18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Monday, February 2, 1914: Really there’s nothing doing for today. Got a paper, so I digested that this afternoon.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Grandma may have read the Milton Evening Standard. It was published in a nearby town. This is part of the front page for January 5, 1912, so it’s not the issue Grandma would have been reading, but it gives an example of typical headlines—
- Politicians arguing about who will replace a deceased court clerk before he is even buried.
- Cold Weather
- A high salary offer for a baseball coach
—-
Whew, was getting a newspaper the exception rather than the rule in the Muffly household? I am amazed that Grandma considered it worth noting in the diary when she got a paper.
I’d always assumed that Grandma read one of the local newspapers every day—but maybe she didn’t.
Did she have a local paper that published daily? Some small towns, even today, only have weeklies…
Still, not much change in those headlines from what you might find today 🙂
The Milton Evening Standard was a daily paper. Another paper from a nearby town was the Watsontown Record and Star. I think it was a daily paper but I’m not positive. Several front pages from 1916 issues of the Watsontown Record and Star are available at My Watsontown:
http://www.mywatsontown.com/?page_id=1243
The news doesn’t change much, does it?
It’s all the same today LOL
Those small town papers have gone away. Even the big city papers struggle. I wonder what she would have thought of our access today?
maybe the paper was considered a luxury?
Maybe she meant she read it more thoroughly than in most days…
Sounds as though this was the exception rather than the rule!
Good for your grandma to digest the paper. Sounds like she read it all very carefully.
I get most of my news from the Internet–can you imagine what Helena would’ve thought of that?! It’s nice to know she was paying attention to the broader world around her.
I love old papers for the ads, the fonts and artwork too. In 50 years kids may not even know what a news paper is.