“Welcome to the house of newspapers,” my daughter whispered to my newly-minted granddaughter as she settled her onto my futon for the first of what would be many days of care. The rustling of back issues of The Weekly View was the soundtrack of a dying art form: the production of copy for newsprint.
When I was a young man living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the city was rich in newsprint: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was the morning paper, and its sister – produced in the same building – was The Pittsburgh Press, the evening offering. The man who would become my father-in-law worked as a printer for the weekly Pittsburgh Courier, a paper aimed at the African American community. When his daughter went out with her friend (me) he asked us to “pick up a paper” on our way home. (The Pittsburgh Press was available after 11 p.m., and years passed before I realized that he was subtly monitoring the time that I brought his daughter home.) I don’t remember when I became an avid reader of newspapers, but when I was newly wed, working as an artist in the display department of Gimbel’s Department Store, I consumed the copy in those three papers.
My sister is an award-winning journalist whose career has been in broadcast. Most of what she has written has been for others to read on air, and she is an avid reader of online news and editorial offerings. Jaci rearranged her life to accommodate our ailing mother but when she grew too sick to stay with her daughter, Mom was moved to a nursing facility. While she lay dying, I would travel to Maryland to visit with my mother, and when I walked into her room in the hospice care center, she would look at my hands and murmur, “Ooh, paper.” Each day, before I drove to the care center to see my mother, I walked from my sister’s house to the local convenience store to get a copy of The Washington Post. My mother, excited to see newsprint, would spread the paper on her bed, and we would quietly and separately read it. Jaci did not buy newspapers, but her brother did, and our mother loved to turn the pages.
One of my first creative experiences with computers was when I came to Indianapolis to work in the advertising department of L.S. Ayres. When I told my first bride that my artistic offerings were coming from a computer, she expressed condolences. She had only known me to sketch, draw and paint on paper. But I told her that I was excited to learn a new medium, and though my ads were designed partly through the use of computer programs, they were executed by artists on the board, and delivered to newspapers to be printed. When Ayres closed its doors and shipped its advertising department to St. Louis, my former boss invited me to go West, and I was in charge of managing the packaging of ads to be shipped to all of the newspapers with which we had reserved space. This physical function has now, of course, been replaced by electronic transmission. But still, there are papers.
These words I’ve written were crafted to be imprinted onto the newsprint that I use to draw pictures for my grandchildren, the same newsprint that produces the pages that I read, the newsprint that excited my mother and blanketed her bed as she read and died. I am no Luddite and know that I will be read online. But I do love the sight, the sound and the feel of paper.