One of the happy sounds of my young life was the thud-bang of a rolled-up newspaper hitting our front aluminum door when the paper boy, like an ace pitcher, lobbed it there every weekday afternoon.
I’d rush to the door to pick up the St. Cloud Daily Times and then sprawl back in a plush chair to read it. In summers especially, the Times had the hot sweet smell of newsprint and ink – still to me a most wonderful smell.
I can remember so often a neighborhood friend or another knocking at the door.
“Where’s Denny?”
“Where do you think?” I’d often hear mom say with mock sarcasm. “He’s sitting in the living room with his nose buried in the newspaper. Where else would he be?”
During my earliest newspaper-reading years (mid- to late 1950s, early 1960s), the page I usually opened to first was the movie page, with posters of movies playing at or about to open at St. Cloud’s three theaters – Paramount, Hays, Eastman. A movie fanatic, I’d spend lots of time soaking up every detail of those ads: show-times, who’s in it, who directed it, who produced it, blurbs from critics.
After perusing that page, I would turn to the news, some of which interested me. I remember reading quite a bit about President Dwight Eisenhower (he golfed a lot), about Sen. Joe McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee sniffing out communists, and about all trouble spots across the planet – Algerian resistance against the French, civil wars in African countries, conflicts over the Berlin Wall, the Hungarian uprising against Soviet oppression.
What I remember most vividly, however, is the shock of headlines and stories about singer Buddy Holly dying in a plane crash, actor James Dean’s car-crash death, Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, movie goddess Marilyn Monroe being found dead in her bed and – most of all – the big black mournful headlines about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In those days, newspapers were our window to the world – our only window. I would help my brother deliver the Minneapolis Star and Tribune early mornings door-to-door in the neighborhood, and I would read that paper as avidly as I read the Times. Another paper I relished was the Weekly Reader we’d get in grade school.
We relied upon those papers for news, information, entertainment because my family (and quite a few others) did not have TV for many of those years, though we often watched it at the neighbors’ homes. When we did get a TV set, we’d tune in to the Today Show morning news sometimes and almost always the Walter Cronkite Evening News and then at 10 p.m. the Twin Cities news.
Fast-forward to the here-and-now: TV cable news 24 hours a day, an explosion of Internet information that includes genuine news, gossip, pseudo-news, trivial nonsense and fake news; social media that constantly blurs the lines between fact and fiction; newspapers, magazines and what-not available online. For the most part, I like the high-tech proliferation and sprawl. I like the options for 24-7 access to news, opinions, information and entertainment.
However, I do think much has been lost, news-wise, in the frantic scramble to digitize everything under the sun. Too often, it feels as if we are being buried in an avalanche of the just “too much.” Too much stuff, too much information, too much of this and too much of that. Audio-visual noise and commotion. After awhile, one can feel overcome and paralyzed by too many choices, too much everything.
I often tell people I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet Age. I’ve adapted – somewhat – and, yes, I do read a lot of news and opinions online. Still, I’m always happiest when I’m in my recliner with my nose buried in a newspaper, an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned newspaper, the kind that smells like happiness, like newsprint and ink.
