The Lorain Sunday News – May 1950

The Lorain Public Library has several different limited-run Lorain newspapers on microfilm that, unlike the Journal, haven't been put online. One of them is the Lorain Sunday News.

The Lorain Sunday News was a weekly. It was an odd little newspaper. It usually covered a few local stories on the front page, but much of the rest of the paper was an eclectic collection of ads and filler. Its main selling point was that it was the only paper published on Sunday.

Here's the front page of the May 14, 1950 edition of the Lorain Sunday News. 

There was a Buyers' Guide edition that came out on Thursday each week. Here's the front page of the Buyers' Guide for Thursday, May 4, 1950 – exactly 73 years ago today.

That's one prim and proper mother in that ad.

Here's another page from that same edition. 

As you can see, there's not much content, and what's there is mostly filler. The sports column is about quail hunting in Florida (not exactly pertinent to Lorainites), and there's a fun little quiz. The best feature on the page is the meager TV schedule, which featured a lot of puppet shows for the kiddies: Judy Splinters, Howdy Doody and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. 

Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody

Kukla, Fran Allison and Ollie, with puppeteer Burr Tilstrom

There's also Cleveland TV icons Dorothy Fuldheim and Linn Sheldon (who we know as Barmaby), as well as a show from Chicago hosted by a buckaroo (below) named Cactus Jim (Clarence Hartzell) .

And here's a page from the Lorain Sunday News of May 7, 1950. Once again, the page has a little bit of everything: two columns of filler, a Hollywood cheesecake photo, several ads and and local fishing news (although it's all about frogs, possible descendants of the inhabitants of the filled-in East Side frog pond).

For me, the best thing about the Lorain Sunday News is that it featured a lot of ads for the public utilities, including Ohio Edison. That meant – you guessed it – lots of Reddy Kilowatt ads!

Here's one from the May 14, 1950 edition.

That's a great rendering of our favorite electrical sprite posing in front of his transmission lines. But he seems to be dressed for war. We were still more than a month or so away from entering the Korean conflict. Maybe Reddy was preparing to do battle against his arch enemy, Speedy, of the Ohio Fuel Gas Company.