It's been a while since I almost recieved a stackful of extremely old newspapers and I've been hoping for anything since then. Recently I got the closest thing yet, when my mother showed me a small stack of yellowed newspaper clippings and said, "These are things my grandmother's mother saved from the papers and I just found them now." She let me borrow them for a few hours, and just so you know what you're about to get into, the first newspaper we'll be looking at is this one:
Circa 1941, ladies and gentlemen. All of these are from 1941 as far as I can tell; every copyright date says so. This page was an insert inside a slightly larger paper for farmers and it contained useful hints, such as this article of underwear tips. My favorite: "For the sake of daintiness, underwear should be changed daily."
Beauty Brevities, from the looks of that loopy first sentence, could have been written last week. It's only when you get to the tips on beauty themselves that you're shocked. There are those who will point out that seventy years from now, the current culture of that time will find US weird. Probably. But not as weird as I find bathing your eyeballs in a salt solution.
Oh yeah, and do you have your pickle leaflet yet? Better get it.
This next clipping looks a lot like Ripley's Believe It or Not, but believe it or not, it's not. It's a ripoff called "Strange As It Seems," strange as it seems. It's the same strip...full of interesting facts.
Milk.....has......f-fuuurrrr??
Maybe THEIR milk had fur.
That is one SPACE-AGE FANNY by gar! I bet by 1978 we'll all be riding bicycles like that.
Roosevelt was still president, and in his fourth term. If you had asked any American in 1941, they would have said they expected to catch up with this guy voterwise eventually. FDR was in there until he died and he was the reason for a two-term limit imposed on every President after him.
It must have been nice for Coleman, except for the fact that if his foot touched another girl's foot he'd be expelled and ordered by shotgun to marry the girl whose foot he touched.
In other news, can bees think? A new study confirms that no, they cannot.
No.
She had a sheet of "normal" newspaper; let's check that out.
It was still a peaceful place; those other guys didn't count....they were English.
I'd like to see Wal-Mart beat these prices. Grapefruit from Arizzona(the extra Z was taken out by lawless hippies) for 19 cents. A whole watermelon for 3 cents a pound. ON ICE!!
Man: Ah, I tried your new-fangled
Neu-Viro doohickeys and it did raise my pep, sure enough! I was
the peppiest 54-year-old in Stumptown until the heart
attack...then I had to crawl back here. These were guaranteed
safe! I'd...*cough*...like a...refund....
Salesman: Okay! Here's your dollar back! *buck slowly falls onto
the guy's body*
There were also several different "joke columns" saved in the pile. I don't know why this is called "Squirrel Food" or why it's printed on better paper, but the "WOW" between gags must be some kind of subliminal thing to make you think the jokes are good.
"You're standing on my corn" is the punchline for half the jokes ever told in the 1940's. Maybe this is why we call a lame joke "corny." People take better care of their feet now, so nobody can identify with these anymore.
Okay, it's time to get REALLY weird. I haven't a clue where my great-grandma got this thing, but it's a pamphlet of "Recitations," which I've determined to be small first-person stories you were expected to read out loud to a bunch of other people. Don't ask me if anyone really did this.
"A Warning" is from the perspective of some old crank who is encountering an elevator for the first time. This can't go well....
"Her son is named Jabez and she's buying him PANTYHOSE??" you're yelling. Hey, it's 1941. I told you the culture was different.
That's all I want to run of that one, but wait'll you see this (and I had to get it all, sorry).
Ooooookay. I have the same reaction to "The View."
There was one clipping left, and I gasped when I saw it....
This is the back of another useless jokes column, so she didn't realize she was saving it...and wow, IS THAT THE ORIGINAL SNOW WHITE AD??? .....Upon closer inspection, given that everything else in the pile was from 1941 and Dopey is riding a very off-model drawing of Bambi...this isn't the original. The Disney co. rotated their older movies in with their newer ones up until the mid-90's. I was one of the last to see Snow White in an honest-to-goodness theater. ENVY ME! Nowadays they don't put old films back in, they just remake them. It saves money and adds to the appeal of the classic version...no wait, it does neither.
This has been fun, really. I should find more old junk. There are a lot of sites mocking the 80's that I now think don't journey far enough. I learned a lot today: that milk has fur, men wear pantyhose, and for the sake of daintiness underwear should be changed daily. Knowledge is power!
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