Newspaper used as insulation has been able to tell me what no civic records ever could: exactly when my house was built. For the most part, it was put together in 1939, by a family named Lodge that was living in Menands at the time. Mr. Lodge worked for the phone company, and parts of the house include some plywood sheets and pieces of crates stamped American Telephone and Telegraph. Because of the . . . interesting way our porch was put together, we had always assumed it started life as an open porch and was eventually enclosed, and we were never sure when the porch was added. Thanks to the miracle of newspaper insulation, we can now see that the porch was added shortly after “F.D.” (no room for that “R.” in that narrow column) repeated his no-war pledge, which was reported in the Knickerbocker News on September 12, 1940. Unfortunately, most of the papers were crumpled and ravaged by time, so there was very little to salvage. But now we know the porch came just about a year after the house.