P. Eye, Paper

I remember riding home to our beloved suburb in the back seat of the family sedan on summer nights in the late '50's and early '60's. Slouched down half asleep and wedged in between my sisters, warm, full of restaurant food after a family outing, I was always reassured, as we drove past Seattle's Post-Intelligencer building, by the sight of the big blue globe with the gold eagle on top, and the spectacular revolving illuminated slogan: "It's in the P.I."

I figured our little world was secure as long as that beautiful neon totem was shining in the night. It was in its place and I was in mine.

Not that I read the P.I. My dad, a television newsman, and in those days an Ed Murrow liberal, remarked somewhat contemptuously that it was a "Hearst rag." He also thought the name was funny, and made funnier by the street cry of the newsprint vendors.

"P. EYE, paper," they said, with the emphasis on the "eye" and a comma before "paper."

As we were headed into a football game in Husky Stadium one Saturday afternoon, dad remarked that "Any tourists that hear that are going to go home and tell the neighbors that people in Seattle sure talk funny."

In recent years, as its readership fell away and the age of the printing press, checkbooks, "cigarettes that bear lipstick's traces," and Kodak film gave way to computer-dominated commerce and communication, the old PI Paper became an excellent repository of first-class local reporting and liberal opinion. Its being one of the country's better dailies couldn't save it from the inevitable.

Before long, the New York Times and Wahington Post on line will be everybody's papers. Local web sites, staffed by volunteers or a few badly-paid journalists will have to suffice for local news markets. The ruling class will still have their Wall Street Churinal, no doubt.

Anybody know what's going to happen to the big blue globe? It's not often that I shed a tear for an advertising device.