captainsblog | Pining for the fjords?!?

There were some pretty amazing fact articles in the June 1 New Yorker, among them Atul Gawande's analysis of the current health-care system in this country and what's wrong with it, but also a lovely piece about a 1930s health-care scare related to the sudden appearance in this country back then of dead parrots.

The author traces the history of pathology, immunology and a lot of the rather specious connections between the then-popular media and the advertisers who preyed off the fears of the public in connection with dread diseases such as psittacosis passed from Polly to (it later developed) only the closest of Polly's human companions. One of the main perpetrators of such stories turned out to be a name I recognized from my own childhood:

Perhaps the era's most effective pro-science publicity machine was the Science Service, a wire service founded in 1920 and edited by a chemist named Edwin E. Slosson. Its purpose was to promote scientific research by feeding stories to newspapers. The service, Slosson said, would not "indulge in propaganda inless it be propaganda to urge the value of research and the usefullness of science."

The piece noted the involvement of the newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps, whose papers still live on in many parts of the country; it did not note the propaganda effort that I remember being a willing participant in as late as the early 1970s, which was known as the Science Program.

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From societyforscience.org:

Edward W. Scripps, a renowned journalist, and William Emerson Ritter, a California zoologist, founded the Science Service in 1921 with the goal of keeping the public informed of scientific achievements. Scripps funded the project and Ritter served as the first scientific director.

Although Scripps died in 1926, Watson Davis continued to lead the editorial staff of the Science News-Letter. That year, this simple newsletter attracted enough readers that the staff decided to reformat it to be a magazine. Filling 14 mimeographed pages, the magazine featured articles on astronomy, pneumonia vaccines, soil chemistry, and more. It quickly grew into a primary source of science news, eliciting numerous requests from libraries, schools, and individuals for direct access to the reports. As a printed publication Science News-Letter reported on the early days of atomic energy, the beginnings of modern genetics, and many other developments. Its solid coverage helped make science reporting acceptable and respectable in both newspaper and science circles.

All of this was well and good among the believers, but for skullfuls of mush like mine own, there was this effort, promoted, no doubt, in the back of comic books, scout magazines and/or Weekly Readers:

The Science Program was published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc., with the help of the Science Service. These books, called 'albums,' were sold as a subscription service and delivered monthly. The books themselves were printed in two colors, but gummed sticker full-color photos were distributed with each book, numbered according to blanks found within the book, to be applied by the reader.

As best as I can gauge without specifics, the Science Program began in the late 1950s, and continued into the 1970s. The internal contents of the books varied little, although addendums and corrections were often stapled into the booklet's center along with the image stickers.

That article goes on to display a number of the "albums" which were sent out to Junior G(eek)-Men like myself in that era. These, at least, are among the ones I remember duly receiving and pasting my stickers into:

A little too down-to-earth for my eye-to-the-sky mind of the Apollo era, but I found the rock sample stories pretty cool anyway.

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Ah, now that's more like it. We were spending billions to get there, so it was nice to have a four-dollar souvenir which, unlike moon rocks, was actually legal to possess.

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I read this shit long before even becoming conversant in the original Star Trek. It certainly didn't hurt my acquisition of canon, other than its lack of reference to green-skinned sluts or Tribbles.

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"I can explain that, Sir. I was an idiot for scientific-community propaganda."

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Yet my fondest memory of all of them was one sticker from this one:

It showed an open-heart surgery procedure being performed, with a doctor and nurse present. Beneath cap and mask, the nurse looked sufficiently like my oldest sister to pass for her, and she did have the necessary O.R. training in the late 60s for it, plausibly, to have been her. In my mind, the album and the sister both being long gone, it still is her.

If all goes well this weekend, I will get to see both of her children, and all two-and-two-thirds of Sandy's grandchildren, which is about as amazing a discovery as any set of stickers could approximate in my mind.