I went back and looked at the Toledo Blade for today, 1951. Google has it online.

The more things change, they say, the more they stay the same. The front page story was that the courts had decided that Harry Truman, as Commander in Chief, had the right to station American troops anywhere he found appropriate. The GOP was pissed of at him, and said he ought to seek Congress's approval before he stationed troops in Europe for the treaty organization - presumably what was eventually known everywhere as NATO.

It Was Food Day

It was a Thursday, when all the grocery ads ran, and two different supermarkets were advertising that you should take home a case of Burger Beer, the famous beer from Cincinnati. Uh, it's about 200 miles from Toledo to Cincinnati, both of them advertising that the price was $2.59. I don't think that was a sale price, even though it was in their weekly ads; Ohio set minimum prices on beer, just as Pennsylvania currently does for milk.

I found three different ads, 1 column by 1 inch, for Betty Zane popcorn. I remember that brand, because we raised popcorn and sold it to them, but I don't think I've seen that brand since the 1950s.

I Wouldn't Sponge Off Strangers If I Could Avoid It

At the top of each section, there was a little "chuckle". A concerned woman to a begger said, oh, you poor man. Tell me, are you married? The beggar says of course not, I wouldn't dream of mooching from strangers if I had a wife.

There were 54 numbered pages, plus the peach section. I had forgotten that the peach section pages were not numbered. The peach section was four pages long, and was printed on salmon-colored newsprint, what most people would call peach colored paper. It had television listings and entertainment news, and in later years, on the front of that section was the Miss Peach cartoon, but it hadn't yet come into existance in 1951. And according to Amazon, there aren't even any Miss Peach books in print anymore, only used books.

Miss Peach Was Playing Hooky

I remember thinking, when I was growing up, that if I were going to advertise in the newspaper, I'd want my ad to run in the peach section. You'd go into homes where the whole newspaper had been thorough read, but often you'd go into homes where the rest of the paper looked untouched and only the Peach section had been pulled out; it always got pawed over by every member of the family.

There was another cartoon, though, about schooling. A cartoon had a couple meeting with a teacher. Is it really all that important, Mama is asking, that junior learn things like reading? He's going to be spending the majority of his life watching television, after all. I'm sure it was a real prawltriller in 1951, but it doesn't seem funny at all, six decades later, only prophetic.

Fillers Abounded

They used itty-bitty items, perhaps a half inch tall, to fill out columns, and as seen here, even smaller ads that were classified ads only they weren't classified. The use of column fillers practice pretty much ended in the late 1960s when newspapers switched from using setting type in hot lead with linotypes to setting type photographically with a computer.

I've done screen captures of a couple of small stories. The biscuit seller in Saginaw came over the wire, even though Saginaw was only 140 miles away. It seems a little odd, as Saginaw wasn't really a big city for immigrants. It sounds like the biscuit man came from Italy or Sicily, doesn't it? The majority of the immigrants in that era, as I remember it, were escapees from Hungary, Latvia, and other Warsaw Pact countries.

He Had A Big Pair

I think the shoe story was something that eventually ended up in an episode of the TV series M*A*S*H. I'm not sure about that. I was a fan of the movie, but the television series quickly bored me. You had surgeons doing meatball surgery, blood spurting all over everywhere, but nobody ends up covered in blood, and the patients were all docile and taciturn, as if their injuries weren't really bothering them all that much. and rarely did the surgeons struggle to save a patient only to have him die on the table.

It seemed all too unrealistic to me, as did Hogan's Heroes, and McHale's Navy, but then, I was never in battle, so what do I know. As William Tecumseh Sherman advised us, War is Slapstick.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Betty Zane popcorn - Burger Beer - Cincinnati - cold type - column fillers - food day - Harry S Truman - Hogan's Heroes - linotypes - MASH - McHale's Navy - Miss Peach - NATO - Toledo - Warsaw Pact - William Tecumseh Sherman