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After I wrote about the Philadelphia origins of the term “Black Friday” for the shopping day after Thanksgiving, I got the following email from a reader:

I had recently dropped out of college for the first time. I had just turned nineteen and had no clue what I wanted to be when I grew up. The dire warnings came from the sweet older women that took me under their wings in the arts and crafts department at John Wanamaker’s department store in center city Philadelphia shortly after I was hired as temporary holiday help in October, 1971. They warned me to be prepared for the hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents that would alight from the banks of elevators onto the eighth floor toy department, all racing to ride see the latest toys on their way to visit Santa. The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it “Black Friday.” I’m quite sure it had nothing to do with store ledgers going from red to black.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t push the frontiers of knowledge forward since we already knew that the term was in common use by at least 1966. But it does offer us an opportunity for some crowdsourced research. I figure this blog must have at least several dozen readers from Philadelphia. With some linkage help, maybe a few hundred will see this. Many of you will have older relatives who have lived and worked in Philadelphia for a long time. And many of those older relatives will have been cops or bus drivers or retail clerks in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

So here’s your task, Philadelphians: talk to your relatives. Find out if they remember the term “Black Friday” being in common use and compare this to the era when they worked. If, say, clerks from the 40s don’t remember this, but clerks from the 50s do, we’ll be making some progress. Science demands that we do this. So ask away, and either email me your results or leave them in comments. Let’s demonstrate the power of the internet to the infidels.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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