The Editorial Wee

The New York Times obituary for Sid Yudain, rounder of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, contained an anecdote that seems like it should be in a children’s book—except that no child today would understand it.

Yudain was the seventh of eight children growing up in Connecticut in the 1920s and ’30s.

“For some reason or other, we were all spirited kids, but we didn’t have real fights,” Mr. Yudain recalled in an interview with Roll Call in 2005. “When we got mad at each other, we published these newspapers. We had a little Remington portable typewriter — I guess it was one of the first ones that came out, and we all learned how to use it, even when we were really small — and we published these newspapers, writing editorials against each other instead of staging fists or rocks or something.”

Typewriters? Household newspapers? Why go to all that trouble when you can use the internet to tell the whole world about your yucky sibling?