Monday, May 29, 2006
Time Capsule
Years ago, my dad and brother created a makeshift bedroom out of half of the garage. It was for my brother's use; a place to crash while he was on military leave so he wouldn't displace my sister or me. Not a bad job -- panelled, insulated, air-conditioned and carpeted. But it's outlived its necessity, and my brother spent the past couple days tearing it down. He found a long-forgotten treasure. When he and Dad laid the last of the carpet they put down a section of that day's newspaper underneath it: Wednesday, November 13, 1968. My brother was was 22, my sister was 20, I was nine.
The cracked and yellowed pages were fascinating to me. Even though San Antonio had just hosted a world's fair, the newspaper betrayed it as very much a small town: here an advice column, there a recipe. If you had told the people then that San Antonio would be the nation's ninth largest city and the claimant of the World's Champion NBA team (for the next few weeks, anyway), no one would have believed you. The pages were filled with ads for stores that no longer exist, wedding announcements (I wonder what happened to Mr. & Mrs. Kenneth Mattke?), and police blotter tales. A few bigger news stories were included as well -- a forthcoming visit by legendary New Year's bandleader Guy Lombardo, and a Nixon pictorial, "Prelude to the Presidency." (Unlike the future of Mr & Mrs. Mattke, I know what happened there.) There was also a page of comics -- all white, all family-oriented, with the exception of the Native Americans in Redeye. (A new comic then, and still around today.)
Reading the innocent capers recounted in the crime stories, I almost wished we were still in those times. What brought me back to reality was a short paragraph about a all-male golf club being planned in Minnesota, and comic strip heroine Winnie Winkle -- the liberated woman of the 1930s & 1940s -- telling her sister-in-law she should give up the chance to travel the world. (Give up a chance to travel the world. Hmph. No matter how you phrase it, that sentence makes absolutely no sense to me.)
Google searches turned up nothing on the Minnesota golf club and Winnie Winkle was discontinued 10 years ago. Good.
The cracked and yellowed pages were fascinating to me. Even though San Antonio had just hosted a world's fair, the newspaper betrayed it as very much a small town: here an advice column, there a recipe. If you had told the people then that San Antonio would be the nation's ninth largest city and the claimant of the World's Champion NBA team (for the next few weeks, anyway), no one would have believed you. The pages were filled with ads for stores that no longer exist, wedding announcements (I wonder what happened to Mr. & Mrs. Kenneth Mattke?), and police blotter tales. A few bigger news stories were included as well -- a forthcoming visit by legendary New Year's bandleader Guy Lombardo, and a Nixon pictorial, "Prelude to the Presidency." (Unlike the future of Mr & Mrs. Mattke, I know what happened there.) There was also a page of comics -- all white, all family-oriented, with the exception of the Native Americans in Redeye. (A new comic then, and still around today.)
Reading the innocent capers recounted in the crime stories, I almost wished we were still in those times. What brought me back to reality was a short paragraph about a all-male golf club being planned in Minnesota, and comic strip heroine Winnie Winkle -- the liberated woman of the 1930s & 1940s -- telling her sister-in-law she should give up the chance to travel the world. (Give up a chance to travel the world. Hmph. No matter how you phrase it, that sentence makes absolutely no sense to me.)
Google searches turned up nothing on the Minnesota golf club and Winnie Winkle was discontinued 10 years ago. Good.
# posted by Peggy @ 11:16 AM 
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That is so cool! Better even than the dreams I occasionally have where I discover a door in "my" house that I hadn't noticed before, open it, and discover there's all kinds of cool old stuff left behind by a previous owner.
Never mind that I've never owned an interesting old place like that.
So did the newspaper survive pretty well under the carpet for all that time?
Cool...
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Never mind that I've never owned an interesting old place like that.
So did the newspaper survive pretty well under the carpet for all that time?
Cool...
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