Tuesday, January 10, 2023

A Gene Patrick Cartoon and the Hot Line – Jan. 1973

It's been quite a while since we last saw Gene Patrick's The Passing Scene on this blog. Gene served up two editions of his weekly comic in the Journal in July 1969, and that was it for the 1960s.

While the comic eventually returned some time in the 1970s, there were none in 1970, 1971, or 1972. Of course, Gene opened his Hobby Hub store in April 1972, and was no doubt a little busy.

But apparently he still was trying to maintain some kind of connection with the Journal. The illustration below by Gene appeared in the paper on January 12, 1973. (By the way, the article about burglaries that the cartoon accompanies is pretty interesting.)

I couldn't resist posting the whole page since it includes an ample sample of the popular "The Hot Line" column. This one has some goodies, including a person seeking advice on how to rat out his neighbor, who apparently was running a business out of her home, as well as where to buy a singing canary.

Also on the page are two of those distinctive drawings of Journal columnists, as well as a typical "Below Olympus" cartoons by Frank Interlandi.
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2 comments:

  1. -Alan D HopewellJanuary 10, 2023 at 8:30 AM

    Ah, now THAT was a newspaper page! Iwas seventeen when this page was printed, but had been reading some of those items for over ten years by then. Every one of them brought something interesting to my curious mind daily, and took me from next door to spots halfway 'round the planet .
    Here's to all these lodes of information and whimsy, and so many others that graced the LORAIN JOURNAL, Ann Landers, Dr. Crane, Count Marco, Otto Binder, Al Loekum, and so many others that gave the hometown newspaper its unique personality.

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  2. Don HiltonJanuary 10, 2023 at 11:05 AM

    Dan:

    Two things that strike me about that page:

    1 - The amount of white space. I'm most used to reading the very dense, tightly packed layouts of the distant past when the most expensive thing about printing a paper *was* the paper. Late 1800s... Nothing but print. No space at all. That started changing when it was possible to effectively print images and the text started opening up around them. Still, even in the 1950s the layouts were still fairly crowded.

    Do you have a page from any really old Lorain paper you could post for comparison?

    2 - The brief article on breast enlargement. My mum used to tell a story of a flat-chested friend who, back in the early 1940s, sent 5 bucks for a "breast developer" as advertised in woman's magazine. A few weeks later she received, in return, a picture of a man's hand!

    Buyer, beware,

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