"If only this Gazette could tell us about its travels..." read a note on the back of a business card from Jackie Wayman Seward, Keene, Texas, listing her as "Texas Coordinator" for "the National Grassroots Organization of Republicans for Environmental Protection."

It accompanied a pristine copy of the Thursday, Jan. 2, 1969, edition of the McCook Daily Gazette, which she said she found in a trunk she had purchased.

It was imprinted with the name of Wendell Frickey of Lebanon, whose subscription incidentally expired three days before.

Two inches longer and three inches wider than today's editions, it carried eight columns of news and advertising over 12 pages.

Yes, it was more than 36 years old, but some of the news seemed eerily familiar.

War -- 113 Americans died the week of Christmas, which was the lowest in 10 weeks. Of course, the war was in a different corner of Asia than the current conflicts.

Gas prices -- The French were paying the equivalent of 85.65 cents per gallon for gasoline. Can you imagine?

Missing girl -- The nation's attention was focused on a girl, missing while on vacation from college.

Government spending -- A government program was discovered to have been misspent.

Space flight -- A cartoon on the opinion page showed the earth as viewed through the window of Apollo 8, which had just made its famous flight around the moon and back.

Reading the old paper made me miss Linda Hein, who shared many such reviews of old newspapers with her "On Main Street" readers over the years.

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Speaking of spaceflight, I read a tidbit of news that doesn't get much attention, possibly because it isn't politically correct among the "green" crowd. NASA's foam trouble, it seems, began when it switched from ozone-damaging Freon, to a more environmentally friendly -- but less effective -- gas in making the insulating foam.

As a matter of fact, I read it in Readers Digest, which has purchased rights to the photo of the stuck landing-gear drama last month at McCook Regional Airport. The editor who obtained Connie Jo Discoe's photo said it probably will be published in the November issue.

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I ran into another helpful hint at the clinic the other day, and didn't believe it until I saw it work for myself.

For some reason, wrapping an ATM card with a layer of blue plastic grocery sack makes it read more accurately when it is "swiped" at the cash register.

You know the blue plastic sacks I'm referring to -- there are a lot of them around.

Now as long as they aren't imbedded with some microcircuitry that automatically sends our numbers back to company headquarters.