How Kelly flipped Matt's van

Never having rolled over a car myself, thank God, I had to do some research on exactly what would happen when Kelly fell asleep at the wheel. The U.S. Department of Transportation has some helpful animated videos that show the whole process of accidentally driving up a guardrail,  plus several others. They're not embeddable but you can watch them all here.

More from Dr Buchmann

Download the whole story FREE here in the Kindle store.

From my new free short story

Download it free for Kindle, here.

New FREE Christmas short story

Dr. Buchmann's spending a working Christmas holiday in London, inventorying the lab of the late Dr. Jekyll -- and he can't help continuing the other doctor's experiments.

Of course, he needs a subject, someone who won't be missed even at Christmas. And of course he finds just the man at Scrooge and Marley.

Yes, it's ridiculous crossover, and it's all done in overwrought Victorian style prose. And it's free in the Kindle store -- click here.

Is FUN short for fundamentalist?

"The FUN Man" ran this ad in some '50s comic. Apart from the weirdness of serve the Lord/get prizes (two masters, anyone?), it's also notable that the ad doesn't show the "inspiring, beautiful Religious Wall Motto plaques" that are supposed to be so easy to sell.

The FUN Man's address in Chicago was later occupied by So Good Accessories, now closed.

"Once dreaded by every woman"

Making buttonholes. Shudder.

My mom learned to make buttonholes by hand in school. The readers of Wanted Comics (or their mothers?) seem to be resigned to leaving it to the professionals -- unless they can seize hold of a new technology.

Actually, I wish it were still possible to darn socks -- it'd be better than trying to find a use for the ones that wear right through in one or two spots while the rest of them  are still fairly new.

Letting 'em think they can make money

This is a small but important part of the make-money-selling-greeting-cards ad: Salespeople's alleged earnings. It says right at the top that these are "exceptional earning records", so it's got "results not typical" built in. Still, how many readers would've thought of it that way? And how many would've understood "exceptional" to mean "not typical" instead of just "pretty good, by gosh"?
Nobody's full name given, of course, just initials. Interesting regional distribution, also: One from the East, one from the West, all the rest, like the Cussans' customer base, from the Midwest.

The ad that made the landlord so mad

I searched vintage magazines and comics online, but couldn't find an ad quite like the Cussans', though there used to be so many of them (you'll just have to take my word for it if you're not old enough to remember.) 

So I reconstructed what it might've looked like, or what it'd look like by now, faded paper and all. 

The craft-at-home ads always ran under "of interest to women" rather than "of interest to all."

So much for the front pages of old comic books

In the back pages you'd find mostly dubious ads for impossibly cheap, impossibly cool novelties and "easy" moneymaking "opportunities."

Though this one is from the '50s, ads just like it were still running in Kelly's childhood. And $50 was still a lot of money then.

The Cussans' business was much more small time and less legal, and they could only dream of running a full-page ad like this.  

(From the Digital Comics Museum)

More from Lindsey's old comic book

Being forced to listen to how Evelyn Ellis and her gang "ran wild until the stern hand of the law wrote finis to their evil careers" would be . . . about what Kelly deserves. 

The overwrought prose of the narration boxes is equaled only by the sanitized criminal slang of the dialog: "You mean to tell me these two-bit punks are the hard boys you were bragging about?" "Pipe da new chicken! Wot's the matter . . . lost yer wings?"

The Digital Comics Museum's worked hard to let us read stuff like this that otherwise would be lost, so give it a visit sometime.

Pauley Perrette as "Nurse" Breanna

From her time on NCIS, she'd come across as both edgy and competent.

This photo's from her participation in The Heart Truth, an NIH program to make sure women know yes, they can get heart attacks. (Family history is a bigger factor than we'd like to think.) 

Since red dresses always get attention, each February during Fashion Week a collection of them is brought out and modeled by celebrities.

Mädchen Amick for Kelly's (flashback) mom

HHS photo

Mädchen Amick (aka Alice Cooper, no, not that one, but Betty's mother in Riverdale) has experience playing residents of quirky small towns. She could be a convincing 1970s mom, especially to a little girl who grows up into Beverley Breuer. Also a convincing partner in crime to Shea Whigham.

More fantasy casting for the County movie

via IMDB

Kelly's a tough one to cast, but I think Beverley Breuer of Riverdale would be good, after seeing her as Sister-of-Silent-Mercy Woodhouse, who tries to pass herself off as a nice aging lady. That's how Kelly rolls.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia. CC

Next, for "Dr." Matt, the head of the Facility, Diedrich Bader of American Housewife . . .

NASA photo

Well, okay, I originally figured on Shea Whigham for Matt, but now I think he'd do better playing Kelly's father in the flashbacks. He was in First Man and would be able to play someone from that era again. Also goes to show how alike Matt and Kelly's dad really are. 

Some fantasy casting for the (unplanned) Onbekend County movie

Photo by GabboT via Wikimedia Commons

Melissa Leo would be great as Nora --  I know her coloring isn't exactly right, but she first came to my notice in Frozen River as an ordinary woman driving recklessly through rural New York State in a desperate attempt to make a few bucks. That film brought back memories of a place I'd lived in once, where living in a trailer didn't (necessarily) make you trash but was sometimes just the most practical way. And maybe those memories, some of them painful, were the beginning of Onbekend County.

The Facility's Past Lives, # 8

by Steppinstars via Pixabay

Finally, the building came full circle to be a hunting lodge again -- not for "some rich guy" and his friends this time, but for paying guests. 

This would've been after Kelly's and Nora's childhood expedition to the place; it was fixed up extensively before being closed up again and eventually turned into the Facility.