instead, it is an unsettling story of magic and manipulation, just the kind of thing that might put a smile on Edgar Allan Poe's grim face.


Widow Wycherly a recipient of Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

Pretty poison..."poison ivy"

"In praise of poison ivy"

It is a fascinating, sometimes beautiful and environmentally essential plant.

by

Deborah Blum

June 26th, 2011

Los Angeles Times

I still remember the moment in my childhood in which I lost all faith in the innocent purity of plants. One day, I was a carefree adolescent at summer camp, exploring the leafy woods with my fellow campers. A couple of days later, I was an illustration for a medical textbook. "The worst case of poison ivy I've ever seen!" the camp nurse told the other staffers as she trotted me and my dime-sized blisters around for inspection.

OK, I kind of enjoyed the attention. The slightly awestruck reaction. What 12-year-old girl wouldn't? But the itching, the oozing, the angry red swelling of feet and legs? Hated every minute. And since that summer, I've never entered forested land without conducting a slightly neurotic survey of the plant life furling about my feet.

It's a story that places me among the countless Americans — health officials estimate there are more than 350,000 new cases every year — who've tangled with poison ivy or its relatives, poison oak and poison sumac, and regretted it. I may, however, be one of the few ivy victims who have come to admire the enemy. In fact — have I spent too much time in the woods recently? — my purpose here as summer begins is to defend and even praise the fascinating, sometimes beautiful and environmentally essential poison ivy plant.

The triumvirate of poison oak, poison ivy and poison sumac has been admirably holding its own against humans for centuries. Poison ivy acquired its unaffectionate label from one of the 17th century British explorers, Capt. John Smith. A founder of early English settlements in Virginia, Smith is probably best remembered for his story of being rescued from unfriendly Indians by a young tribe member named Pocahontas. He apparently fared less well with the native plants, writing in his journal about one that upon "being touched causeth rednesse, itchynge, and lastly, blisters." He named it poison ivy, after its resemblance to the ornamental ivies of his home country.

And poison oak and ivy — if one can manage objectivity — really are ornamental and startlingly pretty, especially when they unfurl crimson leaves in the spring or blaze into fiery copper in autumn. In fact — and this is confirmed by the website at Monticello — President Thomas Jefferson once ordered poison ivy as a decorative vine for the garden of his beloved Virginia home.

The plants are usually referred to as three-leafed, as in "leaves of three, let it be." But they are actually more complex in design than the rhyme suggests. Each leaf is a cluster of three leaflets; the slightly glossy trios alternate from one side to the other along the stems, giving the plants a rather lacy appearance. They are astonishingly adaptable in their ability to conform to the environment, growing up trees as a flowering vine, branching out into small shrubs and creeping along as ground cover. They thrive in field and forest, in newly plowed subdivisions, along the crumbly asphalt of road edges and even on sand dunes, where they are sometimes used for erosion control.

Poison ivy's geographic range also reflects a remarkably easygoing acceptance of living arrangements — "Eastern" poison ivy is now found through most of the Southeast, between Arizona and Florida along the southern rim of the United States, to Nebraska and Canada in the north. If not for the western mountain ranges, notably the Sierra and the Cascades, botanists believe, it would now be flourishing along the West Coast. But really, why bother, when its close cousins, poison oak and sumac, do the job so well there?

The plants' ability to be everywhere makes them a dependable meal for species ranging from insects to deer. Poison ivy vines produce tiny greenish-white flowers and silvery winter berries. Wild bees feed on poison ivy flowers, and no, the honey is not toxic. Wild birds depend on those waxy berries in the winter — among the varieties known to feed on them are woodpeckers and warblers, wrens and robins, blue birds, sapsuckers and, I mention this one because I love the name, the tufted titmouse.

So it's good news for the birds and bees, if not the rest of us, that poison ivy and its relatives brilliantly adapt to climate differences. Is it also good news that they seem to adapt, or even thrive, in response to climate change? Even I, author of this ode to Toxicodendrons (Latin name, showing off) didn't exactly cheer when U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists announced recently that this plant species responds happily to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They warned, in fact, that today's poison ivy plant shows signs of growing 50% larger than the version found in the early 20th century.

Some studies also suggest that the oily sap that flows through these plants, called urushiol, might also become more toxic in a climate-changed world. Scientists already estimate that 70% to 85% of all people react badly to urushiol, accounting for those thousands of blistering inflammations reported every year.

Most biologists believe that urushiol's unfriendly chemistry developed as a way for the plants to discourage snacking by animals. And that, of course, hungry animals, dependent on the food source, made their own adjustments in turn. We, a species that only comes in casual contact with poison ivy, would have no real biological pressure to adapt to its defenses. It turns out that occasional annoyance doesn't drive adaptation, which is why humans are still stuck with those "rednesse" and "itchynge" issues.

So consider the steadfast poison ivy plant. It has responded to centuries of human enmity by expanding its range and increasing its annoyance potential. It serves a wide range of other species while remaining impervious to our outrage. How can you not admire such a capable life form, such an able combatant? Still, should it go further, turning into a climate-driven super-toxic ivy, you may well find me expressing my admiration for its adaptability from the safety of the great indoors.

[Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, is the author of "The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York."]

Toxicodendron radicans [Wikipedia]

Riverside, California and Chinese history

Chinese workers handle citrus fruit in the F.B. Devine packing house.
Riverside, California

Ethics again. When does one say no to history for current economic opportunities? But the developer's response is reasonable..."In response to activists' concerns, Jacobs said he would set aside room for a Chinese garden and a display area to showcase artifacts."

"Activists fight to preserve Riverside's Chinatown site"

A developer is trying to build a medical building where Riverside's Chinatown once stood. Activists want the lot and its buried artifacts to become a memorial park.

by

Ching-Ching Ni

June 26th, 2011

Los Angeles Times

A fenced lot overgrown with weeds near the heart of downtown Riverside is believed to contain the largest undisturbed early settlement of Chinese farmworkers in Southern California. But now a local developer wants to put up a medical building there.

The proposal has touched off a legal battle with activists who want the lot and its buried artifacts to become a memorial park. They say it should honor early Chinese pioneers and stand testament to the prejudice that led to the birth and demise of this Inland Empire Chinatown.

Though it was smaller than the urban Chinatowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles, activists say the Riverside Chinatown played an integral — and largely forgotten — role in creating Southern California's flourishing citrus belt.

Riverside developer Doug Jacobs wants to buy the property to build a medical facility. Activists sued to block the sale temporarily, and Jacobs' side has appealed. In response to activists' concerns, Jacobs said he would set aside room for a Chinese garden and a display area to showcase artifacts.

"This site has been nothing but a weed and trash dumping ground," Jacobs said. "I am building a medical facility because it's needed."

Supporters of a memorial park say the remains are best left undisturbed, perhaps to be fully excavated someday. "When you destroy archaeological resources and do token recognition, it simply trivializes the significance of the site," said Eugene Moy, incoming president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.

Most of the old Chinatown, including the remains of a temple, is entombed underground. A partial excavation of the site in 1984 yielded three tons of artifacts that were put in museum storage, including delicate ceramic vases and opium pipes.

During its heyday from the 1880s to the 1920s, the settlement's Chinese residents supplied groves with needed skills, said Margie Akin, a retired archaeologist and a member of Save Our Chinatown, the committee trying to preserve the site.

Many of the Chinese migrants who came to California to work on the railroads — and later in agriculture — were farmers who brought with them specialized knowledge of oranges, a fruit that originated in China. They were able to efficiently pick and pack oranges for mass consumption in the U.S., Akin said. "It was the Chinese laborers who carried the horticultural knowledge of citrus that was responsible for making Riverside the center of the citrus industry," she said.

Riverside's Chinatown had only about 400 full-time residents, but the number approached 4,000 during harvests. The settlement served as a commercial hub for Chinese laborers for miles around, according to Sue Fawn Chung, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Their labor helped make Riverside a citrus powerhouse by the 1890s, said Judy Lee, vice chairwoman of the preservation committee and a UC Riverside librarian. But fire, prejudice and a lack of women doomed the settlement.

In 1885, racist laws evicted Chinese-owned businesses from a site at the center of town, so Chinese residents moved to the outskirts of town. After a mysterious 1893 fire destroyed most of the new Chinatown, other buildings were erected on top of the debris.

"The Caucasian businesses didn't like the Chinese businesses there, so they booted them out," Lee said. "Now they want to develop over the remains of this second site. It's almost like booting them out again."

The Chinese community finally disappeared, in part because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act forbade Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. and prevented those here from marrying white women or owning property. Most of Chinatown's residents remained bachelors. The last of them, a man named George Wong, died in the 1970s, leaving no children, Lee said.

The state of California apologized in 2009 for persecution of Chinese immigrants. Rep. Judy Chu (D-El Monte) and other members of Congress have introduced a resolution calling on the federal government to make a similar apology. Saving Riverside's Chinatown, activists say, could help raise awareness persuade newer Chinese immigrants to support this cause.

"We have such a big Asian population in the San Gabriel Valley now," the historical society's Moy said. "But most of us have no idea of the very dominant Asian population here more than a century ago."

Ark Encounter theme park...controversy

"The park alone could generate as many as 600 to 700 new jobs, according to a consultant's report." I guess that's the bottom line...economics. It's okay and Kentucky government sanctioned to build the Ark Encounter theme park. So much for the separation of church and state. But it isn't that simple.

"$43 million tax break approved for Ark Encounter theme park"

by

Beth Musgrave

May 20th, 2011

kentucky.com

A controversial Bible-themed amusement park received approval Thursday for up to $43 million in state tax incentives over a 10-year period.

The Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority, which oversees tax credits for tourism and film-related projects, unanimously approved the tax credit for the Ark Encounter project, which is scheduled to break ground in August outside Williamstown in Grant County.

In addition to the tax rebate, the state may spend an estimated $11 million to improve an interchange off I-75 near the 800-acre site in Northern Kentucky.

The park has been criticized by late-night talk show hosts and those who say the state should not give tax breaks to a business that espouses a particular religious view. But Gov. Steve Beshear has defended the incentives, saying the state cannot deny the application on religious grounds. The park alone could generate as many as 600 to 700 new jobs, according to a consultant's report. That number doesn't include jobs created from construction or from new hotels or restaurants.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, based in Washington D.C., blasted the board's decision Thursday.

"The state of Kentucky should not be promoting the spread of fundamentalist Christianity or any other religious viewpoint," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. "Let these folks build their fundamentalist Disneyland without government help."

Lynn said his group will sue if they find the tax rebate violates the Constitution's guarantee of the separation of church and state.

Beshear has said the law does not allow the state to discriminate against a for-profit business because of the subject matter.

The Answers in Genesis group, which started the Creation Museum that opened in Petersburg in May 2007, will handle daily operations of the theme park, expected to be completed by 2014. Since the Creation Museum opened, it has received more than 1 million visitors, its backers say.

To receive the state tax rebate, tourism projects must be open more than 100 days a year, cost more than $1 million and attract at least 25 percent of visitors from out-of-state by their fourth year of operation.

The Ark Encounter project exceeds all of those requirements, said consultant Rob Hunden of Hunden Strategic Partners, the consulting firm that presented their findings to the tourism authority before the vote. The theme park will cost more than $172 million to build, be open year-round and attract more than 86.4 percent of its visitors from out-of-state, Hunden told the board.

An executive summary of the consultant's report was made available to the media. However, the entire report was not released because it contained proprietary information.

The 800-acre park is expected to have a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark, a Tower of Babel, petting zoos and other live animals and an assortment of Bible-themed exhibits.

If the park does not espouse a particular philosophy, such as creationism, it will draw a larger audience, Hunden estimated. Under that scenario — which Ark Encounter backers said Thursday they will follow — the park is estimated to draw about 1.2 million visitors a year and have a net economic impact, minus the sales-tax rebates, of about $119 million over a decade.

The rebate allows the company to receive some of its sales tax back over 10 years. However, if the project does not generate sales taxes as expected, it will not receive the rebate, said Carolyn Ridley, chairwoman of the tourism authority.

Mike Zovath, senior vice president of the Ark Encounter project, would not disclose the major investors in the project but said that project backers are still raising money and hope to have all of the $150 million needed for initial construction by the end of June. The Hunden report cited the lack of funding as a major concern.

"If it is not fully funded, it will either not open or it will be less of a major attraction or success," the report said. "However, if that is the case, then the rebate it will be eligible for will be reduced."

Zovath said the group is confident that they will be able to raise the money.

Hunden's report said the cost of the reconfigured highway interchange will be about $11 million, but that's an estimate. The state should not construct the interchange until there are assurances that the funding for the park is in place, the report said.

Transportation Cabinet spokesman Chuck Wolfe said the cabinet will do its own initial study, which will include a cost estimate, in the next two months. There is an interchange near the proposed site, but that interchange would have to be reconfigured so it could handle more vehicles, he said.

"The governor's position is that as long as the developers follow through with their commitment, then it will be a priority," Wolfe said.

The project is not yet in the state's road plan, which the legislature and the Transportation Cabinet use to guide road projects. If the developers come forward with the money for building the park, then Beshear will ask that the interchange be placed in the road plan in January.

Rep. Darryl Owens, D-Louisville, has filed requests to the Tourism Arts and Heritage Cabinet about the Ark Encounter through the state's Open Records Act. Owens said Thursday that he has received some answers from the cabinet, but a May 2 letter in which he asked more questions about the origins of the project and how it was approved for incentives have not been answered.

"I am disappointed that this appears to have been fast-tracked and there just was not a lot of vetting," Owens said.

Deceased--Gene Colan

Gene Colan
September 1st, 1926 to June 23rd, 2011

"Gene Colan, Prolific Comic-Book Artist, Dies at 84"

by

Margalit Fox

June 25th, 2011

Los Angeles Times

Gene Colan, a towering figure among comic-book artists, whose depictions of some of the best-known characters in the genre were lauded for their realism, expressiveness and painterly qualities, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 84 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was complications of cancer and liver disease, his son, Erik, said.

Most closely associated with Marvel Comics, Mr. Colan also drew for DC and other publishers. At Marvel, he was best known for Daredevil (written by Marvel’s editor in chief, Stan Lee), about a blind man with superpowers; the Falcon, one of the first African-American superheroes, created by Mr. Colan and Mr. Lee; Howard the Duck, written by Steve Gerber; and The Tomb of Dracula, which Mr. Colan created with the writer Marv Wolfman.

Mr. Colan’s work was noteworthy on several counts. The first was its sheer duration: He completed his first professional assignment in the 1940s and his last a year or two ago. In between, his art was a mainstay of the Silver Age of comics, as the period from the mid-1950s to about 1970 — a time of heady artistic ferment in the field — is known.

The second was its prodigious volume: Over nearly seven decades he illustrated many hundreds of comics, from the famous, including Batman, Wonder Woman and the Hulk, to the possibly less so, including Ben Casey, Falling in Love and Captain Britain.

The third was his visual style, by all accounts unlike that of any other artist in the business. Where comic-book art tends toward deliberately flat, stylized images, Mr. Colan preferred a realistic look that emphasized texture and fluidity: the drape of a hero’s cape, tilt of a head, the arc of an oncoming fist.

A lifelong film buff, Mr. Colan was known as a master of light and shadow, which lent his work a noirish, cinematic quality.

“He was referred to as a painter with a pencil,” Tom Field, the author of “Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan“ (2005), said in an interview on Friday. “Comic books had been put together like a production line: There’s someone who writes the script, someone who would letter the words onto the pages, someone who would do the pencil illustrations. And typically another artist would come along with India ink and embellish those illustrations so they would stand out for the printer. In Gene’s case, the pencils were so rich and lavish that when the technology evolved to that point, the publishers stopped putting ink on his pencils and reproduced the work just as it was drawn.”

Mr. Colan had lived for many years with glaucoma; since the early 1990s, Mr. Field said, he was nearly blind in one eye and had tunnel vision in the other. Throughout this period, his work continued unabated, and it was, in most estimates, as fine as what had gone before.

Eugene Jules Colan was born in New York on Sept. 1, 1926. (The family name, according to Mr. Field’s book, was originally Cohen.) He was reared in Manhattan, where his parents ran an antiques business on the Upper East Side. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and toward the end of World War II served in the Philippines with the Army Air Forces.

After the war he joined Marvel (then known as Timely Comics), where his assignments would include Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man and Sub-Mariner.

For DC (and its precursor, National Comics), Mr. Colan drew Batman, Hopalong Cassidy and Silverblade.

Mr. Colan’s first marriage, to Cynthia Sanders, ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Adrienne Brickman, died last year. He is survived by two children from his second marriage, his son, Erik, and a daughter, Nanci Solo; and three grandchildren.

Underpinning the realistic look of Mr. Colan’s comics was his fealty to real-world models. For the Dracula series, he based the title character on Jack Palance, whom he had seen play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a 1968 television movie. Fittingly, Mr. Palance went on to play Dracula in a 1974 television movie.

On another occasion, Mr. Colan needed to draw a particular make of handgun. “He was such a stickler for detail,” Mr. Field said, “that he went down to the police station and asked them to pull one out and show it to him.”

Comic Book Resources...

June 23rd, 2011

Writer Clifford Meth shares the sad news that comics legend Gene Colan has died. He was 84. Colan was in poor health for some time and passed away following a broken hip and complications from liver disease.

Colan is considered one of the premier Silver Age Marvel artists, illustrating some of the best known comics characters of all time including Captain America, Doctor Strange and the characters he's most associated with, Daredevil, as well as Blade, a character he co-created with writer Marv Wolfman. Colan also contributed work at DC Comics, with the majority of it seen in the pages of “Batman” and “Detective Comics.” Colan's last major achievement came in 2009, contributing to "Captain America" #601 with Ed Brubaker, which was awarded the Eisner Award for Best Single Issue.

CBR will have a full remembrance of Colan on Friday by columnist George Khoury. In the meantime, those looking to learn more about this major artistic talent should read this panel report from 2009’s Comic-Con International, our interview with Colan from 2009 or this extensive interview that looks back on Colan’s career conducted in 2000 .

Visit Comic Book Resources website

Gene Colan [Wikipedia]

"Billy the Kid" tintype and tintypes

"Billy the Kid photo auctioned for $2.3 million"

Private collector William Koch buys the only known tintype of the Old West outlaw. It is believed to have been made in New Mexico around 1880.

June 26th, 2011

Associated Press

What is believed to be the only surviving authenticated portrait of Billy the Kid went up for auction in Denver on Saturday and sold for $2.3 million.

The tintype on Saturday evening went to private collector William Koch at Brian Lebel's 22nd Annual Old West Show & Auction, where auction spokeswoman Melissa McCracken said the image of the 1800s outlaw was the most expensive piece ever sold at the event.

A 15% fee was added to the bidding price, making the selling price more than $2.6 million. Organizers had expected it could fetch between $300,000 and $400,000.

The tintype is believed to have been taken in 1879 or 1880 in Fort Sumner, N.M. It shows the outlaw dressed in a rumpled hat and layers of clothes, including a bulky sweater. He's standing with one hand resting on a Winchester carbine on his right side and a Colt revolver holstered on his left side.

Tintypes were an early form of photography that used metal plates. They are reverse images, and the Billy the Kid tintype led to the mistaken belief that Billy the Kid was a lefty. The myth inspired the 1958 movie "The Left Handed Gun", starring Paul Newman as Billy.

Billy the Kid gave the image to a friend, Dan Dedrick, and the tintype has been owned by his descendants, the Upham family, ever since. It has only been publicly displayed during the 1980s at a museum in Lincoln County, N.M.

McCracken said it's recognizable around the world as a classic image of the Old West.

"There's only one photo of Billy the Kid, and I think that's why it captivates people's imagination," she said before Saturday's auction.

The tintype was auctioned off along with more than 400 other Western-themed items, including documents from Buffalo Bill's aborted divorce, Native American antiquities, and a painting from Andy Warhol's "Cowboys and Indians" series depicting a Navajo woman with a baby on her back.

Recently...

"Billy the Kid Denied Pardon"

No pardon for Billy the Kid; Annie Lennox honored by Queen Elizabeth II; Cee Lo and Gwyneth Paltrow may work together…

No Pardon for Billy the Kid: New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has announced that he won’t grant a pardon to Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid. Billy the Kid, born Henry McCarty, was killed at the age of 21 by Sheriff Pat Garrett 129 years ago. Some Billy the Kid historians say that territorial Gov. Lew Wallace had promised to give the outlaw a pardon about 130 years ago, and that the pledge should be honored regardless of his other crimes. Some members of the Garrett family oppose a pardon. Richardson, who is leaving office, made his announcement on “Good Morning America.” “I’ve decided not to pardon Billy the Kid because of a lack of conclusiveness and the historical ambiguity as to why Governor Wallace reneged on his pardon,” Richardson said. He said it was a “very close call” and he had been working on the case for eight years. “The romanticism appealed to me to issue a pardon, but the facts and the evidence did not support it and I’ve got to be responsible especially when a governor is issuing pardons,” Richardson said.

On tintypes Robert Leggat in 1999 wrote...

The tintype, also known as a ferrotype, is a variation on this, but produced on metallic sheet (not, actually, tin) instead of glass. The plate was coated with collodion and sensitized just before use, as in the wet plate process. It was introduced by Adolphe Alexandre Martin in 1853, and became instantly popular, particularly in the United States, though it was also widely used by street photographers in Great Britain.

That this process appealed to street photographers was not surprising:

The process was simple enough to enable one to set up business without much capital.

It was much faster than other processes of the time: first, the base did not need drying, and secondly, no negative was needed, so it was a one-stage process.

Cheap to produce, a typical price for a tintype was 6d (2 1/2p) and 1 shilling (5p).

Being more robust than ambrotypes it could be carried about, sent in the post, or mounted in an album.

The material could easily be cut up and therefore fitted into lockets, brooches, etc.

The most common size was about the same as the carte-de-visite, 2 1/4'' x 3 1/2'', but both larger and smaller ferrotypes were made. The smallest were "Little Gem" tintypes, about the size of a postage-stamp, made simultaneously on a single plate in a camera with 12 or 16 lenses.

Compared with other processes the tintype tones seem uninteresting. They were often made by unskilled photographers, and their quality was very variable. They do have some significance, however, in that they made photography available to working classes, not just to the more well-to-do. Whereas up till then the taking of a portrait had been more of a special "event" from the introduction of tintypes, we see more relaxed, spontaneous poses.

Some tintypes that remain are somewhat poignant. The one shown here is of a child who has died. If this seems bizarre, it would seem to have been quite a practice in the last century.

In fact, the original name for Tintype was "Melainotype." It is perhaps worth adding that there was no tin in them. Some have suggested that the name after the tin shears used to separate the images from the whole plate, others that it was just a way of saying "cheap metal" (ie non-silver).

The print would come out laterally reversed (as one sees oneself in a mirror); either people did not worry about this, or just possibly they did not discover it until after the photographer had disappeared!

Being quite rugged, tintypes could be sent by post, and many astute tintypists did quite a trade in America during the Civil War, visiting the encampments. Later, some even had their shop on river-boats.

Tintypes were eventually superseded by gelatin emulsion dry plates in the 1880s, though street photographers in various parts of the world continued with this process until the 1950s; the writer well remembers being photographed by one of these street photographers in Argentina, when he was a boy. Eventually, of course, 35mm and Polaroid photography were to replace these entirely.

Tintype [Wikipedia]

And thinking of "old West" photos, is this Wyatt Earp's wife????