"Kane! Kane! Kane!"

As per assignment, here are some assorted and sundry thoughts regarding newspapers.

1) I don't remember much in the way of newspapers in my years before, say, age seven. The Henderson, KY, Gleaner, and The Kansas City Star, were there, in our home, and read. I started to read when we lived in KC, so the Star was certainly on my reading list. I was a voracious reader; my mom to this day tells of the time she sent me out to empty the cat's pan. When I was over-long in returning from the chore, she went out to check on me. She found me reading the newspaper on the bottom of the pan.

2) I do remember the pictures and headlines from John Glenn's flight, John F. Kennedy's assassination and funeral, and Winston Churchill's and Douglas McArthur's funerals. And the Sunday funnies.

3) My first encounter with the First Amendment and the freedom of the press came in Batesville, Arkansas, when I was nine. We had moved to Arkansas the first year Batesville had integrated its elementary schools (1965-66 school year). Things went swimmingly, I seem to remember -- but that was the naive view of a third grader. I just couldn't see what everyone was getting worked-up about. Kids were kids, black or white. We wrestled each other during recess, played baseball together, enjoyed each other's company.

One day, on the way home from school, I found a rolled-up newspaper, with a rubber band and thought it odd ( boys and girls, we used to get newspapers, at least in the big cities, tied with string; The Batesville Guard was folded by our paperboy in ninja-star style and sailed by him to our holly bushes, his Honda Cub 50 tailing two-cycle engine smoke). Of course, curious kid that I was, I had to unwrap the paper and read. Not quite an Augustinian "tolle, lege;" the words of the rag breathed of a different spirit.

It was a Klan newspaper. I had never before encountered such sentiment; I was shocked and outraged at its cartoons, virulence, and pure blind hate. I remember bringing the rag home in tears, and showing it to my mom. She said that she thought it stupid, too. I remember sobbing a question as to why such could be printed -- and she responded with an explanation of the First Amendment's protection of the freedom of the press and speech and something about yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. I couldn't make heads or tails of it, other than coming to the conclusion that the world of adults was beyond my ken.

4) Fast forward a couple of years, and I devoured the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Memphis Commercial-Appeal after MLK was shot, and the Louisville Courier-Journal when RFK was shot. After finding out about John Peter Zenger in our history class in fifth grade (thank you, Mrs. Hankins, for all the great things you instilled in us that year!) I began to understand the necessity of a free media.

5) My brother Mark and I delivered the Beardstown, IL, Star-Gazette, for several months, and made a grand total of $3, plus change. The route had been "let-go" by its previous paperboy, who had not been diligent with collections. We worked the route with our dad to bring the paper into the black. After all of the struggle, we were worn-out with the route. We turned-it back over to the paper, who then gave it to the guy who had run it into the ground before!

The paper was a daily then, with attempts at some national news coverage; it mostly was of the small-town pics of who had a caught a big bass, or the winner of the stock show, or pictures of my little sister and one of her friends posed with a husky and dog sled, saying "mush" -- or of my winning best costume for the Halloween town gathering (a rubber devil mask, aluminum foil pitchfork, and a red bedspread -- all to my shame, now, for appearing as such, but it was "B.C.").

6) In highschool I worked for KPRE-AM, a country station, and did the weekend shifts, to include gathering and reading the news. I became intimately familiar with the contents of the UPI & AP broadcast wire services; I became the scourge of my civics class when it came to the weekly current events contests.

I also wrote for the PHS Cat's Meow. I remember then (1974-75) thinking that newspapers would soon go the way of the dinosaur (I had a decided bias towards broadcast media then). Somehow I figured that we'd have information consoles or somesuch device in our homes, and that broadcast media would outstrip the print media. Interesting now how that blogging and podcasting appears to be what will be killing the broadcast star.