Tales discovered while searching for other stuff.
Music to my ears
JULIUS F. STONE says that rehabilitating Key West for the FERA has its ups and down.He gives an example.
His staff had renovated a famous old sea-captain’s home down there in order to rent it to visitors. Stone rented the first floor apartment to a well-known detective story writer for pulp magazines. He rented the top story apartment to a famous poet.
One day the poet dragged into his office. He looked on the verge of hysterics and he protested, “You’ve got to move me. I simply can’t live above that word factory.”(Turn the volume up and play the video to see what he meant)
Powder Puff Westerns
Guitars and romance have softened westerns alarmingly, but nothing has so affected the morale of sage brush actors as the discovery that trusty six-guns are shooting talcum powder these days.
This humiliating development was worked out by Producer Harry Sherman and his prop man for the “Cherokee Strip” company. The explosion of ordinary black powder in blank cartridges doesn’t photograph well; looks like a cloud of soot.
A wispy gray curl of smoke, as described in the pulp magazines, was what they wanted. They got it by dropping a pinch of talcum between the paper waddings of the shells. Any day now, they may add a little perfume so that the villain won’t gag on the acrid fumes.
Coincidence
Good coincidence stories, verifiably true, are rarer than you’d think. Here’s one, which sounds like the invention of a feebleminded press agent, but which chances to be fact.
Recently Daisy Bacon, editress of one of the more romantic pulp paper magazines was presented one evening with a black kitten by a friend named Ainslee. She named the feline Ainslee in commemoration.
Next morning at 9 her desk telephone rang and she was informed that the once famous Ainslee’s Magazine was to be revived and that she had been picked as pilot.
