Newspapers.com Adventure! with Chelsey Weber-Smith

I did "Jump Rope for Heart" in 2nd grade. For me, I had one of those sign-up sheets, like you got for selling Girl Scout cookies, and went around getting adults to pledge certain amounts for each MINUTE I would jump rope. There was then one whole day at school where we were in the cafeteria (because my southern public elementary school did not have a gym) jumping rope and being timed. Then we had to go back to the adults who pledged and get them to pay up! I jumped a lot. I don't remember how long I jumped, but I do remember that I collected 80 dollars! This is on "pennies per minute" so shout out youthful exuberance. I made so much money, I earned a branded tee shirt. It was probably all somehow a scam, but it's a core memory now.

On Newspapers.com I found an article that was just, my Dad (then a teenager) and his girlfriend found a cool shell on the beach. Small town newspapers in the 40's were so like that. The society page is just like, "this person visited her sister on the weekend"

I experience cleitheophobia-fear of being stuck. Spelunking talk always makes me uncomfortable. Maybe your also experiencing cleithrophobia?

In Lady and the Tramp, he calls her Pidge. (And maybe pigeon, too.)

You’re so right about the adhd-brain research process 😭 I collect interesting links and stories and sources about a topic until I can put together a central idea and sort through it all

The North American giants! We used to drive from Southern Wisconsin to the suburbs of Chicago every other weekend growing up. My dad told me that the hills of southern Wisconsin were dinosaurs that had fallen and died there. I believed this wayyyyyy too long 😅 and still think they do kinda look like Little Foot's parents sleeping on their sides under grass.

Omg as a person who works with abandoned mines I screamed “no” when you said you went in a mine 😂

To this day, my grandmother Sonja's favourite part of the newspaper is the funnies. She's 93.

This was so interesting and funny. I’m still laughing at the cyclist enjoying a rub down from her maid after physical exertion.

Would you be willing to make your episodes available to link to Spotify? That’s where I primarily listen but I can’t link your podcast 😔 (If there is a specific reason why you opted out, and have already addressed it, I’m sorry for asking)

i know it’s more current, but can you do an episode about concerts? has it always been this bad with tickets / general event vibe ??

If I recall correctly, there was a moral panic when women began riding bicycles because it provided them more freedom. I would love to hear a whole episode on the topic!

i loved this episode so much, you’re turning me into a newspapers.com convert and i’m so here for it. i’m actually commenting regarding your most recent episode about teens featuring harmony! i so resonated with their story about their high school math teacher/coach hybrid because i had the exact same experience. ours was a basketball coach who expected that we, as a pre-AP algebra class, could simply be presented with one single example problem and learn everything from that. constantly we’d say “please coach (we had to call him coach) can you explain this further?” and he’d always say “you’re supposed to be advanced students! you can’t figure it out yourselves?!” it was the first and only class i received a D in. I say that not because it matters but to further prove my point that you have to actually TEACH students if you want them to LEARN!! so frustrating. thanks for coming to my ted talk lol

i think a really great ep for either of your shows could be about those school initiatives like Jump Rope for Heart or those UNICEF cardboard boxes you were supposed to carry around on Halloween or like the chocolate bars that were supposed to donate money??? I thought I individually was responsible to cure children’s disease worldwide w my UNICEF box 🥲

I loved this so much. Please do this again!!!

I love this episode! Please do more newspaper.com scavenger hunt game episodes!

I love Newspapers.com too! I didn't know about it until you mentioned it on your podcast and have found amazing articles about how disability was viewed in NH a hundred years ago. I'm all for that racing suit too!

I live in a tiny town on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania on the shores of Lake Erie and we have an Indian mound park and the legend of giants living in this town have also been talked about! So cool you guys talked about this!

idk if there's still places doing jump rope for heart, but my middle school definitely did as recently as 2016.

Wow, I posted that comment about Iowa City, IA while listening and didn’t imagine that you would later bring up my hometown paper, The Cedar Rapids Gazette!

If any of you ever find yourself in Iowa City, Iowa, there’s a museum there with a rendering of a giant sloth. It’s sort of taxidermied, but I suppose not literally as I imagine the fur is fake? But for kids in the area it is the star of a common field trip. I went last summer with my family and it was still delightful.

My family said funny pages as well!!

So much fun! Please do this again.

More, more, please, please!!

oops all jumprope

I dont have the kind of attention that would allow me to do this work. But, I absolutely LOVED this episode!. I would listen for hours and hours. You both have the best reading voices. Thank you for giving me something delightful to listen to while I pull weeds.

"queer facts about eels" is the best headline and article you can find on newspapers.com imho

I love newspapers.com so much! My grandfather was a professional baseball player, and because he died when my dad was very young, I've always known next to nothing about him. That all changed when I got an account - I was able to compile basically a day-to-day account of his career, and a sizable portrait of who he was as a person, too. I originally thought I'd cancel it after the trial ended, but it's so satisfying to instantly be able to follow every random "I wonder what that building used to be," "How old is that slogan" etc question that comes into my head. Probably the wackiest thing I found through my family research was learning that the year after Lou Gehrig retired, the Yankees had such a bad season that one newspaper wrote a full-page story speculating that ALS was contagious and the entire team had it. It apparently led to a lawsuit and several printed apologies!

The fact that i just watched “The Descent” the other day made listening to bone cave extra surreal. All I could think of was the scene where a character gets stuck while ‘snake crawling’ through a super tight space and the monsters’ chamber full of bones/carcasses 😳. The mention of the prehistoric giant sloths brought it back to reality and I may have a new favorite extinct species 🥹

100% agree on having an account with newspapers.com. I've learned more about my ancestors and filled out my tree thanks to that site. And, along the way, I spot the best news stories!

I mean this as the highest compliment (and may have said it before) but Chelsea, your chuckle sounds to me like what I imagine the lizard laughing meme to be

This episode is amazing, would love to hear more!

I cannot express how much I love this. My heart belongs to newspapers.com. I’ve spent… probably thousands of hours over the past decade or so there cataloging hundreds of horrible accidents and deaths in my town at the turn of the (20th) century. Why? I have no idea, I stumbled on one article and it spiraled into several binders of information. No one wants to take walks anywhere with me now because I’m constantly stopping and saying “Oh! Corner of This St. and That Ave! This is where George Sanders slipped on a patch of ice and fell under a trolley car severing his legs. They took him to the Smith house over there and he died on their dining room table!”

I think this is one of my favourite episodes ever. Love the idea of replacing social media with newspapers.com!!!

So fun! Gonna look into a sub because I think newspapers.com would be awesome to share with my students. A couple things-- Jump Rope fo Heart is still around, it's just called Kids Heart Challenge now. And I recently read an interesting book some of you might enjoy called Wheels of Change from National Geographic about the history of women and bicycle riding.

I’ve done basket weaving before, and whenever anyone says that, I think about how it really is not that easy 😂

I went to Fairhaven with Chelsey (Hi Chelsey!) so when they brought up underwater basket weaving I IMMEDIATELY knew there would be a Fairhaven connection.

This was truly exceptional. Wonderful in every possible way!

'hey cookie... No not you dog biscuit' feels like something you'd hear from a comedy drag queen doing crowd work

Sooo..... When are Sarah and Chelsea just going to make a whole podcast together? cuz that's what the world needs

The Dollop Podcast has a segment/sub-cast called Past Times, where they invite on a guest and read a random newspaper from history. (Most likely using newspapers.com.) They probably weren't the first to do this either, but now you know there is other olde timey newspaper content out there. 🙂🗞️ Also, great episode!

Thongs = flip flops in Australia. I couldn't understand the objection to wearing thongs on the beach. Then I translated in my head. Thongs = G-strings in Australia

I went to The Evergreen State College and I always thought 'underwater basket weaving' was exclusive to us!

Sarah, every time you make an extremely specific 30 Rock reference, I feel less alone in having watched every episode an unhealthy amount of times💜

I just finished writing a piece (and making a map-style zine) about my hometown and between newspapers.com and news.hrvh.org I have spent hours getting lost in the fascinating mundanity of everything! sometimes there would be big news (a landslide, a fire, a scandal) but so often I'd just read about so-and-so making a visit to their neighbor, or getting better after a cold, or making the best cake at a faire. the ADS are INCREDIBLE. I saw names and families that lasted 150 years into the future! so many fads! this episode really had everything for me :) (the only direct information about my dad's youngest brother's death I got from a newspapers.com! he died of leukemia on new years day at the age of 4, my grandparents thanked everyone for their support in the paper. I found out my grandfather died 21 days later — there was no obituary. I'm so grateful I have these documents!)

I had never thought of using newspaper.com this way. I’ve only ever used for ancestry purposes and read some traumatic articles about arrests and letter my grandmother wrote thanking neighbors. I love this idea to use it for fun!

This is such a great idea. Loved this episode ❤️

Holy moly, I was wrong about bop it and that Chelsey beat it is amazing! 👏👏