On Turning to the First of the Century’s Front Pages

“I get up each day because I gotta know how things turn out.”

I was a cub reporter, and I was listening to a man who had been in journalism 40 years. He still beat me to the newsroom most days.

There’s no shame in saying that I adopted his philosophy as my own. This lust to discover and comprehend drives both ends of the newspaper cycle--the reporting of events and the reading of them.

Curiosity is a human imperative. Watch a baby in a crib. Eyes sparkle; wriggling fingers reach out.

“The first and simplest emotion is curiosity,” said Edmund Burke, 18th century orator and political thinker.

The newspaper satisfies our inquisitiveness beyond family and friends--the yearning to know, if not everything, then something of others.

The first draft of history. A civic bulletin board. There are many ways to describe what we hold here.

A newspaper is a catalyst to initiate thinking. This comes not by what a newspaper says, but by what people say and do as chronicled in the newspaper.

Who, 100 years ago on New Year’s, could have imagined the daily unfolding of the century? An end to smallpox, the emergence of AIDS, the atomic bomb, Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, the Holocaust, the San Francisco earthquake, television, stereophonic music, computers, Hitler, Gandhi, Mandela, Mao, Meir, Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Nixon, the airplane, the jet airplane, the rocket ship, the four-level interchange, rock ‘n’ roll, Hemingway, O’Keeffe, Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Einstein, penicillin, the Pill.

For the last 100 days, the archives of The Times have touched us with the marvels, disgraces, catastrophes and oddities of that century. I found the experience unexpectedly reassuring.

Reading these old front pages reminds me, as Daniel Webster said, that the past is at least secure.

Not so tomorrow. New calendars refresh our anxieties. So much seems to be happening so fast. The yield from 100 years of answers is the debt of still greater questions.

The old newsman of my youth has passed on. Now I’m the old newsman. But I have not forgotten the reason to get up each day.

“Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. “One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

Imagine what wonders and anguish will be expressed on the front pages of the next century, whether you believe it starts today or a year from now.

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How we greet this future will help shape it. Politics, the stock markets, art, property values, to name just a few happenings, hinge on our collective favor, our shared hunches, our knowledge. Earthquakes, floods and the state lottery will not bow to human wishes. But day-after stories will measure our mettle, as always.

We cannot run, but we can read.

The written word is nothing but a swab of ink on paper. When blotted up by a practiced mind, it is transformed into energy, which is sifted by experience and measured against understanding. It lodges in our awareness.

The printed word is not an emission received, but a reflection sought. Inactive until activated, it politely waits.

But it cannot wait for long. There are 36,524 front pages yet to come in the next 100 years.

“Life is simply one damned thing after another,” observed Frank Ward O’Malley, a turn-of-the-century newspaperman the last time around.

We begin centuries on a momentous note. From the looks of things, we commence millenniums as something stupendous. And why not? Every generation, not to mention culture, shares a conceit about its calendar.

We’ve proved one thing. We trustees of this new epoch are not to be outdone when it comes to the welcome party. Our emotions are wound up, even frayed. We just know something--something important--will happen.

In the last century, humans peered inside the atom and gazed out to the edge of the universe. These ideas could not be fathomed 100 years ago.

New Year’s Day reminds us that tomorrow beckons from beyond our imagination.

Toward this unknown, hope travels along with our apprehensions. It always has.

As Thomas Jefferson said, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

Isn’t that why we get up in the morning?