I saw it in the paper

I love old newspapers. As an archivist, I get to work with a lot of cool documents, but if the whole world was going to be wiped out and I could only pick one collection to save, I would save newspapers--at least for the 20th century. They aren't as glamorous as the Declaration of Independence, Harriet Tubman's Abraham Lincoln autograph, or something signed by the pope in the 1500s, but newspapers tell you a LOT about the world. It's this amazing snapshot of what life was like. You get your world headlines, your local news, sports, entertainment, comics, ads (which tell you what people could buy and how much it cost), births, deaths, marriages, and so much more.

For example, this week I was digging through some February and March 1938 newspapers. For those of you who haven't been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (so, most of you), March 1938 is the year Hitler took over Austria. I'm going along, and I see Chamberlain and Hitler and Schuschnigg in the headlines. And I know these names! I mean, most people know Chamberlain and Hitler, but who remembers Schuschnigg? So, in the headlines of an 81 year old newspaper, I'm seeing the history I just read. And it's fascinating because the people who first read that paper, the people who wrote those articles? They didn't know what was coming. So you get a real-time perspective in the reporting, you get a feel for what they thought and knew and believed they knew in that moment, without historical hindsight.

Then there was the advice column. How to keep a hubby's attention, problems with in-laws, so many things that honestly aren't that different from what we deal with now. Although the advice has hopefully improved from "make yourself up and cook him a nice meal".

The grocery prices wouldn't seem all that interesting, but back in the day, you could get a dozen donuts for 19 cents. Which seems like a steal, but according to the CPI Inflation Calculator, 19 cents in 1938 is equivalent to $3.45 today. Slightly more than your Smith's dozen donuts on sale, but much less than Krispy Kreme's dozen.

Finally, my favorite news story was that of the Stork Derby, or the "Millar will Baby Derby", as the local newspaper referred to it. Charles Millar decided to prank everyone after he died by creating a fairly zany will: he left his Jamaican house to three people who hated each other; he left some ministers and temperance advocates stock in a brewing company on the condition they keep it in the company. And because he had no descendants of his own, he left a big chunk of his estate to the woman who had the most babies in the ten years after his death. Thus, the baby/stork derby. How is this a thing I didn't know about?

Aren't old newspapers awesome?!