The Morning Reading: "Final Edition: Twilight of the American newspaper" - Richard Rodriguez

This just in.

The November issue of Harper's features an essay by Richard Rodriguez titled, "Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper."

I started reading it, got very sad as you do when reading an obituary, had to put it aside, and then, later, picked it up again to finish it.

Only an abstract is available online, so you have to visit a library or buy your own copy - or borrow mine.

Here's the opening:

A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago—had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.

Several generations of children learned to read from that text. The schoolroom had a wind-up phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glory, and one record, from which a distant female voice sang "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life."

Is it better to have or to want? My friend said her teacher knew one great thing: There was something out there. She told her class she did not expect to see even a fraction of what the world had to offer. But she hoped they might.

I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle when I was in high school and lived ninety miles inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from school, twenty-five cents bought me a connection with a gray maritime city at odds with the postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen, whose column I read immediately - second section, corner left - invited me into the provincial cosmopolitanism that characterized the city's outward regard: "Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?"

"There was something out there." - love that.