Newspapers

Being an Old Guy, I like newspapers, and headlines like this depress me. I learned to read from the comics section of the Mexia Daily News, to which my parents subscribed, along with the Dallas Morning News. I don't know how long their subscription to the Mexia paper ran, but my father was still a subscriber when he died. So well over sixty years. He and my mother had given up the Dallas paper years earlier, as had I, but for different reasons.

When I left home for The University of Texas at Austin, one of the first things I discovered was that I could have the DMN delivered to the door of my dorm room, so I subscribed. It was the paper I knew, and I didn't bother subbing to the Austin paper at the time.

After I left college, I taught school in Corsicana, where I again subscribed the the DMN, and after Judy and I married and moved to Denton, I subbed again. When we moved to Austin for more graduate work, we subscribed to the DMN and to both the morning and afternoon Austin papers. In Brownwood after grad school, I took the Brownwood paper, and, of course, the DMN. It was only when we moved here to Alvin that I finally stopped subbing to the DMN. I could get it, but only by mail, several days late, so I reluctantly gave up reading it after more than thirty years.

I didn't give up newspapers, though. We subscribed to both the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post. The Post is gone now, but we still take the Chronicle.

I can't imagine a world without newspapers, but I suppose that's where we're headed. I don't know that we'll be any the worse for it. There's plenty of news on the Internet, more than I can handle. Still, I'll miss settling down in the armchair and unfolding the newspaper. I've been doing it nearly every day for a long, long time. I think I'll go do it now.