Chicago Sun-Times Fires Twenty Photographers…by Robert M. Katzman
© 5/31/13
I sold the god-damned thing
On a corner in Hyde Park
 For twenty years
Heat, snow, rain
Sleet, wind storms
Whatever else came my way
***
Cost a dime in 1965
A good deal
Compared to the
Nothing
It is now
***
If you live long enough
Everything goes to hell
***
For a guy like me who
Handled thousands of copies
Each week
Stuffed the Sunday comics into it
Supervised endless kids
Their young faces blurring
In my memory
***
For me to see a
Once respected publication
Dismembered
Passed along from
 Indifferent owner to indifferent owner
Is heart-breaking
***
The original home of
Roger Ebert and Ann Landers
(yeah, first read her column when I was a child)
***
Today
Ironically
As a vendor newspapers past
I am surrounded by hundreds of
Yellowing Sun-Times
From the 1940’s, ’50’s & ’60’s
Famous headlines
Long forgotten people
***
But the paper had class
It was something worth reading
***
Trucks speeding from the Downtown presses
Screeched up to my newsstand
Threw off heavy bundle after bundle
Black headlines screaming
The latest hot story
Grabbed the cash from me
Then zoomed down to their
Next corner, stop
And once there were
Hundreds
***
Newspapers were so much like radio
Except
You could hold them
In your hands
You could scan the headlines
Read the sports page
See the great photos or tragic ones
Laugh at the comic strips
***
Or see what epic
Hollywood movie
Finally came to our Town
Our Midwestern
Flyover town
After New York and Los Angeles
Were done with it,
Like a hand-me-down
Celluloid rag doll
***
A reporter with a
Byline
In the Chicago Sun-Times
Was proud of it
Had a reason to be
***
Who
Still working there today
Some burly pressman
Sitting alone in a dim booth
Of a corner tavern
Morosely cradling a beer
With both hands
Ink-stained hands
Could look you in the eye
And say that today?
***
Our culture is bleeding.