Sunday Morning With The New York Times

I have been reading the Sunday edition of The New York Times since 1952.  I used to sit with my next door neighbor in Cambridge while my wife slept in, my friend, a student at Harvard Law, I, studying the classics, both of us deep into the pages of the wedding announcements.  We were both Midwesterners, fascinated by the elaborate structures of East Coast society as revealed at Harvard, in Boston, and Manhattan, and there to be studied in the Times. We sat there over our coffee, taking turns, one of us reading out the details of some one of the couples featured in the pages describing weddings, while the other guessed where it was placed.  It seemed to us that in those days the listings were organized by the editorial staff’s notion of social superiority, so the bridal couple’s details mattered--Greenwich over Scarsdale, East 73rd over West 73rd,  Brearley over Spence, Harvard over Rutgers, and of course St. Thomas over St. Vincent Loyola and naturally pulling up the rear the Temple Immanuel on Fifth Avenue. She or I would begin reading a new listing and the other, as soon as sufficient markers were mentioned that could assign a page location, would shout out the page number.  It was fascinating how often we got it right.  Father, bank president, groom and bride with three names at least two of which were surnames, products of Groton and Miss Porter’s School,a residence in one of the towns of the Main Line, a wedding at St. Thomas or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine--Bingo! First page.  Nowadays wedding announcements are an agreeable melange of ethnicities, locales, professions that seem to have been put together by computer, yes, the way it should be, I suppose, but hardly fun to read. Who cares about these people?  You can read the same sort of thing in the Podunk Evening Herald.  Then to turn to the rest of the Style section nowadays is to encounter the same sort of celebrity one gets in every other contemporary publication.  Who cares about pretty young men and women who are children of film agents, proprietors of magazines, distant relatives of former presidents, all of them out at the latest glamorous--and what is glamorous?--hot spot nobody has heard of except those in the world in which they move, asked the old grouch.  I guess all the “old money” is dead or refuse to come out at night. I rarely recognize a name in Bill Cunningham’s society photographs let alone the events these people are attending (God bless the Rockefellers, such a huge family you can always count on one turning up.) The first section of the Sunday paper has a Sunday tone, come to think of it, unlike the weekday pages of news where the editors have done their utmost to gather up every conceivable horror story of war, mismanagement, chicanery, all of which is designed to arouse the itch for control that animates most readers who are otherwise engaged in various projects to save some aspect of the world.  Sunday’s first section is far more chatty in the presentations, more like reading a magazine, the only problem being you have to get into maybe the fourth paragraph before you get the sense of what the article is all about.  I find myself skipping more and more pages to get to--what?--who knows?  I guess it’s time to call the whole thing off.  But then what?  I remember an Italian husband of a friend on his first visit to the United States who remarked: “You don’t need Mass here on Sundays, you have The New York Times.”