I’m addicted to newspapers.

Not just writing for them but the smell of them, the feel of them. As a kid, I even liked to eat newspapers—I’d tear strips from the TV Guide pages and chew on them. I have my favorites, of course. The Daily Telegram, The Washington Post, USA Today. They’re all well-written, if a little lighter than back in the old days.  Plus, of course, they have the smell.  In fact, one of the first things I do when I get my Telegram out of the mailbox—after checking to see who died—is put the paper right to my nose.  Not because my eyesight is failing, but because of that smell. That wonderful, distinctive odor of newsprint coated in ink.

I am transported back in time.  As a kid growing up in Tecumseh, I grew up reading newspapers. My folks took The Detroit News and sometimes The Free Press, and we always read the weekly community paper, The Tecumseh Herald. My dad loved to read the paper—our big kitchen table seemingly always was littered with newspaper sections in various stages of disarray.

Even then, I loved that fragrance.

In fifth grade, our class visited The Toledo Blade—”One of the nation’s great newspapers.” The 40 years that have passed since then make me understand how my 10-year-old mind probably exaggerated the size of The Blade’s printing operation. But, it seemed massive. I remember only the vast room with high ceilings, and a behemoth machine with big, fat rollers slapping together on the newsprint so quickly that it roared. It was loud. It was dirty. And it smelled just like ink.
I fell in love immediately. After visiting The Blade, I imagined working in such a place, seeing something I wrote come off those shiny rollers.

Then, in the mid-1970s, the peak of my adolescence, newspaper reporting became really interesting, thanks to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigative reports. There followed a book, “All the President’s Men,” and, subsequently, a movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing the now-legendary Post staff writers. Watergate spawned a series of television programs that played off of the intrigue and adventure associated with investigative reporting, shows like “Lou Grant.” I pursued my interest in newspapers through high school and college, penning articles on such scandalous topics as the cafeteria menu for the week and the departure of the most popular priest on the Siena Heights University campus.

After awhile, my goal to be the next Bob Woodward fell by the wayside and I wound up working in a dress shop in Tecumseh. I had my master’s degree by then and some post-grad study, but I lacked the one thing I needed for gainful employment with a master’s degree in English: a teaching certificate.  Not long after, I responded to an ad in the late Mr. Mazoo circular for a receptionist at The Saline Reporter. At last, I had found a way back to the smell of the ink and the feel of newsprint beneath my fingers. That was almost 25 years ago.  The Reporter had a printing press then, the smell of ink and newsprint wafted throughout the building. When the press was running on Wednesday nights and Fridays, the whole building shook—kind of like it still does today when gravel haulers are traveling Michigan Avenue.  Although the press was sold long ago and its berth remodeled to make way for the technological advances in printing and publishing, sometimes I can still sense that ink smell.  They say that the sense of smell is one of the most powerful memory-joggers in the body. I believe it. Pressing the front page of The Daily Telegram to my face immediately takes me back to my career in community newspapers, the sight and smell of those printing presses and the early years working with Paul Tull and Tom Kirvan at The Reporter. My memories are fragrant images of stuffing inserts, learning to type stories on an Underwood manual typewriter, and watching the newspaper roll off the press. Mostly, the smell reminds me I had a chance to live my dream.

I’ve tried to build my career around my own personal mission: to tell the stories of as many people as I possibly can before I die. But once I’ve breathed my last, I hope my editor will have enough wherewithal to roll my remains up in several sections of The Daily Telegram Sunday edition, complete with all its advertising inserts, and then lay me down to rest. Make sure the front page is close to my nose. I can’t think of a better way to go for an old beat reporter—wrapped in newspapers like pub-style fish and chips.

Just don’t forget the Guinness.