Lately, Eleanor McCallie Cooper has been ruminating about her hometown newspaper’s countdown to digital delivery.
For the past three weeks, Cooper has been journaling about picking up her newspaper in front of her Missionary Ridge house, as a way of saying goodbye to a lifelong ritual.
Like many people of her generation (she is an older baby boomer), Cooper says she can never remember a time when there wasn’t a physical newspaper in her house. Even when she moved away from Chattanooga for a time as a young adult, Cooper said her mother would save local newspaper clippings to mail to her, even sending them overseas.
“[She would] pack the clippings in manila envelope,” Cooper said in a telephone interview last week. “That was my connector to home.”
Cooper, a community activist and author, said her mother’s mailed clips were mainly about family friends and high school sports, with a few self-help articles mixed in.