YOUR SPACE: Quit messing with my newspaper, reader says

Sorry, Bill.

The knuckleheads struck again.

They messed with what you call the newspaper.

Around here, it's the print product. To you it might seem more like the shrink product.

Bill Beck, 82, Gazette subscriber since 1976, doesn't like changes to his newspaper.

He retrieves his Gazette at his condo doorstep at 6:30 a.m. sharp. Neighbors set the clock by him.

He unfolds the paper over a bowl of Cheerios. He reads it cover-to-cover.

"I devour it," he says.

The reading ritual takes about two hours. Or at least it used to.

"It's intimate communication. I get absorbed in what I am reading. I think. I ponder. Even if I don't like a story I read it."

An interactive media experience to Beck is using scissors to clip articles of interest.

He knows he's lucky to still have a print product to hold in these times when papers are going online or to limited editions - or bust.

Still, he has one request: Make those knuckleheads quit messing with his newspaper.

He's still coping with the loss of the daily stock report several years ago.

There's lots of Becks out there who want it all at their fingertips.

"Even Leo, across the street, with his online capability, he likes to devour the paper," Beck says. "I don't know what people like us are going to do."

Not to worry, Bill. The print product isn't going to pot - yet - it's merely being produced with more efficient use of paper and ink to save money.

There's less to hold. Less to savor over Cheerios.

More time to call the newsroom.

Beck often phones - never e-mails - to praise reporters about their stories, using a proud fatherly tone to make it seem as if it's the best article ever by saying things like, "You fashion words into a piece of art."

It isn't in his nature to complain, unless his paper is being messed with - like the restructuring this week on the heels of the for-pay-only option of the TV Spotlight. His TV Spotlight.

The Gazette got a call from Beck on that decision. Double whammy.

"The paper was critical of the Stormwater Enterprise, and now they blackmail you if you want a TV guide to pay 99 cents a month," he says.

He's not ashamed to be a fuddy-duddy. He doesn't have a computer, a cell phone or caller ID. He does have a TV and a massive old tunes CD collection.

He stays busy. "Silver Sneakers exercise. Bridge. The Senior Singles lunch. I keep my life about as full as I can."

He got rid of his car when he quit driving. His garage is stocked with a year's supply of cereal as well as prizes for the laid-back singles lunch group he started after his wife died in 1994. (To join the lunch bunch call Beck's land line at 550-0636.)

He used to be hip. He ran radio and TV stations for years. "I'd go rip the news off the AP wire," he says.

He hawked papers on street corners as a kid and did a bike route until he fractured his skull in a spill.

He was a sportswriter for his Kansas City high school newspaper in 1942 when cartoonist classmate Mort Walker did a teen bobby-socked, saddle-shoed, moon-faced version of "Beetle Bailey."

"He's still drawing it," Beck said.

And Beck still reads Walker's comic strip every day.

Note to our new publisher: Don't even think about cutting it.

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Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com