2002-10-06 - 11:51 p.m.

Old Newspapers

What have I been doing with myself recently? Looking at old newspapers. Sounds exciting, right?

It's all part of the chess journalist thing. The other day, while looking in my attic I ran across an old scrapbook that was in the old files of the Frown Town chess club. I'd always known it was there, but I'd never taken a real close look at it.

As it turns out, there was a chess column in one of the Frown Town papers from about 1938 to 1942. It seems odd to contemplate that sixty years ago there were at least two papers in Frown Town, a morning one and an evening one, but newspapers used to be the primary source of news until TV and radio got big. Lots of cities had two, or more, newspapers.

Anyway, these chess columns had a lot of interesting information, including the names of Frown Town Chess Club Champions back into the 19-teens. Also there were dozens of games from players who previously I had only known as names on the championship list.

What's the point of all this? Well, knowledge is good for its own sake, but I plan on using the information to write a couple of columns, so all this work is going to actually pay off.

Since I had some free time I decided to go to the Frown Town Public Library to look up the old newspapers that these columns were in, mainly to see if there were any more that weren't in the scrapbook. To make a long story short: just about all the newspaper chess columns were in the scrapbook. The guy who'd put it together 60 years ago had been pretty thorough.

Reading old newspapers is kind of interesting because it gives you a sense of the times that is somewhat at odds with the general perception of the past.

There is a concept that I may have talked about before that my high school friends came up with: Chroncentricity. It's basically the misconception that the time you happen to be living in is the MOST IMPORTANT time that ever was, and that people in the past really would have no understanding of "modern" things. This thinking is wrong from two angles: life in the past had its own complications, and people in the future will probably think we are a bunch of backward hicks, too.

While in a lot of ways the old saw "the more things change the more they stay the same" is correct, there are obvious differences between the past and now.

For instance, the type in old newspapers is TINY! Apparently newspaper publishers were much more interested in fitting the most information possible on the least newsprint possible than they were in not ruining their readers' eyes. They printing jobs were often smudgy, making reading even harder. And not only that, reading the newspapers on microfilm is probably a lot easier than reading the actual papers themselves because the words on the screen are actually bigger than on the original. Modern newspaper readers are wimps! In fact the newspaper I work for just changed its format about a year ago so their print was even bigger than before and there were fewer columns per page.

Well, the average newspaper reader is getting older, so now every newspaper is becoming a Large Print Edition to match that demographic. Sad, but true.

Nowadays there seems to be a separation between "hard news" and "info-tainment" which is more like gossip than actual news. In these old newspapers before 1945 the line seems to be much more blurry. There were a number of really sensationalistic stories that I ran across, that I felt crossed the boundary of good taste. Newspapers seemed to be a lot more death-obsessed, reporting on gruesome accidents of all kinds with disturbing thoroughness. Although, perhaps the opposite argument could be made: today we are in denial and trying to hide from the harsh realities of life, even when reading the news.

For example, in one paper from the 1920s there was a headline of a small article "John Doe, 68, Former policeman, Blows Own Brains Out." The article then went on to talk about how he'd been sick and depressed recently, and he'd used his old police revolver to do the deed, making quite a mess all over the wall. When was the last time you read something like THAT in a local newspaper?

More importantly, in one paper from the very early 1900s, there was a series of articles that was a first-person account of a U.S. military action in the Philippines. It was graphic to say the least, describing the horrible conditions and the low morale of the men, and the high rate of suicide among them. Now compare that to the sanitized reports we got about Desert Storm (and will probably get about the upcoming war with Iraq). Frankly, in terms of facing the realities of life we seem to have taken a huge step backward. Our news is harmless, wrapped in cotton, controlled by the government.

On the other hand, while all sorts of trashy goings-on were reported in great detail, sex was never mentioned, not even in passing. Generally rape was referred to as "assault" or "an attack." Okay, so some progress has been made. Less death, more sex.

Also it's amusing to read about the social problems of the past. For instance, In one paper from the turn of the last century, there was a fiery editorial talking about the problem of "scorchers," and another article talked about a young woman who had been assaulted by a "scorcher" and knocked down, but she seemed to be unhurt. It took me a while to figure out what the hell they were talking about. A scorcher is someone tearing around on a bicycle! Not exactly something we have a big problem with these days. Well, except for this daredevil.

However, most of those points were from papers I'd come across from previous research. The thing that struck me the most from these newspapers from the early 1940s was how war-obsessed they were, even quite a bit before the U.S. entered World War II. Like most clueless people born after 1950 I assumed that the United States was minding its own business when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, but that is far from the truth. The nation was gearing up for war: building ships and munitions, calling in reservists and calling up draftees. War news was all over the front pages and everywhere inside. I wonder if the people of the time could see it so clearly, but to me it almost looks like Pearl Harbor was a convenient excuse for the U.S. to enter the melee. America was chafing at the bit to join the "fun." From the perspective of the future, it almost seems inevitable, like destiny.

That's why I love history. The stories of people in the past, and the shifting perceptions about what they mean as time unfolds is just fascinating. It helps make it not so terribly dull, scanning hundreds of dark, blurry pages for the word "chess."