Page Forty-One
I have two copies of a clipping about my dad, his promotion, and our family’s subsequent move to North Carolina. One was in my mom’s papers and the other was in my grandmother’s, probably sent to her by my mom. Neither of them have a date or the name of the newspaper on the clipping.
We moved a lot when I was growing up so I, luckily, have many different times and places to use as mental and physical landmarks. I can date photographs by the inside of a house, the outside of a house, the back yard, the front yard, interior rooms, inside the school, outside the school, the age of my siblings or friends, clothes, hairstyles, me, just about anything in the picture. This picture of my dad is just that, a picture of my dad, other than his rough age, his hair style, and the width of his tie, there are no clues in the photograph.
My date estimate for the article was Fall 1964, probably early October. I went to school in three different states the year this article was written. Internet searching was inconclusive for area newspaper titles. Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, are close enough to share an airport, Lehigh Valley International Airport, (ABE), but not necessarily newspapers, so I called the Easton Area Public Library for suggestions. The reference librarian thought my parents would have subscribed to the Easton Express, which the library had on microfilm but which had not yet been digitized. I explained my page 41 problem, and he offered to ask the local history librarian. It helped that I called during a snowstorm and apparently no one was in the library. He questioned other newspaper articles on the clipping, but none of the articles on either side had a date, year or month or day.
The adjacent article about Rolls Royce’s new model, the Silver Shadow, had possibilities for date identification. Wikipedia lists the Silver Shadow as first produced in 1965. Car production calendar years, and model years are not synchronized in America. A 2018 model year automobile is available during most of the 2018 calendar year, and is also available in the third quarter of 2017 because production of the 2018 model began in July or August 2017. I don’t know if that’s also true of Rolls Royce in Great Britain in the 1960s. So while the article lent credence to the date, it didn’t corroborate it.
On the reverse side of the clipping was an article about a Lehigh and Rutgers football game taking place the next weekend. I had it! Multiple sports web sites exist with decades of football schedules and results.
Lehigh played football at Rutgers October 10, 1964, dating the article some time around the 4th to 9th. However when I re-read the article, it mentioned an away game, so it couldn’t have been in 1964.
I checked 1965 and sure enough Lehigh hosted Rutgers at Lehigh October 9, 1965. Business articles in local newspapers were generally published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I called the Easton Area Public Library again and explained I was wrong about the year and that my current best guess for the date of article was 5 October 1965 and wondered if she could verify my clipping was published that week in the Easton Express.
She did, it was published Thursday, 7 Oct. 1965 on page 41 of the Easton Express. Moving from the right time period in the wrong year, to an exact date in a specific newspaper, was wonderful.
