If you’ve read a lot of Peanuts reprint books, you’ve probably at some point read the June, 1962 storyline where Linus’s blanket got turned into a kite, which in turn got carried away by the winds. You may even have seen this panel:
That panel showed up the in the newspapers as well, over in the funnies. If you’re old enough, you may have seen it there. But did you bother to look in the classified section, in the lost-and-found section? Let’s take a look at the (Dover, Ohio) Daily Reporter:
Or The (Klamath Falls, Oregon) Herald and News:
Or The (Santa Fe, New Mexico) Santa Fe New Mexican:
Or The Arizona Daily Star:
And you could find similar listings in papers in Battle Creek, Michigan; Terra Haute, Indiana; Sikeston, Missouri; Somerset, Pennsylvania; Des Moines, Iowa; Tacoma, Washington; and many, many more.
But the readers of the Detroit Free Press got something special!
And the folks in Florida got an article explaining (among other things) that the object that many people were seeing in the sky that day was not a blanket-kite, but merely another weather satellite that had just been launched from Cape Canaveral. In Tucson, a businessman reported finding the blanket, and supplied a photo of it conveniently dangling in front of his business. In Port Heurn, Michigan, they covered a letter that was received in response to the listing. Heck, in Dover, the responses were front page news! And so on and so forth. It was, at the time, a bit of a thing.
