I Miss my Sunday Newspaper

I miss my Sunday newspaper. My first exposure to the Sunday paper occurred when I was about six years old. I liked the Sunday color comics, those four big pages of adventures, Tom Sawyer, or Popeye cartoons. My parents never missed the Sunday paper. By junior high, I was reading the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune each week, and that would beckon me to page six with the rest of the story. Sunday afternoon was a delightful mixture of entertainment and education. Mom and Dad traded sections, and I lay on the floor of the living room with two pages spread out in front of me.

During my college years, I seldom missed buying a copy. Sometimes there were free copies in the dorm's commons area where I lived at the Univ. of Minnesota. I was very busy that year because math, physics, and English literature soaked up seven days a week of studying. But a couple of hours with the Sunday paper was like a vacation, a trip to other lands, or politics, or an opinion column.

While I was working long hours in the summers, I still found time for the Sunday paper. It was an invitation to the wide scope of culture, history in the making, or prognosticating political commentators. Church had a place in my Sundays when I didn’t have to work. Although that often slipped off the schedule, the Sunday paper did not.

When I moved to Michigan and enrolled at Hope College, I explored a wider range of Sunday papers. The Grand Rapids Press was my go-to, but the Detroit News or Free Press often provided a deeper dive into subjects of interest. I learned a bit about Michigan government and how the auto industry was functioning or fighting with its unions. Although I was engrossed in this vast world of information, I was still also enthralled by the fifteen or twenty cartoon features. Besides, on occasion, I would put down the extra cash to buy a New York Times. But I could never get through that 5-pound behemoth of paper. It was like signing up for a banquet of everything from apartheid in South Africa to Alaska natives’ fishing culture, and the Broadway plays. I certainly learned about things that I would not have known to ask about.

Perhaps that was the primary allure of the big Sunday newspapers, they presented a whole bushel basket of topics I had never thought about before. Sometimes it was technology, rocket sciences, or medical miracles. So every Sunday afternoon, I spent several hours absorbing this rich dose of knowledge about the world. I was in college, and later, in seminary, so I had plenty of studying to do, but those subjects were seldom as delightful as the flow of Sunday news.

In Illinois, I got used to reading the Chicago Daily News or the Tribune. I never missed columnist Mike Royko’s views. He had insights and a sharp tongue that taught me that you can be annoying and disrespectful if you have embarrassing facts about a public figure. This trail of years reading Sunday papers crashed to an end a few years ago. The Grand Rapids Press, like so many others, grew rapidly in price and diminished dramatically in content. I finally gave up.

Perhaps as you do, I now scan several news sources daily on the internet. The flood of information is larger than any Sunday paper I ever read, but the format is more insistent. It wants to grab me. It slips advertisements right into the middle of something I’m reading. I can’t just flip through the pages quickly, scan all the subjects and reports, and easily turn to my favorite topic. Maybe I will gain skill and get to manage this flood of words. But I will always miss that big, beautiful Sunday newspaper