Old newspaper clippings recant history
It’s history. And we can’t throw it away. Inheriting a pile of old newspaper clippings is an interesting proposition, although there is little in monetary value associated with them. But that’s not important. The person who spent years carefully snipping the parcels of the past from pages of this and other newspapers obviously thought the stories were important enough to keep.
So, on one recent Friday evening, my lovely wife and I became wrapped up in sorting through piles of these yellowed, cracked, fragile notes carrying faded words about a variety of local, national and international events.
One series of clips revealed a tragedy more than 70 years ago when a prominent local man murdered his family before turning the pistol on himself. We found the home where this heinous crime occurred is one street away from our own.
Images of snow piled above car roofs and local police pointing, obviously at the behest of a news photographer, to the top of one such heap imprinted another stack of cuttings.
An area man’s rampage during which he slaughtered his own family and several others over a period of several days was carefully folded among the relics.
Still another series showed multiple photos in their black and white (now more sepia) tones of pieces of a wrecked passenger plane.
The crash killed 11, four of whom were young men on their way home for a holiday vacation.
Wow. And we think the headlines today are scary.
There were the more normal narratives: stories about the death of England’s King Edward and the coronation of his daughter, the now-reigning Queen Elizabeth; Ike and Mamie Eisenhower and their ascent to the American throne; and pictures of the latest fashions, or at least the ones current to the decades covered: the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. (Women’s hats were very unique in those days, weren’t they?)
I marveled most at the way, the words, the styles in which the stories were written. They conjured stereotypical images of the crusty reporter, sitting in front of a massive metal manual typewriter, clacking away at the keys with two or three fingers (no touch-typing in those days), his vest unbuttoned, necktie hanging from an open shirt collar, a cigarette streaming smoke clamped in the corner of his mouth and (I have heard these stories before but am unable to verify them) a partially-consumed bottle of whiskey neatly tucked in the desk’s bottom drawer.
Reading several of the 1930s accounts of murder and mayhem aloud, the words forcefully stung the air: The bullet “crashed through his brain,’ the victim was “too critically hurt to be moved from the luxury of her home,’ and the spunky stewardess was “Not afraid to fly again. I’m in the air business, you know,’ after a plane crash nearly killed her.
Surprisingly, many of the older stories under the banners of the “Evening Standard’ and the “Morning Herald,’ the forerunners of today’s Herald-Standard, carried no bylines. Several did and they were names I had heard when I first began working here nearly three decades ago.
I felt a little pride that these major news events of the past were so well covered by my predecessors. The stories were good: they answered the traditional questions of “who, what, when, where, why’ and even added some “how’ to the mix, if you read between the lines.
The clippings, I found, were redolent, exuding an odor of must and ink, a perfume probably pleasing only to a newspaperman accustomed to the smell.
“What are we going to do with these?’ my wife asked, pointing to the collection of blocks and strips of variously cut papers.
But she knew the answer already.
The next morning she had decided to buy some manila file folders and begin labeling them as they become repositories for the history strewn across our dining room table. “We have that empty file cabinet downstairs,’ she said. “I suppose we can put them there?’
Could we do anything else?
Oh, and by the way, did you know that you could get two pounds of ground beef for 19 cents in 1936? And that a new radio (one of the fancier models) cost a whopping $112.50 in 1930?
Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?
Have a good day.
James Pletcher Jr. is business editor at the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at (724) 439-7571 or by email at jpletcher@heraldstandard.com