KENNETH E. HALL SEPTEMBER 13, 2015 HOUSTON
[UPDATED MAY 10, 2019]
It was some time in the late Sixties....
He stood on the street corner of Canal and Basin - you know, by Krauss - or rather where Krauss used to be? I was waiting for the St. Bernard bus, and it was running late. I was tired and hungry and just wanted to get home. The Canal Street was filled with a cacophony of noises that could tell a blind man he was on one of the city's busiest thoroughfares. But there was something more - something I had heard just about every time I ever went into town.
I heard it again: "Get -cha PAY-pah! Get-cha STATES Pay-pah! Get-cha LATE STATES PAY-pah!" It was a repetitious staccato of slurred words in the deep brogue only a native-born New Orleanian could speak. But if you only lived there a few years, by now you knew that this man was selling one of only two daily newspapers available in the city: Either the States-Item or the Times Picayune. Being the afternoon, it was the LATE Edition of the States-Item that the old man was peddling to the crowd gathered at the bus stop, and to those walking by.
This guy was haggard and old now, but my guess it that he started out as a young boy, hollering "EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!" - and maybe he started from this very street corner - back in the day when the Southern Railway trains made frequent departures just across Basin Street Back then, in the Roaring Twenties, streetcars ran all over the city, and more than just a few wooden steamboats still plied their way up and down the Mississippi, making the Port of New Orleans one of the world's largest.
The many years that passed by him had etched their way into his expressionless face like a road map that went from no-place to nowhere. He looked tired.
The paper he sold only cost a nickel, and the bus only a dime, and I had a silver dime in my pocket and a transfer from the Canal streetcar in my hand, so I bought a copy. Then, after reading all about it, whatever "it" was, I stepped back as passengers alighted from the maroon and cream-and-white colored NOPSI bus. I looked at my watch, and was happy - I'd be home in about a half-hour. I held out my transfer, the driver took off the top coupon, rang me up as a transfer fare, and I walked in and sat down, and continued reading my paper.
Many years went by, and I was living and working in another city. The sights, the sounds, and the many wonderful things that make up New Orleans were for me but a pleasant memory, now. That terrible storm Katrina had taken away many things that I loved, and time, progress, and other events took away much of the rest. One day I decided to check in on how things were doing in my beloved Post-Katrina New Orleans. I went online and read something that made me very upset: The Times-Picayune was about to be history!!
The Times-Picayune published its *last daily edition on Sunday, October 14, 2012, and in so doing made New Orleans **temporarily, at least, the largest city in North America without a daily newspaper! It was bad enough that the city lost so many other things, but when I heard that my home town was about to divest itself of its very voice, its mirror, its daily chronicle of life, I just could not believe it!
When I was a little boy, I often heard my grandfather decrying the Times-Picayune, saying: "The MAYOR doesn't run the city; he just THINKS he does! He's just another tin-horn politician who would sell his very soul just to get a few votes! I tell you, The New Orleans Public Service (utilities company) and The Times-Picayune run the city!"
I never believed that diatribe, but considering the fact that the New Orleans Public Service (NOPSI) held a MONOPOLY on gas, electricity, and transit service within the city limits, and the Times-Picayune was a mighty force for swaying and forming public opinion, there might have been a grain of truth to it after all.
IT'S ALL ABOUT TRENDS!
With the growth of television, Internet, and Cable TV news channels, printed periodicals such as newspapers, magazines and the like are fast disappearing. This trend actually started the minute the news was first broadcast on television. The decline and demise of newspapers was, from that point, inevitable. The question was not if, but when.
Those who passed notes in class as kids now post daily on Facebook. The graffiti artists of bathroom walls and tenement halls of the 1950's and 1960's are today's bloggers, and their writing can be seen around the world instantly.
Newspapers, once purchased daily and read from Page One to the Obits, from Want-Ads and Ann Landers to the comics, have, one-by-one, shut down city after city. What once cost a dime, (and cost every bit of that to print!), has become passé.
What lines the bottom of our canary bird cages today? I wonder.
Books, keepers of our culture, are also disappearing. No, they did not perish in the apocalyptic fires of Fahrenheit 451; they are being tossed away like last week's magazines, unread, into the dustbin of history. Some few have been saved as relics - only seen as "quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore."
The stories these books held are themselves too lengthy to bother reading. We want "just the facts, Ma'am." (as was often said on TV's DRAGNET series.) We have no time for raconteurs — we only want the Cliff Notes version, and keep that simple, too, please. George Orwell predicted this "Newspeak" in his novel 1984. He just got the year wrong.
Today's conversations typically occur in brief, poorly-spelled and non-punctuated "Tweets."
Even our handwriting is going away, as many schools no longer consider cursive writing "relevant." How sad.
Our culture has boiled down to the immediate, the concise, the mundane, and the trivial. We know the names of the three Kardashians, but we don't know the names of the three branches of our own government. REAL emotions are considered as a weakness, and words open one up not to debate or discussion, but to vile criticism. The secret to success is to fake sincerity. We sit at the table with friends, and never make eye-contact, because we are all on our cellphones. When a flight attendant asks us what our choice of beverage would be, we look up at her mindlessly, and ask her: "What is it?" We didn't even hear her because of our earphones, which blare into our ears some inane and meaningless noise that we consider music.
So the days of the corner newsstand and paper man and even the neighborhood paperboy are now over — we won't "read all about it" anymore - at least not in in the States and the Item, nor in the Picayune, either. They are all gone - gone to join the swelling ranks of things that we look back upon.
I wonder what will disappear next.
On second thought, I really don't want to know.
!* The Times-Picayune resumed daily editions, but was printed in Baton Rouge, and so it is not a TRUE New Orleans paper. The once-modern Times-Picayune/States-Item building where so many editions were laid out, edited, and printed, has been slated for demolition. **
!UPDATE: **The Times-Picayune
Entire New Orleans Times-Picayune staff axed after sale to competitor
READ ALL ABOUT IT: https://nypost.com/2019/05/03/entire-new-orleans-times-picayune-staff-axed-after-sale-to-competitor/?fbclid=IwAR1d9BEwOF6jJF6aVbG2ou27paGqkf8SiIRy5EBTcfVvdRq7iHVFkJMg_kc
This was originally written SEPT. 13, 2015, in Houston and rewritten July 30, 2018. It is intended to follow a story: "Madam Librarian." : http://kennyduke.blogspot.com/2014/06/madame-librarian.html
Paper Boy clipart is "Public Domain": http://www.clker.com/clipart-paper-boy.html
As someone once said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” (A quote attributed to Mark Twain, but unsubstantiated.)
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http://kennyduke.blogspot.com/2014/06/madame-librarian.html
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