A blast from the past
I love scrapbooks. In fact, I just went on a three-day scrapbooking retreat this past weekend, where I finished three Christmas albums and most of a 2008 album. Oh, and my high school album. (My 10-year reunion is this year. There’s a little bit of a delay.)
Well, my husband is into scrapbooking too, in his own way. I like fancy paper and family photos. my husband, well, my husband loves newspapers. A lot.
So what he does is cuts out old newspaper ads and pastes them into blank books. He gets super-old newspapers at used book sales, and from his mom’s house in Delaware County.
Now me, I like newspapers, but really only like local news. So I was super-happy when he flagged an ad for me recently. It was from the State Register in Laurel, Del., from Oct. 4, 1919. (Price of that edition of the newspaper? 3 cents a copy!)
It’s an ad for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, and one of the testimonials is a woman from Hellam!
The medicine was for “female troubles,” and the Hellam woman, Mrs. E.R. Crumling, was happy with how it relieved those symptoms. The thing is, she said she wasn’t able to do any work before, and now she’s thrilled because she can keep up with all her housework. Um, wait. I wouldn’t want a medicine that made me MORE able to do housework! (Just kidding.)