The story included snipes about the gas company and competing newspapers: "The gas company press agent, apparently, was able to persuade the Tribune and Telegram that it didn't amount to much and they refused to publish pictures of the blow up and restricted their mention of the matter to an absurd minimum, the Tribune taking three days before they grudging published the fact that gas was responsible for the damage and the injuries." Later in the story: "You can rest assured the gas company were on the job bright and early with two or three crews of men endeavoring to erase the traces of the devastation, but there were too many such to prevent any knowledge of what had happened."

The Manti Messenger of Jan. 10, 1919, had the headline "For Control of Ugliness: Science should be capable of remedying or preventing defects, either physical or mental." The story's first paragraph put the problem clearer: "Why is it that one member of a family is ugly or imperfectly developed while all others are practically perfect in form and features?"

• Items regarding race that would be considered politically incorrect today.

• Stories that show that some things stay the same, generation after generation. From the News Advocate of Jan. 29, 1931, is this headline: "Water shortage facing eastern Utah feared; Balmy winter cause of much anxiety by Price water officials."

"World growing warmer, but by slow degrees" is the headline of another item from that same issue. "According to Dr. J.W. Humphreys, a famous physicist and weather expert, the trend is toward a hotter earth; but the warming up process is so slow there is no cause for fearing the heat will torture this generation or several to come. In fact, Doctor Humphreys says, next summer may be delightfully cool."