IT’S ALL NEWS TO ME!

Being married for 41 years you begin to get the message. As a husband you are the second most important person in the house, everyone else is the most important.

We get two newspapers on a Sunday Morning and during the week. The reason I structured that last sentence that way is because of the rituals of marriage that have taken me from my once free and independent life of bachelorhood to the structured life of dependence and compromise of marriage. Sunday I have to give TLW (The Little Woman) the Daily News to read first. That is because she likes to read a feature they have every Sunday called: The Justice Story. It is about usually a murder that has happened in the past, what happened and how it was solved.

During the week, she gets both papers first so she can peruse them quickly and then go off to work. These are the many perks she has being married to me. There are other things that she gets also that carry her through her day.

We get two newspapers the other being Newsday. Both are rags and both are a waste of time to read for news. They are biased and poorly laid out rags that have a tradition. Growing up in Brooklyn, Dad would send me out each morning with a nickel and I’d go to Sam’s across the street on the corner, a candy store basically, where I would buy either the Daily News, and if they ran out of it, the Daily Mirror.

Now Dad read the newspaper because of the sports pages in the Daily News, and I would watch with fascination as he would start the paper from the back page and work his way forward, so as to cover the sports section first. He would pinch the paper in the middle of the page and turn to the next page, with a cigarette and cup of coffee. He would read Jimmy Young the famous sports writer that covered the Brooklyn Dodgers and announce that the News had the best sports pages in town.

When sales were brisk or I was late getting the paper in the morning and the Daily News was sold out, I’d buy the Daily Mirror and immediately turn to the Walter Winchell column and his staccato like bites of news. The man fascinated me because he had a segment on the TV where he would carry over from his radio days his technique. He was a reporter who could make or break a politician or movie star by what he said. He would begin his telecast by saying something like: “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!” There would be a big microphone in his face, and a cigarette in his hand with what he was reading and a fedora on his head.

At night, Dad would return home, a fedora on his head, and the NY Journal American folded under his arm. He would ring the doorbell down stairs and we would ring it back and he would ascend the two staircases and whistle on his way up. That was the signal that dinnertime had arrived, and as he changed from workingman to Dad, we would take his newspaper and go to the comics to read them before dinner was ready on the table.

Dad was not a NY Times reader, and his son never cared for the paper either. I never liked it, subscribed to it and found that the reporting was too biased for my liking, so a lot of the ‘facts’ that they reported were built on a sanctimonious, arrogant and elitist displays of long-winded interpretation of the news. I can do that on my own. I had it delivered to my home and to my office, but never really cared for the news end of it. To me it was and still is dishonest.

TLW is smart, she reads only factual stuff that has an impact on her life. She goes to the Internet like a lot of us do now, and really doesn’t hold that much stock in reading the rags. But it is nice to do a Sudoku puzzle or a good old-fashioned crossword puzzle, holding a newspaper with a pen or pencil.

When we were first married, my in-laws would come to the house on Sunday, and my father-in-law Jim would read my Sunday newspapers, and as much I loved the guy, he would totally leave my newspapers in disarray, the pages slipping out of their position. He would read the paper, make a comment out loud and bury himself, immersed in the minutiae of the story and physically get rough with the pages. I am very particular about how my newspaper should look when I pick it up to read it. Pristine in condition is what I want. If I went to a newsstand to buy one, it had to look unread, if it looked otherwise, the news was used, not new to me. (OK, I’m crazy)