Found a 1978 grocery list in a cookbook from a yard sale

I picked up an old Betty Crocker cookbook at a yard sale in Akron last month for fifty cents. Tucked between the pages for meatloaf and gravy was a folded piece of lined paper. It was a shopping list dated March 12, 1978, with things like 'hamburger $1.29 lb' and 'Tide'. It made me think about the person who wrote it and all the meals they made. Has anyone else found something that made a past stranger feel really close?

3 comments

3 Comments

susanm5617d ago

It's wild how a scrap of paper can do that. You find these little bits of proof that a whole life was being lived, with its own worries and routines. I get the same feeling looking at old photos in thrift store frames or names carved into a library desk. The past is full of ordinary people just trying to get dinner on the table, and we're all part of that same long chain.

bennett.mason11d ago

Exactly. Read an article once about a historian who studies old trash dumps. They called it "garbology." The point was that the real story is in the broken dishes and worn out shoes, not the fancy things saved in museums. That grocery list is the same idea. It's the stuff nobody meant to save that tells you how they really lived.

mark_hayes17d ago

The real find is that hamburger price. Susanm56 is right about the chain of ordinary life, but my link in that chain involves paying eight bucks for the cheap ground beef. That list writer was living the dream.