This morning while scanning the list of web sites in my browser bookmark tab labelled “News.” I may have been doom-scrolling, but I soon lost interest in today’s events and opinions and began to think about what “News” was like when I was growing up on Waschke Road in the region that the denizens occasionally call “The Fourth Corner,” referring, perhaps pretentiously, to the last corner of the U.S. to be dominated by Europeans.
First, we lived in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house. When I entered the first grade, my grandparents bought the house and five acres across the road and they moved there, leaving old farmhouse to my parents.
My grandparents subscribed to the local daily newspaper, The Bellingham Herald. The Herald arrived by mail the day after it was published. No home delivery on Waschke Road back then. When my grandparents finished reading the paper, they gave it to my parents, usually just before supper at five-thirty. Thus, we read the evening newspaper about twenty-four hours after it was published.
We got a TV when I was in the first grade, but we didn’t watch the evening news much because Dad switched off the television when the news started. That was the signal to go to the barn and milk the cows, taking all our attention until eight or eight-thirty. That schedule was fixed by the sun and the cows. Bovines must be milked every twelve hours or they stop lactating. Milking had to be at six in the evening and six in the morning, or the dairy interfered with raising summer field crops.
Sometimes, we turned on the radio at noon dinner break, but more pressing farm issues often dominated the midday.
Knowledge from off our road also came from magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Washington Farmer, Farm Journal, McCall’s, Sunset Magazine, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Saturday Review all graced our rural mailbox at one time or another.
No dearth of content threatened the old farmhouse, but the cadence of our news sources was far different from my sources today. Our most constant news source, the daily newspaper, had a twenty-four hour delay built in. Everything else was either weekly or monthly.
Compare that to today. I have close to twenty websites listed in my news bookmark tab. I could easily add more. These are all updated continuously and I open them several times a day. I have almost instant news from all over the globe.
Am I better informed than I was in the 1950s and 1960s? Depends on what you mean by “better.” I certainly wallow in half-baked and ill-considered data, but am I more aware of what is important in my surroundings?
I don’t know.