We got a county newspaper twice a week in my hometown. It was thrown into our dirt driveway. I rarely paid it much attention. We knew most everything that was happening anyway, like who’d grown the biggest watermelon, whose dog had died, and who was favored to win district.
But somewhere around my 10th year, two beautiful things happened. One, we started getting Sports Illustrated. Beautiful pictures of faraway places like Dallas or Los Angeles or even Europe in a golf match called the British Open. Dan Jenkins became my favorite writer. While he told you who’d won and who’d lost, he also told you a story. Most of the time, it was funny. The ballgame was just a backdrop for a bigger picture of people competing but still living in the real world and dealing with real life. “Putting on greens slicker than Sam Snead’s head…” Jenkins would write, and on like that.
The other thing: we started getting The State on Sundays. The State was and is the daily newspaper from Columbia, S.C., and on Sundays there it would be in our Dillon County rutted driveway, hopefully not in a mud hole or dog doo.
The State was a beautiful thing.
Cut off from the 3D world by tobacco fields and hog pens and the inability to legally drive anything other than a Farmall tractor, I latched onto The State to take me to the only thing I cared much about: ballgames.
And it did.
There on Sunday mornings before church would be a picture of the Citadel’s game against Wake Forest, or the Gamecocks and North Carolina’s Tarheels. Once there was even a picture of our hometown hero, B.B. Elvington, a three-year starter at defensive tackle, blocking a punt for Clemson, and it was right there in my hands in living color. B.B., in the paper! I mean, my goodness, he lived right down the two-lane on the way to town, and here he was, in the paper!
How such a thing could happen, how a guy could block a punt five hours away on one afternoon, how you could actually know him, and how a story and picture about it could be in your driveway the next morning, only magic could make such a thing happen. I was hooked.
I have loved the newspaper since.
Big papers. Little ones. Twice a week publications and dailies. I have respect for them all, first because of what they meant to me when I was a boy, and now because of an understanding of how hard it was, and is, to produce one and get it, every day, all the way from Clemson to Myrtle Beach or from Shreveport to Oil City and Ruston and Mansfield and Marshall, Texas.
Transportation is a bit different. The mode of delivery, from our hands to yours, is a whole new ballgame.
We used to run big presses and get the paper by car to your driveway. Now this is done through some sort of “cloud” and internet magic, delivered from our laptops to your phone.
Either way, it’s a beautiful thing.
I was once a real newspaper guy, daily in the middle of a wonderful mix of chaos and laughter and ink and pressure. Now I’m a fringe guy, but still in the family, gratefully. We each bring different things to the party.
And the newsPAPER is no longer that. It’s this new-fangled digital thing.
Like many of you, I miss holding a paper in my greedy little hands too. But times, they have changed. Horse and buggy to automobile. Radio to TV. Typewriter to computer. It’s an efficiency thing.
No longer do the presses roll. No longer is ink on a reader’s fingers. No more passing the Business Section around.
Another story for another time.
But we still have news. And stories. And someone’s B.B. Elvington is in the newspaper, even on this very day. It’s still a priceless miracle, “getting the paper out.”
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