Missing the daily newspaper
I have been a newspaper reader for a bunch of years. I wouldn’t say that it was for all of my 80 years, but it is pretty close to 80 years.
In my earliest days, in the early 1940s, we subscribed to the Fort Smith Times-Record, which was at the time the most available daily newspaper in northwest Arkansas. There were larger papers in the state, such as the Arkansas Gazette published for long years in Little Rock, and there were other local weekly newspapers around us, like the Benton County Democrat published in Bentonville. But for a daily paper we relied on the Fort Smith newspaper.
You could say that my early educational experience, learning my A-B-Cs and my numbers 1-2-3-4-56-7-8-9-10, began by sitting on my Dad’s lap reading the newspaper with him after the evening milking was done. I started the project of learning to read by having him read the comic strips to me. We called them “the funny papers.” Dad would show me the words on the page as he read them to me. Most of the old comic strips that we were reading in those days are now long gone, like Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchum, or Little Lulu, or Allie Oop, or Little Orphan Annie, or Al Capps Dogpatch (with L’il Abner & Daisy). I think the only one of the old strips that is still published today is Dagwood and Blondie.
Dagwood hasn’t changed much since the 1940s. He still works for Dithers and Co., still goofs off on the job, and still always has Mr. Dithers on his back about something. I know of one exception — Dagwood now comes to work in a carpool rather than almost missing the bus every morning. Blondie now has a career as a caterer, rather than being a stay-at-home mom. I guess their kids will never grow up. They are still teenagers, even after all these 80 or so years.
I pretty vividly recall the news headlines on the front page of the Times-Record during the early 1940s. Quite often we would see the words Japs or Germans, since we were in the midst of World War II. I remember learning the word “bomb,” and other words like troops, tanks, fighter planes, jeeps, battleships and submarines. Sometimes the news would be about President Roosevelt (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), or Adolph Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, or Winston Churchill, or General Dwight Eisenhower, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or General Patton (the famous tank commander), or General Douglas MacArthur (old soldiers just fa-a-de away). We didn’t see color very much in the old newspapers. Like photo prints, most newspapers were published in black and white. We did have the comic pages in color on Sundays.
In later years I recall the “battle” between the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat. My personal opinion was that the Gazette had always been the better newspaper, but it lost popularity during the contentions times over school integration, and the Arkansas Democrat was somehow able to undercut the older paper on the cost of want ads. The end result was that we lost the Gazette, and we had a new paper called the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It was pretty much a Republicanleaning paper, despite the name, and very little like the old Gazette, except for the comic strips and a few writers who carried over from the Gazette.
The Gazette, to describe in terms often used today, was somewhat left-leaning, where-as the Democrat was middle-to-right-leaning, with neither being extreme left or right. I came to be OK as a reader of both papers, and continued as a subscriber when they were merged (sort of). I myself tend to lean left of the right and to the right of the left, and so am not highly popular with either side.
This is the year in which we began having the daily newspaper on iPad rather than on the printed page. There are a few advantages, I would say. The pictures are prettier, more colorful, the type can be sized larger or smaller, you can call up older issues without going through a stack of papers, there are no old papers to take for recycling, and so on. But even after these several months I still have trouble getting to the pages I want to go to, the screen still seems very small for reading a newspaper. I have never had to boot up my old newspaper, never had to charge its battery, and it was always easy for me to grab the A section or the B section or the E section or the F section rather than swiping my finger across a sometimes uncooperative touch screen. There is still nothing quite like sitting with the newspaper on your lap and a cup of coffee nearby as a way of starting the day.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by email at joe369@ centurytel.net or call 621-1621.