Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

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T _M_his afternoon, while our two small children were napping, my wife and I went down to the basement to see if we could ferret out the three (or was it four?) boxes of Christmas tree ornaments we had stored away last January. If your basement is anything like ours, then you can probably imagine what happened to us — at least the beginning of it. We hadn't been there five minutes when the only light in the place blew its brains out, plunging us into total darkness. While I fumbled about in vain for a flashlight, my wife (the practical member of our family) made her way cautiously towards the steps, intent on getting a new bulb upstairs. Fate, however, had a detour planned, and instead of guiding her foot onto the first step, it guided it onto a collapsed old baby-stroller. From where I stood at the far end of the cellar all I heard was a dull thump and then a long relentless moaning. Somehow, despite the pitch blackness, I was suddenly able to make things out quite clearly. Maybe my eyes had adjusted to the dark, or maybe there is, after all, some extra candle-power within us which, in times of extreme necessity, casts its own ray of light. Whatever the explanation, I reached my wife in a flash to find her lying motionless, flat on her face. I bent down. "Can you get up?" I whispered. "Of course I can!" she said, leaping to her feet and dusting herself off. "You mean you aren't hurt? From the way you were moaning I thought — " "I wasn't moaning," she said, looking at me sheepishly. "I was cursing. You know I never curse out loud. Now let's get a light down here so we can see what we're doing. If it hadn't been for that pile of old magazines I might really have conked myself." That pile of old magazines that had broken her fall against the hard concrete floor, those wonderful soft old paper magazines (which I had been too lazy to burn) were, we discovered when we came back with a light bulb five minutes later, movie magazines — a bunch of old Hollywood Yearbooks, Hollywood Romances, Screen Albums, and a complete collection of Modern Screens going back to 1950. All of which proves what I've been saying ever since I became an editor: If you want to stay healthy, happy and safe in this dark cruel world buy lots and lots of Modern Screens1. They saved my wife, and they might save you. But seriously, when we'd pulled ourselves together, Astrid insisted we put the baby-stroller in a safe place (the garbage), and straighten out the magazines, which were scattered around like cards in a game of 52-Pick-Up. I got a cardboard carton and we started piling them in when suddenly she turned to me out of the blue and said, "Guess when Eddie walked out on Debbie?" "In the morning?" I said. "C'mon, really, when?" she insisted.