Two Cents for 30 Pages — D.C.'s Evening Star, Aug. 27, 1926

Description:
The whole paper — thirty pages of front-page Washington news — costs two cents. That's roughly thirty-five cents today. And it's still not the wildest thing on this page.

This is The Evening Star out of Washington D.C., Friday, August 27th, 1926. Thirty pages, two cents — call it about thirty-five cents now. Up at the top left, the lead story: a coal mine explosion in Pennsylvania has just killed forty-one men. Three are still missing. Fifty-eight workers were trapped underground. The paper lists wives and children keeping a ten-hour vigil above the shaft. One paragraph mentions investigators found the blast started in a machine shop one hundred feet from the main tunnel. That detail just sits there, in the middle of the column, like a note in a margin. Forty-one dead, and the investigation is already underway.

Now look at the center left. There's a portrait of a man identified as Captain Ira Baker of the Air Corps. The headline reads: 'Plane Crew Prepared to Die With Bettis in Case of Crash.' The story explains that Army regulations required a parachute be worn on this flight — but Lieutenant Bettis had been injured and physically could not put one on. So his crew decided: none of them would wear one either. They flew the whole trip without parachutes, together, on purpose. The paper runs this as a straightforward item about military loyalty. No outrage, no investigation announced. Just — that's what they did.

And then over on the right, look at this illustration — a cartoon woman with a ukulele, rivers swirling around her, advertising music lessons right next to the news. The headline to her left: 'Trudy Welcomed Home in New York With Great Pomp.' That's Gertrude Ederle, twenty years old, who had just become the first woman to swim the English Channel — beating the men's record by nearly two hours. The city gave her a ticker-tape parade. Mayor Jimmy Walker presented her with a scroll of honor. The paper says, quote, 'the conquest of the English Channel was a feat never before achieved by a woman.' And right next to that history, someone is selling ukulele lessons. That's the Evening Star in 1926 — forty-one miners dead, a pilot flying without a parachute, and Trudy Ederle on top of the world, all on the same front page, same afternoon.

What strikes you about this page isn't any one story. It's the compression. Forty-one men dead in a mine. A pilot crew choosing to fly without parachutes out of loyalty. The first woman to swim the English Channel getting her ticker-tape parade. All of it costs two cents. All of it lands on the same front page like it's just — Friday.

Another front page from a hundred years back tomorrow. If this one got you, stick around — we do this every day.

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Chapters:
0:00 Opening
0:14 Closer Look 1
1:02 Closer Look 2
1:39 Closer Look 3
2:31 Reflection
2:57 Close

Source: NASA LOC_FRONTPAGES — "Evening star (Washington, D.C.), August 27, 1926"
Image: https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:ndnp:dlc:batch_dlc_goodman_ver02:data:sn83045462:00280659113:1926082701:0118/full/3000,/0/default.jpg

Late Edition reads one real front page from exactly 100 years ago, every day.
The date on the paper is today's date, 1926.

#history #1920s #newspaper