The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

Around this time last year, I decided to try “technology free” Sundays for a month. The idea  was that, for September, I would completely unplug from the digital world from sunup to sundown on the Lord’s Day. I would embrace the “old” way of doing things; football scores from  the radio instead of the NFL app, talking with friends rather than posting at them on Facebook, and reading the Sunday paper.

I learned a lot from the experiment; most notably, there is a real  sense of disconnectedness associated with leaving the iPhone on the charger. I also learned that the Sunday paper is now more of a Sunday pamphlet … which costs $5.

The Sunday Toledo Blade of my youth, by comparison, was a behemoth of a paper, two or three inches thick, and cost something short of a dollar. Granted, an inch of that thickness was  ads, but still, it was a lot of content for the price. We didn’t have home delivery, but an enterprising youth sold copies from a red wagon outside our church. I think he had a pretty  good gig there. Between the three services, he probably sold 75-100 copies while standing in one place. Of course, that meant being there in the rain and wind and sleet and snow, but I’m  guessing it was still better than riding around town, delivering them. 

I was only 7 or 8 when I first started reading the Sunday paper, but it was just the comics, or as we called them back in the day, the funny pages. Peanuts, The Family Circus, Beetle Bailey, B.C. and Hagar the Horrible were my mainstays, but I would occasionally scan Blondie or Nancy. I also liked looking at the ads – pages upon pages upon pages of ads – perhaps foreshadowing my later interest in marketing and advertising. Eventually, I added the Sports and Entertainment – which The Blade called A&E – sections to my Sunday repertoire. It was during this period that I took to cutting pictures of favorite athletes and TV stars from the paper and pasting them in a photo album. Yeah, that sounds  incredibly dopey when I write it almost 50 years later, but what can I say? It was a simpler time.

There was an entire 12-page pull-out section devoted to the television schedule, which is pretty astounding when you consider there were only four channels. 

As I progressed through my high school years, I became increasingly interested in the News and Business sections. However, I will freely admit they never got the same attention as Sports or A&E, and I never cut out a picture of Thomas Murphy or Cyrus Vance and pasted it in an album. I also added more text-dense serial comics like Dick Tracy and Prince Valiant to my  weekly reading. 

A full-color pull-out section called Sunday Magazine targeted “homemakers,” and often featured a long-gone staple of Sunday paper perusing, the mail-in offer. These were ads for “special” deals that usually required the proof-of-purchase of a specific product. You might be  able to score a nifty Tide T-shirt, for instance, by sending a couple of bucks and a proof-of-purchase for any Tide product to Proctor & Gamble. Again, that seems rather quaint to our internet-savvy consciousness, but I still have a Duracell rain jacket that I acquired with 10 proofs-of-purchase and $2 shipping. Of course, the reason I still have it some four decades later is that it was so cheap-looking I immediately threw it in a box and forgot about it.  (Seriously, it was like someone fashioned a shower curtain into the rough shape of a jacket and  put a Duracell sticker on it.) 

If you had told me as I was cutting out a picture of Archie Griffin (STILL the only two-time Heisman Trophy winner!) that one day newspapers would be rendered obsolete by a wireless, hand-held device that was also a stereo, television, video camera, game console and flashlight, I would have said you were nuts. On the other hand, Dick Tracy pretty much invented the Apple Watch, didn’t he?