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Des Moines Tribune I recently mentioned the Des Moines Tribune, and how I used to deliver it when I was in grade school. It was my first paying job ever.
We lived in Ames, a college town about thirty miles north of Des Moines. The Tribune was Des Moines' evening rag. It was published together with the Des Moines Register, the more popular morning paper.
Following a familiar plot that has played out across America, the Tribune ceased publication in 1982, leaving only the Register. Funny how the web is. I can't find a single page on Google that talks in detail about the Tribune's historical demise. This page is the best I could do. You'd think everything like that would be on the web by now.
As a newspaper boy for the Tribune, I was subcontractor. I didn't get paid by the Register & Tribune Company directly, but by the husband and wife couple who had the routes for both papers in the student housing complex in which we lived. They delivered the morning paper and hired me for the evening one. I used to get paid with checks that had the Iowa State mascot on them.
I have a lot of memories about marching around in the evening after dark in the snow of central Iowa with those big ink-stained canvas bags. In retrospect, it was fun.
My only regret is that I didn't save those Tribune editions with the evolving map of South Vietnam in 1974 and 1975. What a bleak time it was. There was a cancerous pessimism of defeat that kids today couldn't possibly understand, given what has happened in Kosovo and Afghanistan. There was a feeling that the tide of history was completely against the U.S. There was nothing anyone could do but watch the provinces turn dark as they fell to the Viet Cong. The Central Highlands went one by one, until only Saigon remained.
I kept the papers for a couple years, but threw them out during a move when my dad pestered me "You really want to save these?" I told him to throw them out, not because I didn't want them, but because I thought that's what a grown-up would do.
But I would have loved to have saved those maps I delivered. I would scan them and make a flip-through web site. It's not that you couldn't do that now, by making your own maps. It's just that I believe the art of map drawing for newspapers is one that has largely been degraded by the use of digital tools. Subtleties in typography and line width are lost by relying too much on digital circuits to make the decisions for you. It's the way I feel about physics articles in my field too, that the old way of hand drawings actually went a long way to helping you understand a concept, the same way using a slide rule taught you more math than a calculator does.
5:48:33 PM 
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