The Deseret News turned 150 yesterday, and you know what that means. Today we get started on the next 150.
No days off. No breaks. No Sorry, didn't feel like it. Just get going on the next century and a half. Editors are heartless.
All week long, people have seen the big birthday banner in our lobby and asked how it feels to turn 150.
Don't ask us. Nobody knows. We weren't here in 1850. We're surprised we're here now. We were all on the way to law school or stockbroker school or Harvard or the big leagues or the great American novel, and we wound up here.
Then we took out one of those sweet low-interest loans at the Credit Union and that's been that.
Soon as it's paid off, we're outta here.
But as long as we're here, let's talk about us. In true Steve Young fashion.
One hundred and fifty years! And George Steinbrenner's never sued us! Neither has Cher!
We have covered 31 presidential terms, from Zachary Taylor to William Jefferson Clinton. We were around when the Titanic sunk and the movie by the same name didn't. We're older than Bob Hope's jokes. When we got started, Arizona wasn't even a state. Neither was Utah. California had no smog.
And still, people have trouble with our name.
Sometimes they leave the "t" silent so we rhyme with "Chevrolet." Often they leave the last "e" out, and we're the Desert News.
I once went to 15 straight Super Bowls and covered every one for the "Desert News." Except once. That year the NFL finally got it right, I noted, as I reported to my seat in the stadium and saw "Deseret News" spelled properly.
But the reporter next to me from Palm Springs was upset. He worked for the Desert Sun. Only now it was the "Deseret Sun."
"Idiots!" he said of the NFL, looking at his misspelled name tag. "They can't even spell desert right."
So we've heard.
Biggest change over the past 150 years?
It sure isn't the name.
Jim Mortimer, our longtime publisher, would say it's technology.
For the first hundred years, newspapers were unchallenged in the lead position as the purveyor of news.
Mr. Mortimer remembers delivering the Deseret News in his hometown of Logan the day World War II ended in 1945.
He turned the corner on his bicycle, and "people were waiting on their porches for me," he recalls. "They couldn't get the news until I delivered it to them."
Now, there's network TV, cable TV, satellite TV, CNN Headline News, radio, faxes, the World Wide Web, the Drudge Report, "Larry King Live!" e-mail, wristwatch computers, and those video screens when you're at the gas station filling up.
In the '60s, two decades after Mr. Mortimer, I delivered the Deseret News by bicycle in my hometown of Sandy, and things had already changed dramatically.
The only things waiting on the porch for me were people hoping to protect their potted plants and Doberman pinschers.
Now, two decades beyond that, nobody's on the porch — if there is one — and nobody's on a bike, either.
Paperboys and girls either get their parents to drive them or they don't deliver. It's in their contract.
The weird part is, bicycles are so much better now.
I'm not sure which was preferable, the past, the present or the future.
But let's say the present.
It's where we are for the moment and the only thing we have any real control over. And if you're 150 and still standing, a very good place to be.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.