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 Sullivan County, Tenn., on Aug. 26, 1896.
That last part — 1896 — jumped out at me when I was reading about her. That’s the same year that Frank Munsey introduced the revamped Argosy magazine in an all-fiction format that became known as a pulp magazine.
Shortly after Ms. Cooper’s birth, the October 1896 number of Argosy hit the newsstands.
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.)
The pulp magazines spanned the period between 1896 and the late 1950s (though a few stragglers, Ranch Romances in particular, lived beyond their contemporaries as did Ms. Cooper).
For those of us who weren’t living through the 1950s, that period seems long ago.
But October 1896 — that seems like ancient history. It was, after all, only 31 years after the American Civil War.
In reality, October 1896 was just a lifetime ago — a very long lifetime, granted — but maybe not as distant as we often think.
