Our comix page had Jumble (the grown-ups version) which I was very good at.
And there was Cappy Dick, which was a contest of some sort and you could win prizes. I won a tiny tool kit.
When I was a kid, we got the Chicago Tribune and I made a daily ritual out of swiping the Tempo section which was sort of a lifestyle/entertainment section. Primarily because it had the comics but then I’d read Dear Abby, Ann Landers, Bob Greene and my mom would have me read her horoscope. Sometimes I’d read a few of the articles as well; I think it was Thursdays that had Ebert’s movie reviews for the coming weekend. On particularly enthusiastic days, I’d go back to the main news section to read Mike Royko’s column, look at the editorial cartoons and read the letters to the editor. If I was still interested, it would be the classifieds – I remember being kinda of mystified by the legal notices for bankruptcies and name changes – and, on rare occasions, flipping through the sports section for Gil Thorp which was never worth it because it was Gil Thorp but I was scraping the barrel by then.
Ink is the only way to do a crossword puzzle. I do all American-style crosswords, including the NYT Sunday puzzles, in ink. I’ve got better at crosswords in the years since I was a child, and no longer have need of pencils.
@Elmer_J.Fudd , I could never figure out the use of the bridge column. I could play the game, and I understood the column well enough, but it never set up situations that I could use in games against Mom, Dad, and Grandma. When I was 10, I wasn’t bananas about playing bridge; I was just a fourth if my aunt didn’t want to play. The chess column was more useful to me than the bridge column.
Not so much the features, but I do remember the days of looking at the obituaries to find out if anybody the family knew had died.
I also remember that our highschool graduation scores were published in a double page spread, and we cross referenced our student ID numbers to find our our score (an exam score across all the subjects you took in your final year at highschool). Sadly - this isn’t done anymore.
And for our university graduation the paper printed a list of all graduands for that particular ceremony. This also is no longer done.
I just learned a new word.
You Brits talk funny. 
How about TV listings? A partial page of what’s on TV tonight plus a Sunday supplement.
These had the grid for all the channels. Often a paper had a designation to distinguish color from b&w shows. To fill it out they’d have an article about a show or celeb.
That Sunday supplement (we called it the “TV Guide”, even though it wasn’t) had the world’s easiest crossword puzzle. I was doing them in ink when I was 8.
Back in the early 70s the Trib had a section on Mondays called Feminique. It kind of promoted feminism or at least tried to normalize working outside the home and you know the women written about wore Charlie perfume. I thought it was a very sophisticated section.
We had L. M. Boyd, who was sort of a proto-Cecil.
I was going to mention the same section. It also contained a column called “Ask Andy” where you could send in a random question about anything to be answered. Pretty much a precursor to Ask Cecil.
wasnt there a Philly paper that was printed on pink paper at one time?
In the 1950s or early 60s there was Dick Tracy’s Crimestoppers Textbook. It was a coupon sized “cartoon” that had advice for youngsters on preventing crime. It even had two printed dots you could punch out and keep all the pages in a small ring binder.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/the-crimestoppers-textbook/
And next to that was another similar advice cartoon for nuclear war preparation. I actually remember one of those. It showed that you should always place your clothes on hangers with all the hooks pointing in one direction so you could quickly grab all your clothing in one armful when you had to run for the hills. 70 years later I think of this nearly every time I hang up my shirts.
Damn, we’re gonna be dead but we’re well dressed!
And the “Ask somebody” (can’t remember who) contest where every week they picked the best question sent in to answer in the newspaper and you could win an encyclopedia. I gamed it and won! The question one time was “What is a glacier” The answer ended with the glacier spawning icebergs. So I sent in “What is an iceberg”? and won! I got a Britannica Junior Encyclopedia and an article about me in the Lorain Journal (Ohio). I loved that encyclopedia and read it all the time. That and the career teacher’s advice to my parents, “Dennis has great potential if he would only apply himself” must be the key to my success.
LOL, I found the article!
I remember Ask Andy, too! It was interesting to read your link where the woman behind Ask Andy was also behind the push to censor comic books!
A little bit off topic, I know, but: I see Neil Diamond sang about you too!
Teacher’d say "he’s just not trying,
got a good head if he’d apply it
but you know yourself,
he’s always somewhere else"
-Neil Diamond, “Brooklyn Roads”
I remember the cluster of, er, “grown-up” comic strips – Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G and Rex Morgan, M.D. – that I never bothered reading. That portion of the page was like a black hole. Honestly, if you printed the secret to riches and immortality there, I wouldn’t have known.
Our daily (Mon-Sat) newspaper in Green Bay came in four sections: News, Sports, Features (though it had some other name, maybe “Life” or something like that), and Classifieds.
What I recall from the Features section, in the mid-late '70s:
- Two pages of comic strips*. Mostly gag-a-day humor strips, including Blondie, Peanuts, The Wizard of Id, B.C., Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Beetle Bailey, etc. They also carried a couple of more serious, serial strips: The Phantom and Steve Canyon. Being a voracious reader, I read them all, every day. (The paper also ran Doonesbury and Tank McNamara, but put those on the op-ed page, and in the sports section, respectively.)
- Advice columns from Ann Landers and Hints from Heloise. I remember that the grainy photo of Ann Landers looked like my fifth-grade teacher.
- A couple of puzzles: a crossword puzzle, and Jumble.
- A bridge column (Goren on Bridge, I think).
- A horoscope column.
- Some daily TV listings (though the paper also ran a weekly TV listing booklet in the Sunday paper).
- Arts and entertainment features, including reviews of movies, TV shows, concerts, and local theater shows (all done by the same “critic at large” guy, who held that role on the paper for something like 40 years).
- A small section of ads for the local movie theaters, with showtimes.
*- My parents still subscribe to the same newspaper, which is now just a shell of its former self. At least half of the comic strips which the paper runs today are the same titles which they were running fifty years ago.
I am currently following Mary Worth and Rex Morgan. More accurately, hate-reading. The best part is reading the readers’ comments under each strip online. (same with Luann strip). I know I, and others, apparently have no life and spend time dissecting and mocking these strips. But better than a lot of other things we could be doing.
Move over, Mary Worth:
Oh, that’s the old-timey Mary Worth. The newer Mary Worth is much cuter, like a sparkly Angela Lansbury on ‘Murder She Wrote’. …in fact we don’t see much of Mary in her own strip any more.