I mourn the demise of the printed newspaper, whose wrinkled, messy pages cannot be replaced by the tiny screen on my phone.
I learned to read at the table every day after supper. Even though I attended New York City schools, my father did not consider public school instruction to be sufficient for a true appreciation of language. So most nights, he would have me and my sister stand at the head of the kitchen table and read aloud from the pages of The New York Times, always a bit tattered because Daddy had already read the whole thing during his daily subway commute.
My sister, Netty, would whimper that she didn’t want to read aloud. She was shy and even the small family audience was too much for her timorous nature. But she always managed to read aloud so well that I was afraid to follow her excellent enunciation.
But I had little choice, so I, too, would read aloud and marvel at the big words that would come out of my mouth. Ten years later, a second sister came along and joined the after-dinner reading club.
I remember Daddy buying our first dictionary from Woolworth’s, so we could look up unfamiliar words we’d find in the newspaper. Our first encyclopedia was purchased in 1955 from a door-to-door salesman who convinced my parents that his expensive books would be better than the Woolworth’s dictionary for researching the news. The salesman was right, but it probably cost Daddy six months of his store clerk’s salary.
Both Daddy and Mommy had grown up in rural Virginia, where literacy was an uncommon treasure. The oldest of my 25 aunts and uncles, those born in the 1800s, could not read or write. There were no books or newspapers in their homes. But the younger ones all attended school.
My father even went to college, at Virginia State University, an all- black college at that time. He and his brother Vincent shared a single scholarship and would alternate years, one working to pay the tuition while the other attended classes and sang in choir. The arrangement lasted four years, until their education was interrupted by World War II.
But Daddy had sampled the sweet taste of literature, and was never again without books.
When I was in middle school, both my parents were hired by Eastern Airlines. They dumped trash, and tidied and restocked airplanes between flights. Passengers would leave behind unbelievable numbers of books and magazines, all destined for the trash. Our family was suddenly blessed with a limitless supply of free literature. Soon, we had books in every room of the house. Reading material filled every available space.
One summer, when I was home from college, there was no longer enough room for my bed in the tiny bungalow. I spent humid summer nights on a thin mattress perched atop cardboard crates full of paperback fiction, but consoled by the fantasy that, as I slept, words percolated up through the mattress and inundated my mind with wisdom.
After my mother’s airline job ended, she drove taxicabs in New York, another bottomless barrel of left-behind literature.
I mourn the downturn in the newspaper industry. You can read aloud from a laptop perched on the dinner table, but it just won’t be the same.
Warren Johnson (tecolote@earthlink.net) is a family physician in Brighton.
