Journalism roots run deep

I really had no choice but to go into newspapers. I grew up in Linwood, N.J., next door to the editor of the local weekly paper. The neighbor on the other side owned and operated a service station, so clearly I picked the less lucrative career. Good thing I didn’t grow up next to an ax murderer, I guess.

Perhaps it was through some form of osmosis, but by the time I was in elementary school, I knew I wanted to make newspapers my career. At age 10, I started a neighborhood paper with one of my friends. Gary and I one-finger-typed it on portable typewriters (you know, those things that are all in museums now), using a carbon, and went door-to-door in the neighborhood, selling them for a nickel. I actually did this for a few summers; we were responsible for our own amusement a lot more in the pre-Playstation days.

Our paper contained “news” you wouldn’t find in any other publication (with good reason, I suppose). When my mother had a tooth pulled, it was front-page news in the Crestlea Park Press. When Gary’s dog, Taffy, had an operation, we reported it without the indelicate details. We lifted riddles from a book (c’mon, who would sue a child for copyright infringement?) and included several. Here’s one I remember:

Q. Who is bigger, Mr. Bigger or Mr. Bigger’s baby?

A. The baby is a little Bigger.

People actually paid for this stuff! And a nickel was big money in the mid-’60s.

We included Little League standings, and my team was in capital letters, the same way big-city papers handled standings for their hometown baseball teams.

One time in July 1965, we actually had breaking news in the paper. Gary and I were busily churning out an issue when we heard that Adlai Stevenson had died. Along with the neighborhood news in The Crestlea Park Press was this: “Flash! Adlai Stevenson just died. They will perform an autopsy.”

Context wasn’t important to us at that age; besides, we probably didn’t even know who he was. We heard on TV that he had died, so we figured he must have been important.

I can’t remember if the breaking news helped our sales that week. Our customers were loyal, but they DID have other sources for news.