I can go on all day about this, so here are “25 More Reasons I Love Newspapers Besides All the Stuff I’ve Already Talked About”:
1. They ain’t heavy, except on Sunday.
2. The Far Side.
3. Mike Royko’s column out of Chicago.
4. You don’t have to look at the ads if you won’t want to. It’s hard to escape television commercials no matter how fast your remote control finger is.
5. Editorial cartoons.
6. They are brief about the weather: “Today: Cloudy with a high near 75.” Television weather lasts longer than some thunderstorms.
7. Baseball box scores that can tell you exactly what twenty-three guys did in a two-and-a-half-hour period in about three inches of agate type.
8. Peanuts.
9. B.C.
10. Adult movie ads. I once saw one called “Thar She Blows.”
11. Occasionally I have the pleasant surprise of finding humorous writing on the editorial page.
12. The personal ads. They keep me up on what’s kinky.
13. As I read my paper, I often fantasize about owning my own newspaper. Its slogan would be “Born to Raise Hell.”
14. They don’t play any loud rock music.
15. The fact there’s a crossword puzzle in every day in case I ever decide to take up doing the crossword puzzle.
16. If you read a newspaper every day, there will be very few topics you can’t talk about.
17. The Wizard of Id.
18. College football and basketball odds.
19. Those “People” columns where they tell you what’s doing with Prince Charles and Lady Di and Elizabeth Taylor.
20. You can serve your dog leftover steak bones on a newspaper.
21. You can be going through your grandmother’s attic and find a paper from 1939 and have a lot of fun reading it. You will want to say, “Watch out for Hitler.”
22. Newspapers make great starters for fireplace fires.
23. Automobile dealers can’t do their own commercials.
24. Newspapers are the only romance in my life that hasn’t eventually picked up and left me.
25. If you really think about it, newspapers are one of the last great bargains. Most daily newspapers cost a quarter. What else can you get for a quarter that tells you how various wars and famines are going, how much money you lost in the stock market or betting on a ball game, what new thing will kill you according to researchers, how many people got killed in the latest soccer riot, how many people are going to have AIDS by the year 2015, what Congress did, how bad the president is doing, what the weather is going to be like, not to mention informing you of the day and month and year it is?
What really gets me is, after all the service newspapers give people, most people don’t really like newspapers. Perhaps it’s the old messenger-who-brings-the-bad-news thing. A newspaper tells you the ozone layer is going to disappear in twenty years and you’re going to be fried alive, and you get mad at the newspaper.
Readers are always asking, “Why don’t you print more good news?” The answer is simple: There’s not any.
If there were any good news, we’d print it. Let’s say I was interviewing God again, and He said, “Tell everybody we’re going to throw out the Sixth Commandment on Judgment Day.”
You recall the Sixth Commandment. Moses tried to get God to forget it in the first place, but God didn’t know at the time that the Playboy Channel would come along on cable and make everybody want to commit adultery.
So now God realizes “Thou shalt not commit adultery” isn’t really an operative thought anymore, and He tells me He’s going to overlook it for everybody born since 1945, except for Jimmy Swaggart, of course. God would have forgiven him for simply committing adultery, but he couldn’t forgive him for selecting that sweat hog he found in a New Orleans motel room as his adultery-ette.
Anyway, if that story broke, it would indeed be good news and newspapers would carry it, front page, top story.
The New York Daily News would say:
“GOD ON SEX:
’LIVE IT UP’ “
The New York Post would say:
“I WANT YOUR BODY”
The New York Times would say, in a headline size much more dignified than that of the Daily News and Post:
“GOD GRANTS FORGIVENESS FOR
ADULTERY FOR THOSE BORN AFTER 1945.”
Followed by these subheads, in descending type size:
“SUPREME BEING INDICATES
SIXTH COMMANDMENT PASSÉ”
“PLAYBOY’S HEFNER
ELATED AT NEWS”
“POPE STARTLED,
CANCELS TRIP”
“THOUSANDS CELEBRATE
IN TIMES SQUARE”
“WADE BOGGS GOES 5-FOR-5
IN BOSOX ROMP OVER YANKS”
So this is to be a book about newspapers, written by a man who has been both a newspaperman and a newspaper columnist, and that makes me an expert on just about everything about newspapers except how to sell advertising, how to crank the delivery trucks, and why the accounting department always questions my expense accounts. This is also going to be a book about how and why I got into the newspaper business and where it has taken me. Not all of it will be pretty. I’ll have to deal with my days as sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance. This was the worst period of my life. I was dragged to court by one of my sportswriters, divorced by my second wife, once sat next to a man who had a rooster on his head on a Chicago Transit bus, and had to help push a friend’s car, which had a dead battery, eight blocks through the snow, quite a shock to my southern-born hatred of cold weather.
To work your tail off getting a paper out, and then be handed a first edition, which always felt warm to me somehow, like it had just been taken out of the oven, was a joy. It was instant reward. I would never have been happy in a business where it took more than forty-five minutes to see the results of my labor.
And after I got into the business, I met a thousand characters who loved newspapers as I did and didn’t really give a damn they were getting paid so poorly.
There were so many other rewards. Like knowing we got the news first and it was our job to tell everybody else. It’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s also good for the ego. I always felt a little superior to civilians.
I got my first newspaper job when I was ten. I didn’t get paid, but I did get to see my name above an article for the first time, and it was a thrill the likes of which I have not often known again.
That makes thirty-four years in the profession. I mentioned earlier that, one day, I might quit all this and open a liquor store, but I won’t.
In the immortal words of Frank Hyland, a friend and colleague, “Wouldn’t it be hell to have to go out and get a real job?”
It would.
IF IT HADN’T BEEN for my Uncle Grover, who married my mother’s sister, Aunt Jessie, I could have wound up in any number of careers other than newspapering.