I see by today's paper that Si Newhouse Jr. has died.

Sometime around 1945 I found myself sitting next to this freshman at the typewriter lab in the journalism school at Syracuse.  Evidently trying to impress the kid with how the school would make him a professional, I bragged that I'd spent the past summer at the Penn Yan Chronicle-Express -- to which this freshman responded that he'd spent it as a reporter on his father's Staten Island Advance.

Which, come to think of it, was the paper for which a generation later my son Avi Lank covered some good stories at one point...