Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

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".

Related threads:

Secrets of Playboy

Sunday, November 17, 1974. Greek democracy restored.

The Greek New Democracy Party won the first Greek parliamentary election since 1964 and the first since the fall of the Greek military junta.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 8, 1974. WIN

Labels: 1970s, 1974, Commentary, Economics, Gerald Ford, inflation, Ronald Reagan, The Great Inflation, the spoken word

Saturday, July 19, 1924. Birth of Stan Hathaway.

Argentinian police and ranchers killed 400 indigenous people of the Toba and Mocoví native groups following heighted tensions between the native groups and ranchers which had lead to livestock killing.

Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler was chosen as the VP candidate for the Progressive Party.

Stan Hathaway, Governor of Wyoming from 1967 to 1975,and briefly Secretary of the Interior, was born in Osceola, Nebraska.

Hathaway, whom I saw argue in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court many years ago, was the fifth of six children born to Lily (Koehler) and Robert C. Knapp.  He was raised and adopted by a cousin and her husband, Velma and Frank Hathaway, following his mother's death, on their farm near Huntley Wyoming.  He served on a B-17 in World War Two as a radioman, and was shot down over occupied France where he avoided capture with the crew through the assistance of the French Resistance.  He term of Governor was marked by the passage of environmental laws and the enactment of the first mineral severance tax in Wyoming and the creation of the Trust Fund from the same.

He was a great Governor who would no doubt be constantly attacked as being a RINO by populist who think they're Republicans today.  

Hathaway was an Episcopalian for most of his life, but late in life, converted to Catholicism.

Last edition:

Friday, July 18, 1924. The Murder of Robert Imbrie.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Baháʼí, Iran, Persia

Monday, March 4, 1974. Suez.

Israel completed the first phase of its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula 24 hours ahead of schedule. This gave Egypt control of both sides of the Suez Canal for the first time since 1967.

Last prior:

Sunday, February 24, 1974. Advent of Fireforce, getting mad at Confucious.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. Accidental Legal Muse.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303

 

Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.

Eh?

Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four  years old.  How could this be?

Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.

From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty.  Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps.  He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one.  It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.

Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure.  Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate.  He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.

What's that have to do with law school?

Well, this.

In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class.  I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon.  I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.

That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.

Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort.  I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy.  I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.

Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound.  Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.

Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".

The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"?  That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer.  I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned.  It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.

And hence the seed was planted.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

In an anticlimactic footnote to the Siege of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese Army raised the flag above the outpost that had been abandoned by the United States on July 5.

Khe Sanh bunkers

The entire affair became symbolic for many for the state of the Vietnam War. The US had occupied an interior position, much like the French had at Dien Bien Phu, and then held it against what turned out to be a giant feint in order not to suffer the same humiliating defeat that the French had earlier.  In the meantime, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive and the combined impact of everything made the NVA and VC look to be a much more potent force than they really were.  Having said that, the NVA assault on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh was an impressive feat involving moving a large number of men, including artillery, through the jungle without being detected.

The siege commenced on January 21, 1968 and ran all through the Tet Offensive and into the Spring with President Johnson ordering that the base not be allowed to fall after the base was quickly surrounded.  Air support to the surrounded base was massive.  Ground fighting on the neighboring hills was sometimes intensive. 

The 1st Cavalry advancing in Operation Pegasus.

In March of that year Operation Pegasus was commenced, over Marine Corps objection, to relieve the base, which the Marines asserted was not in need of relief.  By mid April the 1st Cavalry Division had reopened the highway and declared the base no longer surrounded.  On April 15 the Marines followed on the Army's Operation Pegasus with Operation Scotland II to clear the area around Khe Sanh. That operation continued into February 1969, but in the meantime the Marines withdrew from Khe Sanh in July, 1968.

Marine Corps memorial service for fallen American and South Vietnamese servicemen on June 19, 1968 the day the abandonment of the base commenced.

Operation Charlie, the withdrawal from the base at Khe Sanh was commenced on June 19, 1968 and was conducted at night.  Hill 689, near Khe Sanh, was occupied for a few days after Khe Sanh itself was evacuated.  On this day, the NVA occupied Khe Sanh. While the military declared the ongoing occupation of Khe Sanh pointless in the conditions that followed Tet, the Press was not kind to the US military after the occupation was learned of. Less well known is that the Khe Sanh plateau continued to be patrolled by the Marines, lending credence to the changed American view on the importance of the base, if not the overall American assessment of the strategic situation in 1967 and 1968.

Khe Sanh was actually reoccupied in 1971, a fact that's rarely noted, by the ARVN and the US in Operation Dewey Canyon II and subsequently used for a jumping off point for the ARVN in the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 offensive.  That latter offensive turned disastrous for the ARVN in Laos and the base was abandoned for good on April 6, 1971.

Sunday, June 21, 1914. A warning.

Serbia warned Austria of intelligence reports suggesting there would be an assassination attempt on Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he visited Sarajevo.

Serbian diplomat Jovan Jovanović Pižon who delivered the warning, which was ignored.

Montana miners left the IWW and formed the Western Federation of Miners.  The union dissolved in 1967 in the US, and 1993 in Canada.

Last prior edition:

Thursday. June 18, 1914. Wolves and their prey.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, 1940s, 1943, actors and actresses, Bai Lang Rebellion, China, Italian Empire, Italy, Monarchy, Republic of China (Beiyang government)