Believe it or not, Zephyrus hasn’t always been the immaculately produced, impeccably edited block of truth that it is today (in fact, Zephyrus, the newspaper, has only existed since the mid-1970s onward. We used to be a magazine). From the 1940 Edina-Morningside Blue and Gold to the 1970 Buzzette, Edina publications have included some serious bizarreness, raunchiness, and a pinch of disaster.

“It was labor-intensive! We’d actually have to print it off ourselves. And there were always issues with what they’d let us print, especially in the ‘70s,” said Dave Langholz, the advisor of Zephyrus in the early 1980s.

As staff writers, sitting in the back of the publications room and giggling over old newspaper headlines and advertisements has become one of our new favorite hobbies, alongside such other illustrious pastimes as Wikipedia racing and eating. In any case, though, here’s a collection of our favorite headlines and quotes from Edina papers of old: the mundanely olden-timey, the intriguingly out of place, and the outright strange.

• One of our favorite newspaper headlines comes from the Edina-Morningside Blue and Gold of January, 1940. Try and make some sense of it. “It Can’t Happen Here; That is We Doubt If You Can Find Any Good Candy; But There Was Indigestion.”
• “Kindergarten Children Visit Boiler Room; Dictate Experiences” – Edina-Morningside Blue and Gold, February 26th, 1940. (Vaguely Twitteresque; did Twitter arise from these headlines? Maybe…)
• “More Edina Men EnterAmerica’s Armed Forces” – Edina-Morningside Blue and Gold June 1st, 1945. (In the same issue, an article was written titled “Let’s Cut Down on War News.”)
• “One of the big questions today is, ‘What are the latest records?’” According to the Edina-Morningside Blue and Gold of 1945, the answer is Bing Crosby’s “Just A Prayer Away.”
• The Edina-Morningside Courier of December 1950 has listed the tentative lunch menus for the week of Dec. 8-15. Items include creamed chipped beef with hard cooked egg on mashed potatoes, chicken and egg hot dish, potato celery soup and enriched bread.
• “The smoke in the lavatories smells different these days…” – Edina Zephyrus October 16th, 1970.

• “The cost [for Sweethearts] is three dollars per couple” – Edina Buzzette February 4th, 1972. (This one speaks for itself)

Of course, by even publishing this, we’re dating ourselves horribly, just like the Courier of 1951 did when it published a futuristic description of what the high school would look like in… 1976! We can only imagine future generations of Edinans finding this paper in some cardboard box in the back of the Pub Room/Robot Slave Holding Dock. “Hey, what is this? Did they find something comical about creamed chipped beef, way back then? And what’s this Wikipedia thing?…”