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August 1939. "Medford, Oregon. Half-grown farm boy on main drugstore corner in town." Not quite Lana Turner at Schwab's, even if the photographer is Dorothea Lange. Hey kid, your 15 minutes starts right ... now. View full size.
Young's was one of a succession of drug stores in Medford's Palmer-Medynski Building, which was built by neither Palmer nor Medynski, but by Byers & Jacobs in 1884. It's among Medford's three oldest buildings--one of three known 1884 buildings to survive.
Dorothea Lange took several pictures in Jackson County, Oregon in August 1939, including two of this young man. Should you want to go to the files of the Library of Congress to find out more about them, don't bother--they have the prints, but no notes. The Farm Services Agency only retained notes and other supporting documentation when their photographers were on assignment, and Lange apparently took her Medford and other Jackson County photos "for fun," on her route in 1939 between the hop fields of Josephine County and the potato fields of Klamath County.
It's possible notes or memoirs about her Jackson County sojourn survive in her personal papers, at the Oakland Museum of California.
With Shirley Temple on the cover.
Here's another picture crying out for colorization. Hope to see it happen.
A syndicated cartoon strip from 1928 to 1970, at its peak in 1,300 newspapers. Other incarnations included books, radio shows and film shorts. Created by John Hix (1907-1944) who considered Strange as It Seems to be a library of “the curious, in nature and humankind, set adrift on the vast sea of public opinion with the hope that it will fulfill its mission to entertain and acquaint its viewers with some of the marvels of the world in which we live.”
His socks ought to throw party and invite his pants down
Where did we go wrong?
[89 cents, not .89 cents, which would be less than a penny. - Dave]
Young's Cut Rate Drugs, building is still there but redone.
The alarm clocks with the black outer rim and white numbers are probably glow in the dark radium-painted numbers.
Use them to test your geiger counter.
With Joan Bennett on the cover, 29 years old at the time. Her big role that year was in The Man in the Iron Mask as Princess Maria Theresa. Her two great roles were yet to come, in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), starring in both with Edward G. Robinson.
Because the radio announcer was "That Way."
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