GET ME MY NEWSPAPER

With all the media open to us for information and amusement, the newspaper is still my favorite form of news. In my home, there are two newspapers delivered every morning. I get an email telling me the papers have arrived. The first paper I read I have been reading since childhood, the New York Daily News. The snobs call it the “New York Daily Rag”, I call it the New York Daily Rag. It is on opposite ends of the poll with the New York Times. The Times is for people who like to sound important. “Did you read the op-ed page of the Times yesterday?” No, I read the comics in the News, that Dagwood is a hoot!

I got into the News as a young 5-year old reading the Sunday comics, its what got me on the course of reading. Every morning, Dad would handle me a nickel and send me across the street to the corner candy store and buy off the newsstand a copy of the news. I would read the front and back pages of the paper while heading back home. Such headlines as; WHO’S A BUM and WAR were some of the headlines I remember.

Once Dad got his tabloid newspaper I would watch him red by turning the paper over and reading the paper, back to front, especially the sports pages that in his opinion were the best of the city newspapers.

The other newspaper was the Long Island Newsday, the one-step lower than the “Gray Lady” the New York Times. The Times was the businessman white-collar paper read by members of the educated and the elite, and of course, Yankee fans. In those days if you went to Yankee Stadium, all you saw were fedora hats, suited and tied while clapping their hands politely as the Yankees jumped out to a big lead and slowly pulled away. At Ebbet’s Field what you saw were screaming and booing, yelling and shouting, cigar smoke filling your nostrils and all dressed like they were in a hurry on a hot summer morning trying to escape a fire, T-shirts and overalls or dungarees as we called them with Keds sneakers. Of course, they were Dodger fans.

Newsday offered me some kind of self-respect, reading a sometimes Pulitzer Prize award-winning newspaper. I even got an Op-ed article in the newspaper on a Sunday! The paper gave me great business and financial info, local news and the latest high school scores that I didn’t want. It is important to know what the commercial banks offered compared to the credit unions. I didn’t give a cent for that info either.