We have skulls all over the place. Here’s a deer.
Back in the 1970s I was roommate with a guy from a small town in Montana. Once a week he got the local town weekly by mail.
It was filled with things like “The Smiths had the Joneses over for dinner on Monday”. So you don’t have to go that far back. You only have to go to a place where not a lot was hapening, but they still needed to fill the inexhaustible maw of news reporting. Plus it got peoples’ names in the paper, which also leads to sales.
There’s also the list of kids on the honor roll for the semester or the articles about which college kids are on the dean’s list at university.
The owner of our paper (our neighbor, actually) loved those press releases from the colleges (free copy!). He was always urging college-bound kids to make sure they listed the Messenger as where the college office should send notices of accomplishment.
Good grief. That’s almost as bad as Facebook in printed form. With this degree of uselessness, it’s no wonder people referred to newspapers as “mullet wrappers” or other similarly derogatory terms.
How cool is that? But does it entertain squirrels? 
Yeah, by modern standards those old papers must have been a hoot. My mom was researching genealogy and found some old obituaries written like this:
In the Feb. 7, 1865, edition of the Baltimore Sun, one death notice included a brief eulogy to a promising young man’s life cut short at exactly 21 years, eight months and 10 days.
“The subject of this notice was married but six weeks ago. He had just embarked in business and possessed the health and vigor to render it profitable when the strong hand of affliction was laid upon him, and the form recently so manly was soon prostrate in death.”
The article also says:
Genevieve Keeney, president of the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, Texas, says that death notices published in local newspapers also functioned as quasi-legal documents. Since the newspaper was a public forum, a death announcement served to notify creditors who might want to file a claim against the deceased’s estate.
I’ve actually visited that museum…while there I learned that soldiers in the US Civil War sometimes had legs amputated and so had to be carried in a wicker basket, hence the term “basket case.”
Or the waterproofing insulation off a [fritz! crackle! wizzzz! pop!] telephone line. 
When I was around 8, we had a class assignment to write to a celebrity. Everyone wrote to movie stars, famous politicians, etc., but I wrote to the mayor of our small suburb. Soon there was a front-page article about me and my family in the local newspaper, complete with a photo of me and the mayor. My first 15 minutes of fame.
If left where they can get it. Antlers and bones are great rodent treats.
Newspapers (at least in Montreal) routinely published addresses of accident victims - e.g the 76 (known) victims in a tragic movie theatre fire in 1927.
I have a friend who bought a stack of vintage newspapers at a garage sale. They were all from a small Wisconsin town and spanned a couple of years back in the 50s.
He was soon poring over the yellowed papers, piecing together the lives of people like Georgie T. Winster, who was on the winning lawn bowling team, active in the local Odd Fellows charity drive, and retired after 35 years “on the line” at the Mid-County Saw Blades factory. But then was “publicly chastised” for shoplifting a small packet of throat lozenges from Wellmeyer’s Pharmacy.
Oh, and somewhere in there, Georgie had a sister and her husband visit from “down by Chicago”.
My sister modeled a bit and they published her address with a pic. She got some pervs calling her.
Also, art imitates life?
When a stranger gets off the bus from New York City, the folks in Mayberry are naturally curious. When he strolls into the barbershop - calling everyone by name and knowing things that no stranger should know - their suspicions go into overdrive, especially since nobody knows who he is. In fact, Ed Sawyer’s knowledge of the goings-on in Mayberry is uncanny. Soon, as a result, he’s accused of being everything from a foreign spy to a space alien - or worse! - and his friendly attempts to fit in and settle down are coldly rejected. Andy, on the other hand, seems to be the only one in town unwilling to judge Ed until he knows the facts. After a particularly curious encounter twixt Ed and Lucy Matthews, the woman he loves - whom he’s never even met! - Ed asks Andy for help and explains how Mayberry came to be his “hometown”, revealing that he’s a loner with no family and no real home. It seems that, in the army, Ed befriended Joe Larson from Mayberry (son of Pete and Edie Larson) and loved the stories Joe told about “back home” so much that he began to take the town newspaper and tell folks that he was from Mayberry.
Yeah, that used to be a thing—subscribe to the hometown paper while serving in the armed forces or after moving away to live in the big city.
Cripes. I recently watched (on youtube) a forgetable B&W movie with a very similar plot (minus the newspapers). Stranger drifts into town, meets the local heiress, is mistaken for crook/spy, turns out to be awarded soldier who wants to adopt the town of his dead buddy…
I couldn’t help but notice that this is essentially the plot of the 1982 Gerard Depardieu film The Return of Martin Guerre which, in turn, was based on a real 16th century case in France
There was a Richard Gere film Sommersby, that used the same plot and was obviously based on Martin Guerre, but set after the American Civil War.
In all these cases the imposter learned all the town details by being a companion of the man he was impersonating, not from a newspaper.
Very weird to see the Andy Griffith Show anticipating The Return of Martin Guerre. The case had been written about many times, including by Alexandre Dumas. You gotta wonder if screenwriter Arthur Stander had read one of those.
Similar. I only saw the episode once but IIRC the stranger in Mayberry isn’t pretending to be someone else.
“Sneaky Pete” on amazon prime is also like Martin Guerre…it’s really good if you like capers, con games, etc.
Another variation:
I don’t know if this is still current usage anywhere, but in older writing I’ve seen the word “drive” used to include even just riding in a car, particularly in a taxi or other car where someone else is doing the actual driving but according to your orders. For instance you might read in a P.G. Wodehouse story of someone hailing a taxi and driving somewhere.
The schematic chemical diagram for 3-pentanone (AKA diethyl ketone) looks like Marilyn Monroe:
Just read this one today.
Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin were the Republican nominees in the 1860 election. Hamlin was chosen to balance the ticket (he was a New Englander and an abolitionist). And the campaigning in that era hadn’t involved the candidates traveling around the country (Douglas would break tradition by doing so in this campaign).
The result was that Lincoln had never even met Hamlin until after the election was over.
I see you were going for the cleavage thing, but it looks like a stick man with mega clown feet