It was this very week — Dec. 12, 1935, to be extra-precise — that the first edition of what then was known as the Northern Virginia Sun rolled off the presses.
The big story in that week’s edition was the attempt by residents of the East Falls Church neighborhood, then located in the town (later city) of Falls Church, to be absorbed into Arlington County. As eventually happened.
Always good to dip back into the archives in order to see the week-by-week (and later, when the Sun became a daily, the day-by-day) transformation of the local community.
One of my do-it-before-I-die projects on the to-do list is to compile some of the columns from the editor of the Sun that ran on the front page from the 1930s through the early 1950s into easily digestable form, either online or (keeping it old-school, to borrow a phrase from columnist Carol McEwen) in print.
They are fascinating to peruse, and show that, long before I turned up on the scene, the Sun’s various editors could dissect the ins and outs of local governance, business, politics, etc., with clarity, pithy humor … and the occasional jaundiced eye. And given the relatively lengthy tenure of some of the editors over the past eight decades, we have been like the J. Edgar Hoovers of the Northern Virginia politico-media scene: We watch others come, we watch others go, but we are eternal. Well, almost.
Anyway, grab a piece of cake and a glass of champagne and toast the 86th birthday of the Sun. In good times and bad, the paper (we’re supposed to say “multi-media news organization” now, I guess) has been chronicling the news of local communities.
HOW’D I MISS THAT? Speaking of birthdays, one from the “how’d I miss that?”, back on Nov. 22 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacob Cohen, known to posterity as Rodney Dangerfield.
Funny, funny, funny guy. Note the video below to see how he had both Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill in stitches. (The reference to Randolph Scott in the final joke, which managed to crack up even the stone-faced Nancy Reagan, is a little lost on modern audiences, but it was funny at the time.)
- Scott McCaffrey