Opinion | Richard Ford: Born to a World at War

To mark The Times’s 175th birthday, Times editors asked writers to reflect on — and imagine a little bit about — the newspaper’s front page on the day they were born. Look up your own birthday page here.

The first thing I notice about the front page of The New York Times’s Feb. 16, 1944, edition is how much more content there is than in, say, last Friday’s offering. Twelve stories appeared on the day I was born 82 years ago — only five were given more than a sentence or two a week ago. Was there more news fit to print back then?

Of course, I realize The Times has physically shrunk over the decades. Also, a world war was on in 1944, and multiple combat fronts needed coverage (unlike today when maybe there’s a war going on, but maybe not). The United States back then had legitimate allies, and these countries — to one extent or another — had our fates in their hands and required reportage. There were, as well, two well-identified enemies — more if you count Italy (and some would say France). Reporting on these upped the word count.

On my birthday, front-page space was also allotted to the rumored Finnish-Russian peace negotiations; to an apparent coup in Argentina that foreshadowed the rise of Juan Perón; to the Brits’ blockade of the Bay of Biscay; to our troops pounding the sanctified Benedictine Monte Cassino Abbey in Italy, which German soldiers were using to store artillery. And then there was what President Roosevelt and Gen. Eisenhower had to say about this mournful destruction (they concurred, but with heavy hearts).

Plus, the home front demanded notice. The civilian population was dropping, but New York City apartment occupancy was at its highest in more than 20 years, stumping the experts. The war may have been a factor there. Inside pages contained news of the Office of Price Administration combating price gouging on poultry parts, and there were encouraging stories about war bond sales and about denials of reported “color” restrictions against American soldiers in England. A world war creates a lot of news.

I can’t help thinking, though, that the plenitude of column inches in the winter of 1944 may also have spoken of a different appetite for news, versus our appetite today. We all know people consume news from a variety of platforms in 2026 (whatever a platform is). Competition alone may be a factor in a skinnier paper. There’s also much less agreement nowadays about what’s a fact and what’s not; whereas in 1944 — dedicated to covering the war — The Times may have enjoyed a less skeptical, more trusting local readership, thereby enhancing its sense of what’s newsworthy. The very style of The Times’s war writing was often less formal, more colorful, occasionally verging on the colloquial, sometimes opting for a first-person point of view even in news stories, suggesting a profounder sense of the paper’s affiliation with its community.

The redoubtable C. L. Sulzberger wrote this sentence about the destruction at Monte Cassino: “At 1:23 p.m., twenty Marauders” (twin-engine, short-winged American bombers, nicknamed “flying coffins”) “dropped a magnificent massed cluster of bombs smack on the abbey.” To me, this sounds like a man addressing readers he knows personally and to whom he’s striving to give all he can. Which might mean that The Times’s front page in the winter of 1944 envisioned a mission somewhat different from its sleeker, more national remit today.

And, what do I feel about the significance of The Times’s Feb. 16 front page coinciding with the day of my birth? It might mean more if Cy Sulzberger had given this blessed event a sentence or two. “And as Allied bombs were bursting in air over the hallowed abbey, Edna and Parker Ford of 736 North Congress, in faraway Jackson, Miss., were having a son …”

Failing that, as with most coincidences, there’s a frustrated, almost redundant, sensation attendant. Novelists are trained to be wary of coincidences. They’re almost always cheap contrivances. Though it’s possible, I just may not be a birthday person. To me, my birth doesn’t add anything to a day’s importance; an accident of fate underscoring my unimportance; something supposedly worth noting, which really isn’t.

And yet, alongside the redundancy, there’s this: Reading The Times from the day of my birth leaves in me a willowy feeling of having missed something. Possibly it’s not unlike the way you might feel on the day you die. Only different. And of course what I miss is the future, unknown but large and immanent in these pages — the future I would live: tumultuous, surprising, often lucky, but unmendable and beyond reach.