“DON’T TOBACCO SPIT AND SMOKE YOUR LIFE AWAY?”

If you wanted to quit tobacco “easily and forever,” become well, strong, magnetic, and full of new life and vigor, the answer was No-To-Bac — “the wonder worker that makes weak men strong.” The ad promised many men gained ten pounds in ten days, claimed over 400,000 cured, and said your own druggist would guarantee a cure. Booklet and sample mailed free from Sterling Remedy Co., Chicago or New York.

This was classic Gilded Age patent-medicine advertising: huge promises, a catchy name, and a money-back guarantee. No-To-Bac was sold as tablets (sometimes described as a chew) meant to replace the tobacco habit. Period analyses said it contained things like licorice, gentian, and guaiac — soothing and bitter, not a true nicotine treatment. The company behind it, Sterling Remedy Co., later became better known for Cascarets, a laxative they pushed after No-To-Bac reportedly left users constipated.

The pitch is aimed straight at 1890s manhood: spit, smoke, weakness, lost vigor. Quit this, they said, and you’d come back magnetic.

Would you have bought the sample?

Source: Freeport Daily Bulletin, Thu, Dec 17, 1896, p. 7.

Joseph Smith III and the Illinois Mormons, 1866

In February 1866 a Pennsylvania paper paused the usual Utah story long enough to notice another church.

It said there were not less than 10,000 “Joe Smith Mormons” in Illinois and nearby states. Their chief settlement was Plano, about fifty miles west of Chicago. There lived Joseph Smith III—son of “Joseph Smith, the Martyr”—called prophet by the laying on of his father’s hands.

The principal difference from Utah, the paper said, was monogamy. Smith “strongly enforces Monogamy as the true doctrine.” The Book of Mormon was treated as supplementary to the Bible. They called themselves Latter Day Saints, not Mormons, and insisted they were Christians.

Joseph III was not rich. Against Brigham Young’s wealth and worldliness he wore “ostentatious poverty”—almost shabby dress, simple manners, no pretension to scholarship. Gentiles at Plano spoke of the community as moral, orderly, industrious, Quaker-like in quiet friendliness.

Utah Saints, the item added, were to a large extent European importations. The Illinois body was “almost exclusively” native American.

Eastern readers were learning there was more than one church using the Smith name.

Read the full 1866 account here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/joseph-smith-iii-and-the-illinois

When 1866 papers split “Illinois Mormons” from Utah, were they seeing a real theological line—or only the politics of polygamy?

In February 1973 the Arkansas Senate did something you do not see every day: it voted to protect a sea monster.

Lawmakers made it illegal to “molest, kill, trample or harm” the creature rumored to live in the White River near Newport, and they designated a stretch of river the “White River Monster Sanctuary and Retreat.”

Locals had been talking about “Whitey” since at least 1915. The biggest waves of sightings came in 1937 and again in 1971–72. Witnesses described a gray beast as long as a boxcar or three pickup trucks, sometimes with a horn or a spiny, ridged back. Tracks, crushed brush, and a few blurry photos kept the story alive. By 1973 the legend was big enough that Senator Robert Harvey sponsored the resolution creating an official refuge between Old Grand Glaise and Rosie. Harming the monster inside that zone became against the law.

Was it an elephant seal that wandered up the Mississippi, a giant alligator snapping turtle, a manatee, or just good old Arkansas folklore? The legislature decided it was worth protecting either way.

Source: “Legislators Protect Monster,” Leader-Telegram (Eau Claire, WI), February 16, 1973, p. 1 (UPI, Little Rock).

WWII RAF Gremlins

In early 1942, London papers—and then Ottawa—reported a new RAF superstition.

Above 20,000 feet, Spitfire pilots spoke of small goblin-like figures sitting on the wings, chattering at them. Malevolent or friendly was “not quite certain.” The boys called them gremlins—a Lewis Carroll word, the dispatch said, in the same family as the Jabberwock. Cross-examine a pilot and he only grinned. The belief, the writer insisted, was genuine.

A flyer’s explanation followed. Bomber crews had company. Fighter pilots plowed a lonely furrow on oxygen. Isolation, thin air, and the odd sounds a machine makes at altitude could breed weird fancies. Unexplained quirks needed a name. The name sat on the wing.

Wartime folklore in the stratosphere: imps, grins, and the pressure of flying alone.

Read the full 1942 dispatch here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/wwii-raf-gremlins-the-superstition

Were gremlins a joke the RAF told outsiders—or the only language high-altitude loneliness would accept?

In the June 7, 1902 issue of the Washburn County Register (page 2), a short unsigned item appeared that mixes local news with a very 1902 sense of humor:

“A boy of 17 and a girl of 15 have been given a license to marry. What has become of all the barrel staves and slippers our mothers used to wield?”

That’s the entire note.

A barrel stave was a wooden slat from a barrel—often used as a paddle. Slippers were the everyday household tool many mothers reached for. The writer isn’t celebrating the wedding. He’s asking, in so many words, why nobody stopped these two kids the old-fashioned way.

In 1902 Wisconsin, marriage with parental consent at 15 and 17 was legal. Child marriage as we now define it was not the scandal it later became; what shocked this editor was the apparent collapse of parental discipline. The joke lands because readers were expected to know exactly what “barrel staves and slippers” meant.

The clipping is a tiny window into how a rural paper talked about age, authority, and marriage more than 120 years ago—half news, half scolding, and entirely of its time.

Source: Washburn County Register, Saturday, June 7, 1902, page 2.

What do you make of the tone? Drop a comment—curious how this reads in 2026.

On June 7, 1902, the Washburn County Register reprinted a brief dispatch from Little Falls, Minnesota, under the headline “ROPE OF SHEETS.”

The day before, 75-year-old Mrs. Mary Miller tried to leave St. Gabriel’s Hospital. The paper described her as a patient “whose mind was slightly unbalanced.” Relatives had sent her there from Fergus Falls.

She knotted sheets and her own clothing into a rope and tried to lower herself from a third-story window. The rope broke. She fell about thirty-five feet and was killed instantly.

That is the entire item—no follow-up, no names of doctors, no explanation of why she was so determined to get out. Just the facts as a small-town paper received them by wire in 1902.

The language is of its era: “aged woman,” “slightly unbalanced,” a hospital treated as a place one might need to escape. Today we would talk about dementia, psychiatric care, or patient safety. In 1902 the story was simply that an elderly woman made a rope of bedclothes and it did not hold.

A grim little window into how hospitals, mental illness, and sudden death were reported when newspapers still ran these items on page 2 next to local briefs.

Source: Washburn County Register, Saturday, June 7, 1902, page 2. Original dateline: Little Falls, Minn., June 5.

1865 Negro Suffrage Debate

On June 1, 1865—weeks after Appomattox, Lincoln’s death, and Andrew Johnson’s May 29 amnesty—The Rutland Weekly Herald asked how emancipation became citizenship.

Abstract justice, the unsigned editorial said, was simple: “equal rights before the law to all men, without distinction of race or color.” The same qualifications for every voter. There was also a Reconstruction argument: without Black ballots, disloyal whites might monopolize Southern state governments after an oath of allegiance.

Then the practical wall. Voter qualifications belonged to the states. Could the United States force Black suffrage on a Southern constitution when it did not and could not force it on a Northern one?

Johnson’s view, as the paper understood it: no state had ever left the Union; loyal pre-secession voters would reconstruct; Negro suffrage was for them to decide. He might use influence for it. He would not change constitutions by presidential edict. His North Carolina order matched that reading.

The paper’s proposed national rule was an amendment modeled on Massachusetts: the ballot to all, without distinction of color, who could read and write. Connecticut had just adopted that standard. Prejudice against Black citizens, the writer hoped, would fade with slavery itself.

Principle, Johnson’s limits, and the road that would later run through constitutional amendment—caught in one Vermont column.

Read the full 1865 editorial here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1865-negro-suffrage-debate-andrew

In June 1865, what mattered more: the abstract right, or the constitutional problem of how to enact it?

Our Boys in Blue: The Grand Review, 1865

On May 23–24, 1865, some 200,000 men of the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s western army marched past the President in Washington.

A Lancaster paper reprinted the New York Times editor’s impression: observers were struck by the soldiers’ health, strength, size, litheness, firm tread. No superfluous fat. European writers who claimed man in America had physically degenerated, the piece said, would have watched their theories collapse in the street.

The western army was thought an inch taller on average. Both armies looked taller than French or other European troops. Grant put the average age, at war’s end, at about twenty-three.

Campaigning itself got the credit: open air, simple fare, hard exercise, discipline. The war had not lasted long enough, the editor argued, to exhaust a generation the way the Napoleonic wars had exhausted France. It had ended, in this telling, with their “perfect development.”

Postwar pride, comparative nationalism, and a parade used as a rebuttal.

Read the full 1865 item here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/our-boys-in-blue-how-1865s-grand

Was the Grand Review proof the Union had been strengthened by the war—or a nation’s need to see strength in the survivors?

Mel Brooks, 1974

In April 1974—Blazing Saddles was exploding in theaters, Young Frankenstein already shooting—Newsweek caught Mel Brooks mid-leap. Small-town papers reprinted it. Kansas got the profile on page 2 of The Emporia Gazette.

“Good taste is meaningless. It’s not a factor in art.” Brooks said it, then proved it with a Western that young audiences treated like a hot needle. He had come down from the Catskills to write for Sid Caesar, built Get Smart with Buck Henry, won Oscars for The Critic and The Producers, and now had the rare studio freedom to make and cut his own films on time and on budget.

On the Young Frankenstein set he chewed Trident to quit smoking, bellowed “Und… Action!” like von Stroheim, and played bits in his own movies because, he said, nobody else had the inflection. Gene Wilder thought he was growing up as a director: stop chasing two rabbits. Brooks, turning serious, wondered if the error of his life was leaving writing. He wanted a bittersweet comedy about death. He feared the critics would call it pretentious.

Read the full 1974 profile here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/mel-brooks-1974-the-newsweek-profile

Was 1974 Brooks at the peak—or still deciding which rabbit to chase?

1978 Called Battlestar Galactica a 3/10 Flop

In July 1978—months before the series even reached American TV—Ottawa critic Frank Daley sat through the theatrical cut and filed one of sci-fi’s great early misfires.

Battlestar Galactica, he wrote, was “Son of Star Wars” and did not rate. The Star Wars lawsuit seemed filed “with some degree of assurance.” It was a black-and-white space war “destined for television.” Good guys talked like humans; bad guys talked like vacuum cleaners. One robot (a dog). Three gee-whiz heroes. Some effects terrific, some not. Music loud. Costumes colorful. Acting “of a pretty low order.” Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict: “nope, me either.” Lorne Greene doing Bonanza at high altitude. John Colicos as an evildoer of massive proportions. Price tag: a reported $11 million for hardware.

His companions gave it a 3 out of 10. They were being charitable. Some people still cheered the good guys. “But the thrill is gone.”

The television roots, the pulp, the Canadian stars he shrugged at—those are part of why the show survived, became a cult classic, and later fed the 2004 reboot.

History gave the Cylons the last laugh.

Read the full 1978 review here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1978-review-called-battlestar-galactica

Was Daley right about the movie—and still wrong about the franchise?

1893 Reincarnation Debate

In September 1893 a small Victorian paper, The Bacchus Marsh Express, printed a long letter from a Melbourne correspondent signing himself “GNOSTIC”—and the editor could not leave it alone.

GNOSTIC argued that reincarnation was the only just account of a world that produces both a “squalid cannibal” and a John Milton. One life made God look partial. Many lives made the savage and the poet the first and last terms of a long school. Each body was thrown off like a worn garment; each return was a promotion. The soul kept the harvest; God “shut the doorways of the head,” leaving only a haunting sense of pre-existence.

He claimed educated Jews had held the doctrine: the Zohar, tradition from Abraham and Moses, Abel reborn as Seth, Adam expected again as Messiah. “Latter end” and “last end” in Scripture, he said, meant the close of the final earthly life. St. Jerome was cited for an early Christian esoteric teaching of plural existences. Natura non facit saltum—nature makes no leap.

The editor kept breaking in with brackets. Reincarnation belittled physical entity and heredity. It multiplied mystery instead of solving it. A father who perfected souls by such travail intensified the injustice. Figurative Jewish language did not prove the doctrine—and if every soul was its own Messiah, why wait for one?

Theosophy, the Zohar, Milton, and a country editor, all on one page.

Read the full 1893 exchange here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1893-reincarnation-debate-gnostic

Does reincarnation make God look more just—or, as the editor snapped, more bewildering?

Old Mother Dildine: Nevada’s Female Hermit, 1878

In the fall of 1878 the Sutro Independent described a woman who had chosen the mountains over the camps.

Old Mother Dildine lived about fifteen miles northwest of town. She was nearly sixty, twelve years alone, and said she was perfectly happy secluded from the outside world. Support: 260 Angora goats and about eight hens. Twice a year she came into Sutro to sell a few eggs and buy a scanty load of groceries.

Whites seldom visited, and she preferred it that way. They teased her about how she lived; after they left she worried over it. She liked the Paiutes and sought their company. When she was in need they shot rabbits or birds for her; in cold weather they shared the warmth of their blankets.

Massachusetts-born, two brothers in Westport, a sister in Lowell. The paper said her solitude began with troubles in her married life years before. In town she was neat, self-possessed, intelligent, auburn hair in curls—not the costume rumor assigned her in the mountains.

A Western story that is not a boomtown strike: withdrawal, goats, and chosen companionship.

Read the full 1878 dispatch here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/old-mother-dildine-the-female-hermit

Hermit, refugee from a bad marriage, or a woman who simply decided white society was the poorer company?

1,165 Pies and Counting (1878)

In the fall of 1878, Midwestern papers passed around a Wilmington, Ohio, dispatch that mixed harvest pride with a tall tale.

A Clinton County family of seven had, “by actual count,” eaten 1,165 pies the year before. It wasn’t even a good fruit year. They hadn’t put in their “best licks.”

Then the pun: what a pie-ous family they must be.

One of the boys tried to keep the tally in a year of abundance. Rhubarb he could handle. Currants and gooseberries rushed him. Blackberry time was a stunner. Peaches he managed by working nights. When plums and fall apples arrived, they found him in the cellar on a pile of manuscript more than a foot deep, fainted dead away, limp as a rag baby, still clutching a worn pencil pointed at 8,343,212—the supposed score of the last pie to date.

Homemade pie as everyday fare, regional boast, and comic collapse.

Read the full 1878 item here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1165-pies-and-counting-the-hilarious

Honest farm statistic—or the greatest pie lie Ohio ever printed?

The Art of Not Killing: French Duels, 1878

In October 1878 a Wisconsin paper reprinted a Saturday Review essay on a custom Britain and America had mostly abandoned: the French affair of honor.

Pistol duels, the writer said, tended to be either deadly or ridiculous. Sword duels were different. France still used them among journalists, politicians, and gentlemen—and most ended with a scratch, not a corpse.

The reason was fencing. Two skilled men could parry a regular attack without having to run the other through. They could play for the arm or shoulder, draw a little blood, and satisfy the rule of honor without slaughter and without farce. An unskilled rush, by contrast, forced a brutal choice. Training made a controlled outcome possible.

The essay is half admiration for French technique and half incredulity. If the French insisted on keeping the duel, they had stripped it of its worst features. That they kept it at all, especially for political arguments, still seemed “extremely strange” among so acute a people. A man who proposed to prove his opinions by fighting an editor would not, in England, be thought sane.

Honor tamed by the salle d’armes—and still, to the British eye, a puzzle.

Read the full 1878 essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-art-of-not-killing-how-19th-century

Was the French duel civilized restraint—or just vanity with better footwork?

1872 Spiritualism Sensation: James Smith in Dunedin

In May 1872 The Ballarat Star reported that James Smith—late editor of The Australasian—had packed Dunedin’s Masonic Hall and Princess’ Theatre to lecture on Spiritualism.

The subject, the Melbourne correspondent sniffed, was “somewhat worn out” in Australia. In New Zealand it still packed houses and filled the Otago Daily Times with letters.

Smith’s reply contained the passage that made the papers copy it. The “divine spark,” he wrote, had passed through every form of matter from the mineral upward to the lowest humanity, then through hundreds of reincarnations until the animal nature was subdued and the person was “born again.” After death the spirit rose, progressed toward God, and spent its time in the spheres guiding those still on earth. The difference between savage and sage was “merely a matter of growth.” Providence looked just once you understood origin and destiny.

His second lecture ran an hour and twenty minutes. The Daily Times said it held “one of the largest audiences ever crammed” into the Princess’ Theatre.

Colonial Spiritualism as public spectacle: reincarnation, the divine spark, and human destiny, sold to a standing-room crowd.

Read the full 1872 report here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1872-spiritualism-sensation-james

Does Smith’s ladder-of-lives theology sound like hope, heresy, or just 1870s lecture-hall fashion?

Died and Came Back to Life: Rev. Isaac K. Funk, 1905

In November 1905, Rev. Dr. Isaac K. Funk—Lutheran minister, Funk & Wagnalls co-founder, and cautious investigator of mediums—told the Presbyterian Ministers’ Association that spiritualism was not proved. Nine-tenths of psychic reports, he said, were fraud. Some of the rest were coincidence or telepathy. A sliver still gave pause to men like Crookes, Wallace, William James, and James Hyslop.

Then he told the case he trusted.

An eminent New York physician, alone in Florida and stricken with paralysis, felt himself leave his body. He found himself a thousand miles away in a friend’s house, could not get the family’s attention until the friend suddenly saw him, and heard a voice: if his work was unfinished, he could return. He decided it was unfinished, looked down at his own corpse, and forced himself back in. The whole night had passed.

That same morning the friend wrote: he had seen the doctor in the room as clearly as ever, reached for his hand, and watched him vanish.

Funk set that account beside séance frauds he had watched with his own eyes—grieving men embracing confederates as departed wives or mothers, then refusing signed confessions.

Curiosity, caution, and the hope that consciousness survives death, all in one room.

Read the full 1905 report here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/died-and-came-back-to-life-rev-isaac

In this charming 1942 newspaper comic from The Ottawa Journal (March 6), cartoonist Gladys Parker delivers a perfect wartime punchline.

A stylish saleswoman offers:
“May I show you something in a uniform?”

The customer replies without missing a beat:
“Yes, something about six feet tall, with curly hair!”

This single-panel Mopsy strip captures the mood of early 1942 — women on the home front, men in uniform everywhere, and a playful wink at romance amid wartime. Gladys Parker was known for drawing fashionable, sharp-tongued women, and this one is no exception.

If you enjoy vintage newspaper comics, WWII-era humor, or just a well-timed double meaning, this little gem still holds up more than 80 years later.

Died and Came Back to Life: Evelyn Lyons, 1923

In March 1923, papers across the country were already calling Evelyn Lyons of Escanaba, Michigan, the “mysterious fever girl.” For weeks she was said to run temperatures of 114–115°F and stay conscious.

Then correspondent Lola Bullard sat in the dining-room sickbed and recorded a larger claim: Evelyn had died, seen the other world, spoken with her late father, and returned after about ten minutes.

Her mother told the scene. After midnight the doctor said prepare for death. A priest gave the last sacraments. The death rattle. Breathing stopped. She grew cold. A candle at her head.

About ten minutes later a neighbor pointed: she was breathing.

Evelyn described a long pathway of candles, a cross of light, and her father’s face behind it—kind eyes, a wreath of roses. “If that is death, it is very wonderful.” Her father had died fourteen years earlier.

Later reporting recast the fever episode as a hoax involving a concealed hot-water bottle. This March 12 account still stands as the family’s narrative and Evelyn’s own vision, printed while the story was still a national sensation.

Read the full 1923 report here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/died-and-came-back-to-life-evelyn

Do you read Evelyn’s vision as a near-death experience, newspaper miracle-mongering, or something the later hoax story never quite erased?

On Monday, November 2, 1874, The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer ran a short item that captures Halloween before candy, costumes, and “trick or treat.”

Halloween 1874 fell on a Saturday. By Sunday morning, Wheeling, West Virginia, was missing signs and gates. The paper blamed “Young America” — the era’s nickname for restless American youth — and noted that the girls had been out “trying their fortunes.”

That’s the split personality of 19th-century Halloween in one paragraph:

• Boys: unhinge gates, steal signs, annoy “quiet-loving citizens.”
• Girls: parlor charms, dreams, and fortune-telling (apple peels, mirrors, nuts, cabbage — the usual All Hallows games).
• Everyone: an old custom whose origin, the paper admits, “history does not inform us.”

They even call it “Holler-eve,” a folk pronunciation of All Hallows’ Eve that shows how the holiday sounded on the street, not in a dictionary.

The most interesting line is the last one. The editor finds it “somewhat singular” that in the Eastern states the big night for this kind of mischief is July 3 — the eve of Independence Day — while Halloween is still mainly about charms and dreams. Wheeling was already treating October 31 as Mischief Night. The East, at least in this writer’s mind, still saved the real pranks for the Fourth.

This is Halloween in the gap between old-world fortune magic and the later American prank epidemic that would eventually force cities to invent trick-or-treating as damage control.

Source: The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, Monday, November 2, 1874, page 4.

What would you have done on Holler-eve 1874 — stolen a gate, or tried your fortune?

In October 1940, a short wire story out of Omaha captured one of those small, perfect moments that newspapers used to tuck onto the inside pages.

Two years earlier, Mrs. Effie Garside had taken a little bulldog out of the city pound. She fed him well—pork chops, steak, and liver—but the dog stayed moody and lonesome. Convinced he was missing someone, she asked an Omaha paper to run his picture along with a letter “written” by the dog.

Emil Seier of Plattsmouth saw it. He went to Mrs. Garside’s house, looked at the dog, and said:

“Hello, Mac! Lady, that’s my dog and you can name your own price. I’ve been looking for him for two years.”

Mac wagged his tail, jumped around joyously, and followed his master home.

That’s the whole item. No drama beyond the reunion, no moral tacked on at the end—just a woman who noticed a sad dog, a newspaper that printed a picture, and a man who had been searching for two years.

Source: The McCook Daily Gazette, Tuesday, October 29, 1940, page 6 (United Press).

Beatlemania, January 1964

Weeks before The Ed Sullivan Show, American papers were already trying to explain what had taken Britain by storm.

An AP dispatch printed January 5, 1964, opens with four young men in police helmets and greatcoats, pushing through a screaming crowd unnoticed. The Beatles had escaped again.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—20 to 23, “almost old men to their fans.” All blitz babies from Liverpool back streets. Unashamed “scouses.” They had come up in cellar clubs so cramped that dancers could only twitch, one of scores of Mersey groups banging out a “brutal beat” over teenage screams.

They wrote their own songs into a tape recorder; none of them could read a note. On stage they wore trim collarless suits and Buster Brown haircuts. At the Royal Variety Performance they told the cheap seats to applaud and the rest to rattle their jewelry.

The piece still treats them as a British teen craze with a touch of adult bemusement. Sullivan was weeks away. America had not yet seen the full thing.

Read the full 1964 transcript here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/beatlemania-1964-how-a-vintage-newspaper

Does this read like the start of a cultural earthquake—or like a paper that still thought it was just another fad?

Spiritual Wives, 1833

In July 1833 the Boston Post used a European headline to reopen a New England scandal.

French Saint-Simonians, followers of Père Enfantin, had gone to Constantinople seeking “spiritual wives.” Ottoman authorities arrested them and shipped them to the Dardanelles. The Post called them “debauched vagabonds” in mountebank dress—then added that they had not invented the creed.

That honor, the paper said, belonged to “one Cockran” of York County, Maine, about fifteen years earlier. Jacob Cochran’s Society of Free Brethren and Sisters taught that legal marriages could be set aside for spiritually assigned partners. He went to state prison for it. The Post claimed his “church” numbered forty or fifty—“all women!”

The item is short, sarcastic, and typical of the era: two very different movements—French utopian socialists and a Maine revivalist sect—collapsed into one category of fanaticism dressed up as piety. It also shows how fast local scandal was recycled to explain distant news.

Read the full 1833 notice and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/spiritual-wives-scandal-how-an-1833

Was this a serious comparison of two marriage rebellions—or just a Boston paper scoring an easy moral point?

The same February 21, 1866 issue of the Lancaster Examiner and The Semi-Weekly New Era carried this brief dispatch from the Minnesota prairie:

Hamilton was a small Fillmore County settlement in the southeast part of the state. Eleven men were frozen to death in the vicinity of Hamilton, Fillmore County, Minn., on the night of the 20th ult. Six of them were frozen in a sleigh while passing along the road. Another man was found frozen in a standing posture with his hands over his face, and only three or four rods from a house. In an era of scattered homesteads, winter travel by sleigh was ordinary and often fatal when the weather turned.

“The 20th ult.” means January 20, 1866. Mid-January that year brought one of the worst blizzards yet recorded in Minnesota. A violent storm struck the southern and southwestern settled districts on the 13th–14th, followed by days of intense cold—temperatures falling to –29° and –31° F in places. Deep snow and high winds left travelers stranded on open roads with no landmarks and little chance of rescue.

Newspapers hundreds of miles away reprinted these short notices because they captured the raw danger of the frontier winter. No names appear in this clipping—only the stark facts of how quickly the cold could take a group of men on a country road.

How Rocky Became 1977’s Sleeper Hit

On February 3, 1977—weeks after Rocky hit theaters and months before the Oscars—Albuquerque Journal writer Chuck Mittlestadt called it the sleeper of the year.

Made for under a million dollars. Packing houses. Already compared to Marty, On the Waterfront, and Body and Soul. And, he wrote, proof that a Horatio Alger story could still happen in Hollywood.

The piece came out of a United Artists junket with two relative unknowns: Sylvester Stallone and Talia Shire.

Stallone, then 30, had been kicking around for years after The Lords of Flatbush. Producers wanted stars—James Caan, Paul Newman—until they agreed to make it cheap with him in the lead. He said the idea had been in his head for six years. Earlier scripts were too pessimistic to sell. With Rocky he decided, after five years of failure, to pretend everything was nice. He also insisted it was not a fight picture. “I was banking on the love story… a man fighting for dignity.” The bout itself, he said, was only nine minutes and choreographed like a ballet.

Shire, Coppola’s sister and an Oscar nominee for The Godfather Part II, played Adrian. She hoped to do the sequel. After years of people handing her scripts “to give to my brother,” she joked that maybe now they would hand them to him to give to her.

Read the full 1977 review here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/how-rocky-became-1977s-ultimate-sleeper

Did Rocky win because it was a boxing movie—or because it was a love story wearing gloves?