[Ads-l] Black Friday in Rochester, NY, 1961

[Bonnie Taylor-Blake]

That's extraordinary, Barry!  Thanks for sharing it and thanks to Ben
for forwarding it.

This usage in Rochester, New York, may (or may not) explain an ad I've
been looking at for some time.  It was published in The Daily
Republican (Monangahela, Pennsylvania) on Friday, November 27, 1959,
the day after Thanksgiving that year.  See the bottom right corner of
the page below (PDF).

http://www.med.unc.edu/uploads/sxkbw.thedailyre.pdf

(That link will remain there for a week.)

I haven't known what to make of it, because it struck me as somewhat
odd that whoever laid out this ad for a used-car lot would refer to
"Black Friday."  I figured that maybe the same ad had run two weeks
earlier, on a Friday the 13th (and we know that Fridays the 13th have
been referred to as "Black Friday" before), which still may be the
case.  I suppose I should go looking to see if the same ad ran that
day as well.

In any event, this is very exciting news.

-- Bonnie

On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Barry Popik forwarded this important "Black Friday" discovery to some
> of us off-list. It slightly predates the Public Relations News article
> about Philadelphia (from Dec. 18, 1961), and it indicates that police
> in at least one other city besides Philly were using the expression at
> the same time.
>
> Here's a link to the page image on the Fulton History site:
> http://bit.ly/1FItVRd
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Barry Popik <bapopik at aol.com>
> Date: Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 2:56 PM
> Subject: Black Friday in Rochester, NY, 1961
> ...
> I've been looking at the Fulton Post Cards database, now with great
> stuff but a terrible search mechanism. The New York Morning Telegraph
> is partly digitized, and you can find "big apple" in 1922 and 1923. No
> 1921 or 1924 yet, apparently.
> ...
> I also looked at "Black Friday" and don't know if anyone has found this:
> ...
> ...
> 1 December 1961, Shortsville-Manchester Enterprise (Shortsville, NY),
> "Around and About," pg. 4, col. 2:
> Kathie Caulkin, our intrepid advertising manager, made a serious
> mistake in judgment last Friday. Took her three kids to Rochester on
> the day all city police call "Black Friday."
> ...
> Besides being the day after Thanksgiving -- thus one of the busiest
> shopping days in the year -- bus drivers were still on strike, adding
> to automotive traffic. Katie reports she waited through 13 changes of
> a single traffic light -- then had to back up to get into the parking
> garage. "I didn't care if I crumpled fifty fenders at that point,"
> Katie reports.
> ...
> ...
> Barry Popik
> Goshen, NY
> www.barrypopik.com
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org