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This past Saturday I was dutifully following my wife from antique store to antique store and at one stop I came across something that could have kept me interested for hours on end. The place had bound copies of the Pueblo Colorado Chieftain that stretched from about 1915 through the late 1920s. Just wonderful stuff.
I poured over some of these papers for an hour or so while my wife moved on to another shop. I'm not sure what the attraction is but reading 'morning after' accounts of games that featured Babe Ruth as a Red Sox pitchers and Rogers Hornsby's batting prowess had me hooked. I wish I had taken more pictures but I was trying to be discreet about it. The volumes were in various states of repair. Some were still tightly bound in their leatherette covers, some were so loose that they came apart as I opened them.
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As you can see I pulled Brisket Howard's card out of my wallet so he could witness some history.
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You have to look close but the box score to the right of Brisket shows Ruth as the Red Sox pitcher. The game was the first game of a doubleheader against the Athletics on August 31, 1917. Ruth went all the way for his 20th win of the season. He beat a Philly pitcher with the fabulous name of Socks Seibold.
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There was a ton of interesting stuff in these old papers. World War I was going on for a good part of it and the Chieftain carried the latest from Europe and sadly lists of locals killed or wounded.
Below is a bit of the sports page from September 6 of the same year and you can see that Seibolt lost again to the Red Sox on the 5th. It was a hard luck defeat with him allowing only three hits.
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The ads were great as well. I should have taken pics of some of them. It was a good time to be a drunk. Plenty of liquor store ads and gin went for 65 cents a quart!
I didn't even ask how much the books were. They smelled pretty musty and I knew my wife would not be happy with one in her car or sitting around the house. I may go back and find the price. If it is cheap enough I'd buy one and just keep it a day to pour through every page.
Awesome! I love stuff like this as well, if they were cheap enough I'd be all over picking a few of those up!
ReplyDeleteI sometimes end up doing the internet age equivalent and reading through old newspapers through a Google News search...like this one for a Brisket Howard TD: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qEdSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=czYNAAAAIBAJ&pg=2965%2C5181639
ReplyDeleteOr, rather, fumble recovery. My apologies. Should have read more closely!
DeleteHis one moment in the sun......until becoming my #walletcard anyway
DeleteI used to have access to a lot of old papers on microfiche. Man, those were fun.
ReplyDeleteI still get lost in the google newspaper archives from time to time. Not the same as the real thing, but good all the same.
I love reading old newspapers, as you can imagine. And I have access to old newspapers in my job! Unfortunately, the microfilm machine isn't hooked up at work (it's considered very antiquated) and if I wanted to look through them I'd have to track down some people and they'd say "what do you want that for", blah, blah, blah
ReplyDeleteLove browsing old newspapers. I do some work at the local Historical Society. I spend a lot of time archiving old articles. I would get more done if I didn't spend so much time reading
ReplyDelete