This Week's Letter
Dear Sirs,
Please accept my check for $5.00 and place me on your mailing list if this is included.
Also, please find enclosed a possible suggestion for fund raising purposes from a tabloid I receive fortnightly. Hope you can use it,
Sincerely,
J-redacted
Editor's Note
This week's mail comes undated, but was located in a folder named 1976-78. The included suggestion reads as follows:
UNDERESTIMATING TASTE: To raise money for a Stanford University literary magazine, editor Michael Smith sponsored a night of film classics featuring Casablanca, A Man For All Seasons, and On The Waterfront. The admission was $1 and the loss was $200. Next, Smith raised the price to $1.50 and presented Behind The Green Door featuring the sexual exploits of Marilyn Chambers, the former Ivory Snow girl. The profit was $1,200, enough to underwrite more than half a year's publication costs.
Lots to unpack there.
Moneysworth was a magazine published from 1970-1987 by Ralph Ginzburg, notable at the time for on ongoing criminal obscenity conviction that wound up being sustained by the Supreme Court, involving his magazine Eros.
The notion to host an adult film festival as a fundraiser was not as hair-brained as might be imagined. At the time adult film and adult theaters were not uncommon in large cities and Houston was no exception. Although no definitive count is available to this writer, at least four such locations served the market inside the loop in the late 70s.
Regardless of the fleeting rise of pornography into semi-mainstream theatrical release KPFT did NOT, in fact, take up the erstwhile advice to raise money from such an event.
As always, comments, corrections, and additions are welcome. Contact Us
About The Mailbag
The letters posted here were among the boxes recovered from 419 Lovett Blvd, as documented in The Mighty 90 Project post and are reminiscent of the work done at Found Magazine and PostSecret. The vast majority of letters date from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, although some newer materials of more recent vintage have been supplied by programmers.
Historically KPFT would, on occasion, read letters on the air and in some cases the letter writers explicitly ask NOT to be so presented. Attitudes towards consent and personal privacy are very different in 2022 as compared to the time these letters were mailed and no one then writing could have imagined the modern internet, much less this type of public sharing.
Accordingly, whenever a letter has personally identifiable information from a correspondent it will be lightly redacted to protect the privacy of the original author.
