Sundays with the Paper

Throughout my boyhood the Sunday paper was a Big Deal--in more ways than one. For one thing, the Sunday edition was always the heaviest paper of the week--chockablock with advertisements, feature stories, COMICS, coupons to clip, a magazine or two ... Even in Enid, Oklahoma (where I lived till I was nearly twelve), the paper was ... substantial.

When we moved to Hiram, Ohio, in the fall of 1956, we were met by the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer, which (for wee me) took two hands to carry inside. Dad got the sports pages first (it seemed he spent forever with them); older brother, Richard, took the Entertainment/Arts section; little brother (Dave) and I battled for the comics ... Mom got the front pages--or what were called the "women's" sections.

By clean-up time (after church, after dinner--which was usually pot roast, carrots, potatoes), it seemed that pieces of the paper were all over the living room. No one I knew had ever heard of recycling, so it all went in the trash. (Joyce, on the other hand, always had parakeets, so pieces of her Sunday paper--the Akron Beacon-Journal--lined the bottom of the cage.)

The years went by; I got bigger and stronger (not a lot, mind you), and soon it took just a single hand to carry in the Sunday paper. But it was still very substantial--thick and fun. And when I became a teacher, Sunday afternoons were generally dreary (paper-grading, lesson-planning), so spending hours with the Sunday paper was a temptation I fought fiercely to resist.

Later on, I would write book reviews for the Plain Dealer--about one Sunday a month--a gig I never would have predicted for myself when I was in school and was certain I had a limitless future in professional baseball and/or basketball.

Even more surprising (and pleasing): Our son, Steve, wrote for the Beacon-Journal for a decade.

And then ... the Internet ... and the slow shrinking of the Sunday paper. We still take three papers on Sunday--the New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Akron Beacon-Journal. But--combined--they don't quite equal the heft of the Plain Dealer alone in its glory days.

I would guess that reading the Sunday paper is no longer much of a family activity. In the coffee shop during the week I see very few people reading any newspaper--well, at least a "hard copy" of one. Most, of course, are online now. I read the Times every morning on my Kindle, the Plain Dealer and the Beacon-Journal on my iPad later in the day. And if I see something interesting, I will clip it from the actual paper and file it at home.

Why?

Habit. You never know ... right?

Today, for example, the Times had a review of a new film about Oscar Wilde ("mushy and meandering," sniffed the reviewer). But I had to clip it, right? Save it for that day when ... ? When ...?

Link to Times review.