Gene was in his second year of producing the comic panel for the Journal. He pretty much had his style established (contrary to his earliest strips in which he was still experimenting with the format).
There's nothing too controversial in the Feb. 19th strip. The bridge to Canada was a pet project of Governor Jim Rhodes; the Journal cast a skeptical eye at the idea in a Feb. 16th editorial.
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| Feb. 16, 1966 |
The last panel features an apparently youthful senior citizen who prefers the teen music show Hullabaloo to old Keystone Kop comedies.
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And for those of you who like to see the "Passing Scene" strip in its proper context, here's the whole page. Hey! There's an Ohio Edison ad with our pal Reddy Kilowatt – what a coincidence!
The bridge to Canada...I remember hearing about that. It would have been interesting, along with the "jetport" for Cleveland.
ReplyDeleteThat is my Grandfather (Robert Carney) in the steel mill article. He moved his young family to Lorain a few months before this story from southern Ohio after he was offered the "Lorain Pollution Control" job. I'm not familiar with this particular story, but he bought a house on the eastside, so he was pretty heavily vested in the "rotten egg" problem. It's pretty crazy that I would have never been born if he didn't get that job. It's even crazier that I am reading about it on a random Thursday morning in 2026. Thanks Dan. Jim Bearden
ReplyDeleteHi Jim! Thanks so much for leaving the great comment about your grandfather – I really appreciate it! You made my day today!
DeleteWas women's basketball considered unusual in 1966? I remember refereeing girls basketball games back then, when I was a senior in high school.
ReplyDeleteBuster... I think the "joke" is all the body parts bouncing along with the basketball.
DeleteThe short article on Dr. Byron Merrick headed for New York to tape "To Tell The Truth" caught my eye, mostly because, as a kid, I loved the show. I can't be sure, but I looked up Dr. Merrick from Berlin Heights, and it turns out he held the very first meeting of Music Box Society International: https://mbsi.org/about/history/
ReplyDeleteThing is, I searched through the show's archive and found no mention or Dr. Merrick, so perhaps it never aired, or more likely, it was not documented because it was the daytime version. Daytime episodes weren't saved and/or document as heavily.
I never heard of the Rubber Railroad before, and neither has Google. While I give someone credit for a unique idea I think that hundreds of miles of unattended massive conveyor belts would have been a disaster. That's a lot of rubber, I wonder if the Akron tire companies lobbied for this?
ReplyDeleteDennis... I did some poking around in NewspaperArchve and came across a slew pf articles on the topic, dating back to the Salem, Ohio, News, Feb 25, 1949:
DeleteWILL TELL SENATE OF CONVEYOR LINE
CLEVELAND, Feb. 25—(INS)—A hearing on the fabulous "rubber railroad" from Lorain to East Liverpool will be staged before the United States senate next Tuesday.
Noel R. Michell, vice president of the Akron, Canton & Youngstown railroad who made the announcement, said that members of the house of representatives also have been invited to study the plan.
Michell, who also is secretary of the Riverlake Belt Conveyor Lines, Inc., holding organization for the 210 million dollar proposal, yesterday gave members of the Cleveland Advertising club a close-up of a working model of the two-way, 130-mile conveyor.
He answered certain possible disadvantages of the system and said that spillage was negligible. He added that he doubted if a caretaker could pick up a "bucketload of lost material in a week's time."