For decades well into the 1960s, the Albuquerque Journal published a story and info box like this one just about everyday, generally on its most coveted front page.

While each/both Albuquerque newspapers (yes, Virginia, there was a time when ABQ had more than one newspaper) frequently included little stories about NM traffic death counts, the Journal led the way with its very regularly updated count in a little box such as above.

Why did the Journal stop doing that? I don’t know, but it was and remains an EXCELLENT idea.

I bring this historic factoid up in part because I’m a new resubscriber to our local paper of record. After years of avoidance, I’m back on-board, having heard good things about the new executive editor and already seeing dramatically improvement in reporting such as this personalizing the oft-depersonalized story of those experiencing homelessness (note: could be a paywall).

So as a new resubscriber I obviously get to tell the folks at the *Journal what to do and how to do their job better. Least I can expect at $8.99 every four weeks, right?

While that little State Traffic Death info box went away decades ago, not everything 1964 has disappeared from the Journal. Here’s a look at this morning’s Journal, page B8.

Yep. We still get Dear Abby and we still get Bobby Wolff’s “Aces on Bridge.”

Dear Abby is and will continue to be eternal, just like the song by John Prine, ‘cuz folks unhappy with themselves, their relatives and their neighbors is a true “evergreen,” in news speak. The card game of bridge, on the other hand, makes me wonder. How many people still play bridge? How many care enough to follow a regular column about bridge strategy?

My version of a 2024 in-depth study of these questions (i.e., about twelve seconds searching and clicking) reveals that while enthusiasm has waned a bit, a couple of million Americans still play the game. Today’s average age of a bridge player is about 68 years-old. In other words, a perfect demographic for today’s Albuquerque Journal.

Hence, this new resubscriber is not gonna curse any possible darkness of wasting newspaper space with **Abigail Van Buren and Bobby Wolff, and instead merely seeks to light the informational candle that would be provided to readers by reinclusion of “State Traffic Deaths,” preferably on the front page and preferably pretty much every time we have another state traffic death.

I apologize for the general tone of whimsy as I urge that Journal readers be better informed on a truly horrible societal problem that isn’t getting better and seems to have become just a perceived cost of doing transportation business. Full disclosure, my whimsy is partly due to an understanding from prior experience that simply hammering the horribleness of the societal problem and seeking to guilt folks, newspaper folks included, into doing something about it hasn’t seem to work very well (e.g., we still don’t have a “State Traffic Deaths” info box on page one these days).

My whimsy is also due to this post being about newspapers. I love newspapers and love talking/writing anything about them. That we’re down to one here is personally heartbreaking, and the depths to which that one had sunk in recent years has been personally unbearable.

So let’s keep “Dear Abby” and “Aces on Bridge.” That just means more paper to love, even if I personally don’t know what a “constructive raise to two spades means” and would rather have my eyes gouged out with a rusty ice pick than have my personal/interpersonal problems introduced to readers and dissected by a newspaper columnist.

Nope, let’s just add the near daily “State Traffic Deaths” again. The numbers meant enough in 1964 to make the front page of the Journal. Being front page news meant something on December 10, 1964 and it thankfully still does today, for some of us, precisely sixty years on.

*By the way, WordPress’ text app has now apparently removed the ability for one to underline text. So I can’t underline “Albuquerque Journal.” As a retired English teacher, I cannot express how much this pisses me off. But I’ll get over it. Someday. Maybe.

**As you may know, Abigail Van Buren was always a psuedonym and the person who used it/wrote the column died a few years back and now that writer’s daughter has taken the name and the column. There is something extremely Dear Abby-ish about this fact and situation.