Large Fat Mackerel..

six for a quarter.

My neighbor Jason posted about this site the other day. You can go read old newspapers and I'm hooked! I'm working through the 1910 editions of the Richmond Times Dispatch where they "print all the news and print it first"..good for them.

The news itself is pretty boring. The only war I read about was the "war on deadly hat pins"..wow, they were really up in arms about it, too. The alderman said that if a lady wanted to wear an oyster or a carrot on her head, fine, but the deadly hat pin had to go. Hat's must have been big back then because there was also a huge debate about men wearing hats in elevators and the evils of allowing it.

On my birthday, 1910, Virginia voted down income tax, too bad that didn't last. Cha-Ching!

They had the whole health thing figured out back then. They had a tonic for appendicitis, piles, coughs. Whatever your trouble was they had a tonic. They found the cure for cancer, too. I wonder if we shouldn't tell someone. Isn't there a hotline or something we could call? I'm sure somebody would want to know.

I really enjoy the ads and obituaries. A lot of men that were dropping dead at the time were confederate veterans...I wonder what they would have said if he'd have been a yankee? Probably best not to mention it, the wounds were still fresh. They never mentioned where the funeral would be held. I wonder what kind of unwritten rule they had back then. It seemed like you were just supposed to know what to do. You could get a pound of butter for 32 cents..we don't even have a cents sign on our keyboards anymore. California Evaporated Peaches were a steal at 18 cents. I don't even know what evaporated peaches are but for 18 cents, I'll try them. You could order your AA ,12HP, Ford for only $600, but you had to order soon for next months delivery...those things just sold themselves, it seems.

My favorite thing in the papers though are the classifieds and personals. They announced everything. The Smiths are in town visiting the Jones'. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton are heading off to Florida. You got a whole paragraph if you were actually leaving the country. That's just showing off, if you ask me. The want ads were broken up by gender. Wanted Male. Wanted Female. They were looking for a man to be the manager for a vaudeville house. He must be experienced and be a hustler. A hustler? Is that like a pick pocket or something? They were looking for a woman with competent coat hands. What exactly are coat hands?! I don't even know what that means. The weird thing is that there weren't any phone numbers, apparently you were just supposed to show up.

The real estate and for sale section were interesting. Apparently electric light was a big selling feature. Eight rooms, paper and paint, electric light. Nobody mentioned a bathroom. For Sale, Old genuine Lancaster snuff recipe. Two please. For sale, buggies, surreys, wagons, and horses, lots and lots of horses. They must have finally accepted that motor cars weren't just a passing fad.

I really enjoy reading about the past but I'll happily stay right here in the future. I don't think I could take all that tonic.