King of pain

Here’s an ad from the August 25 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star.

Not sure why they singled out baseball, but here we are. King of Pain!

Wikipedia has an entry on Minard’s Liniment. The liniment was apparently created in Hants County, Nova Scotia, in the 1860s by Dr. Levi “The King Of Pain” Minard. The active ingredients are camphor, ammonia water, and medical turpentine. Not to be taken internally.

A geocaching website has an article on Levi Minard. At the age of 52, he graduated from the Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Bird blamed for fire

Here’s another bit of filler from the August 25 1931 Toronto Daily Star:

Those damned pyromaniac birds!

Elkader, Iowa, is southeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul and northeast of Des Moines. Its current population (as of 2010) is 1273, down from 1465 in 2000. It was named after the Algerian leader Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri; when the town was founded in 1846, the founders wanted to honour him for resisting the French conquest of Algeria. Its sister city, appropriately enough, is Mascara, Algeria.

 

It’s good, it’s very good

From reading old newspapers, I have learned something about the North American diet in the 1920s and 1930s: people weren’t eating enough roughage, so they were having trouble with constipation. Here’s an example from the August 25, 1931 Toronto Daily Star:

It’s good, it’s very good! And, reassuringly, it acts only in the bowels, not in the stomach (or in the elbows).

A Google search yielded no references to Dr. Papillaud Laboratories, so I have no idea how long they were in existence. Dr. Papillaud and his wondrous pill appear to be lost to history.