What Do We Know That We Didn’t Know Yesterday?

Back in the 1950’s, when I was a kid, the only day that mattered between Labor Day and Christmas Day was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That was the day they played the Army-Navy game, which made it a day that really mattered.

Do you think that the day which was the 2nd Tuesday in November and was the day when they held the mid-term election every four years was an important day? I don’t remember anyone ever talking about it at all.

And don’t get me wrong. My parents and their friends were always politically involved. They voted regularly, they discussed political issues at work and at home. But they got the political news from the two newspapers that were delivered each day (New York Times in the morning, New York Post in the afternoon) plus my father listened to the radio on the way to work and watched the national news on black-and-white TV when he was home.

My father read, watched, and listened to the news, because my mother only began working as a high school teacher, in 1964. Until then, she got together every day over coffee with several other stay-at-home moms, and they gossiped about the kids or about other friends.

That’s how people got the news when I was a kid, and it was assumed that if it was printed in The New York Times or if Walter Cronkite said it on CBS, that it was…