Many people attribute the fall of newspapers to the rise of the Internet. I know better. For proof, travel back with me, if you will, to a small, red-shingled home in Norwalk, Conn., in the mid-1980s. Take a sharp right upon entering, then four steps through a wood-paneled den and turn left into my parents’ bedroom.

You’ll see two beds and two chests of drawers, but what will immediately grab your attention are the newspapers, newspapers stacked halfway to the ceiling, newspapers stuffed into the closet, newspapers perched on top of the bedside tables. No accurate count was ever taken, but they must easily have numbered in the many hundreds.

I’m not sure what sparked my father’s love of newspapers. But if he were here today and I put that question to him, I think his response would be something akin to wanting to learn and getting a good laugh. And the newspapers he bought and the writers he enjoyed reading afforded him those wishes.

He particularly enjoyed a number of sportswriters – Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith, among them – and took great delight in reading a range of political writers, the likes of Jimmy Breslin and Phil Tracy. But his interests ranged far and wide, and I would look at him with more than a little befuddlement when he would hand me an article about the ballet or some Russian poet and say, “Jimmy, you’ve got to read this.”

The newspapers that all but wallpapered the bedroom came from New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago, along with more than a few local and regional newspapers. But the undoubted king of the newspaper hill was the LA Times. And I’m not sure exactly why. I don’t think it was all about Jim Murray, who wrote great columns for the Times back then, but certainly that was a part of it.

Invariably, at least once a month, my mother would threaten to throw all the papers out (some of them easily more than two months old) so that she could find her shoes. And my father would invariably say, “Helen, don’t you dare.” And she never did. Until he passed away in November 1988.

And to this day, the LA Times has never recovered.