November 2?, 1942

[mbarrick]

Elaine and I just found a copy of the "Daily Province" from November 1942 crammed in the space above the sliding doors between the living room and dining room. We were talking and I idly held my hands up near the opening to lean off the door jamb. I noticed a breeze coming out and presumed the wall must be hollow right up to the 4th floor, since the 4th floor suite above us has no living room window at the moment. To confirm my theory we took out a flashlight and looked up into the space and found the paper. Likely the paper was crammed up there to stop a similar draft nearly 61 years ago. The paper is so dry and brittle it falls apart just to touch it and these are the largest peices we could save. I managed to read a the date off one page, November 2[1 or 7], 1942, before it fell apart. Elaine managed to read ads for the "new" Disney cartoon "Donald's Gold Mine" and part of ads for an Abbot and Costello movie, a movie with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan (admission 25¢, plus tax.), and another with Humphrey Bogart and Lionel Barrymore. You don't get to discover things like this in a new building. A bigger version of the scan with no words highlighted here.

Comments

[miss-tease.livejournal.com]

hey good idea you have here. I have something similar here at home. I pried (sp?) apart a mirror from its frame years ago and I found a few pages of a 1926 Vancouver Sun crammed between the two. Yellow, brittle, a little torn but still completely legible. It's really neat, and luckily it has the movie section, which is called "Moving Pictures - Vaudeville - Theatre". The Capitol was playing Son of the Sheik with Rudolph Valentino, and the Orpheum was playing something billed as "The most thrilling bill of the Vaudeville season".

Isn't that cool?

I should bring it over to your place next time you have a pre Sin City thingy.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

That's very cool. Elaine says she finds things like that all the time at work (she's a picture framer) but there's something about finding something like this as part of the building. It's a little reminder that over sixty years ago somebody was standing right were I was, stuffing that newspaper up there. I guess it is different because instead of being an artifact I picked up that turn out to have something neat in it, this is *home*. It's a little like Amélie finding the "treasure chest" (but no where as neat as that would be).

[valerian.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you are interested in preserving it I should probably frame that sucker up for you...!

[valerian.livejournal.com]

The Flynn/Reagan film was "Santa Fe Trail (released 1940)". Flynn died in Vancouver Canada in the Sylvia Hotel (the west end, near Stanley Park) on the 14th of October 1959. Rumor and Mystery surround his death to this day; the official cause of death is heart attack and this well may be the case, but it is a common rumor that he died while in the arms of a local rent boy.

[sleeplessknight.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's so cool. It's like buried treasure! ^_^