News of the Old Podcast

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com

I am looking at a photograph taken on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue a little after 8 on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and wishing my father was still around to fill in a few details. It’s a dramatic image. Center foreground is a cop in a riot helmet who seems to be weighing whether to use his night-stick on the photographer, Michael Boyer of the Associated Press. Behind him, moving right...

I am just back from a couple of days of thrarrghing around the hills and hollows of southern and West Virginia with my friend Roland, he on his Harley, I on a BMW whose early years were spent under the bum of a New Mexico Highway Patrolman but which remains remarkably lively, nonetheless. In the course of our rundfahrt , we visited my parents. They are buried on a wooded ridge above the headwaters...

The National Enquirer is a shadow of its former self. I worked there for a month in 1981 when it was owned and edited by Generoso Pope. I was no fan of his then but in retrospect I can’t imagine him catching and killing for Donald Trump. His guys would have caught and published, the way they did with Presidential aspirants Gary Hart and John Edwards. They would have ripped the lid off Trump’s enco...

August 1897-July 1913 On July 11, 1913, Margery Barber boarded the Empress of Ireland bound for Quebec from Liverpool. The passenger manifest listed Canada as her “country of intended future permanent residence”. The socialite wife of her uncle Benjamin had remarked that “when an unmarried young woman gets to 25, I’ve often noticed she begins to call old maids bachelor girls.” Margery was 25 and h...

November 1931 Margarita Robertovna, as she is known locally, is writing to her mother, who knows her as Margery. She is squeezing as many words as she can onto a sheet of coarse grey paper, the squared kind for doing sums. First the date. November 14, 1931. Then, carefully printed, her address. Урал Каз Край Рыбак Союз, Цалкарский Промысел, Анкотуиского Район.  Copied correctly, this will direct h...