YAKIMA — As you scroll through social media, it’s too tempting to dismiss millennials and Gen-Z as having no sense of privacy.
From photos of meals, check-ins at destinations and heaven knows how many selfies, it might seem to the curmudgeons out there that 21st century people have a powerful need to share what is happening in their lives.
I hate to break it to you, but it’s not really a new phenomenon. It’s just that social media cuts out a step in the process of sharing what’s happening in life with a larger audience.
For more than a century, American newspapers ran society pages that told of the comings and goings of people in the community, mostly with the subjects supplying the grist for the literary mill.
Credit — or blame, depending on your perspective — goes to James Gordon Bennett Sr., the founder of the New York Herald, who started the first society pages in the 1840s. Those early pages usually highlighted the activities of the rich, both the old-money families and the nouveau riche, as a combination of skewering the upper crust’s foibles, flexing for the masses and enforcing the societal pecking order.
(Bennett also introduced other conventions that are common to American journalism today, such as business reporting, foreign correspondents and illustrations. His son and namesake’s middle and last names have become the British equivalent of the American euphemism “gosh darn it.”)
It also gave the masses morsels of celebrity gossip, which was not bad for the bottom lines of the newspapers, so they could either look on the upper classes with envy or schadenfreude, depending on the story.
But eventually the hoi polloi wanted ink as well, both to share what was going on in their lives and to see what their neighbors were doing.
So, in addition to reporting on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the society pages were opened to anyone who could send in a blurb about what they were up to that week.
Yakima’s two papers, the Yakima Morning Herald and the Yakima Daily Republic, which would merge, featured society news as part of its “women’s page” about the comings and goings round the Valley.
The entries sometimes bordered on the mundane, such as a woman resigning her job as a stenographer with the Union Pacific railroad to join her husband who took a job in Eastern Oregon, an Ellensburg resident who came to Yakima to visit with friends and relatives, or a family heading out to their cabin for a vacation.
Sometimes, it offered a behind-the-scenes look at bigger stories in the newspaper. The Daily Republic reported 100 years ago today that William Hillyer Jr., son of former Zillah City Marshal William Hillyer, was leaving Yakima to report for duty with the U.S. Navy at San Pedro, Calif., after attending the trial of his father’s accused killer, Jesse F. Pearce.
Pearce, who was acquitted, gunned down the marshal as part of a running feud between the families that started when the younger Hillyer started dating Pearce’s daughter. The society column noted that the younger Hillyer had “joined” the Navy shortly after the spat between his and his girlfriend’s families began.
(In reality, his family forced him into the service to get him away from his love interest.)
The pages would eventually be phased out over time, but the past columns have found a new life among genealogists, who can look up the contents of old newspapers from a variety of online sources, ranging from genealogy databases to public libraries.
The columns can help family history sleuths find clues about their ancestors by placing people in specific times and places, as well as glimpses into their daily lives.
