No Fake News Here

Dad kept us up-to-date, and we’ve updated his family tradition

Breaking news. Big news. The Ice Box News.

My Daddy inhaled current events. He read the New York newspapers daily, as many as he could, during their heyday when we lived there. He started off with The New York Herald Tribune every morning; The New York Times on his way into the City after breakfast each day; The New York Journal American on his way back home in the afternoon, and finished up the rest of The Times after dinner each evening. He also subscribed to The New Yorker, Time and Newsweek, along with Look and Life. I’ve got the basket, woven in Trinidad when he and Mom lived there, which served as the receptacle for all of his periodicals. I’m told that when I was a baby, I used to crawl over to that news repository near the fireplace and gnaw on its contents. Figures. Like father, like daughter, I reckon.

Daddy also kept scissors and a supply of tape in a kitchen drawer, in the event he found something worthy of posting on the refrigerator, that appliance our first cat Bootie lounged atop while “hatching the bananas,” one of my Dad’s wry expressions. Daddy wanted to keep The Ice Box News current — photos, cartoons, newspaper clippings and the random flotsam and jetsam from the periodicals he read and which informed my world. And he arranged all of this on the front of the refrigerator — a family bulletin board, of sorts.

I remember some of the content from Daddy’s carefully curated kitchen collection. The New Yorker cartoon featuring a simple drawing of a matron, dressed in her Sunday best, holding a protest sign. Or the hound dog lying stretched out at home, his head on his paws and a forlorn look on this face. There is a tiny congregation of fleas on the critter’s back, having a deep conversation. I didn’t understand that one until I was in high school and had started speaking up.

And the countless “Peanuts” comic strips, which taught our family so much about life. Daddy loved it every time Lucy took the football away when Charlie Brown was getting ready to kick it. And the fact that Linus never let go of his blanket, for any reason. And the little bird Woodstock, who appeared to live with Snoopy on top of his dog house? Daddy would howl.

He believed in speaking one’s mind and — sometimes — sticking it to “The Man”. Unless Lucy Van Pelt got there first.

Real headlines, ripped from the pages of daily newspapers, adorned our fridge. Troop escalations. Civil rights demonstrations. The deaths of King and RFK in 1968. The Watergate hearings. Daddy was a real fan of “Senator Sam” Ervin of North Carolina, Chairman of the Select Watergate Committee, and was in an “I told you so” mood when Nixon resigned in 1974. Can’t even imagine what he’d think of our national political discourse today.

Yes, our family was the most current on current events of any tribe I knew in our suburban enclave. But The Ice Box News wasn’t just for headlines. It was for personal achievements and family milestones — new school photos, report cards, swim meet ribbons. Photos of Bootie, Mother Girl, Oliver, Billy Bob and the rest of the endless parade of kitties in our lives. A striking pic of the five big boxes of home-grown pecans my Nana packed up one fall and sent to us. A snap of my Mom as a flight attendant in Nicaragua, and my Daddy as a student at the University of Texas.

Way before we became parents, Moker and I continued the tradition of The Ice Box News. When we first moved to D.C., both of us worked for newspaper staffs based in the Nation’s Capital. I was called in to work the afternoon Air Florida plunged into the icy Potomac River in the middle of a blinding blizzard. As far as adrenaline-pumping stories, this was the biggest I’d ever helped cover.

Of course, the front page news package I worked on that day found its way to our very own Ice Box News in our 19th-Century row house on Capitol Hill.

Moker and I continue this tradition today. In fact, when we first moved into our new house in Charlotte, NC this past September, the fridge was the first appliance I checked out — not to see if it was clean enough to hold our produce, or if it had the automatic ice-maker Moker always requires. Nope, it was to inspect the new home of The Ice Box News — a ragtag collection of photos, magnets, cartoons and business cards that I had carefully collected from the face of our D.C.-area fridge and stored in a shoebox for the trip to CLT.

Imagine my disappointment to find out magnets didn’t stick to the front of this fridge. Note to GE — This is not a good way to win the affection of your newest customers.

We solved the problem, though. I spent a few days mulling over this critical situation for showcasing The Ice Box News, and even considered breaking out the tape and scissors and going “old school” on this project. But I came up with a 21st-Century solution instead. The new fridge is housed in some kind of large wall cabinet designed to match the smaller kitchen cabinets and set it off from the rest of the room. I decided to order a white board from Amazon — both the bane and the benefactor of my existence — to hang on the outward facing wall of the box that holds the ice box. The newest edition of The Ice Box News went to press a couple of months ago, containing all of our faves, and a few new updates, too.

The centerpiece of our family’s version of The Ice Box News has been a 20-year-old Christmas card, sent by my sister-in-law and featuring her four boys. The oldest, probably a senior in high school at the time, has an age-appropriate scowl. The two middle boys have sardonic grins on their faces — OK, Mom, let’s do this. I have a video game or two to get back to. The youngest, who was about five at the time, appears to be trying to mimic his oldest bro — no scowl, but no smile either, staring straight ahead. The family dogs — a White Lab and a Springer Spaniel — seem to have adopted the countenances of older brother and younger sibling.

Why do I keep this holiday artifact, especially since I have newer snaps of these kids as grownups, with wives and children of their own? Well, it matches my Beatles magnet, which anchors the long-ago Christmas memory — the four lads from Liverpool, in a strikingly similar pose, and what could only be matching haircuts. I can imagine my sister-in-law hauling the kids to the barber, pre-photo, and saying, “Four bowl cuts, please. Yeah, sorta like the Beatles. Even for the one with wavy hair.” That never happened, but I can always dream. I wonder if John, Paul, George and Ringo had any pets? Or if they ever attached their concert reviews and cherished photos to their refrigerators?

Our kitchen white board is getting pretty crowded these days. I contacted my good friend Jeff Bezos and ordered another one for my upstairs office. So we now have the original edition of The Ice Box News in the kitchen and an EXTRA! (read all about it) to the right of my desk. This second edition of the publication my Daddy founded so long ago is already running out of room, so I’m thinking about expansion. Gonna need more space when I get my first dose of the Vaccine soon. Big news.