Black And White And Dead All Over

I didn't read a lot of the Rocky Mountain News. It wasn't our local paper. It was news from the big city down the road. My family read the Boulder Daily Camera. Given the fact that one of my father's first jobs was Daily Camera newspaper boy, it probably couldn't have gone any other way. He eventually worked his way up into the pressroom, and began what would become his lifelong love affair with all things printed. Even for a while when we did get two papers, we chose a subscription to the Denver Post. There was just something a little troubling about that tabloid design that left us all feeling just a little nervous.
After all, your standard newspaper is meant to be shared: Your Sports section here, the Comics there, and the Entertainment section for when you've finished everything else. The Rocky Mountain News wasn't made to be shared. It was a chore to read and to handle. I became familiar with the News on my visits to our barber, where there was always a copy sitting on the bench along with a great many magazines about hunting and hairstyles, neither of which captured my interest. I learned to attack the News from the back pages. That was where the comics were. It always seemed to me that there were more comics than our newspaper at home, perhaps just by the layout, and they had Peanuts.
Continuing my backward read of any particular issue of the Rocky Mountain News would land me in the Sports section. As I grew older, I learned to savor these tastes of the grown up world: Sitting in the barber shop, waiting for my turn, reading the Sports section. At twelve years old, it gave me something to talk about in the chair besides school.
It has been years since I have had to think much about the Rocky Mountain News. Only recently did I get talked into buying a year's worth of newspaper delivery for my family here in California. I don't look at it much. Most of my news comes from Al Gore's Internet. That's where I learned that Friday the last edition of the News will be published. Like so many newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, business is drying up. Who wants to lug around a couple of pounds of newsprint just to read the headlines? The Rocky Mountain News is closing up shop just two months shy of its sesquicentennial. Though I never had a subscription, my father's inky blood still runs through my veins, and I feel the loss. Aloha, Rocky Mountain News.