Ink on My Fingers

January 7th, 2020 — one week into the new decade. It has been 20 years since the now infamous “Y2K disaster.” It has been almost 40 years since President Reagan was inaugurated. It has been about 50 years since I was old enough and educated enough to have some sort of awareness of the world, though it would take most of those years since to find my place in it. At this time in 1970, I recently turned eight years-old and was halfway through 1st grade. I was reading, doing math, learning history and geography and, due to the network news broadcasts my parents watched every night, I had an acute awareness of what was going on in the world, specifically Vietnam and Cambodia. I learned that the years were numbered in 1969 and, if memory serves, learned to tell analog time (because no one had digital clocks) around then, too. My sense of time and space were becoming established, but I might have learned about Southeast Asia much too young.

It was more than just the news — everyone had someone in Vietnam. Everyone had someone who died there, it seemed. For my age group is was mostly older siblings or older cousins or older neighborhood kids who came of age during the draft. It wasn’t as though it hit very close to everyone — it did not to me — but it was always close enough to feel it. I did not know who the president was in 1970, I did not know much about politics or our system(s) of government yet, but that would radically change in the presidential election of 1972 — Nixon vs. McGovern. My parents, both Democrats, supported McGovern — I did not know why, but because they did, I did, too. I remember making red, white and blue McGovern campaign paraphernalia. Although I did not know why I was supporting McGovern, I learned quite a lot about the process. Nixon won in a landslide, carrying 49 states. I am not sure whether my parents were more for McGovern or more against Nixon. But their “intuition” regarding him proved prophetic.

The Watergate scandal culminated when Nixon, who was certain to be impeached in the House and removed from office in the Senate, resigned in disgrace. He quit before they could fire him. He was the first ever and so far only US president to resign the office. It was a big fucking deal. I remember it very clearly. In August of 1974, I was not quite 13 years old. It was also during my “paperboy” days. I started by delivering my hometown weekly, but soon moved up to the larger, six days per week “Palo Alto Times.” While folding my newspapers, I was reading them — everyday. I was fascinated by not only what was happening nationally and politically, but also by what was happening locally and globally as well. We didn’t have cable TV or 24-hour news channels. Most households subscribed to at least one daily newspaper, but probably not many 13 year-olds read them as voraciously as I did.

I’d like to say that my passion for journalism continued to flourish, that I recognized early on that I had an aptitude for not only reading, but also writing. Had I recognized and embraced those things that are defining elements of who I am today, my trajectory would have been much different. However (and it is only through the lens of more than 50 years that I can see this), that does not mean it would have been better — or worse. It only would have been different. I still would have preferred to understand and embrace what my talents were earlier on, but only because the chaos in my life might not have affected those who are close to me. But, maybe different chaos would have. Chaos, it seems, does not discriminate.

My story left off with Nixon’s resignation. President Ford was sworn in and lost reelection to Carter in 1976. After Nixon, the Republicans didn’t stand much chance in 1976 anyway. Carter was (and still is) a good man. However, due to a combination of the way the world was at the time and his “nice” persona, he lost to Reagan in 1980. I could talk a lot about the national political scene in those years, but a US history lesson is not the point of this. Google will provide much more than I have here (and, ironically, soon this will be added this to it). Newspapers, still, uniquely engage us. The detail and depth they provide exceeds almost everything that can be found on TV or the Internet, unless it is the web version of — you guessed it — a newspaper.

The recent attacks on journalism are only the latest blow to an absolute necessary component to any free society. Technology has also dealt print journalism and, specifically, newspapers, a crippling blow. First it was cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle, but what cable started, the Internet finished. The “Palo Alto Times,” for example, after consolidation with its sister publication, the “Redwood City Tribune” in 1979 as the “Peninsula Times-Tribune,” finally shut its doors in 1983 — before the Internet was around to archive its rich history. Not that many years ago, the local newspapers I wrote for were still important and relevant. They exist in Internet masthead only now, regurgitating stories from other sources and other places by writers who have no clue where the town I used to write for is.


I have purposely left about the last 40 years out. A lot happened then, too, both globally and personally. Buy the book, if I ever write it. That hometown weekly I delivered for? It’s called the “Los Altos Town Crier” and it survived. It is not delivered on subscriber’s lawns or (if they were lucky) porch by pre-teen newspaper boys anymore, but it still lives and its archives are preserved. So many that went under, especially those that folder pre-Internet, have faded into nothing. While I still prefer the tactile sense of reading a physical newspaper, I have grown accustomed to their electronic equivalent. Although the ink doesn’t get on my fingers anymore, the important words, enough of them, are still being written. We should still be be reading them. Freedom depends upon it.