Category:
1950s
1950s
Miss U.S. Television
The Miss America pageant has been conducted since 1921, but it's only been televised since 1954. Before then, it briefly had competition when the Miss U.S. Television contest, conducted by the DuMont Television Network, aired in 1950. Watch the full pageant at the internet archive, or a version edited for length below. It has a strange opening segment in which the contestants introduce themselves, framed by a fake TV set. Then they go on to their talent performances, some of which were truly awful. The winner was a young Edie Adams.According to wikipedia, the Miss U.S. Television contest only took place once, but there must have been subsequent pageants that used the same title, since once can find women being crowned Miss U.S. Television in later years, such as Phyllis Maygers (below), who won the title in 1952.
Posted By: Alex - Sun Oct 28, 2012 -
Comments (5)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Television, 1950s
Second Shortest Man in the Air Force
This picture and caption ran in papers back in October 1951. It's not clear why it was considered newsworthy. It also left unanswered the question of who the shortest man in the Air Force was, if Sgt. Perkins was the second shortest.
Posted By: Alex - Thu Oct 25, 2012 -
Comments (10)
Category: Military, 1950s
An Icicle That Looks Like A Bird
It must have been a slow news day when this photo ran in papers back in 1959. The icicle that looks like a bird was found outside a Detroit home.
Posted By: Alex - Fri Oct 19, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category: Freaks, Oddities, Quirks of Nature, Nature, Weather, 1950s
Prehistoric Women
Wikipedia offers this summary of the 1950 film Prehistoric Women:
Prehistoric Women is a 1950 science fiction adventure film, written and directed by Gregg C. Tallas and starring Laurette Luez and Allan Nixon... Tigri (Luez) and her stone age friends, all of which are women, hate all men. However, she and her Amazon tribe see men as a "necessary evil" and capture them for potential husbands. Engor (Nixon), who is smarter than the rest of the men, is able to escape them. He discovers fire and battles enormous beasts. After he is recaptured by the women, he discovers fire and drives off a dragon-like creature. The women are impressed with him, including their prehistoric queen. Engor marries Tigri and they begin a new, more civilized, tribe.
It seems like the kind of movie that might be so bad it's good. But PopMatters warns that, though you might hope it would have some cheeseball value, it's "actually not very good." If you watch the clip below of the catfight scene, you'll probably have seen the highlight of the movie.
Posted By: Alex - Sat Oct 13, 2012 -
Comments (3)
Category: Movies, 1950s
Babette Goes to War
Brigitte Bardot fights Nazis! Possibly an inspiration for both Hogan's Heroes and Private Benjamin...?
Posted By: Paul - Thu Oct 11, 2012 -
Comments (6)
Category: Humor, Movies, Sex Symbols, 1950s
Classes in Store Windows
With school budgets constantly declining, maybe this is a money-saving solution that should be reconsidered. Stop building new schools and conduct classes in store windows instead.
[From Newsweek, April 6, 1953]
Posted By: Alex - Wed Oct 10, 2012 -
Comments (5)
Category: School, 1950s
Welcome to Cumback
Of all the towns in America, why did they choose to feature Cumback in their ad? Or was 1958 a more innocent, pre-internet era when the term 'cumback' didn't have the same connotations (see Urban Dictionary) that it does today ?
Posted By: Alex - Tue Oct 02, 2012 -
Comments (9)
Category: Geography and Maps, Weird Names, Advertising, 1950s
I’d Give My Panties for a Crippled Kid
1952 was the year that the panty raid craze hit campuses across America. One of the primary goals of the raids was to cause chaos and commotion (and grab panties, of course), but a few students at the University of Idaho decided to use the raids to achieve a greater social good. They conducted a "reverse" panty-raid. This involved showing up, "whoopin' and hollerin," in the middle of the night at a female dormitory, and then they auctioned off panties to the girls, instead of stealing panties from them. They donated all the proceeds of the auction to the Crippled Children's Fund. It was a nice gesture, but the slogan they chose for the event, "I'd Give My Panties for a Crippled Kid," probably wouldn't pass muster with the guardians of political correctness on campuses today.
Posted By: Alex - Sat Sep 29, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category: Charities and Philanthropy, Fads, 1950s
How Not To Model Stockings
This picture ran in the January 1953 issue of Newsweek with the following caption:
Five young women at a West German fashion show wear these enveloping hoods both to direct spectators' attention to their legs and to spell out the brand name — Elbeo — of their stockings.
Elbeo is still in business, and still selling stockings. Could it seriously never have occurred to anyone there that their fashion show, with "enveloping hoods," was going to look an awful lot like a Klan rally?
Posted By: Alex - Thu Sep 20, 2012 -
Comments (7)
Category: Fashion, 1950s
Your Brain on Mescaline
In the early 1950s, German photographer Leif Geiges created a series of abstract images in order to try to portray "exactly what the mescaline subject sees and hears during the course of his artificial psychosis" — as Newsweek put it, which ran his images in its Feb 23, 1953 issue. This was before mescaline was made illegal, back when psychiatrists still believed that the experience of taking mescaline approximated the mental state of a schizophrenic and therefore could be of great experimental value.As for the mescaline imagery itself, Newsweek explained:
On taking mescaline, first there is nausea, but this is soon followed by a derangement of the brain centers of sight and sound, which causes a constant stream of scenes of incredible beauty, color, grandeur, and variety. The contents of the hallucinations always jibe with past experiences; they are wish-fulfilling fantasies (an air pilot sees mechanical dream cities; an ex-archeologist, mythological people and monsters). The form most frequently perceived is a tapestry, such as a wall-paper pattern that breaks into grotesque shapes. Other familiar forms are (1) lattice work of checkerboards, (2) spirals, (3) tunnels, funnels, alleys, and cones. The mescaline action begins 30 minutes after taking and lasts from ten to twelve hours.
"Wallpaper patterns come to life, change to demoniac caricatures, threaten immediate destruction"
More in extended >>
Posted By: Alex - Tue Sep 18, 2012 -
Comments (12)
Category: Dreams and Nightmares, Drugs, Psychedelic, Photography and Photographers, Science, 1950s, Brain, Mental Health and Insanity
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |