In the age of Craigslist, the weird old charm of perusing the classified ads in the newspaper is gone. Once we depended on them to find jobs, apartments, cars, and weird odds and ends. And nothing was odder than the lost and found, where people paid to list items they had been parted from. In the Schenectady Gazette in 1923, we had an interesting collection of lost items:
- Two stock certificates for the Centrifugal Cast Iron Pipe Co.
- The trousers from a full dress suit.
- A pair of tortoise shell rim gold bow glasses (“Please leave at 4-1/2 Congress st. barber shop”)
- A Remington shotgun “from fender of auto on Rexford or Jonesville rd.”
And not exactly lost:
- “Party who took fur choker from side entrance 105 Park pl., seen and recognized. You are advised to return same at once to avoid trouble.”
