At an estate sale in Rancho Cucamonga, John Atwater found a trophy that may qualify as newsworthy. It involves the news, at least.

A bronze newsboy holds a newspaper aloft, hawking the latest edition. The plaque declares that Keith Malberger got the Pomona Progress-Bulletin’s junior salesman award for February 1966.

It’s not like newsboys were still standing on street corners in 1966 to sell single copies. They were riding their bikes to deliver to subscribers. Also, to try to collect from subscribers who pretended not to be home. But the pose is classic, harkening back to an earlier era.

“It struck me as an important piece of local history,” Atwater reported by text of his find. “I got it for a fair price of only $5.”

Weeks later, I spoke to the local Retired Public Employees chapter in Ontario. Atwater, who is a retired public employee, was in the audience. He gifted me the trophy. He figured that as a newspaperman I was the logical recipient, which I suppose I am.

Atwater likes to collect things. In 2022, he showed me a related find.

It was a half-dozen commemorative drinking glasses produced by the Ontario Daily Report, each decorated with a shocking front page from 20th-century history. A year later, he gifted me a similar set from the Prog.

Frankly, as promotional gimmicks go, these glasses strike a somewhat ghoulish note. Mornings are tough enough to face without having an all-caps headline like “KENNEDY DEAD” staring at you from your glass of orange juice.

Back to the trophy. On Tuesday evening, I drove to downtown Pomona, where I stood on the corner of Third and Thomas streets. With the old Progress-Bulletin building as a backdrop, I held up my paperboy trophy and snapped a photo.

Then I walked back to my car, trophy in one hand, feeling as I were carrying on Oscar.

Five years

Thanks to everyone who emailed about my anniversaries Tuesday with The Press-Enterprise, Sun and Daily Facts. As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, my intention is to share a few of those comments, along with my own, here on Sunday, if I can complete another column before the holiday. (Happy July 4th to you all!)

After that, I’ll be on vacation for two weeks. It’s my annual trip home to Illinois, plus one side trip to another destination. Yes, baseball is involved.

Dancing to news

A while back, Kay Masonbrink of Hemet was listening to the Symphony Hall channel on Sirius XM while reading her Press-Enterprise — a perfect morning? — when the announcer said the next piece would be Johann Strauss II’s “The Morning Papers Waltz.”

“He also related how the piece was written to compete with a waltz by Jacques Offenbach at an event for Vienna journalists,” Masonbrink tells me. “The association decided to name the Strauss piece as ‘The Morning Papers Waltz’ and Offenbach’s as ‘The Evening Papers Waltz.’ ”

She turned to Google to hear both 1864 pieces. She decided, with commendable evenhandedness, that they’re equally fine. “But I do remember that way back in the good old days,” Masonbrink adds. “We had both a morning paper and an evening paper delivered.”

Ah, the Press and the Enterprise, pre-merger and pre-hyphenation. Longtime Riverside County subscribers will appreciate the waltz down memory lane.

Mid Mod at museum

At Ontario’s Chaffey Community Museum of Art, an exhibit titled “Designing Our Community: HMC Architects in the Pomona Valley” explores the firm’s Midcentury Modern work from the 1950s and ’60s. Black-and-white photos showcase workaday public buildings with uncommon style, often incorporating the floor-to-ceiling windows and flat roofs of the era.

Ontario buildings in the exhibit include Hawthorne Elementary (1958), the City Library (1960) and Ontario International Airport’s terminal (1960), the latter two documented, to my surprise, by famed photographer Julius Shulman. The firm’s San Antonio Community Hospital (1964) in Upland and Chaffey College (1960) in Rancho Cucamonga are also documented.

Alumni of Montclair High (1959) may marvel to find their campus part of a museum show.

One exhibit card says of HMC: “The firm developed a streamlined, modernist architectural vocabulary of elegance and utility.”

Founded by J. Dewey Harnish in 1940 in a tiny office in Ontario near the gaudy Ford Lunch, the architectural firm added Mel Morgan and Jack Causey in 1960 to become HMC. It’s now marking 85 years.

Harnish is also notable in Ontario because his wife, Jerene Appleby Harnish, owned and published the Daily Report from 1936 to 1965.

The museum, 217 S. Lemon St., has the exhibit through July 13. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Thursday to Sunday, and admission is free.

Not collecting dust

Meanwhile, at Upland’s Cooper Museum, “Treasures of Our Town: A Collector’s Showcase” pulls examples from the personal collections of almost two dozen people.

Among the range of items: presidential campaign buttons, Anaheim Ducks memorabilia, old Cucamonga wine labels, Nintendo consoles and games, vintage Girl Scout uniforms from Troop 8 in San Gabriel and fossil seashells from, uh, the Banning Pass. (The seashells are said to have been left “when the Gulf of California retreated to its present position.”)

The exhibit can be seen at the Cooper, 217 A St., from noon to 5 p.m. each Friday and Saturday through Aug. 16. Admission is free. The Cooper collects things, but admission isn’t one of them.

brIEfly

In 1991, visiting Southern California from Louisiana, televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was pulled over in Indio’s red-light district for driving erratically. In the passenger seat was a prostitute, who later said Swaggart had swerved because he had seen the police car behind him and “had tried to hide his pornographic magazines under the seat,” according to the New York Times. Swaggart died Tuesday at age 90. He was not the first public figure to fall from grace in the Inland Empire and he won’t be the last — the good Lord willing.

David Allen is in the driver’s seat Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.