Deep in the recesses of Santa Paula’s newly remodeled Blanchard Library, a darkened room awaits. It can be accessed only with the aid of a librarian and your signature on a detailed log sheet.
The room is unassuming at first: a long table with a computer workstation, a behemoth printer/scanner/copier, and sundry supplies and boxes—as if someone’s kitchen junk drawer has been scaled up to giant proportions.
The librarian switches on the computer, you log in under the “Patron” account, and that’s when you spot it sitting there on the desktop: a folder containing a hundred years plus of county history in the form of digitized newspapers.
Huzzah!
The librarian exits, closing the door after her and leaving the room to a reverent silence in which you jump through an ever-expanding rabbit hole into the past.
And with that, today marks the launch of “Vintage Ventura,” a look back at Ventura’s history that will (hopefully) help make sense of the present. Posts will include headlines, ads, and news stories from the corresponding date/week in 1925, as well as features about key events and places in Ventura County history.
Note: Because these newspapers have gone through so many rounds of digitization, the images are often low-res and hard to read, so I will include typed transcriptions that will attempt to preserve the original spellings, punctuation, and style (and mistakes!) of the time.
So jump into the Wayback Machine, don your coolest aviator sunglasses, and let’s trip through time together!
From the Santa Paula Chronicle, Thursday, February 26, 1925
