It's hard to believe it's February already! That means tomorrow is Groundhog Day – which is nice, because it's a ready-made blog topic for me!
But in the meantime, let's see what was going on in Lorain seventy years ago today. Above is the front page of the February 1, 1954 Lorain Journal.
The headline YANK JET DOWNS MIG IN AIR BATTLE seems pretty ominous. A formation of Russian-built MIG-15s attacked an American reconnaissance plane off the coast of Korea. But the whole thing was downplayed by the State Department.
In actuality, the really big story for Lorain on the front page was the price of coffee (a favorite topic on this blog). With prices for the "South American brew" rising anywhere from two to seven cents a pound, Lorainites were naturally upset. But they were still buying, although some decided to switch to tea.
In a related story, a used car dealer in Jacksonville, Florida was running an ad selling a pound of coffee for $600 – and throwing in a free automobile with each purchase!
(Sorry, but I'd pay whatever I have to in order to get my coffee. It's the high point of my day. (That will give you an idea of my day). I look forward to a cup when I get up, when I get to work and as a treat during the day. But don't get the idea that I'm addicted to it.)
Elsewhere on the 1954 page: the Journal's Dirty Dollars Contest, in which newspaper readers were invited to submit ideas for what to do with $550 given by a gambling operator to two Journal newsmen; the crash of a U. S. Air Force courier plane off the coast of Japan; a terrible rail disaster in Korea; a tragedy in Sheffield Lake; a maniac slasher loose in Montreal; and an interesting item from London in which a woman could net a cool one-half million bucks just by changing her name,
5 comments:
It's funny that when I was stationed in Seoul I was riding one of their bullet crowded subway trains I thought, if this thing were to crash and kill me and a thousand others, it would show up in the Journal as some little half-inch story, and people would say, "Wow, a thousand killed in a subway crash in Korea," and then turn to the sports page or the funnies.
"In the paper today
Tales of war and of waste
But you flip right over
To the TV page..."
If you read the front page 70 years ago or yesterday it's pretty much the same. I know it's difficult to stop but give yourself a break and stop reading, watching or listening to the "news". Your soul will thank you.
The change of attitudes regarding gambling is striking:
"Gambling in a community is like cancer in the human body..."
That suicide in Sheffield Lake is the stuff that movies are made of.Don't forget this was back in squeaky clean innocent 1954.Peyton Place and A Summer Place come to mind.A married woman comes from out of state with her 9 year old son to stay with a man for about a week.Then the man and woman live it up and get drunk and probably fight over the child or the man probably wanted the woman to leave her husband for him.This isn't mentioned in the story,but what else could it have been?The boy also might have been his own son? Especially if the woman was partying it up while her husband was in the war as the 9 year old would've been born in 1945.During the ensuing fight the little boy gets wounded and the man probably reeling from shooting his own son,shoots himself in the head and dies.And naturally,the woman kept her mouth shut if any of the above were true.If this isn't a classic pot boiler of a hit in 1959,I don't know what is.And it happened in tiny quaint Sheffield Lake,Ohio.The most scandalous little city on the Lake.
Post a Comment