Native discovers antique Record in Texas
Newspaper-lined cabinet will have new home in restored 1926 house
News editor
A lunch date and shopping July 15 led to a surprise for Marion native Denise Westerhaus Hutcherson of Fort Worth when she discovered a piece of home in a Cleburne, Texas, antique store.
Hutcherson and her daughter, Alex of Waco, picked Cleburne as a place to rendezvous for lunch.
“She said there’s this little antique place that’s supposed to be a lot of fun,” Hutcherson said. “I’d never been there before.”
As she strolled through the antique shop, she spied a “not so cute” medicine cabinet, its mirror almost black. Unsure why, she felt compelled to look inside.
When she opened the door, she found herself looking at pieces of a timeworn Aug. 1, 1912, issue of the Marion Record.
With the front page as a base, additional pictures and clips, presumably from the same newspaper, had been glued on to make a collage.
“I tried to see if I could read any of the stories, but it was hard because it was pieced,” Hutcherson said.
One article billed a recent chautauqua as a “splendid success,” while another previewed an upcoming election. A picture of operatic soprano Sibyl Sammis McDermid had been torn from another page, as had an ad for “Deering Corn Harvesters at Saggau’s.”
Hutcherson didn’t have any luck figuring out the cabinet’s origin.
“I asked the woman who owned the store, but she didn’t remember where it came from,” she said.
Hutcherson, a 1974 Marion High School graduate, didn’t buy the cabinet that day, but she told her siblings about her discovery. All of them wondered why she didn’t buy it, she said.
A week later, she did. The cabinet will end up somewhere in a 1926 house in Arlington, Texas, that Hutcherson and her husband are remodeling.
“In its current state it won’t make a great medicine cabinet,” she said. “I’ll find a place for it.”