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I read the news today, oh boy,

About a lucky man who made the grade,

And though the news was rather sad,

I just had to laugh,

I saw the photograph*

 

For the better part of my life, I read the newspaper.  As a young boy obsessed with baseball and the Pittsburgh Pirates, I pored over the sports pages, studying the statistics of my favorite players.  My father subscribed to the Daily News – a local paper, but with a decent sports section.  On Sundays, we received the much thicker Pittsburgh Press. The Sunday sports section published the batting averages of virtually all baseball players – in both leagues.  The Sunday Comics entertained me with the likes of Dick Tracy, Peanuts, Lil’ Abner and Pogo. 

After we came home from church, most Sundays would find my mother in the kitchen cooking our Sunday dinner while my father sat in his favorite chair in the living room reading the Press.  I would lie on the living room floor, reading my favorite sections of the newspaper scattered around me.  Besides the Comics and Sports, I liked to look at the magazine sections. The TV Graphic contained brief descriptions of television shows for the coming week and told you if the show was a repeat.  The Sunday Roto had pictures of scenes from around town. This Week Magazine had plenty interesting articles on various subjects.

During my high school years, I delivered the morning paper to about 60 homes in our area.  I would wake up around 5:00 AM, and try to complete my deliveries by six o’clock, so I could catch another half hour of sleep before getting ready for school.  Then, on Saturday afternoons, I would knock on my customers’ doors with stubs in hand to collect payment for the delivered papers.  I did not make a lot of money delivering newspapers, but the tips I received around Christmas helped make it worthwhile.

When I became an adult and had to pay for my own newspaper, I had to decide what paper I wanted to read.  The Post-Gazette was the morning paper, so I could read it on the bus during my morning commute.  As a bonus, I could continue reading it when I got to work during my first cup of coffee.  On the other hand, the Press would not be delivered until the afternoon, which meant I had to read it on my own time after I returned home from work.  Plus, I had a history with the Post-Gazette from my days as a paperboy.  I also preferred their editorial page to the more conservative views of the Press. 

The Press went away after the newspaper strike of 1992.  The Greensburg Tribune-Review expanded to the Pittsburgh market to fill the void left by the Press’s demise.  The Trib was owned by conservative mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, which kept me from ever seriously considering it as an option.

When I retired in 2012, I continued to start my morning with the Post-Gazette over several cups of coffee.  During this time, news via electronic outlets on the internet, such as Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and The Daily Beast, began to seriously compete with print newspapers.  In September of 2019, the Post-Gazette announced that they would publish print editions only three days a week.

But by then I had left Pittsburgh and settled in West Chester, Pennsylvania – about 25 miles from Philadelphia.  For a while, I continued to subscribe to the digital edition of the Post-Gazette, to which I added digital editions of the Washington Post and the New York Times.  But I missed the feel and the smell of newsprint – the ink stains on my fingertips – the sound the paper made as I flipped from page to page.

West Chester has a small paper called The Daily Local.  I bought a digital subscription to see if it had enough substance to warrant buying a print subscription.  It did not.  That left the Philadelphia Inquirer.  I purchased Sunday editions on a number of occasions to see if I liked it.  I determined it was a serious newspaper, but the Sports section?  No news of the Pirates, hardly a mention of the Steelers, and the Penguins only came up when they played the Philadelphia Flyers.  Nevertheless, when I showed my wife a special price for which we could get both print and digital editions of the Inquirer, she offered to get it as a Christmas present for me.

For a little over a month now, I’ve gotten a little spark of joy every morning when I look out my frontwindow and see a newspaper lying on the sidewalk.  Old habits remain as I pore over the Inquirer’s Sports and Comics as well as its articles on the major stories of the day while sipping my coffee.  Reading the Philadelphia Inquirer is helping me to learn more about the region where my wife and I have chosen to spend our retired years.  It may actually turn me into a Philadelphia Phillies fan – except when they play the Pirates.

 

*  “A Day in the Life,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney