Nurse Romance Stories: Love Secrets 32 - "He Wasn't My Kind of Man"

Earlier this year I posted scans from the cover story of Love Secrets 32, "I Fell For A Commie". The book also contains this 6-page nurse romance story, "He Wasn't My Kind of Man". The scenario is as follows: Alice Daniels is a newly hired private nurse for financier Byron Mapleton. Mapleton's handsome secretary, Michael Lester, is also a recent hire, and he and Alice are quick to team up in their task of surviving old Mapleton's grumpiness. It also looks as though something romantic might develop between Alice and Michael, until Mapleton's no-good son Craig turns up. He starts putting the moves on Alice straight away, which is bad news, because he's not the industrious student his father believes him to be.

Against her better judgment, Alice weakens and goes out with Craig, who likes to spend his father's money liberally, but not in the way his father expects. Alice gets caught up in a romantic whirl with Craig, and it all happens so quickly that Michael has no opportunity to tell Alice he's in love with her until he's about to leave Mapleton's employ. By then Alice is convinced that there's something real between her and Craig.

Craig's reckless gambling ends up getting him in trouble with the mafia. He steals some money from his father to pay his gambling debts, and when old Mapleton finds the dough missing he prefers to blame Michael rather than his son. Alice spills the beans about Craig, who tries to lie his way out of trouble, unsuccessfully. Alice has already realized Craig is a loser who didn't care about her really, and her hopes that Michael might still be interested in her are realized.

As is often the case with these nurse romance stories, the nurse is a proxy for stereotypes of womanhood generally, and in this story she's shown as someone who is easily fooled, easily led by a manipulative male. On the other hand she's principled, and although she went out with Craig knowing Mapleton would disapprove, she fairly quickly concluded that the younger Mapleton's behavior was hugely inappropriate, and she does the right thing in shopping him to his dad. Although she leaps to the righteous Michael's defense, the concluding scenario places her back in the subordinate position to her new man. She's feminine, and delicate in the final analysis, even though she stood up to her boss when he falsely accused Michael. She's definitely the kind of tough but vulnerable flower any respectable, mildly chauvinistic, heterosexual male would like to scoop up and protect, which is what Michael does.

Love Secrets 32 - "I Fell For a Commie"

McCarthy era Love Secrets 32 (August 1953) published by Quality Comics, with it's cover story of "I Fell For a Commie", contains possibly the most shocking romance tale you're ever likely to read! It chronicles the moral and ideological decline of Gladys, as love robs her of discretion and she plunges headlong into membership of the Communist Party!!!!

 

With dialog suggesting that Capitalism will cause the degradation of this country, even though it was intended to warn us of the lunacy of Marxist philosophy, this comic would probably never have hit the stands had it not been pre-Code! But how did it all happen? It started with Gladys and her friend Ruth, two young women trying to live the American Dream - they just wanted to get a job and make their own way in life. It's at the State Employment Bureau that Gladys's fall from grace is set in motion. There's a rough looking guy, apparently a veteran, expressing his disillusionment with the way returning military personnel are treated by the country they've risked their life to defend. Right there Gladys should have smelled a rat. Obviously she would have been aware of the great care the U.S. government takes of veterans, and that all those homeless bums that social workers claim are ex-military suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and in need of help, are actually unscrupulous individuals trying to con everyone and get a free ride, just the sort of thing communists would get up to! Before she has time to think, though, Gladys is mistaken for a communist collaborator by a cop who is called in to remove the red menace from the bureau. Outside she talks with a handsome young man who was also turfed out, and there's an instant connection - that moment when you just know this is the one! Their love progresses and deepens rapidly, but all of a sudden, there's a note for Glad from her beau Tom Brenner - he has to stop seeing her, hopes she'll understand, and that she'll still think of him. Bummer!

Gladys is stunned by Tom's departure from her life, but then she sees Ruth with Tom in a passing car. No, Ruth hasn't stolen her lover! She recently joined a club that Tom is also a member of, and he was dropping her home. "Can I join?" is Gladys's immediate response, and so the drama of her undoing unfolds. It doesn't take Gladys long at the meeting to realize that this is a clandestine cell of Soviet Russian sympathizers she's stumbled onto - the poster declaring that "Stalin wants peace" kind of steered her in that direction. But when she sees Tom there her good sense deserts her, and she figures what the heck! She'll join the club just to be with Tom and won't listen to their silly communist propaganda. And it looked like she could pull it off when she remained unswayed by reading Das Kapital in the clubhouse basement. Why would anyone want to remove the gulf between the rich and the poor, eliminating those structural inequalities that oppress lower socioeconomic and minority groups and favor the wealthy? American society doesn't have a class system! Those incredibly loaded corporate businessmen, with no interest whatsoever in maintaining conflict with the USSR so they could sell lots of weapons, couldn't help having obscene amounts of money! And they'd have shared it with all those poor people in a heartbeat except that would have robbed those same impoverished persons of their dignity and of the satisfaction they would derive from making their own fortune through honest hard work! From each according to his means, to each according to his need?! Come off it, Karl! But back to the plot - Tom and Gladys are getting serious. We could end up with Reds IN the bed instead of 'Reds under the bed'!

What happens to Gladys next shows us just how dangerous the insidious tactics of those commie scum can be. Gladys is shown respect by the other members for her commitment, and given full membership of the Communist Party. Tom's been part of the whole plan to reel her in, it seems, making out that he didn't want to influence her, that she should make up her own mind. Tom must have learned that trick in a KGB workshop on reverse psychology. But now she's on the inside, the extent of the group's subterfuge is revealed and that last vestige of loyalty to the free market kicks in and Gladys outs as an anti-communist after all. This doesn't go down too well with the leadership.

But Tom intervenes swiftly to steer Gladys out of harm's way. After all, he may be a commie, but somewhere in there he's still a man with feelings for this lady. Gladys, though, fears death at the hands of her lover when Tom catches up with her outside. So Tom has to come clean - he's not a communist after all - he's an FBI agent but obviously he couldn't tell her up until now. With all the evidence he needs, Tom has the case under wraps, and now he and Gladys can enjoy their relationship on a normal footing. Gladys went through it though, didn't she? I mean, there was a point there when she really looked like she was convinced to travel along "communism's evil byways"! It also turns out that the Korean vet at the Employment Bureau that day was a fake - despicably pretending to be a poorly-treated war hero to undermine the public's faith in democracy.

So there you have it. Authored by Senator Joe McCarthy himself during his spare time between witch hunts, this story is an uncompromising Cold War warning against the communist devil that threatens us still! The fact that you don't see this kind of story in modern comics today simply exposes the ugly truth that the comic book industry has been taken over by the Reds!