My friend Walter Dellinger shares a priceless anecdote on the WaPo letters page. Here is an excerpt:
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Letters to the Editor
Here’s one way to eat newsprint
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(Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
April 8 at 7:30 PM
In Dana Milbank’s March 27 Sunday Opinion column, “What goes well with fried newsprint?,” he wrote about fulfilling his promise to eat a newspaper.My grandfather ate the Charlotte Observer. Regularly. The entire paper. I’m not making this up. Ray Lawing was an off-and-on alcoholic. Even though he had abandoned my mother when she was a child, she took him in when he had no place else to go. (She did not claim to be acting out of moral duty: “He was just such good company,” she said. “Always good for a laugh.”)
He would consume the Observer while sitting in the yard watching me play. (For understandable reasons, he was not allowed to eat the newspaper in the house.) He would carefully tear each page into strips, then liberally salt each strip and chew it.