J.C. Smith: The print Tribune has had a good run
I know I’m not alone in feeling like I’m losing a friend. Oh sure, there will still be websites I will be able to access and I can get a weekly summary of the news mailed to me, but The Salt Lake Tribune that I’ve read daily in print for about 70 years will be no more, and that’s kind of earth shaking.
Two and a half years ago I had to give up the tactile, printed Trib because I moved to St. George, and the only option I had to satisfy my addiction was to get the digital version. Admittedly, it’s not the same sitting in my home office with my coffee, in front of my Mac, as it was all those years, from the earliest 1950s until 2018, when virtually every day I sat on the living room floor of whatever house or apartment I was living in and pretty much consumed the newspaper, just as my father had for many years before me, though he preferred the kitchen table. In those days I usually got the paper after him and accepted the fact that newspapers reeked of cigarette smoke.
I taught myself how to read, with my mothers' help before kindergarten, by sounding out the words of the old Tribune comic strips, like “Gasoline Alley,” and “Dondi,” and “Little Orphan Annie,” and “Gordo” and “Steve Canyon.” And as my reading improved, I always read “Nothing Serious,” a daily column by Dan Valentine – (“Dear world, I bequeath to you today one little girl in a crispy dress… I trust you’ll treat her well.”), and “The Sports Mirror,” by John Mooney – (“Dissa and data.”) And I always looked to see what was playing at the Lyric and Capital and Uptown theaters – mostly cowboys and Indians or World War II movies.
My Cub Scout den mother’s husband worked as a printer at the old press behind and to the south of The Tribune Building on Main Street, and we regularly got to go watch the paper as it ran through the presses and was cut and folded and bundled. As we moved on to the Boy Scouts, the printer became our Troop Leader, so the tours continued. It was fascinating to see the huge rolls of newsprint turned into the neatly folded morning paper that would be on my front porch before sun-up, just like in the movies.
So, The Trib has long held a soft spot in my heart. When I went to college, I thought seriously about a career in journalism, but it was the late 1960s and I decided I could change the world more by teaching high school, so I spent the next 32 years instructing older teenagers in the social science courses at Kearns High. And I loved it, and I like to think I helped a lot of kids learn how to think and how to question.
Still, I never lost contact with The Trib or my love of good journalism. Over the years I wrote dozens of letters to the editor and eventually learned what it took to get them printed, and I’ve had a number of commentaries printed, mostly concerning politics.
So now, the era ends, sadly with more a whimper than a bang. It’s been a good run. Our Pulitzer-winning newspaper will disappear from the stands just as so many other great newspapers. Now I wonder how long the New York Times and the Washington Post will last. A while, I hope.
Meanwhile, books are making a comeback. Would it be too much to dream?
J.C. Smith, a retired teacher, lives in St. George.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/2JqAHrv
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