I ate breakfast every morning in the mid-1950s before going to school. My mother fried four eggs (over easy) and four strips of bacon. My brother and I got two of each. She poured a glass of orange juice for my brother and another for me. He had toast. I rarely did. He didn’t read the Los Angeles Times, I always did. Or rather, I assembled my own newspaper from the kit of parts the Times presented daily. My father, who walked to the bus stop to get to his job at the gas company, left the paper behind on his chair at the kitchen table.
I read the non-political columnists. Jack Smith, of course, whose five-a-week slices of suburban life began in 1958. Matt Weinstock, with more of an edge from his own days at the Daily News. Jim Murray, the sports columnist. Although I wasn’t much interested in sports, I was interested words. And voices.
I read the movie reviews, largely because mine wasn’t much of a movie going family. I read the comics. Dick Tracy. L’il Abner. Orphan Annie. Gasoline Alley. I read the city news – just the headlines and the story ledes; rarely to the end. I didn’t read even that much of the national and world news, except to glance at the front page last. Or almost last, I looked at the editorial page for the editorial cartoon. Not for the paper’s cranky Republicanism, in its editorials and selection of right-wing columnists, famous but unreadable.
My famioy subscribed to the Times and the Long Beach Press-Telegram, then an afternoon paper. My father would sometimes bring home a copy of the Herald Examiner he picked up on the bus on the way home from work. Two papers every day – sometime three.
And the experience, in retrospect, wasn’t much different from the experience of “new media” . . . finding the stuff you wanted to read every day in the welter of stuff you didn’t care about. Finding the voices that came alive in your mind’s ear. Making my own “newspaper” of many newspapers, even from the Times, which was widely considered one of the worst newspapers of that era. It was easy. A part of the morning that delivered the satisfaction of the two fried eggs and bacon made by my loving mother.
Maybe all that the old media needs is more breakfasts and more mothers.
The image on this page was made by Flickr user Martin Cathrae. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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