There was a time when Saturday night meant Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and folding newspapers

I am going to sound very old when I describe what most of my Saturday nights were like in the very early 80s.

More often than not, I spent those Saturday evenings:

• Watching "The Love Boat" at 9pm on ABC
• Watching "Fantasy Island" at 10pm, also on ABC
• Stuffing/folder newspapers to deliver the following morning

All three of these things are part of the distant past. The two shows, which were the very essence of cheesy late 70s/early 80s television, have long since been cancelled. And of course, almost no one reads print newspapers anymore.

Except for me, of course. We have covered this before. I still read print newspapers every day. Each morning I go outside to retrieve that day's copies of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Wall Street Journal, and the local News-Herald from the bottom of my driveway. I find it difficult to start my day without having read those papers while eating my never-changing breakfast of oatmeal, a banana, and coffee.

Back in 1981 when I delivered The News-Herald, there were a lot more people like me. You got the paper and you watched the evening news. That's how you knew what was going on in the world.

In those days, the Sunday paper was so large that they would deliver sections of it to newspaper carriers earlier in the week. One section would arrive at your house on Thursdays, I think? And more of it would come on Saturday.

The actual timely news parts of the Sunday paper would of course arrive on Sunday morning for delivery that day.

So, to prepare for the chore of delivering big, heavy Sunday papers, I would take the sections that had already been delivered to me by Saturday night and combine them into one, easier-to-handle chunk. Then on Sunday morning it was easier to combine that with the news and sports sections that would be dropped off by the big orange News-Herald truck that stopped at our house every day.

Folding papers was a tedious chore, so while doing it I would watch whatever little vignettes were to be offered up on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. These shows required little in the way of intellectual engagement, which was good considering I was 11 or 12 years old at the time.

More than anything, I just thought it was funny when little Tattoo would go up in that bell tower and yell, "Da plane! Da plane!"

We were simple folk in the early 80s, you understand.