Newspaper Addict

Published in the Tecumseh Herald, Oct. 22, 2024

I’m addicted to newspapers.

Not just writing for them, which has been spectacular, but the smell of the ink, the rough texture of the paper under my fingertips, even the sound of the newsprint crackling as its pages are turned.

As a kid, I even liked the taste—I’d tear strips from the TV Guide pages and chew them like gum.

These days, when I swing by the office of The Tecumseh Herald, that ink smell greets me, an old friend with whom I’ve shared decades of memories I’ll always cherish.

As a kid growing up in Tecumseh, newspapers were a staple in our household. There always seemed to be a copy of the Detroit Free Press or the Detroit News lying around and, of course, we subscribed to the Herald. My dad loved to read the paper, and we were encouraged to follow suit. 

My love for newspapers really came into its own when I was in fifth grade and our class visited The Toledo Blade. The tour included the massive printing operation. It’s been 56 years since that tour so it probably wasn’t quite the enormous operation of my 10-year-old child’s memory. I recall a vast room with high ceilings, filled with a giant behemoth sporting  cylinders and rollers slapping the newsprint with a thunderous roar.  

It was loud, dirty, and smelled of ink.

I fell in love immediately.

After visiting the Blade, I pictured myself working in such a place, seeing something I wrote come off those shiny rollers, the ink still damp, making its way down the conveyor belt to be bundled and delivered.

In the mid-1970s, the peak of my adolescence, newspaper reporting as a career option really took off, thanks to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s  Watergate investigative reports. There followed a book, “All the President’s Men,” and, subsequently, a movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing the now-legendary Washington Post journalists. Watergate spawned a series of television programs like “Lou Grant” that played off of the intrigue and adventure associated with investigative reporting.  As a result, I pursued my interest in newspapers, writing for “Smoke Signals” at THS and “Spectra” at Siena Heights. When I went off  to grad school, however, I was mired in academic writing. It would be a few years before I found my way back to the newsroom, the aroma of ink in my nostrils and soft, fibrous, unfinished texture of newsprint under my fingers.

That was nearly 40 years ago.

The Saline Reporter, where I landed in 1986, had a printing press then, so the smell of ink wafted throughout the building, much like it does today at the Herald office. When the Saline press was running on Wednesday nights and Friday afternoons, the whole building shuddered,  mimicking the vibration of the tandem gravel trains that lumbered down Michigan Avenue just outside the Reporter’s front door.  Even after the press was sold in 1999, its cylinders and rollers dismantled and carted away, the ink smell remained.

Smell, called “olfaction” in the scientific world,  is known for its strong connection to memory because of its close relationship with the brain’s limbic system, which processes emotions and memories. That would be the biological reason Jim Lincoln’s Herald office sparks so many fragrant moments for me.

Mostly, though, that smell reminds me I still am living my dream.

Someday, when my ticker comes to a halt and I collapse at my keyboard, I hope Jim Lincoln or whoever is editing the newspaper has the wherewithal to roll my remains up in a few copies of the latest Tecumseh Herald and lay me to rest–printed side close to my nose.

I cannot think of a better way to go, wrapped in newspapers like pub-style fish and chips.

Just don’t forget the gin and tonic.