Mary Aukerman has been going through the things her life partner Larry Walsh left behind, and there are a lot of them. Larry was a keeper. He held onto things the rest of us would have tossed years ago, and he held onto them for a long time. Anyone who knew him knew that about him.
While she was sorting through the archaeology of his life, Mary came across something worth stopping for. It was Larry’s original Pittsburgh Post-Gazette delivery bag, the one he carried as a boy, and it was in remarkably good shape.
There is a story behind that bag.
Larry lost his father when he was 10, the oldest of four young boys. In a Pittsburgh household that suddenly needed one, he became the man of the house before he was really old enough for the job. He took whatever work he could find to help his mother and his siblings, and one of those jobs was a paper route. Morning after morning, he delivered the Post-Gazette out of that bag.
Larry’s brother, John, who puts the bag’s age at 86 years, remembers those days. He tells one story in particular. A young Larry once decided the advertising supplements were too heavy to lug around, so he solved the problem by dumping them down a storm drain. His mother was not having it. She made him fish out every last one and see that they got delivered, same as the papers. It is a small story, but it tells you something about the boy, and about the woman who raised him.
That bag was the beginning of a long life in newspapers. The kid who carried it grew into a newspaperman and never really left the trade. Larry spent more than 40 years in journalism, including years at Pittsburgh’s biggest dailies, The Press and the Post-Gazette, the very paper he had once delivered before school. He made his living with words, and he wrote well. His former editor called Larry the “beating heart of two newsrooms.”
When he turned his attention to Confluence and the Turkeyfoot Valley, all of that came with him: the eye for a story, the ear for how people actually talk, and the belief that a small place deserves to be covered as carefully as a big one. It started with a kid, a bag, and a stack of papers to get out before school. It grew into a career, and, in the end, into News & Views.
Mary thought Kris Mamula would want to see Larry’s old newspaper bag. Kris, our managing editor, worked alongside Larry at the Press and Post-Gazette, so the bag meant something to him too. Rather than simply pass it along, Kris had it framed and gifted it to us here at News & Views.
In the coming weeks, we will find the right spot for it here at Tissue Farm, with its history written out beside it, so anyone who stops in can know what they are looking at.
We are honored to have it. We are honored to keep News & Views going in the voice Larry gave it. I only hope we honor his memory the way he deserves.
If you would like to help us do that, come by Tissue Farm and spend a minute with the bag. Eighty-six years old, and it carried a lot more than newspapers.
~ Pope