In defense of the printed word

During the recent ice and snow storms, I was brought back to my youth when we would play in the snow, sled all over the neighborhood, have snowball fights and then go home to warm up and get some hot chocolate and rest before heading out again.

The latest edition of Our State magazine arrived the day before the first storm hit. It brought back childhood memories when we had dozens of magazines covering the coffee table in the library or den. Each magazine was expected to be read each week by everyone in our house — from parents to teenagers to elementary school-aged children — who were expected to at least look at the pictures and ask questions about them.

Being snowed in made reading current and past issues almost a contest to see who could get them and finish them first.

We were not required to read each issue cover to cover, but it was highly encouraged if you had any chance of participating in the lively dinner discussions, especially during the holidays at the Hill house.

I wonder if we have lost a very important thread in American life where great writing combined with great photography and graphic design connected older generations with younger ones. Printed magazines and newspapers have a permanence about them which electronic stories on social media simply can’t match.

It seemed as if every issue of the following magazines from the 1960s and 1970s flashed through my memory banks. There were the oversized glossy print editions of Life and Look magazines. Sandwiched between them were weekly issues from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. Every new Sports Illustrated would be devoured immediately depending on the season of the sports calendar. Occasionally, a National Geographic would come in the mail and youngsters would be lost for hours reading about places they wished they could visit but probably never would.

The adults, of course, had priority to read the magazines. They left the magazines on the living room coffee table or in a rack in the den where any of us could pick up any edition, read it and ask questions to get a fuller understanding of what was going on in the tumultuous world of the 1960s and ’70s.

I remember picking up a full-sized copy of Look or Life magazine as an impressionable second grader and staring at the face of a young President John Kennedy next to his wife Jacqueline and asking my parents and older brother and sisters, “Why did anyone want to kill this president?”

Those magazines lying on the coffee table offered a tangible way for children and parents to read the same material, or at least look at the same photos, and carry on a serious discussion and come back to it later after lunch, dinner or the next day.

Internet stories don’t have the same sense of permanence and can be ignored, lost to spam folders or deleted never to be found again. On top of that, with the advent of AI and the sophistication of internet bots to selectively pick and choose what information a publisher can pass along to the unaware reader, the flow of trustworthy information from generation to generation can be called into question. At least the publishers of hard print publications had to abide by generally accepted ethics and mandated laws of respectable journalism back then.

There has been research about the connection between knowledge retention of material read from hard copies of printed material versus the electronic transfer through the internet. The one thing that can never be duplicated online is the intimacy of a parent or older brother or sister sitting down with a younger sibling while flipping through the amazing photos in a Life or Look magazine. Better yet, reading aloud a Frank Deford or George Plimpton story from Sports Illustrated was a special treat. Discussing a column in Time or Newsweek about the civil rights marches of the ’60s or the Vietnam War gave youngsters the chance to learn the seriousness of life and perhaps start to think of ways to avoid the mistakes of the past and make things better for the future.

There may have been more transfer of history, culture and American philosophy, morals and ethics through such interactions between parent and child while reading Time, Newsweek, Look and Life magazines than could ever be transferred through the public education system.

These snow and ice storms might be a good time to pick up a printed copy of a newspaper or magazine and start reading with your family again.