The Best Little Newspaper Ever

Growing up in the country surrounded by relatives proved to be my own Kickstarter when it came to taking my love of newspapers at a very young age to another level. I don't know if my infatuation was with the smell of the print or everything that a newspaper had to offer from the front page to the last page. Add in flyers and advertisements and the lure grew even stronger. I read all the sections-from local news to national news to sports and special features. When my father brought the newspaper home with him, I was usually the first one to grab it.

My family's home was one of four homes in a row and all those homes were full of those relatives. My grandparents' farmhouse was the anchor. Off in a field not far from the farmhouse was an abandoned chicken coop. That old coop became the center of my universe, as well as my cousins, after the adults gutted it and filled it with the desks, chalkboards, and books from a vacated one-room schoolhouse. We were always in the chicken coop; even in the winter despite snow blowing in through windows with missing panes. We'd play school with imaginary students. We'd put on Easter parades. We'd read books and write books. And from all of this playing and pretending and creating an idea hit like a hurricane.

We'd start a newspaper. And so my cousin and I became reporters, editors, publishers, advertising salespeople, circulation experts and the Sports department. We called our paper 'The Burns Row Journal'. It was named after our grandparents as all those four homes in a row were all Burns' in one way or another. We were a weekly newspaper, publishing on Saturday nights in the chicken coop. There were no computers. We didn't have a printing press so we hand-printed 4 copies of our Journal. We didn't have paperboys or papergirls so on Sunday mornings, we'd deliver a copy of The Burns Row Journal to each of the 4 homes. There weren't individual sections to our pub. It was usually four sheets of loose-leaf paper stapled together and when it came to a new section it would have its own heading. We didn't charge our customers. Each printed edition was a labor of love.

The one thing all of our sections had in common was the fact that every single item in the Burns Row Journal was family-related. Our ads featured a funeral home, a shoe store, a teacher/coach and nurses as all of those professions were represented in those four homes. Our Sports section ran features on anything we considered to be sports. That included baseball games held in the front yard of the farmhouse to swimming in a river down across the road to skating down at the creek. News highlighted anything we could think of family-related and that could have been news briefs on family pets or a special event coming up at the chicken coop clubhouse.

I can't remember when our 'printing press' stopped. Probably when we grew out of doing such a silly thing as hand-printing four copies of what we considered to be our own New York Times on Saturday nights.

(Photo included shows that old chicken coop clubhouse. I am the one standing between two neighbor kids. This is the only photo I have of that amazing clubhouse-home to the amazing Burns Row Journal.)