Sometimes when I tell my kids stories about what life was like when I was growing up, they just blink at me like I’ve started speaking Latin. Every now and then, one of them takes the opportunity to be head smart aleck and says something like, “Man, how old are you anyway?”

I’ve been writing this column for a while now, and I’m pretty sure I’ve repeated myself here and there. Not on purpose—mostly because some stories just make me smile, and I figure maybe they’ll make someone else smile, too. There are folks out there who grew up in towns like mine, and they know exactly what I mean when I say things like “you had to slow down in front of the newspaper office.”

That’s one of those little quirks I’ve probably mentioned before. In my hometown, people used to slow down when they passed the press office, because the editors would write news bulletins on big sheets of butcher paper and tape them up in the front window. If you were coming in from the highway and headed past the courthouse, you automatically hit the brakes a little to see what was posted.

I still remember when Bing Crosby died – that’s where I saw the news. On the window of the newspaper office, written in marker. It was our version of breaking news.

I was back in my hometown last weekend, and I noticed they don’t do that anymore. Can’t say I was surprised. It’s just one of those little things that faded out, like so many others.

Take the radio station, for example. I’ve written about it before, probably more than once. We had a morning guy who might play a song here or there, but most of the time he was doing things like reading the weather, announcing school lunch menus, or firing up the “morning march” to help people get moving. He had a call-in show, too, called “What Do You Think?” My grandma was on it once with some other well-known cooks from the area. The host asked her about her onion ring recipe. It was a big deal. We all tuned in like Grandma was a local celeb, which she kinda was for folks who had dined at the Elks Club or had lunch at the Kon-Tiki.

But what I was reminded of on this last trip home was something I’d completely forgotten: the Mystery Voice.

Now that was a production. Every so often, a local business would sponsor a prize – maybe some gift certificates, maybe a little cash – and the station would record someone from around town saying, “I am the Fairfield Mystery Voice. Identify me and win the jackpot.”

And that was it. No hints, no clues – just that voice on the air a few times a day. If the station called your house and you could name the voice, you’d win.

My mom and her friends took this very seriously. There were full conversations in beauty shops and grocery store aisles about who it might be. “It’s got to be Mr. Hoffee from the lumberyard,” someone would whisper, like it was classified information. “No, no, it’s definitely Yvonne from the bank.”

I remember going over to my best friend’s house a few doors down, and his mom had written her guess on a note pad right next to the rotary phone – just in case the call came in. We were sitting on the porch with a transistor radio, the kind with the antenna you had to hold at a weird angle to get a signal, and we argued about who the voice really was.

It’s funny, the things that seemed so important at the time.

Back then, the Mystery Voice was a big deal. Same with the butcher paper headlines. We didn’t have push notifications or apps that told us what was happening before we even asked. We just had each other, the radio, and the hope that maybe this would be the week someone we knew would win twenty dollars or a shopping spree at the dime story uptown. 

Simpler times? Sure. But also sweet, and oddly thrilling in their own way.

I still think if I drove past that newspaper office and saw something taped up in the window, I’d slow down – just to see what it said.

I wonder if anyone ever got rear-ended in front of the press window?  

Probably not, unless it was an “out of towner.”