The seventh magazine in the Dusty Mags archive is the strangest one yet. Kudzu was a B&W newsprint men's magazine published out of Abbeville, South Carolina from 1974 to 1981 by a man named Delbert "Del" Crenshaw, and the only reason any of it survives is because Del's nephew kept paying the storage fee on a unit in Anderson long after Del was dead.
The first surviving issue, Vol. 1, No. 5 from October 1975, is now online. Issues #1 through #4 have never been located — Del apparently gave most of the early print run to advertisers and friends, and not one copy is known to survive. Issue #5 is the earliest in the archive and the earliest we may ever see.
Where most of the magazines in this collection were trying, in their own modest way, to look like a poor man's Playboy, Kudzu wasn't trying to look like anything. It was printed on cheap newsprint — the same kind the small-town weeklies used — in straight black ink with no color separation, no halftones, and no pretense. Del couldn't afford a real printer, so the whole thing came off a one-color press at Piedmont Press in Greenwood, run by a man Del called "Curly" who let him pay in installments.
The price was seventy-five cents in 1975, going up to a dollar fifty by 1981. The print run was about five thousand copies. Distribution was truck stops, bait shops, barbershops, gas stations, and roadside grocery stores from upstate South Carolina down through Georgia and into Alabama, Mississippi, and the rural parts of North Carolina. Del did the deliveries himself in a 1971 Mercury Montego that ran most days.
Del was forty-three years old when he started Kudzu. He had spent the previous fourteen years selling classified ad space for the Greenville News — a job he was apparently very good at — and had inherited a small piece of his uncle's peach orchard outside Abbeville when the uncle died in 1973. He sold his half of the orchard to his cousin for forty-two hundred dollars and used the money to lease a storefront on Court Square (formerly Hagan's Five & Dime), buy a used light table, and convince his sister Donna Jean to keep the books for ten percent of the gross.
Del's voice in the magazine is something I've been trying to describe for two days and I still don't have it right. The closest I can get is: Southern gentleman meets junkyard philosopher. He calls every woman in the magazine "darlin'" and means it as a compliment, not a come-on. He tells stories about his ex-wife (Donna Jean's older sister, also named Donna, in a confusing piece of family history I will not attempt to untangle here) the way you'd tell stories about a flat tire — with weariness and resignation and the faint suggestion that you brought it on yourself. The publisher's letter in this issue is about his first year in business and includes the phrase "I have lost about seven hundred dollars and I have made about six hundred dollars and I am calling that a success because the difference is smaller than my second divorce."
The October 1975 issue runs thirty-six pages and is built around three girls: Luanne Culberson from Anderson (a waitress at the Dixie Diner, photographed at a fishing pond outside town), Becky Stansell from Greenwood (a clerk at Owens' General Store, photographed at the store after closing), and Darla Posey from Abbeville itself (a loom operator at the mill, photographed at a creek south of town). Del shot all three of them himself with a Mamiya C330 twin-lens reflex and a single reflector held by his nephew Bobby Ray.
The features are vintage Del: a deer hunting season preview by his friend Tommy Reeves, and a guide to the best barbecue joints between Abbeville and Augusta written by Del himself after a research trip that he describes as having gained him seven pounds, none of which he regrets. The barbecue article alone is worth the seventy-five cents — Del's recommendations include a place behind a man's house called Purvis Bowen's that has no sign and is open whenever Purvis feels like being open.
The back four pages of every Kudzu were the classifieds, and the classifieds were the magazine's real engine. This issue has dozens of them: mail-order knives from a place in Wadesboro, North Carolina; CB radio kits from Spartanburg; "adults only" photo sets from Macon, Georgia; the Charles Atlas-style body building course from Atlanta; X-ray specs from a novelty house in Memphis; a Walker Coonhound for sale in Newberry; a 1971 Chevy C10 in Iva ("do not ask what happened to the tailgate"); and a personal ad from a man in Honea Path looking for a woman who can cook and doesn't mind dogs.
Del was up front about it: he made his money on the classifieds, not the photos. The whole front of the book existed to get the magazine into men's hands so the back of the book could pay the rent.
Every issue of Kudzu had a humor page called "The Kudzu Patch" — jokes, lies, and Del's observations about Southern life. This issue's cartoon is one of my favorites in the entire collection: a man and a woman in a bikini standing in front of a pickup truck that has been completely overgrown by kudzu vines overnight. The caption reads, "I think it's time for a trim, babe." The joke is the joke. It is also more than the joke. Del's whole magazine is in that cartoon.
This copy is in fair-to-poor condition by the standards of any other magazine in the collection — but very good condition by the standards of cheap newsprint that has been sitting in a South Carolina storage unit for fifty years. The paper has yellowed considerably (newsprint contains lignin, which oxidizes faster than coated stock). There is moderate foxing throughout. The center fold is creased and slightly torn near the staples, suggesting it was kept folded in someone's back pocket or rolled up on a truck dashboard. The classifieds pages have ink rub-off — you can read the type from the opposite page through the paper in a few spots.
Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent. The yellowing and foxing have been preserved in the scans rather than digitally cleaned out. This is what Kudzu actually looks like.