The Newspaper
My name was in the newspaper today.
No, not in Police Beat.
It was in the “building permits” section, saying that a building permit had been issued to me for my address (a couple of weeks ago.)
Speaking of not-so-current events, the entire front section of the newspaper wasn’t news at all, but rather dealt with historical issues. For instance, there was a large front-page story about the diaries kept by a man for many years in the latter part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries. One of the events recorded in the diary was the 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois. Now, I grew up in Springfield, so I find it a bit of a travesty that I hadn’t even heard of these riots until I had gone away to college in another state. As I was growing up, it was never mentioned on TV, nor was it spoken about in my presence. I wonder, how I could have NOT heard about it, when you can’t walk down the street without tripping over history - after all, Abe Lincoln lived here. And had an office over there. And had an outhouse over there. But the race riots? Seems to have been swept under the rug for decades.
There was also a story about the Marquis de LaFayette, the young aide-de-camp of General Washington in the Revolutionary War, and a story about a World War II airplane found again on a beach in Wales.
I’m guessing it was a slow news day.
