So I’m digging through history, looking for a story about a local traffic intersection. I think I’ve got what I want to write about, and it connects nicely with what’s happening now at that intersection. And luckily I’m not into the WRITING yet; I’m just researching.
As I dig through The Dallas Morning News archives, I keep coming across these great bits of wordsmithing, bits that make me want go back in time to when a headline like, “Toreadors of Abrams Road Fight Speeding Autos, Not Bulls to Board Streetcars,” didn’t prompt a guffaw. When thieves were referred to as “robbers” and “bandits” that “bedeviled” police. When “juveniles” and “youths” were “hanging around places that would certainly get them into trouble.” When a furniture store opening was announced by a picture of some lawn furniture and this press release:
Umbrella Beauty - Glimpse the inside of this umbrella done in a red rose pattern, the valance attractively edged with six-inch white fringe. There’s a place for the zinc-plated handle in the glass-top table. Chairs of washable vinyl plastic in a palomino color have wrought-iron frames and come in several different colors.
You can almost hear a woman in an ivory pencil skirt with a conservative up-do, saying the above into a fist-sized microphone as the staged lawn furniture spins on a laminated press-board platform. I’m having fun. I wish I could tell my high school history teacher, Mr. Glenn, “See! I DO like history. Just not in the way you teach it.”
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