The top half of the March 1967 centerfold depicting the 19 year old "Fran Gerard". This photo was taken from Cynthia Blanton's webpage, where it appears in this fashion (i.e., you can't see her nude) and is put up here under the fair use exception. No doubt if the full centerfold was spread out, Camuglia's happy smile would not be what attention was drawn to.
Sort of going down the rabbit hole, I suppose, on this one, but the story is so illustrative of certain things, most of them pretty sad, so it's worth an additional, illustrative, look.
Cynthia Blanton replied to the post here, which was extremely nice of her to do, on her being a doppelganger for Francis Anna Camuglia, the March 1967 Playboy "Playmate", who appeared in that role as Fran Gerard. It turns out that my comment that they were close in age was not only correct, but there's an added freakish element of. The two young women were just eight months apart in age and, while Blanton had not met Camuglia, they had even been schoolmates in the same California high school, Granada Hills High School, prior to Blanton's family moving only shortly before March 1967.
Camuglia's obituary simply notes that she "attended" the school, which causes me to suspect, with nothing to back it up, that she might not have graduated. Her life would likewise suggest she didn't graduate.
The high school still exists, but is a charter school now. It was nearly new then, having opened in 1960. It seems to have consistently been a well regarded high school.
Camuglia was just a teenager when she appeared in Playboy and only barely out of high school. And not only was she only 19 when the photos ran, give the nature of production, she was 18 when they were taken.
One year younger would have made this child pornography.
Not that this would prove to be a deterrent for Playboy. At least two of the Playboy "Playmates" were 17 years old when their photographs were taken, and the magazine knew that at least one of the girls had that young age. They waited to run that girls' 17 year old nude photographs until she turned 18, which would not have made it legal, but rather likely to be undiscovered. Another seems to have lied about her age, although seemingly this could have been checked up on. One girl was specifically run as a recent high school grad who was the "youngest" playmate and getting her high school wish to be a centerfold, when in fact she was 17.
Early on, Playboy was under a serious European threat for advancing pedophilia, although oddly enough from its cartoons. It turns out, however, that it did in fact go as low as it could go, age wise, for nudes, and even lower than legally allowed.
To add to the sadness of this, Camuglia's first husband had divorced her, or vice versa, just a month prior to these running. When he married her he was 37 years old. She was 18.
I don't know the reasons for the divorce, or the marriage. What did an 18 year old see in a 37 year old. I don't know what he saw in her, but her physical attributes were no doubt undeniable. The marriage lasted only seven months and he disappears from the record. A person has to wonder if the Playboy spread brought about the divorce, although that's pure speculation. The odds wouldn't have been good for its survival at any rate, given the odd age disparity.
Her next marriage was in 1970. She would have been 22 years old at that time. Her second husband doesn't seem to be mentioned on her headstone, however, which suggests that she was not married at the time of her death.
Her father died in 2010, and her mother in 2016. Their devotion to each other, and their children, is noted on their headstones.
Undoubtedly another Playboy photograph, but as she more likely actually appeared. Fran Camuglia didn't actually wear glasses. This was taken from an entry on Find A Grave and is likewise put up under the fair use exception.
I don't know where this all goes, but its a sort of morality play on bad decisions, combined with a lack of societal safe guards, and declining public morality. It's perfectly legal for a 37 year old to marry an 18 year old, but it's almost never a good idea. I'd guess her parents opposed it, and we don't know the story behind it. Really short marriages of much older men to teenagers have historically tended to be explained by pregnancy or mistaken belief in pregnancy, and the 18 year old Camuglia could fairly easily pass for an older young woman. Male interest in her can easily be explained by her obvious, apparently, physical assets, something which has apparently caused her to retain a fan base forty years after her tragic death.
It's hard to believe that this story wouldn't have worked out better if Playboy hadn't been around to exploit young women. I'll spare repeating all the details that were given in the documentary on the magazine, but they're horrific. Suicide wasn't limited to Camuglia. Murder was visited on at least one Playmate and visited upon a person by one. According to the documentary one young woman associated with the magazine died at a party and her body simply disappeared. One suicide scrawled her opinion on Hugh Hefner graphically on a wall in the apartment where she killed herself. A host of "bunnies" was used by men at an event physically in a way that traumatized them.
What, if anything, Camuglia endured we don't know. Maybe only having her 18 year old body be the object of, well, for forty decades, which would be odd enough, and which would also contribute to psychic loss.
In 1967 when Camuglia appeared in the magazine, in middle class society the magazine was both accepted and regarded as dirty. It claimed for itself that it managed to become the Stars and Stripes of the Vietnam War, and as grossly exaggerated in Apocalypse Now, it was so accepted by that time that Playmates appearing in the way that movie stars had in World War Two and Korea in the combat theater occurred. Pinup girls didn't appear overseas in the earlier wars, even though they existed.
At the same time, however, the magazine remained a "dirty" magazine and there were legal efforts as late as the 1970s to try to address its obscenity, although they failed. Being n the magazine branded those who did it in ways they could not escape. Whatever happened to Camuglia, she apparently couldn't escape it.
Well, may God rest her soul and may the perpetual light shine upon her, and all who endured such tragedy..
I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article. That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit. I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.
Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:
Blanton with the top part of the "Miss March" centerfold. This is directly linked to her blog. I'm using the fair use and commentary exception to copyright, but I don't own the rights to post this and will immediately take it down if asked.
Miss March holding her own centerfold?
No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.
The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing. Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt. She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph. Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar. Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy. Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.
So why am I posting this here? Cute story?
I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does. But we're posting this for other reasons.
Gerard is apparently a famous Playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted. The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy. That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.
And that's the reason we're noting her.
She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family. By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life. If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be. She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.
In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.
Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico. She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.
At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age. Camuglia was born in March 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that. Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.
Blanton went on to success. Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.
The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy. In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker. It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.
What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be. Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through. Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.
I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either. Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links. That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew. There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people. Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.
Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".
1944 The USS Goshen, originally named the Sea Hare, commissioned. She was a fast attack transport.
The USS Goshen was sold in 1947 to American Mail Lines Ltd and renamed Canada Mail. In 1963 her name was changed to California Mail. In 1968, she was sold to Waterman Steamship, re-registered as the La Fayette. She was scrapped in 1973.
The US prevailed in the Battle of Metz.
The First Battle of Kesternich began on the German border with Belgium.
The Battle of Mindoro began in the Philippines
The Myōkō was damaged beyond repair by the USS Bergall.
The USS Nashville was severely damaged off Negros Island by a kamikaze attack.
The U-365 was sunk in the Artic Ocean by a Fairey Swordfish.
The former Emperor of China, Puyi, was expelled from the Forbidden City by Gen. Feng Yuxiang who unilaterally revoked the Articles of Favourable Treatment of the Great Qing Emperor after His Abdication
Puyi lived a tragic life, having been born into the anachronism of the Chinese Empire at a time it was collapsing. He'd go on to be Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, a prisoner of the Soviet Union, a prisoner of the Red Chinese, and finally, a gardener. He died in 1967 at age 61.
President Coolidge made a Thanksgiving proclamation:
The U.S. M3 Scout Car was produced by White Motor Company from 1939 to 1944. The early version, the M3, was made in only limited numbers, but the successor M3A1 was fairly widely produced.
Envisioned as a cavalry vehicle, it really wasn't up to the task and therefore while produced, it was arguably obsolete from the onset.
The M8 was introduced in 1943 and picked up where the M3 left off, being a much more combat worthy vehicle. It remained in service into the 1950s in the US but had a long life in other countries, with some still being used.
The M20 Armored Utility Car was another US armored vehicle that came in and supplemented the M3.
On the occasion of the reintroduction of the Scout, an example of their very first model, which was manufactured from 1965 to 1970. They were somewhat smaller than the Jeep CJ-5 of the same vintage.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
The government issued the Warren Report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and that Kennedy had been inadequately protected during his November 22, 1963, visit to Dallas.
US troops rescued sixty Vietnamese hostages and seized the main camp of Montagnard rebels operating at Buon Sar Pa.
Bob Denver, who had previously been portrayed as a beatnik, played the title role. He'd been previously known for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. All of the actors in the short run series ended up typecast, in cluding the talented Alan Hale, Jr.
UPI critic Rick Dubrow commented: "It is impossible that a more inept, moronic or humorless show has ever appeared on the home tube."
As a kid, I'd often watch the show, already in syndication, when I got home from school.
Rebels in the Congo rounded up of all foreigners trapped in Stanleyville and Paulis.
The "High National Council" was installed to function as the legislature for South Vietnam.
Somehow, Pvt. Pyle managed never to be deployed to Vietnam, and seemingly, with the exception of one single episode I can think of, remain in the Pre Vietnam War era entirely.
President Johnson and Mexican President López Mateos shook hands on the International Bridge at El Paso. Later that day President Johnson flew to Oklahoma for the dedication of the new Eufaula Dam and spoke about the Vietnam War, stating: "There are those that say you ought to go north and drop bombs, to try to wipe out the supply lines, and they think that would escalate the war. We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys."
FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) launched the Mozambican War of Independence.
The youth hostel movement was born when a group of hikers lead by Richard Schirrmann found shelter in a school in a thunderstorm.
Schirrmann was a teacher as well as an outdoorsman. During World War One he served in the German Army, participating the 1915 Christmas truce, something that lingered in his area for quite some time after Christmas. He founded the Youth Hostel Association in 1919 and founded the children's village "Staumühle" on a former military training ground near Paderborn, where my German ancestors hail from. HE served as the President of the International Youth Hostelling Associating until the Nazis forced him to resign and put the control of the hostels under the Hitler Youth in 1936. He rebuilt the association after the war. He married late, in 1942, but had six children with his wife before dying in 1961 at age 87.
The SS Cartago telegraphed a report of a hurricane near the Yucatan, the first radio warning of a tropical storm.
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