The end of every year brings the promise of a better year to come. Many begin to plan out their obligatory, “New Year’s Resolutions,” which usually range somewhere between losing weight to quitting their job and volunteering in Kenya.  No matter how you slice it, people want to start each year from scratch, with a clean slate, and with an opportunity to reach goals that might have been abandoned during the previous year. New Year’s Resolutions stem from all of us wanting to kick old vices to the curb and improve our lives, which explains why so many resolutions are similar and really don’t change much over the years. Take for example this New Year’s cartoon from the Wichita Daily Eagle. Two men vow to quit smoking for the New Year, placing a $50 bet on the resolution.  One of men must smoke, so he takes a small blimp up in the air where his friend will never catch him. But the blimp catches fire when he lights his cigarette, falling to the ground where he is caught in the act by his friend.

And in another New Year’s comic, a man resolves to stop swearing, but from the time he wakes up until he arrives at work he is put in many situations that would provoke him to swear.

Many people, like the characters in these comics, fail to keep their resolutions for very long, so it’s always encouraging to see when people actually succeed at their intentions, as unusual as their resolutions might be.  This gentleman resolved to not cut his hair until a democratic president was elected and has the mane to prove his dedication.

Or this Eugenic couple, who vowed to be physically and mentally fit in order to improve the genetic make-up of the human population.

There is always the hope that the New Year will bring joy and promise to all, no matter what their resolutions may be. From all of us at the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program, Happy New Year!

Throughout Oregon’s history, its citizens have always been inclined to look hopefully toward the future. New Years Day has always been an important holiday in the state, as the historic newspaper record will reveal. A search of Historic Oregon Newspapers or Chronicling America will yield a number of headlines and illustrations commemorating the arrival of a New Year. Below is an example from the December 31, 1922 Astorian that you won’t find on either of the web sites (because it falls outside the scope of dates digitized for this title.)

Note the fuming factory smokestacks in the background of the picture–this is a recurring motif in newspaper illustrations of the day. While we in the 21st Century tend to look at the pall of black smoke and say “Yuck! Pollution!”, in the 19th and early 20th Centuries smokestacks are commonly used to symbolize wealth, industry, modernization, and desirable economic growth. Awareness of the negative impacts of environmental pollution would not begin to enter the broader American consciousness for a few more decades. So this truly would have been the perfect image of a “Happy and Prosperous New Year” for most residents of Astoria in 1922.

Here at the beginning of another New Year we find a convenient opportunity to remind ourselves that the times are always changing.  —Jason A. Stone