The Gundella Letters

They often misspelled her name!

Eastern Michigan University was fortunate enough to have renown
sociologist Marcello Truzzi on their staff and when he died his papers
were donated to the institution. Among those were many letters to
Gundella the Witch (Truzzi had brought her to local and national
prominence a few years beforehand and the two became good friends), both
for her Witch Watch column in the Observer newspapers and personal
correspondences asking for spells, that Truzzi was using for a study.
Hundreds of letters, in fact. Fortunately for me I have a co-worker who
goes to school there and was willing to grab me some photos of a few of
the letters. Originally, I had wanted them scanned but seeing the photos
that she sent makes me realize that they are better seen as is.

Since I'm likely going to EMU today to gather some of the
Gundella letters so as not to overburden my "colleague" (as the
librarian referred to my co-worker in an e-mail; laughably since I'm a
colleague to only circus clowns and even that is an insult to the
professionalism of said clowns) I'll share one with you, even if you
don't want it.

It's from Val Palmateer and she was responding to
a Free Press "Action Line" segment in which a reader asked for a
fictitious spell conjured up by
Shakespeare. Gundella responded by saying that although there is no
magic involved in casting spells, but rather pure psychological
application, she would send a spell to anybody who wrote her.

Detroit Free Press, March 20, 1972

3,000 or so letters later a follow-up column appeared. The Freep took
it so serious that they placed it on the comics page. Nonetheless, it
discusses the fact that her friend Marcello Truzzi, who cavorted with
Anton LaVey and witches from the area, had been studying her letters for
3 years. Which would probably tie into the time frame when he earnestly
began studying witchcraft and published his book on the matter "Caldron
Cookery" in 1969. Which is available in its entirety as a FREE e-book
on my Gundella blog as are Gundella's two books.

Detroit Free Press, September 28, 1969

The early letters stem from appearances on the Bill Kennedy and Lou Gordon television programs where some were even read.

Detroit Free Press, March 31, 1972

Truzzi and Gundella worked on a book of
psychic phenomenon and witchcraft together but it was seemingly never
published. Some or all of the 1972 letters are collected in the Truzzi
papers at EMU.

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A Dudley Randall Poem in Milestone 2

I bought this Milestone 2 poetry Magazine at a Livonia estate sale this week. Milestone was the literary publication of Wayne (State) University and this second issue dates to 1949. While I don't recognize most of the names, Dudley Randall was both a nationally known poet and the librarian for the Wayne County General Hospital at Eloise via the Wayne County Library System. The poem featured is The Southern Road which was a revised version of the completed poem from 1948 that h as a handful or two of word differences between the two. I don't know if Randall edited the poem for later collected works editions or earlier but this link features it in its likely final form in 2009. Neither version particularly enchants me but the block print in the magazine is an added bonus.

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The Nankin Township Historical Society

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