Seventy years ago, Ohio was almost through celebrating its sesquicentennial year. As part of the festivities, a special cartoon feature entitled "Our Ohio" was offered to newspapers. Here are a few samples that appeared in the Lorain Journal in October 1953 .
 |
| "Crisp Autumn Morning" Watercolor Painting by L. McClelland |
The "Our Ohio" samples are fun to look at, although the caricatures of huge-nosed Native Americans are probably a little inappropriate now. The cartoon of George Armstrong Custer (with a beard?) also looks like there was no available photo or painting of him for reference. Oh well.
But there's a nice selection of Ohio trivia and historical tidbits. I also like the mixture of cartoons and realistic renderings.
Alas, this kind of little cartoon feature that used to liven up newspapers (like Scott's Scrapbook) are a thing of the past, right along with the papers they used to appear in. But in their heyday, they provided some entertainment and maybe even served to stir up some interest in topics that many newspaper readers previously never knew existed.
****
Kingston of Vermilion has a nice collection of watercolor prints by Leiland S. McClelland decorating many of the walls in the east wing.
4 comments:
This would seem to have been part of a publicity campaign by Ohio's independent telephone companies.
Yeah... The phone company was definitely in cahoots, huh?
And yeah... Offensive caricatures.
For decades, my grandpa snipped the little "filler" pieces in the paper ("Vienna is the only city with a weenie named after it.") and glued them, with no source info, in a series of huge, homemade, brown-paper scrapbooks that all had "DID U KNOW?" written on the outside of them. He was working on one when he died at the age of 95, in fact.
Personally, I was a big fan of Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Fillers are one of the old newspaper traditions that are no more, and that's a shame. Sometimes they were odd facts, like Vienna and weenies, and sometimes newswire articles that didn't require more than a one-line head and a paragraph. My favorite was one that appeared in a small daily that I worked for 50-some years ago. The story was about golf balls branded with the likeness of then-Vice President Spiro Agnew. The head: "Agnew Balls Up for Sale".
I've read so many old (old) newspapers in my research, and I always chide myself for not making note of cheeky or clever headlines. I shall start doing so.
Post a Comment