​Growing up in the small town of College Point Queens New York in the 1960s, there were many strange and unusual places my family would go during road trips with my sister, brother, me, and my mom. Having no father present, my mom served as both caretaker and principal entertainer. My mom was an only child, and with both her parents dead along with her grandparents, it was just the four of us.
 
One popular form of entertainment that my mom enjoyed was driving.  She loved to drive. She would take us everywhere. We would all pile into the car, and she would take us to neighborhood locations such as the bowling alley, a friend’s home, or any one of the many corner bars that dotted the town. Occasionally, she would take us on long drives with no destination in mind, exploring the burrows around the city of New York and the North shore of Long Island. Many times for dinner she would drive us to various diners, such as the Towers diner in Flushing, owned by people she knew from the lanes. As mom worked at College Lanes and served as the secretary for the Star Journal league, on Saturday nights she would need to drive down to Long Island City to drop off the bowling averages to the sports editor Don Rotter (and his brother Hot) before the 10 PM deadline so they could be posted in the Monday morning edition. Before going to the paper however, we would get something to eat. We ate out a lot. Mom was never one for a family style sit down at home dinner, we were always in the car on the go.
 
Before dropping off the bowling scores at the Star Journal, we would find a place to eat, and one such popular place we would go was on the corner of Northern Boulevard and Belle Boulevard in Bayside Queens, White Castle. White Castle was a car-hop style fast food restaurant where waitresses would come to your car carrying a yellow plastic mesh tray full of food that would hook on  to the driver’s side slightly rolled-up window. White Castle hamburgers were fried, steamed, small, square, and cost $.12 a burger with only onions pickles and ketchup, unless you wanted a burger with cheese which was an extra three cents . Each person in the car would order three or four hamburgers, and all of it would arrive on paper plates stacked on the tray brought to you quickly by the lady car hop. The burgers were wrapped in a thin strip of tissue paper vertically, so that the burger’s edge was slightly exposed, but  the bun surface was covered. On the tray would be a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup, packets of salt, napkins, and of course the drinks that were also part of the order. Looking out of the car’s front windshield, you would see a sign with the White Castle logo. Printed on the sign was a list of instructions on how to deposit the trash created in the process of eating your food. After finishing our food, and as the car hop would grab your tray while driving out of the parking lot, we would turn right onto Northern Boulevard, heading west to our next destination. As we turned onto the Street, looking to the right my brother and I swore we saw a small round sign that we claimed had the face of Mickey Mouse. To this day I don’t know, nor do I recall if we ever Learned what that small round sign really displayed.
 
Driving down Northern Boulevard towards Long Island City, our next stop was an unusual store. It was a small, shingled wooden shack with a closed and blocked walkup window you could barely see through with a spring-loaded, always opened door. Owned by Rudy, a small colorful character who had a very unusual newspaper stand. Rudy’s newspaper stand had the reputation of getting the Sunday morning paper with the funnies before our local hometown corner candy store, giving College Point horseracing fans the jump on the nags and their odds.  As we approached Rudy’s there would be many cars idling and double parked with people standing around outside the shack waiting for the Daily News and the New York Times truck, delivering the Sunday paper. You had to wait outside of Rudy’s. You had no choice because the entire inside of the shack, from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall, was filled with newspapers, comic books from who knew when, and piles of newspaper additions long gone by. I remember there was a large red Coca-Cola cooler that served as his countertop but even that was covered with stacks of newspapers. You could not get a soda or more than 3-feet into the door of the building. Rudy’s shack was so filled with newspapers that as time went on, Rudy had to perch himself higher and higher above stacks of old newspapers just to receive your payment. When you squeezed in to that small little open door space looking up at Rudy, passing over the money for the paper, the smell of newsprint and ink was unforgettable. To say the least, Rudy’s shack was a fire hazard, and the last time we drove passed Rudy’s shack it had completely burned down, and the final fate of Rudy became unknown, and now, a distant memory.
 
As a final note, today, the Sunday morning paper has become almost extinct as information continues to transform into the digital world in which we live. The feel, smell, and the dramatics of the ink pressed headline on the front page is something unknown by today’s generation. The power of the printed word on a page of fragrant newsprint offers much more to the senses than the text on a screen that can be easily modified, changed, rearranged, or quickly deleted. Physical things like the paper boy, the newsstand, and the newspaper itself, is dematerializing along with Rudy, his shack, and all those material forms that back then we thought would have physical permanence.