A sad sign

Happy Veterans Day, folks! I would like to personally thank all those who have served, are serving and will serve for all that you do for our country.

I hope you all saw yesterday’s print and online edition of the Times. It certainly had a good bit of veteran-themed content, but I wish it had had more.

You see, our Advertising Department had this idea, and it was one that had worked well many years ago. We asked our readers to send in a little write-up about a veteran in their lives along with a photo, and for a $10 fee, we’d run it on our special Veterans Day Salute page.

Well, we put it in the paper with a little form you could cut out and mail to us and we sat back and waited for them to come in the mail.

We got two.

Yep, that’s all. Now, no, I don’t think that there are only two veterans whose friends and family love them or are too cheap to drop $10 to get them in the paper. I think it’s mostly just that people don’t mail things anymore. It’s all digital. Text messages and emails and Instant Messenger are how communication is done these days. When’s the last time you wrote a letter?

It’s a little sad, I must admit, to see that. But I guess like everything else, mail… or “snail mail” as it’s sometimes called these days, is going away. Sure there will always be the need for mail service on some level, but it’s probably going to be very different in 10 or 20 years.

I wonder, now, what kind of response we’d have gotten if we had asked for submissions on Facebook?