Sting-Ray Afternoons by Steve Rushin

Author:Steve Rushin [Rushin, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-07-02T23:00:00+00:00

Dad’s turn-ons include black coffee, televised college football, and Milk Duds. And drawing, apparently. Two Christmases from now I’ll get a large hardcover book inscribed to me from Dad. It’s called Fun with a Pencil by Andrew Loomis. “I had this when I was a kid,” he’ll say, and something in his expression will tell me that he had this—and only this—when he was a kid.

The instructional book was published in 1939 and is filled with the most amazing pencil sketches of that age—gangsters in double-breasted suits, cardsharps in green eyeshades, prizefighting palookas, icemen, beat cops, grannies. In a section called “Let’s Mix Up the Races,” an African man in a loincloth stares at a toothbrush, a cartoon question mark floating above his head. This collection of cultural stereotypes—a Chinese coolie, an American Indian chief smoking a peace pipe, a mustachioed Italian man singing opera—was Dad’s first view of the wider world beyond Fort Wayne, Indiana, before Mickey Mining and the 747 conspired to show him what it looked like firsthand.

At the back of the book, as at the back of Pik-Quik, are pictures of women in various stages of undress. Two full pages are headed “Vamps” and “More Vamps”: a bare-bottomed, bare-breasted Eve batting her lashes at Adam; a topless burlesque dancer covering herself with a feathered fan; a Hollywood starlet prone on a bearskin rug.

It scarcely matters that they’re drawings. These are the first boobs I have ever seen, if you don’t count the trick in which punching 5318008 into a calculator and turning it upside down reveals BOOBIES. 710 77345 inverted on the calculator becomes SHELL OIL, but that trick doesn’t fascinate us in quite the same way that BOOBIES does.

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