{"id":2012,"date":"2012-12-09T15:51:13","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T20:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/?p=2012"},"modified":"2012-12-09T15:51:13","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T20:51:13","slug":"just-a-lifetime-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/2012\/12\/09\/just-a-lifetime-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Just a lifetime ago…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Argosy,You may have heard or seen the news last week that Besse Cooper<\/a><\/strong> died at the age of 116 on Dec. 4 in Monroe, Ga. As far as I know, she had no direct connection with the pulps.<\/p>\n

She was the world’s verifiably oldest person at the time of her death. She was born in Sullivan County, Tenn., on Aug. 26, 1896.<\/p>\n

That last part \u2014 1896 \u2014 jumped out at me when I was reading about her. That’s the same year that Frank Munsey<\/a><\/strong> introduced the revamped Argosy<\/em><\/a> magazine in an all-fiction format that became known as a pulp magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Ms. Cooper’s birth, the October 1896 number of Argosy<\/em> hit the newsstands.<\/p>\n

The Wikipedia entry says that Ms. Cooper enjoyed reading. I’d like to imagine that, despite being busy teaching and raising children, she may have picked up a pulp to read now and again. It’s possible. (Hopefully she didn’t turn up her nose at the thought.)<\/p>\n

The pulp magazines spanned the period between 1896 and the late 1950s (though a few stragglers, Ranch Romances<\/em><\/a> in particular, lived beyond their contemporaries as did Ms. Cooper).<\/p>\n

For those of us who weren’t living through the 1950s, that period seems long ago.<\/p>\n

But October 1896 \u2014 that seems like ancient history. It was, after all, only 31 years after the American Civil War.<\/p>\n

In reality, October 1896 was just a lifetime ago \u2014 a very long lifetime, granted \u2014 but maybe not as distant as we often think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have heard or seen the news last week that Besse Cooper died at the age of 116 on Dec. 4 in Monroe, Ga. As far as I know, she had no direct connection with the pulps. She was the world’s verifiably oldest person at the time of her death. She was born in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[5,9,11],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-2012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-people","category-pulps"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2qgXO-ws","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2012"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2018,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2012\/revisions\/2018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2012"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=2012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}