Front Page News
Earlier this year The Atlantic wrote an article about the end of The New York Times print edition—going so far as to predict the presses might stop for The Grey Lady in May 2009 (obviously not). I panicked and thought What will I do without the NYTimes in my hands?! Then I realized I hadn’t held The New York Times in my hands in a very long time. I read it every day—online. Every now and again I’ll buy the Sunday Times (I bought it yesterday), but for the most part, I go for the virtual edition.
Nine times out of ten what’s on the cover of the print edition is also on the front Web page of NYtimes.com. Unless, of course, there’s a breaking story. So I was shocked when I received a letter from my friend and frequent commenter Masa with a cut out of the front page of the NYTimes with an interesting story about Donna Reed and her collection of letters. It was front page news, and I had missed it somehow. Apparently, the actress held onto the many letters written to her by soldiers during World War II. From the article:
All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer script method cursive rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think your swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense.
I wondered for several seconds: How could I miss this? Then I looked at the date: May 25, 2009. Memorial Day. One of the days I gleefully swore off my computer. I would have caught it had I had the print edition that day, alas Masa caught it for me, and I am most grateful.