This is a list of who have advertised in just those Let's Go which I have scanned to date.In early 1925 Father O'Connor reached the conclusion that St. James Parish needed a new church. The "old" church had become unusable and the church was using part of the brick school on Tamm Ave. (which was torn down in the early 1960s).
Father O'Connor (generally called P.J.) called a parish meeting and presented the idea for such a church. The plan was affirmed and as part of that building fund P.J. published a weekly (mainly) magazine called LET'S GO. This was short for: Let's Go Find The Money To Build A Church.
Almost single-handedly he wrote this quality magazine from March 1925 to July 1932. When the pages are number consecutively it is a total of 1190 pages!!!!!
The first edition of March 21, 1925 is almost exclusively devoted to that first parish meeting and the project of "Let's Go" getting off the ground. After this the weekly magazine grew and were typically 16 pages, at times as many as 24. They contained a HUGE amount of parish and neighborhood information and are the earliest and perhaps only such printed and surviving record of this neighborhood of Dogtown in existence.
Mrs. Joe Boman worked at the rectory at this time and in that entire period she typed all copies of the magazine to ready it for publication. When the magazine ceased to exist in 1932 P.J. asked Mrs. Boman how many issues of the magazine she had. She had kept them all, everyone. The parish also had one copy. Father O'Connor had those two full sets bound. Each set is three leather bound volumes. Both survive, the one in the possession of Joe Boman, the other in the rectory of St. James Parish.
I heard about this treasure sometime in the late 1990s and begged Joe Boman to allow me to borrow his copy. He did and I made a xerox copy of the entire 1190 pages. When I did this I discovered that Mrs. Boman had cut out one issue, a painful issue from when Mr. Boman had died. I went to the rectory and Father Rauch, then pastor, loaned me the parish copy to copy that one 16 paged missing entry.
Below is what I have so-far scanned. It is a massive job. First of all I am working with xerox
copies and they don't scan so well, so I have to do a lot of proof reading. Secondly, the quality of
xerox will simply not allow me to scan decent photos, so I am (for the time being) skipping the
few photos. Further, given the poor quality of the text I am using I am sure I will miss many
errors in the scanning. I ask your help in this. If you are reading and see errors, please e-mail
me and I will try to make the correction. However, one note of caution:
It seems they really used a different system of capitalization that we currently used. Many words
are capitalized in the original which we don't, today, capitalize. I left all capitalization
as it existed in the original. It seemed an important comment on the times.
I know that many many families in Dogtown have a few copies of this 5x7 periodical in their family holdings. I urge any of you who have them to consider seriously donating these historical treasures to the Dogtown Historical Society. This would make a marvelous place for an entire set of these to come to be held for the future of the neighborhood history.
Enjoy the texts, and please, don't hesitate to write me at the e-mail address below to share your thoughts and memories, and I, in turn, will post them on my daily e-mail list of the history of Dogtown.
Bob Corbett
March 2004
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