News from Wichita – 1964

My grandma is legendary for her insistence on saving everything. It’s been an epic struggle for my parents to consolidate and reduce her museum-style collection (amassed over 80+ years) as they prepared her home for the market. How do you decide what’s important? What’s merely junk? Strange things occasionally pop up. Rattlesnake rattles. Penmanship awards. And newspaper clippings from Wichita, Kan.

Come with me to 1964 – a time when the Vietnam War was raging, The Beatles were invading and the world was just simply a scary place.

It’s your typical blotter item, albeit one involving a series of attacks on Wichita women with a spray can of nitric acid. The name of a relative is redacted. But what my mom found next caused her to tear up laughing.

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