I had a lot of fun looking through the Victoria Advocate archives yesterday. I immediately noticed that the newspaper 25 years ago was only 35¢ for its 64 pages but advertisements were in abundance. It wasn’t unusual to be reading one column on page A3 and finish it on page A12 because the rest of A3 was filled with a huge Dillard’s ad.
The big local issue of March, 25, 1988 was a discussion on giving teachers a 6% raise. Of course that was nixed, so the sentiment hasn’t changed in 25 years. I was surprised that nationally, there was a report out against standardized tests for kindergartners. Why did we start testing them in the first place and are we doing that now? Hey, I was in my early forties and raising two teenagers; so I probably didn’t know this was happening.
Nationally, President Reagan was still answering questions about the Iran-Contra scandal. Even back then they were setting up a deficit panel. On the business front, DuPont discounted making CFS (Freon) because it was depleting the ozone layer. The Dow Jones average was a mere 2,026 points and trying to recover from the S&L crisis.
This particular day, Henry Wolff wrote about his latest visit to Matagorda Island and described it only as he could.
Remember the old “Hocus Focus” where cartoon characters would be involved in some activities on two different panels? The object of the game would be to pick out the differences between the two panels. For example, one character might be using his left hand to pound a nail into a board and in the other panel; the character would be using his right hand. I remember it becoming a race between my workmates to find the differences.
The ads were interesting, and it’s a good thing they were because they were everywhere. In this particular edition, Kmart had their plants on sale; a full steak meal at the Sirloin Stockade was only $5.49 and Jerry Lentz had a 25% off on all their sporting goods. Twenty five years ago, Montags had their round steak on sale for $1.99 a pound, but I would have opted for their tenderized fajitas at the same price.
The entertainment section of the paper was also interesting. Hungry Jacks had their 80¢ draft beer the Armadillo band was playing at Schroeder, but they all had to compete with the local night clubs like Cody’s,Dallas,Peppers,and the Cowgirl Club. We had three movies theaters, Cinema IV, the Playhouse, and Salem Six where you could watch a movie for four bucks.
I used to have my head buried in the sports section in those days starting with the cartoon Tank McNamara and finishing with Julius Ermis’s outdoor section.In between the Cowboys and Astros were in their hey day,so there was a lot of material to read.
Whatever happened to the Town Crier section where you could catch up on the gossip and what was the L.M. Boyd section about?