I’m stealthy about slipping outside each morning to retrieve newspapers from the driveway. I dread someone driving by, lowering their window and yelling, “Get with the times!”

Oh, darlin’, we’re with the Times — and the Journal and the Star and the News. Two papers in print and four online.

Back when an apple was still a fruit and nobody ever heard of the internet, every house on both sides of the block got a morning newspaper. Today, we are the only house on the block to get a newspaper in the driveway. We might be the only ones in the whole subdivision.

Paper and print are part of our history. We met in college. He was a graduate teaching assistant in the photo lab and I was an undergrad. We met in the darkroom to see what would develop.

We bonded over newsprint, halftones, the deafening roar of offset presses and the smell of darkroom chemicals.

I grew up in a home that received a newspaper in the morning and another in the evening. Mom and Dad had the same thing every day for breakfast: coffee, buttered toast and the morning paper.

They had the same conversation every day, too.

He’d say: “You don’t need to read that to me; I just read it.”

Then she’d say: “OK, but did you read this—"

Then they’d trade sections.

After dinner, it was the same thing all over again, but without the buttered toast.

My husband’s first job was delivering newspapers door to door on his bicycle. As a girl, I poured through the Women’s section on lazy Sunday afternoons vicariously attending weddings of strangers, learning where they were from, who their parents were, how the groom planned on earning a living, where they would live, and how long the train on the bride’s wedding gown was.

A great aunt used to make sailor hats from newspapers, clean windows with them and wrap tomatoes in need of ripening in them. Newsprint was a multi-use tool.

Newspapers took us through the assassination of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" and the horrors of 9/11.

And now? They’re a novelty -- like turntable record players and 35 mm manual-focus cameras.

Before any big family gathering, the husband tears out pages with comics, the crosswords, Sudoku and word puzzles. A son-in-law and half-dozen grandkids charge through the front door and make wild grabs for them. There’s often a cluster working to solve for 61 across: solid fossil fuel.

Yes, you can find everything in print online, but there’s just something about a newspaper in your hands. Maybe it’s the feel or the crinkle. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of wrestling that monster into position. You bat back a page, snap it behind another, give it a shake, fold the whole kit and caboodle, and are ready to read. Newspaper aerobics.

Some may think people who still get a newspaper in print are relics. We prefer to think of ourselves as affectionate historians.

©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC