I was digging around for a little more background info about 1932’s The Lost Squadron when I came upon this contest in the March 1 edition of The Miami News:
The contest is in the middle of the page (“LOST! See If You Can Find It!”). Click image to enlarge to full size.
I scrolled through two pages of classifieds in the News, and while I spotted some great prices on cars, pondered fountain pen repair, and felt sure that many more eyes would see the eleven total “Help Wanted” ads than the two bursting columns of “Want Position” ads (a large proportion of which were placed by job seekers identifying themselves as “colored girl”), I was left flummoxed when it came to discovering “a complete sentence” referring to The Lost Squadron.
I highlighted a couple of the fragments I spotted, and there were several more of these littered throughout the two pages of Times classifieds, but I would have been more likely to buy a used Singer sewing machine that March morning then to brainstorm my free entry to the Paramount Theater.
I suspect that the complete sentence is actually a combination of all of the individual fragments rearranged into a single sentence.
This seems like a heck of lot of work to bother spending 2¢ on a stamp and not even feel confident in my answer. Then again with the average price of a theater ticket running about 21¢ that year and that sum of that early ’30s coin being worth about $10-$13 to the average worker today, entering that contest probably would have been a better use of time than answering any of those eleven Help Wanted ads!
Though I do see one of those ads announces $1,000 in prizes potentially available to marathon dancers. No, it’s not regular work, but that jackpot would have probably had me seeking out an ad offering lessons!
I’ll be posting about The Lost Squadron (1932) within the next day or two. For now, here’s a neat action shot found spreading across two pages inside the March 1932 edition of Photoplay … Erich von Stroheim holds the cane:
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