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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Here is a citation for a protest held on the day after Thanksgiving in
1961 that symbolically used black on Friday. Bonnie has probably
already seen it.

Newspaper: The Mexia Daily News (Mexia, Texas)
Date: Sunday, November 26, 1961
Quote Page: 2

The word "employes" was misspelled as "emplyes"

[Begin excerpt]
COURTHOUSE GIRLS GARBED IN BLACK

SAN ANTONIO (AP) Many courthouse
emplyes wore black Friday
in a reported protest against
not being given the day off for
a long Thanksgiving holiday.

Secretaries said they agreed
among themselves to wear black
dresses after Commissioners Court
"ordered  county  offices kept at
full strenth Friday.
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Bonnie Taylor-Blake
<b.taylorblake at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Bonnie Taylor-Blake <b.taylorblake at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Black Friday in Rochester, NY, 1961
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>>
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>
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