I enjoy looking through old copies of The Greeneville Sun, the older the better. It is a great way to find ideas for columns.
One thing noticeable in the papers 90 to 100 years old is that they include many advertisements for patent medicines, tonics, ointments, etc. Most of these were not set up like typical newspaper ads, but designed and displayed like news stories.
They are what we now would call “advertorials,” with one difference: modern advertorials have a visible notation identifying them as paid advertising. However, the ones from the 1920s and thereabouts generally weren’t labeled as ads. You had to figure it out for yourself. Sometimes that meant reading through inches of copy before you spotted the first reference to whatever miracle remedy was being promoted.
Sometimes, though, the advertising aspect was obvious in the headline, such as the following one from the July 2, 1925, Greeneville Democrat-Sun, predecessor of today’s Sun. The headline says:
“Full Of Pep And Feeling Fine,” with a lengthy multi-deck subhead following: “Greeneville, Tenn., Farmer Says HERB JUICE Relieved Him Of Constipation, Biliousness, Torpid Liver And Stomach Trouble After Other Medicines And Treatments Failed.”
The text tells how a Route 3 Greene County farmer used the advertised medicine to relieve a seemingly endless array of medical woes and regain enough health and strength to do his farm work again. The medicine he took that ended his problems could be obtained at Boyd Drugs in Greeneville, we learn in the final paragraph.
Elsewhere in that day’s edition is a headline that surely must have been intended to go atop another advertorial, but wound up, somehow, on the wrong story. The result is hilarious, because what the headline says is “Good-by Stomach Gas.”
The problem isn’t the misspelling of “Goodbye” or the inherent awkwardness of addressing the subject of stomach gas. The problem is that the story over which that headline ran was, of all things, an obituary.
That’s right! The deceased man’s survivors opened their newspaper that day to find their loved one’s death notice topped with the rather undignified and unexpected final farewell: “Good-By Stomach Gas.”
“Good-By Stomach Gas” headlining an obituary may elicit laughter now, 96 years down the line, but the blunder probably wasn’t funny either to the newspaper staff or the man’s family at the time it happened.
Can you imagine how chagrined and job-insecure the newspaper staffer responsible for the mistake must have felt while creeping shame-faced into the newspaper office the next morning?
That poor soul probably was met by a furious publisher with a rolled-up, swat-ready newspaper in one hand and a YOU’RE FIRED, DUMMY! notice in the other. Even worse, grim-faced relatives of the late Mr. S. Gas may have been there as well, ready to share a reaction or two of their own.
All those actually involved in that snafu are long gone by now, but since I’m here at the same paper that once was The Greeneville Democrat-Sun, let me issue the following long-overdue correction:
An incorrect and inappropriate headline appeared on an obituary notice published on Page 3 of the July 2, 1925, edition of The Greeneville Democrat-Sun. The newspaper regrets and apologizes for the error, though we admit that, nearly a century later, we can’t help but find it pretty funny. We apologize for that too.
You may be wondering whose obituary that was. I’m not going to say. I think he still has family around here.
June 12, 2021 at 10:00AM
https://ift.tt/3iG5JLk
JUDD: Wrongly Placed Headline Is Funny 96 Years Later - Greeneville Sun
https://ift.tt/3eOfySK
Funny
No comments:
Post a Comment