November 10th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Bare-Assed Cheerleader, 1964
This is another one of those images that usually floats around without attribution:
I got tired of seeing it loose in the wild with no collar on, so I tracked it down to the cover of National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, which credits it to photographer Vince Alosa. Sometimes I feel like my job is to wander the cyberwilds with a dart gun, stalking feral imagery and tagging it with metadata…
Looking a second time at the image, I wonder at the “K” letters on the cheer sweaters. Is the “K-K-K” a coincidence, or a Klan reference? Perhaps there’s additional content in the magazine that sheds some light; if so, no doubt an ErosBlog reader who has seen the mag will chime in and enlighten us.
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Someone has kindly posted a PDF of the whole thing. I haven’t looked at it all, but it looks like one of those drive-by visual jokes the Lampoon enjoyed making, without any follow-up. The book is a fictional artifact from “Kefauver High”. Estes Kefauver was a career liberal and New Dealer, so I don’t think it was a pointed dig at anyone in particular, maybe a dig at upper-middle-class mostly-white high school cliquishness at most.
This said, there’s also a picture of the hall monitors, wearing smart Sam Browne belts and colored armbands with white circles on them (presumably with a K inside, but the scan isn’t that good).
National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody
“The book, as it was originally published, appeared to be a genuine yearbook from “C. Estes Kefauver High School” in “Dacron, Ohio” (a reference to the city Akron, Ohio,[1] and to inexpensive synthetic fabric Dacron.)”
I literally saw this image the first time because my Dad stashed that parody mag under his bed where he would store his Playboys and (occasional) Penthouse. I later found out he left them there intentionally as a formative experience for his 12-year-old son (me). He couldn’t talk to me much about sex, but he did what he could, including letting me see that (amazing) image. Note that this was just after _Animal House_ came out (which he also let me see), when National Lampoon was at the peak of their powers.
Funny you should mention Animal House. True story, my working theory when I first started researching the source of this image was that it might be a screen capture from one of the Animal House movies; I didn’t remember any such scene but it’s been a LONG time and the spirit seemed right.
Your question about the K and the possible connection to the Klan is right up there with the level of misunderstanding shown at the World Series game last year when fans were putting K signs on the railing after every strike out. Twitter began freaking out when the third strike out garnered a third K on the railing. It was laughable to see this explosion in public by people who had no idea what they were seeing.
I knew P.J. O’Rourke back in college days and later when he was the editor of the National Lampoon and the driving force for this high school yearbook parody. I still know him. We all knew who Estes Kefauver was and thought the idea of a high school named for him was hilarious. Forty years later we see how topical humor doesn’t last because the current generation doesn’t get the reference. Now we have current thinking that allows some to assume a symbol may represent something that never occurred to the creator of that image. Even Kefauver is no longer funny; largely because he’s dead but also because he’s been replaced by other politicians who look stupid when they speak in public.
You looked at the image, but you don’t seem to have looked at the book. It is brilliant. The names are a huge part of the brilliance: the principal’s name was Dr. Humphrey C. Corhnolt, the class slut was Maria Theresa Spermatozoa; Larry Kroger was the naive kid and this name was later used in Animal House, Purdy Lee Spackle (Psycho) the one who will end up in prison, and the goofy Senator from Arkansas was the namesake for a fictional high school. Dacron was a mashup of Dayton and Akron and there are many other great names in the book. The small town ads in the back of the book look just like the ads that were in my yearbooks in high school. The National Lampoon had a good run and the yearbook is one of the best humor efforts of the Boomer generation. But it now has to be annotated, like The Canterbury Tales, so that modern reader can understand it.
I’m not sure why it’s laughable when someone who lacks the context to understand a joke, fails to understand the joke. But otherwise, I appreciate your explaining some of what’s going on in that deeply obscure yearbook parody.