Hollenbeck: NEWSPAPER ENTERTAINMENT

            Back in the days of my youth, we got a lot of entertainment out of reading the newspapers. Townspeople usually got a daily paper that was delivered right to their door. A lot of young folks made their spending money delivering papers on a route, which was a sought-after job back when income was scarce and kids were not handed money every time they walked out the door. My grandparents got the Omaha World Herald and like many others, as soon as they were through reading it they passed it on to others whose budgets did not allow for such a luxury as receiving a daily publication. That was where our World Herald came from. My granddad always worked the crossword puzzle found in each publication, but other than that it was usually in pristine condition. The Sunday World Herald, as was the case with most daily papers, was quite thick and had one whole section dedicated to cartoons. Of course, that was that the kids enjoyed the most, but every newspaper contained at least one question and answer segment, such as “Ann Landers, Ask Abby,” etc. People would write in about their problems and the columnist would give advice.     Ann Landers was a pen name created by a Chicago Sun-Times advice columnist Ruth Crowley in 1943, and “Dear Abby” was created by a lady named Abigail Van Buren. The columns disappeared when those two ladies died. Although there have been numerous attempts to replace them, those columns were nearly irreplaceable.

            Then too, there was a recipe column where women sent in their favorite recipes as well as household hints, gossip columns, stock market reports as well as commodity price reports, sports and news from a large area. I often wondered how the newspaper editors were able to put all that together so quickly and get it several hundred miles away into the hands of the readers. Whenever any newsworthy event happened anywhere in the entire region, reporters and photographers were on the ground almost immediately. I have a copy of a special edition dedicated to the aftermath of the Blizzard of ’49 with pages of stories and photos from as far away as Rapid City and Casper and beyond.

            With many of our small, hometown newspapers struggling to survive, I believe it is important to support them as much as possible. As Richard Kluger stated, “Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism…” and one quote that hits close to home today as by the late Thomas Jefferson: “Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

            Undoubtedly, television removed the need to get a daily newspaper, and now the internet has created a shift in how people consume news. There are so many falsehoods on the internet as well as artificially altered photographs that it is hard to believe anything you see there. When you read a newspaper you evaluate and make your own decisions about an event. If you aren’t interested in a topic, you don’t have to see someone berating the issue; you just turn the page and move on.