Naked ladies! ShowMe had crossed the line. The Board lost their minds. The December issue of ShowMe would not be going out until their penalty was decided. Instead, the magazines would sit locked in the ShowMe offices while the Board conferred.

ShowMe held a drunken party at the editor Noel Tomas’ apartment, attended by the journalism students and their friends.

One of those friends was my Dad, Danny. I think he was Noel’s friend, because they were both on the ’52 G.I. bill. Dad — who was drunk — offered to drive Mom back to St. Louis when Christmas break came along.

Mom was particularly sad that the December issue was locked in the offices, because it contained her vicious takedown of the girls at Stephens College.

Mom was sad her article was sitting in a box in the office. (That might have been mitigated by knowing no one would see the imame / inane typo.) But in addition to ShowMe, she had two side hustles. One was writing headlines for the independent student newspaper: The Maneater (Mizzou’s mascot is a tiger). The second job was writing comedy for the semi-satirical version of The Maneater: The Ladies Home Maneater.

The Ladies Home Maneater, or LHM, while humorous, was less edgy than ShowMe. They wrote a lot of parody poems. (On the other hand, the LHM didn’t like Jayne Mansfield’s squeal in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter which is the BEST PART of the movie.)

LHM had this remarkable recurring column.

Finally, LHM was the paper that reported, in big block letters:

SHOWME IS DEAD.

The Board had decided to shut ShowMe down completely, plus all those December copies sitting in the office had to be destroyed.

Mom has already rescued five copies of the December issue. She offered one to Dad after he drove her home at Christmas, because she liked him even better when he was sober. She was impressed with his ability to drive a stick shift, smoke, and drink a soda all at the same time.

I have always wondered why she had five copies of the December ShowMe. Anyway, that’s the last secret revealed, and almost the last bit of Mom unread.

Of course, she annotated her Dickens. She had the whole set. That’ll need to be a retirement project.

ShowMe had a variety of editors, but it was always a college humor magazine. It always had photos of pretty co-eds, jokes, cartoons, and a pre-digital layout.

It had to be profitable, so there were also lots of ads, sex references, and pandering to college rivalries (lots of references to how vacuous the girls at nearby Stephens College were).

With those constants, every editor put a stamp on the tone of the magazine.

One didn’t even use his name. He went by ECAT. I only have one ECAT edition.

Next there was a duo: Skip and Nanci. Skip and Nanci included personal essays from marginalized students. Written exposes of fraternity anti-Asian sentiments, a veteran’s experiences in Korea, an Indian student‎’s experiences at home. Slip and Nanci were great. I believe it was during their oversight that this appeared under every masthead.

And things were censored. There was a Board that governed what went in the magazine, and they would point to the offending part in the literal cut-and paste, and the editors would snip a joke or cartoon from a different page and paste it on top.

Most of the content went over my teenaged brain, but I do remember I caught on to one mildly dirty joke. Dick Noel had a running column in which he addressed his readers as “mothafs”.

I checked the dictionary. No entry for mothaf. Sometimes it was spelled mothaff. Eventually, the penny dropped.

“Mom, I just realized Mothaf is short for Motherf … you know.”

She argued. I showed her multiple examples of Mothaf in context. She was astonished at first, then said, “Good for you,” pleased I supposed for being less innocent than she was at that age.

The final mothaf looked like this.

After co-editors Skip and Nancy left, a new editor (named, confusingly, Noel Tomas) came along. He defiantly doubled down on the sex references and the gross-out comics. No more essays on the student experience. The post-Sputnik November issue was funny, but the Christmas one went so far as to print A) photos of fellow journalism students shirtless, on the beach, drinking beer, and B) these ads:

I KNOW. I can publish that, because I have a Mature WordPress designation, but the Board didn’t catch it until after it went to Press.

What happened next would change the course of Mom’s life.

Mom worked for a while on the University of Missouri college humor magazine, ShowMe. A remarkable number of college stories stem from the nine months she worked there.

Before she landed there at UofM in Columbia MO (Mizzou), Mom went to a local college for two years where she wrote a column for the school paper. It was very well received.

I recently re-read some old issues of the paper. Her column recieved excellent reviews in the letters to the editor. On this most recent reading I realized those letters came from her childhood friends. They were clever: they each changed one letter of their last names to ensure anonymity, and it worked for almost 75 years. They were life-long friends as well: “Aunt” Nancy, Claudette, and others.

During this time, Mom wrote a funny letter to the editor of ShowMe. When she left St. Louis for the University of Missouri in Columbia (“Mizzou”) two years later, the staff still remembered the letter.

So, when she got to Mizzou, she submitted a funny article for ShowMe titled “I Hate Men”. Again, it got attention in the letters to the editor — legit letters from other college humor magazines asking to reprint it. Plus, someone wrote a parody, and it doesn’t get better than that.

Suddenly she was on the masthead. She was in charge of publicity.

I imagine she did nothing, because Showme was about to become a scandal.

Here is the impossibly perfect cousin Cindy. Blonde, petite, sporting a mod ‘60’s turtleneck, not a nonsensical purple/white number.

She is actually my second cousin. I believe her grandmother was Jerry’s Mad Aunt Jo, my grandfather’s sister. Her mother was the sympathetic woman Mom stayed with during part of the separation.

The only other thing revealed about her in Mom’s letters was that SHE DID NOT LIKE ME. Evidently she would only come over to play if my maternal grandfather was visiting from Saint Louis. I don’t know what his appeal was, unless she was missing an alcoholic grandfather.

Didn’t like me. Hmpf. Look closely at that look on her face. She looks sweet until you look at her eyes.

Remember I thought my Mom and Dad met when he drove her back from Columbia, MO when her sister died? And I couldn’t understand how Dead Sister Dolores was referenced in their letters?

I have now developed a forensic reconstruction of the events of Mom’s life from college in 1954 to her death in 2008.

The timeline reveals that Mom and Dad had been dating six months, they had a spat, cards referencing this Mysterious Squabble were sent, Dad reacted by writing and not sending a letter declaring his love, and Mom reacted by going to a dance without him, where she was swept off her feet by my father, Jerry (OG father).

The timeline revealed that Dolores died soon after THAT meeting — just days after, according to my spreadhseet.

Can you imagine though? A man dances with you, kisses you at the end of the dance, tells you he’s going to marry you at the end of the evening, then just days later helps you through a devastating emotional event? She must have been out of her mind with love. And … just out of her mind generally to marry him just six months later. If I’d been there I’d have said, “What are you thinking, Margi?”

So that clears that up: a paternal figure drove her home in that crisis. I suppose I should have asked which one.