Barbara Van Reed Several months ago, during the height of the
Cranston Print Works demolition work, Nancy French came into our
office with a stack of old newspaper pages. She had been
cleaning out her basement, getting ready for a yard sale. Nancy
and her husband Bob bought the building at 3 Lake Street, across
from the library, 46 years ago and renovated it to become
Nancy’s House of Beauty. But they had never gone through the
entire basement. The newspaper pages she found had been put down
by the previous owner to store things on. One of them, the one
that had stopped her, was a full page ad by Cranston Print
Works, dated June 21, 1945. The ad showed a shoeshine man
bemoaning what his life might have been like if he’d kept his
war bonds and bought more of them. Our first thought was, why
would Cranston Print Works run an ad like that? The small print
at the bottom of the ad reads “This is an official U. S.
Treasury advertisement – prepared under the auspices of the
Treasury Department and the War Advertisin