Lady Luck
From Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers
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Lady Luck is an American spirit loosely associated with Dame Fortune, or in the ancient Roman pantheon, the goddess Fortuna. She first appeared in the 20th century as a young woman who grants success and luck, especially when one is trying to beat the odds or take a gamble. In the United States the name Lady Luck completely replaced the older name Dame Fortune during the 1940s and her image evolved as well.
In 1940, the cartoon artist Will Eisner created the character of Lady Luck as a feisty Irish-American detective heroine who was the costumed alter-ego of demure Brenda Banks. He designed her green costume -- a short-skirted dress, bolero hat, sheer face-veil and shamrock decorated opera gloves -- and wrote the first two stories under the pseudonym "Ford Davis," after which Dick French became the writer. Lady Luck was one of two light-hearted 4-page back-ups to the 8-page Spirit tabloid newspaper comic book. (The other back-up was Mr. Mystic, a turbaned metaphysical detective and stage magician.) The first Lady Luck artist was Chuck Mazoujian (1940-1941), and he was followed by Nicholas Viscardi, also known as Nick Cardy (1941-1942), Klaus Nordling (1942-1946), and Fred Schwab (1946), at which point the series came to an end and was gathered together in the form of 32-page newsstand comic book reprints through 1949.
The Lady Luck series was distributed via newspaper syndication to as many as five million readers every week during the Second World War, and was bolstered by comic book reprints with circulations in the millions as well, but the character is mostly forgotten today. Her Irish heritage and decorative shamrocks, however, live on in a second incarnation of Lady Luck, which also came out of World War Two.
The second Lady Luck is conventionally depicted as a young, large-eyed Irish-American woman with long, wavy red hair, wearing a bikini top decorated with matching billiard 8-balls, and a skimpy bandana-sarong marked all over with card suits tied at her waist. She wears dice earrings showing 5 and 2, for the combined lucky number 7, a lucky horseshoe as a tiara, and she holds aloft a four-leaf clover and a "left-handed monkey wrench," a mythical mechanic's tool. She may be accompanied by further gambling symbols such as playing cards, or a background poker chip. This specific rendition of Lady Luck developed among bomber pilots during World War Two. The pilots were permitted to name their planes and paint images on the fore-part of the aircraft, which was termed "nose art." According to military records, the original Lady Luck was a B-24D Liberator bomber, #41-23778, in the 8th Air Force, the 44th Bomb Group, and the 66th Bomb Squadron, stationed in the U.K. in 1942 and 1943, and then detached to the 9th Air Force in North Africa, for Operation Tidal Wave. The bomber was originally named Jenny, but was renamed Lady Luck by its pilot, Lieutenant Rocco Curelli, for its having surviving the Ploesti mission with no casualties to the crewmen. The 8 ball decorations on Lady Luck's black bikini top referred to the 44th Bomb Group, known as The Flying 8 Balls.
The Lady Luck name and nose art was soon copied onto a newer Lady Luck bmber, the B-24H, #41-229128, in the 8th Air force, the 446th Bomb Group, and the 704th Bomb Squadron, stationed in the U.K. in 1944. This new Lady Luck had no 8 ball decorations on her bikini top, since she was not in the 44th Bomb Group, The Flying 8 Balls. The name and spirit of Lady Luck proved so popular that ultimately, by the end of the war, at least 22 bombers of various sizes and types, belonging to various bomb groups, had been named Lady Luck.
During and after the Second World War, tattoos depicting the bomber nose art form of Lady Luck became popular with the general public. The name gained further traction in 1957 when the rhythm and blues singer Lloyd Price, a veteran of the Korean War, had a big hit with "Lady Luck," which was his own composition. In the 1960s, the Lady Luck bomber art took off among West Coast surfers as a nostalgic call-back to World War Two, as seen in the ironic light of the then-ongoing Vietnam War. In 1964 Honest John's Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, was renamed the Lady Luck Casino, and it became particularly popular with female gamblers. In 1996, Catherine Yronwode introduced a line of lucky green retro-styled Lady Luck spiritual supplies with labels drawn by the cartoonist Trina Robbins in homage to Rocco Curelli's nose art. These Lady Luck products contained Irish-themed herbs, and included hoodoo oil, incense powder, sachet powder, bath crystals and matching vigil light candles. The Las Vegas Lady Luck Casino was renamed the Downtown Grand Hotel and Casino in 2006, but there are now Lady Luck Casinos in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Mississippi to take its place. The 21st century has not seen a decrease of interest in Lady Luck. Variations of the nose art images are now found on T-shirts, decals, and hat-patches, and have remained popular as an old-school tattoo design to the present time.
Credits
This page is brought to you by the AIRR Tech Team:
- Author: catherine yronwode
- Contributors: Papa Newt, nagasiva yronwode
- Images: Unknown Decal Artist, Nicholas Vicardi, Unknown Military Artist in the style of Lieutenant Rocco Curelli, Unknown Photographer; photo-sourced and edited by catherine yronwode and nagasiva yronwode
