If you’ve read this blog for any length you know I get a kick out of digging things up out of the backyard, which is a steady supplier of stuff — most of it as worthless as it is intriguing. Be it marbles, figurines, opossum jawbones, World War II era German army helmets, whiskey bottles stamped with prohibition restrictions, circa-1950s toothpaste tubes, fragments of a license plate from 1920, lumps of coal, Batchelder tiles, and all sorts of old nails and whatnot, there seems to be no end to the excavationings.

As an aside I keep meaning to photographically catalog the collection into an online Museum of Backyarchaelogy, but haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Well today’s find comes not from beneath the soil out back, but from the basement beneath the house. Having gone down there to see if our cat Jiggy had gotten down there and if so to try to get him out, I poked around a little bit and found some crate siding that had been hammered up against the floor beams for whatever reason, maybe to create a little storage area. Burned into the wood was the last name of “Haskett” and the words “Los Angeles Cal.” Upon further examination I found the other side of the wood was lined with pages of some sort and sure enough when I gave one piece a gentle tug down came the following piece fom a magazine called “The Woman’s Home Companion.” Dateline?

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The fragment of page below shows the partial headline to read “…TTING OF THE WHITE HOUSE,” but other than that there’s not much else decipherable. Turn it over though, and there are three articles whose headlines are clearly visible through the decades of dust and dirt that have settled on it: “New Liquid That Clears The Skin,” “Problems in Dressmaking” and “B. & B. Styles Fit For A New Century.”

See for yourself (click to triplify):

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