June Recommendation: A Simple Salad
This is the only salad recipe you need.
In the town where I grew up, at the time when I grew up, there were two types of people: those who subscribed to the morning paper, The Chattanooga Times, and those who subscribed to the evening rag, The Chattanooga News-Free Press. The unfortunate hyphen, famously mocked in The Elements of Style, was also a moniker that often fit. If you cared about anything happening outside the county borders, the paper was far too often free of news. The Times, then owned and run by the Sulzbergers (Adolf Ochs started running the Chattanooga paper before heading north to buy that other one), rarely ventured into any investigative reporting that would trouble city leaders. But there was national news and international news and sports scores that happened overnight when you were asleep.
By the time I was old enough to pay attention to the paper, they were already on the road to the inevitable merger. The Free Press dropped the News (the result of an earlier merger) and became the only Sunday paper in town, sent even to us Times subscribers (albeit in the morning for once). In the late 1990s, the Sulzbergers sold, and the local owners of the Free Press sold, and the out-of-town owner of both began the process of bleeding the merged paper dry, at which they have finally almost succeeded. Is it any wonder that I dream about the glory days of two competing papers, fat with ads and dueling editors trying to win the loyalty of Chattanooga readers?
The Lifestyle sections were always my favorite to read. Advice columns, horoscopes, engagement and wedding announcements, book reviews — it was the best part by far. On Wednesdays, it transformed into the Food section, full of recipes to cut out and save, even if you never quite got around to cooking any. Having worked at the merged paper almost two decades ago, I’ve heard stories about the rivalry between desks at the then-competing papers. But nothing quite fascinates me as much as a time from before I existed: the 1960s Food sections.