One of the best parts about my job is the opportunity it affords to explore the nooks and crannies of life.

Learning about electric autos and hair tonic - from 1909

Sometimes those nooks and crannies are figurative, of course. Journalists probe the inner reaches of bright minds for answers. We pore over government budgets. We study studies of all shapes and sizes.

But sometimes the nooks and crannies are quite literal, special places that time's forgotten, places privy to the press but not the public.

A tour of the grand Old Main building at the Montana Veterans Home in Columbia Falls was one of those nook-and-cranny moments. The brick structure, which once housed Civil War veterans but has been closed for nearly 40 years, was in the early stages of getting a new roof the day I was there. Roofers had gathered a pile of artifacts found in the rafters - the far reaches of the attic.

A pair of wire-rim glasses surfaced, as did various bottles of ancient ointments, old pipes and the real find of the day - an October 1909 copy of Everybody's Magazine in excellent condition.

It's a mystery how the publication survived all these years in a building that leaked like a sieve. But there it was in all its glory and all its insight into a bygone era.

I remember hearing about the magazine in my college journalism classes because its editor, John O'Hara Cosgrave, loved to publish long, detailed investigative pieces. Upton Sinclair's investigative article, "The Condemned Meat Industry," published in the magazine in 1906, is one I recall learning about, but many other well-known investigative journalists of the day wrote for the magazine.

Critics accused Everybody's Magazine and several similar publications of muckraking, publicly exposing real or apparent misconduct of prominent people and businesses. It was a wild time in the history of journalism.

But journalism aside, what was going on in America in 1909 when this particular edition of Everybody's Magazine rolled off the presses?

It was the last year of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency. Charles Strite invented the pop-up toaster. And corsets finally were beginning to loosen their grips on women's waistlines.

Anderson Carriage Co. has a full-page advertisement in the magazine for The Detroit Electric, an electric car that was produced from 1907 to 1938. Don't we wish now, with Hurricane Rita threatening to increase gas prices once again, that someone would have truly heeded the ad, which declared: "In every household in which it is installed, the Detroit Electric becomes an indispensable factor in the home life." As it turned out, electric cars were very dispensable for decades and are just now returning to any measure of popularity.

I was impressed with the number of products advertised in 1909 that are still popular today - Jell-O, Cream of Wheat, Ivory soap, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce and Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Any product that's survived a century can't be all bad, although I still maintain Jell-O has no good reason to exist.

Not everything lasted, though. A full-page ad lauded Victrola as the "newest and greatest of all musical instruments." There were plenty of ads for hair tonic, accompanied by illustrations of women having some very bad hair days. Yesterday's "tonic" is probably hair gel today.

Pocket watches, razor straps and player pianos were also popular in 1909.

The magazine that found its way to rural Montana in 1909 didn't last forever, either. It flourished during its muckraking days. And During World War I, even Teddy Roosevelt wrote a pro-war article. But, according to the Spartacus Educational Web site, sales plummeted, and even after dropping its political writing and focusing on fiction, it failed to engage the American public and went out of business in 1929, a few months before the infamous stock market crash.

Spending a little time flipping through the pages of a vintage magazine is one of the perks of this job, I figure. So was walking through the hallowed halls of Old Main, as old and decrepit as they now are. One day they'll be restored and made into something usable, a veterans clinic or museum, perhaps. But I won't forget the nooks and crannies that provided an interesting glimpse into the past.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.