39 year-old time capsule

and window into a bygone world

There’s a reason why I always go to estate sales when I see them, and it’s to find interesting things that just can’t be discovered anyplace else. The newspaper above is a case in point.

About a year ago, I was in the apartment building of a man who was a Literature professor. He had literally thousands of books, stored onto bookshelves that were built into every every room in his place. A very learned man, clearly. But one of the things available for sale, when he was no longer in need of any of it, was a copy of the Chicago Sun Times from the morning after the Chicago Bears had won their first, and regrettably still their only, Super Bowl championship back in early 1986. Thirty-nine years from the day I’m writing this, to be exact.

The professor was wise enough to understand the effects of air on a newspaper, so he had wrapped it in plastic, which had preserved it remarkably well. I was able to buy it for perhaps a dollar, because it was the final day of the sale (that’s my strategy for getting the best price on things) and it was money well spent.

Many people in a situation like mine would seek to have it framed or encased in glass, with an eye toward making a big profit on eBay or some such reselling service. But, as someone who was a senior in high school when this happened the first time around, I was curious to know what life in Chicago was life in the days before I called it my home. I often tell people that I first came to Chicago when the Bears were Super Bowl champs, and sadly that was a very long time ago.

It occurred to me, when reading through this paper today, that anyone who was my current age on the day this paper was published is almost certainly dead today. A sobering thought, but a reminder that I have lived a significant part of my life in Chicago, which might not be exactly where I planned to be as a high school senior but it would have been all right with me, just the same.

There were many interesting nuggets inside, including seven-digit phone numbers (since area codes were still a few years away),

mail-in coupons,

classified ads (I hope that the guy who wanted a work car that runs for $75-100 somehow got lucky),

and many businesses and prices that we’ll never see again.

A column with summaries of many soap operas from the eighties—of which only three are still on the air—was fascinating,

as was a prognostication from Irv Kupcinet that Walter Payton would “sparkle” in the next year’s Super Bowl (which sadly never came to pass).

It was a dollar well spent, to be able to return to a day that, unfortunately, hasn’t been replicated in Chicago since I began living here. My long-time practice—since Mike Ditka and the Super Bowl Bears team left town, really—has been to not give very much of my emotional energy to the Bears’ fortunes. I’ve seen all the other major sports teams win titles since I’ve been here, but a Bears championship—should I live long enough to see it—would probably put me into a state of mind like the guy shown below. And I wouldn’t mind being photographed that way, either.