A photographer caught me not wearing pants. It reminded me why I love newspapers.
My name has been in the newspaper a few times in my life.
OK, let’s be honest: It’s been in the newspaper a few thousand times. In fact, look up at the top of this column, and — voila! — there it is again.
In general, seeing my name in the newspaper is not something I get worked up about, and it’s not a surprise when it happens. But last week, for the first time since I helped lead my Little League Baseball team to the town championship, it was both.
I guess the best place to start would be to explain the unique packing challenge I faced.
Shortly after Christmas, my family and I were getting ready to go spend eight days in Aruba, where it’s basically always summer, followed immediately by two days with family in Philadelphia, where it right now is most definitely winter. And since our rental car in Aruba was going to be a Honda Fit — a vehicle not known for being able to “fit” more than a couple of small suitcases — we needed to make some tough choices about what to bring.
Among those I made? Only one pair of pants. Jeans.
This is how it came to be, that, on a windy 30-degree morning last Friday, hours after the area’s first substantial snowstorm of the season, I found myself doing my morning run in a suburb of Philadelphia wearing the one long-sleeve running shirt I’d brought; a dorky winter hat and some old skiing gloves, both borrowed from my dad; and the same pair of shorts I’d worn on five runs in the Caribbean.
It was so bracingly cold that, for a second before setting out from my parents’ house, no joke, I considered running in my jeans. But I stuck with the shorts, much to the amusement of two men who were shoveling their respective sidewalks as I ran past.
“I wanna know when we’re gonna get the weather that he’s dressed for,” yelled a guy dressed like Ralphie’s little brother from “A Christmas Story” to his similarly dressed neighbor.
A few miles later, I was running toward a four-way stop sign when I noticed a dark-colored Toyota Prius stopped at the intersection, and a man in heavy winterwear standing over the open driver’s-side door with a camera pressed to his face.
It was aimed at me.
When I got close, he explained he was with a local paper. He asked me a few simple questions, and I managed to convey the fact that I’d been in Aruba the previous day, was visiting my parents, and didn’t have pants.
Then he told me I “might” be in the paper, and we continued on in our opposite directions down the slushy street.
Pretty quickly, I warmed to the idea of possibly being featured. When I got back to my parents’ house, my encounter with the journalist was the first thing I mentioned to them.
On the most basic level, the prospect of seeing myself in the paper just seemed ... fun. A fun way to commemorate my vacation, my visit with my parents, my dedication to running.
So when my photo and my quote made it into the online version of the story Pete Bannan wrote for the Delaware County Daily Times that afternoon, I immediately showed my beaming parents, who fought over my phone trying to get a look, then shared the link on Facebook.
By the next morning, 19 of my friends had “liked” my post. (I know, that’s not a lot. Hang on for the punchline.)
That morning, I went to the Wawa, ostensibly to pick up a half-gallon of milk for my mom, but perhaps more so to peek at the newsstand and see if I’d also made the print edition of the Delco Times.
I had! It was more exciting than I thought it would be. I bought multiple copies.
My parents practically cheered when I showed them my picture in the papers. My younger sister went out hunting for more. I snapped a cellphone photo of the page of the newspaper I appeared on, and posted it on Facebook. Two-hundred and sixty people liked it.
There could be nothing to read into that, by the way. It could mean Facebook’s algorithm for putting posts in news feeds favors a photo over a link. But I have to say, I had a similarly outsized reaction to being in print as compared with being online: While I may never look at the online version of that story again, I treated my copy of the paper like it was a first edition of “Treasure Island,” taking care not to get anything on it, being careful not to tear it, crease it, or smudge it in getting it back here to Charlotte.
And the more I thought about it, the more I thought about all the people I’ve written about over the years — and about how, when I finish my reporting, I almost always wind up in the same conversation with the subject.
I tell them I’ll make sure to send them a link to the story when it goes online. They ask me whether the story will also be in print. I say yes. They say, “Can you let me know when? Because I’ll want to run out and buy several copies.” If they can’t find any on the day it publishes in print, they ask me if there’s any way I can have a stack sent to them.
A precious, priceless keepsake
A lot of things are said nowadays about print newspapers, and the print editions of newspapers. To nobody’s surprise, not all of them are positive.
But there’s no denying that, when you appear in one, it becomes a precious, sometimes priceless keepsake.
Mainly because you didn’t create it. You didn’t take a photo of yourself and have it printed by Shutterfly and sent to your home. Someone else deemed you worthy of speaking with or photographing, based on a success you had or a perspective you offered, and then wove it into a narrative and then assembled around that narrative a collection of stories and images about other noteworthy things happening in your community. Then that someone else had it all packaged and printed up and sent to stores and homes.
It’s also, in some small part, the permanence of the thing. A newspaper clipping becomes a tangible piece of your history, something that very well could be passed down through generations in frames, scrapbooks, and boxes.
Look, after all this, you may think I just sound like a middle-aged old-school journalist trying to make a pitch for traditional newspapers. There’s probably more truth to that than I’m willing to admit.
But this is true, too:
Because I didn’t pack any running pants, I got my name in the paper for something other than writing a story — and it’s the first copy of a newspaper I’ve set aside to save in a very, very long time.
This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 1:00 AM.
