Fred and The Morning Paper

A Guest Blog by Lisa Gutt Arnold

Robin's note: Lisa Gutt and I went to school together in Los Altos, California, from kindergarden, at Loyola School, through graduation from Los Altos High School. She's now living on Bainbridge Island, in the Greater Seattle area, where her father Fred is long retired. Their morning daily paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, just folded, and I asked for her thoughts on coping without a morning daily.


Lisa Gutt Arnold and her father, 90-year-old Fred Gutt, share a laugh over Fred's feature role in this article.

Fred and the Morning Paper by Lisa Gutt Arnold

My father’s love affair with newspapers began in 1930 when he sold the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago American (both afternoon papers) on the streets of Chicago. Eleven at the time, he was paid fifty cents a day to sell papers for three cents each after school. The owner of the newsstand pocketed a penny per paper.

My father, Fred, always read the paper, leaving the comics for final deliberation after digesting the weightier news. But the high point of the day was his trip upstairs to Quinn’s speakeasy, above the Piggly Wiggly supermarket at the corner of Waveland and Broadway, where he delivered a paper to a member of Al Capone’s gang, in return for which he received the fat tip of a quarter.

Much later, in the nineteen fifties, with a wife and four kids, living in Los Altos Hills, California (before it was the most expensive real estate in the country) he blew an extravagant sum on the Sunday New York Times, delivered Thursday of the following week. The bulky sections were the centerpiece of the coffee table in the living room, an eternal fixture of change from week to week. In the afternoons and evenings Fred took up his Sunday Bible, which, along with his holy shirts (well-worn t-shirts with holes in them) was as close as he ever got to organized religion.

At the time, three other newspapers added to the coffee table mix of journalism: the San Francisco Chronicle, Palo Alto Times, and the weekly Los Altos Town Crier. Fred’s dictum, “Always read between the lines,” was a sobering blend of skepticism and contradiction from a man who devoured black ink the way other men ate steak and potatoes.

Lately, living on Bainbridge Island in Washington State, filling his living room with newspapers is more challenging. The Financial Times has superseded the New York Times; the local weekly arrives like clockwork every Saturday. But the daily Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s long and anguishing demise has lightened the pile and caused considerable angst. Replacement by the afternoon Seattle Times isn’t worth the price nor is the unappetizing, stale taste of after-news. What really burns is the loss of comics. High brow papers like FT relegate comics to low brow publications.

The picture of Alfred E. Newman stating “What Me Worry?” on Fred’s living room wall will have to take the P-I’s place for now.

Lisa Gutt Arnold
Bainbridge Island, Washington