Did You Know?
In the “My, How Things Have Changed,” category (something I just made up on the fly), I’ve found a few old newspaper items that would seem mighty odd if they were printed today.
On June 7, 1941, was an advertisement for the movie “The Great American Broadcast” that used the phrase “The Gayest Musical of Them All.”
Of course, the second word in that description has changed from being an example of merriment to something that some people have been known to use as an insult in today’s parlance.
On the same page of that day’s Uniontown Evening Standard, there was another ad for a movie that would be playing at the Capitol Theatre in Uniontown, which certainly would elicit laughter of the unintended kind today.
“The Burning Question” was the original title of the camp classic, “Reefer Madness.”
The ad for that film was accompanied by the phrases, “Innocent Youth,” “Victims of the New Sex-Craze,” “LOVE WEED,” “Weird Orgies,” “Wild Parties,” “Unleased (I think they meant “Unleashed) Passions” — to hammer home the point that marijuana was a growing scourge that is, today, beginning to gain legal acceptance in some states.
But in 1941, according to the ad, “ACRES OF THE DREAD ‘LOVE WEED’ WERE GROWN RIGHT HERE IN FAYETTE COUNTY!”
I found another item in the June 8, 1942, edition of the Evening Standard, which would certainly raise a lot of eyebrows today.
The nationally syndicated columnist, Ruth Millett wrote, “It’s beginning to look as though nobody loves fat women” as the lead paragraph of her column with the headline: “War Winds Blow Woe for the Plump Women, Says Ruth Millett.”
You’d have to wonder what would possess a woman who had readers in more than 400 publications to write, “It’s no great chore for the slim and athletic to walk or pedal bikes instead of riding around in cars. But it’s hard on the puffing, panting ladies who take a size 40 and up?”
Millett’s bold treatise on the virtues of not being overweight, concluded with, “No wonder ladies on the plump side are talking more than ever of reducing.”
I think we’ve come a long way since then – in both tone and in substance.
We’re still nearly two weeks away from the official start of summer, but young folks are already celebrating. They get a head start on the season every year.
On this date in 1936, for instance, the Uniontown Morning Herald reported on its front page that two of Uniontown’s “youthful canoeists” had battled waves of between 12 to 15 feet along the Mississippi River on their 600-mile canoe trip that began on May 3.
James Neill and Joe Shimko started on the Youghiogheny River at Connellsville, and it was reported they had arrived safely in New Orleans.
It must’ve been a harrowing excursion. It was reported that, “They left with nothing more than their packs, their canoe and $2 in cash between them.”
On June 10, 1953, hundreds of Uniontown’s young playground patrons were about to embark on a project that would travel nearly as far as those canoes. Although, it didn’t require the playground kids to leave town. “Playground Youngsters In Annual Balloon Race,” said the headline on the front page of the Evening Standard.
Helium gas would be used to send hundreds of balloons aloft at each local playground. The previous year, it was reported, one of the locally jettisoned balloons traveled 400 miles and was found 60 miles south of Richmond, Va.
On June 10, 1955, there was a picture of two dozen youngsters in Western attire on the front page of the Evening Standard.
“Kings, And Queens, Of The Wild Frontier,” said the picture’s title, which described the participants in the Davy Crockett Day festivities on the Craig School playground. Davy Crockett was about to become a national craze that year, thanks to the ABC television show loosely based on the life of the folk hero/frontiersman.
The TV show and the lead character’s coonskin cap became wildly popular. But three years later there was any even bigger craze — the Hula Hoop.
With summer quickly approaching, it might be an appropriate time to solve one of those perpetual summertime mysteries about nearly everybody’s favorite confection — ice cream. Why is it that we sometimes get a headache when we take a bite of ice cream?
I found what appears to be the answer in June 9, 1890, edition of the Evening Standard. Under the headline “NATURE’S FREAKS,” and the sub-headline, “ODD THINGS EVERYONE HAS NOTICED ABOUT HIMSELF,” I found a medical reason for it.
“As for the ice cream, when such a big mouthful of it is incautiously swallowed it produces a chilling effect up the nerves of the larynx, and the pharynx, in the throat. The sensation shoots back to the center of those nerves in the brain; but there it finds a side connection with the great facial nerve that starts from in front of the ear and extends its branches over the side of the face. The pain from the chill is sidetracked along the nerve branch that traverses the temple and the feeling is likely to be quite agonizing in that locality for a moment or so, very likely involving the eyeball sympathetically. This feeling of a sensation in one nerve when another nerve is attacked is what is called ‘reflex action.'” So, now you know!
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freeddoms@bellatlantic.net.