My eldest daughter brought me back a treasure from her garage sale trip to Penn Valley last weekend. It’s a large stack of old newspapers. Most of the papers are from the Oakland Tribune and are dated in the 1960’s. A good find! There are lots of historical headlines; John Glenn, the Kennedy’s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are some of the names found. But what I find most poignant are the names that no one remembers. Example; “Saturday, June 8, 1968. (AP) Elizabeth N.J. Two spectators waiting for the train bearing Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s body to Washington were killed today by a train heading in the opposite direction. Police said the crowd was jamming the tracks and the two persons apparently could not get out of the way of the northbound train…” The assassination and funeral of Bobby Kennedy was the headline story, but for two families it became quite personal and altered their lives forever. I wonder what became of those families? How did they deal with the loss?
The old papers are filled with stories similar to that. Little people, ordinary people…facing tragedy. The newspaper of today has the same sort of stories but the passage of time has given these old stories a patina that can’t be found in today’s news.
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