Many more issues of The Daily Record from Dunn, N.C., have been added to our site thanks to our partnership with the Dunn Area History Museum and Campbell University. These daily issues span from 1963-1965 and include an assortment of local, state, and national news.

One signature of The Daily Record during these years seems to be the cultivation of sensational, attention-grabbing headlines. Typically printed in fonts even bigger than the masthead, these headlines invoke the kind of high-stakes drama and mystery that you can’t just walk past. This seems to be especially true when the story involves litigation:

In case you’re curious, the “other woman” in the love triangle was “the attractive dark-haired wife of a St. Paul truck-diver.”

But just because the headlines are flashy doesn’t mean the rest is all fluff. Here’s one story that gets better the more you read:

While this event in itself is certainly a newsworthy crime, the details build on the excitement set up by the headline. The subtitle of this article is “Youth Makes Escape in Souped-Up Car.” It goes on to specify a “freckled, red-haired youth” who made a “noisy getaway” in “a souped up automobile equipped with dual exhausts and loud mufflers.” To prepare for this robbery, he dressed up in “white tennis shoes, a bulky cardigan sweater, yellow shirt and black trousers.”

Lest you think this young man was a particularly talented bandit, the article notes that this branch of the First Union National Bank had been robbed three times in the past five years. He also apparently dropped $4,000 of his haul (contained in brown paper bags) as he fled from the bank.

While the entertainment value of these stories is high, the paper also has a lot of coverage of the national issues from 1963-65, which were numerous. Several issues reference the “Red Scare” of communism, the Vietnam War, Barry Goldwater’s run for President, and the tension of the Civil Rights Movement, albeit with a somewhat unsympathetic angle:

You can see all issues of The Daily Record by year in our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To see more materials from the Dunn Area History Museum, visit their partner page and their website. To learn more about Campbell University, you can also visit their partner page and website.

The Daily Record, May 28, 1959.

Senate Passes Minimum Wage Act, May 7, 1959.

Thanks to support from the North Caroliniana Society and to our partner, Harnett County Public Library, new issues of The Daily Record are now available on our website. This batch expands our current collection of the paper to include 1956 to 1962. Published Monday through Friday, The Daily Record suppled Dunn and Harnett County with local and global news stories. Today, the paper continues to be published in Dunn, North Carolina.

Major headlines in this batch include Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to America, Russia’s announcement to send apes to the moon, the aftermath of America sending monkeys to space, and the establishment of a minimum wage in North Carolina.

Starting in 1945, citizens of North Carolina fought for the establishment of a minimum wage in the state. The article to the right, “14-Year Fight Ends; Action First In South,” highlights the establishment of a minimum wage by North Carolina’s General Assembly in 1959–the first state south of Pennsylvania to do so. The bill guaranteed that all workers in the state would be paid a minimum of 75 cents an hour, equivalent to about $6.88 an hour today. 

To learn more about Harnett County Public Library, please click here.

To view all issues of The Daily Record, please click here.

To view more newspapers from North Carolina, please click here.

The Daily Record, October 27, 1955.

A new newspaper title, The Daily Record, has been added to the DigitalNC collection thanks to our new partner, the Dunn Area History Musuem.  1134 issues spanning the years 1950-56 are available to view online, expanding our coverage of Harnett County, North Carolina.

Headlines, April 22, 1952.

Succeeded by The Dunn Dispatch, The Daily Record supplied the local area with publications on global and local news every Monday through Friday.  Major events reported on in this upload include the end notes of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the 1952 Presidential election of Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. While headlines often revolved around global politics,  The Daily Record notably made Klan arrests and court rulings front page news, as well as acknowledging moments of national desegregation.

Headlines, April 29, 1954.

Comics, November 11, 1952.

To view all issues of The Daily Record, click here. For more information about the Dunn Area History Museum, visit their website here.