August 2022 – saleintothe90s

Oh hey, yeah I’ve been gone for nearly the whole month of August.

I cut my left index finger wiiiide open at my job (I was repackaging Road to Avalonea dvds, the Xacto knife slipped) so I wasn’t in the mood to type when I came home from work, you know?

The locker backpacks! I had the original, the Wiz, the $20 one in second grade. The backpack didn’t last long, it started falling apart at the seams. It was various neon colors.

This was in a Teen magazine in 1992, I believe. a TEEN magazine. She looks like someone’s mom who just dropped her kids off at the bus stop.

I’m so sad that these are microfiche copies so we can’t see them in full color. I found some Mead Super Shades examples from eBay:

(eBay user themotherroad)

(eBay user rmcm59) — turquoise! filler paper! I’m sure that wasn’t allowed in most schools.

Those Grip Stix pencils! I had those in the first grade and thought that they would help me improve my handwriting. They did not.

Because I too, brought my sassaby cosmetics case to school on the first day.

Back when times were tough like in 2012 when I couldn’t find work, I abused the Sun In.

Zillions was a magazine that my house received briefly when I was 11 years old. It was a kid’s version of Consumer Reports. When I saw this cover feature about a gorilla testing binders, I really thought someone dressed in a gorilla suit threw around some binders in the Zillions office. I wish. (I think in the era of TikTok they would have today) No, they put the binders through something similar to a rock tumbler:

By the time I was in high school in the late 90s, we didn’t have homeroom. Homeroom was just, the first class of the day.

I didn’t go to a “real” college until my junior year, and I didn’t gain weight from the dining hall, I gained weight because I constantly went to this nice grocery store we had about a mile away, Martin’s. I came from a tiny town where you had to drive nearly an hour to get to a big grocery store, so Martin’s was a big deal for me. I didn’t know that colleges served sushi in 1988. Apparently sushi just became a weekday thing at my college in the last couple of years.

I just saw on TikTok last night someone running across these original Lisa Frank folders from the late 80s/early 90s at a thrift store. Lemmie try to find it. Here it is.

Oh these wireless neatbooks were the worst to keep as a notebook to take notes in, but great to just carry around loose leaf paper for assignments without the bulk of a binder.

You know, I know, we all know this backpack would only last about a month.

yes, Spuds McKenzie the dog from the Bud Light Beer commercials was a hot item for back to school.

We all know that JTT was the only one who deserved hat raise.

Okay, so the person who wrote this letter about his Davey Allison NASCAR flag being stolen is the father of these two absolutely mean girls who I went to school with. Davey had died a few weeks earlier so I guess the thief thought that flag was going to be worth something.

Suffice to say, Kim did not make it to another Olympics. She tried a comeback in 1998, but it didn’t work out. I didn’t know that Phoebe Mills was also a diver! I can’t find a clip.

So this was August 1st. Jurassic Park came out in the theaters on June 11th. You don’t see ads in the papers for movies 2 months after it comes out anymore. Heck, unless it was a huge release, it’s out on DVD nearly two months later these days.

I went to this!

Southwestern / Santa Fe was def a trend around this time. Does anybody remember the last couple seasons of Perfect Strangers when the gang moved into this huge house, and Balki’s room was Southwestern/Mypos/Wayne Newton?

Daily Press held onto this Comics banner for years.

Oh my god. Does anybody remember when Bill’s younger half brother, Roger was some sort of popculture sensation right after Bill became president? and he tried a singing career?

They didn’t last.

Things that aged poorly.

Glamour Shots is something I did not like back then. They made everybody look 30 years older. Even as late as 2001 when I graduated from high school girls at my high school were getting their senior photos at glamour shots at the Coliseum Mall.

Okay, so for some reason this month there were no Sunday ads on the proquest edition for this paper. I had to grab these from the Ocala Star Banner from Florida. This Montgomery Ward salespaper was like, 70 pages. No wonder they went out of business a few years later.

These look absolutely to die for! Starburst fro yo?! The bars look like they would melt in three seconds, but the fro yo cups?!

Unfortunate placement in this drugstore salespaper.

OH. This is the beginning of striped shirt trend! Mom didn’t like me wearing striped shirts because I was so fat.

This was the first “grown uppy” stuff I was allowed, about a year after this ad ran. I didn’t know how to use it.

I remember seeing these at people’s houses back in the day and thinking they were for the washing machine. No, they were for the dishwasher?!

I guess Goldfish Cookies were Pepperidge Farm’s answer to Teddy Grahams?

Is that holographic school box a cat?!

Aw, I have memories about these pencils. I remember my dad buying them for me one time.

I miss these cardboard car shades. I hate those flimsy ones we have now.

So I left the big one for last, it was the main story that day. It was a giant investigation about a local businessman, David Merritt, and how he duped people in my hometown when he said that he would build a night club in the old Post Office in the downtown area. The night club, named after him (!) was only was fully functional for a few weeks, then it became special occasions only.

Highlights:

Another mistake, critics say, was Merritt’s decision to dip into his limited personal resources to build his basement offices and a lavish, 1,700-square-foot apartment before the restaurant. That ate up more than half his money, while delaying the opening of the restaurant – and the revenue source that would return the money spent on construction.

“He reversed the deal,” O’Neill says. “Now the restaurant not only had to carry itself, it had to carry the other two.”

Says Merritt, “Looking back now, I wouldn’t do the apartment and offices first.”

But he offers no apologies for the amenities inside, which included a state-of-the-art stereo system, a tanning bed, a 50-inch TV, a $1,700 sofa and a weight room – the last so he could stay in shape.

[…]

Merritt unveiled a grandiose – and costly – vision for the place. It would feature an indoor gazebo, a 1931 Ford roadster, an old-fashioned jukebox and a bakery counter. But its opening date kept moving into the future: from late 1989 or early 1990 to May or June 1990 to sometime in 1991. It finally opened in August 1992.

[…]

Promising “casual gourmet dining at its best,” Merritt’s finally opened in mid-summer. Behind the scenes, its owner was staving off contractors and others who demanded that he pay his bills.

In December, Merritt’s closed, except for private parties. In the coming months, it reopened sporadically, on weekends, marketed not as a restaurant but as a nightclub. Soon neighbors were complaining of gunfire and rowdy crowds on weekends.

It took years, but David got jail time. He was sentenced in 1998! :

NORFOLK — David J. Merritt turned and faced his family, friends and former contractors Wednesday, and apologized to the dozens of people he scammed in his failed Hampton restaurant project.

“I love all of y’all,” Merritt told his relatives in the U.S. District courtroom. Then, with his voice cracking and his lips quivering, Merritt spoke to his brother in the first row: “Tell Mom and Dad I love them.”

Minutes later, Judge Raymond A. Jackson dashed any hopes Merritt, 39, would see his elderly parents anytime soon.

Agreeing with a prosecution request to go above the recommended guidelines, Jackson sentenced Merritt to 140 months – almost 12 years – in federal prison on 82 counts, stemming from fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice convictions. Jackson also ordered Merritt to pay $717,672 in restitution.

The paper used to do a feature where they would do a phone in poll everyday. Although nobody should ever use the word “rape” in this way: