A Website for Toledo Polonia is long over due; after all we're living in the 21^st Century. There are wonderful Polish related pages on the Internet created by Polonians based in Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco to mention a few. They have been there for years. Some of those Websites are using cutting edge cyber technologies. Obviously they have some well-trained professional web designers and web masters at the helm. In contrast, I am self-taught in the area of writing HTML code to construct web pages. I don't think my amateur status will change any time soon.

Back in the days of the American Revolution and before, I am reminded, the press was very much different in structure than today. When Ben Franklin was publishing the "Penny Press" the situation was that the newspaper owners were both pressman and editor. The intellectual and the technical aspects of the enterprise were two different reins held in the same hand. Today, the men who actually get their hands dirty in the pressroom have no say in the editorial content. Certainly, the dynamics of the web are a throw back. The only difference, at least in my case, is that the technical production side [coding] and the editorial content side [writing] are both dependent on the Hunt & Peck method of typewriting, which I am slowly mastering.

When I was a doctorial student at the most prestigious university for my line of interest in Mass Communication, I had the requirement of taking a First Amendment Law & Policy class. My professor was an old-line journalist who in my estimation could have just as easily won a Pulitzer Prize as argue "reporters privilege" in front of the Highest Court in the Land.

On the last day of class we met in a Saloon. And, over draft beers we shared and compared our last assignment. A pictorialization of the First Amendment concept. We students took great liberty in our conceptual art. And, whether the characterization was formed in crayon or artists' pen, for the most part the caricatures were far from scholarly stodginess, but rather in the vain of graffiti. Nonetheless, they were all pertinent, holding up and reflecting the self-truth and values vested in ideals of free press, free speech. Just before the aged and about to be retired faculty member paid the bar tab, he bought a daily paper from a vending machine, opened the "broadside's" section "A" at the gate fold and distributed a sheet to each of us. Although it was not indicated on the class syllabus, he thought it important [perhaps only for fun] to instruct us on the construction of a pressman's cap [those square newsprint head covers press operators used to protect their hair and scalp from ink spray].

Somewhere half way through my career, I found myself as the Director of Marketing for a flagship television station in Chicago, my office and staff were housed across the street in the co-owned Chicago Sun-Times building. Walking through the long and narrow lobby to the elevator bank, one would pass a glass wall, which looked down into the bowels of the gigantic pressroom running the length of the building on the riverside. Often I would stop and press my nose against the glass wondering how the press operators could make the multiple intricate folds necessary to make a pressman's cap out of the Sun-Times. The paper was a tabloid about 40% less area than the Chicago Tribune's broadsheet format.

After a week of off and on examination of the hats through the floor to ceiling window panes, I brought a brown bag lunch and a Sun-Times, sat on a lobby bench over looking the presses and started folding a sheet in a way that didn't come close to conventional methods. I caught glances from the jump-suited, paper lidded operators below watching me fiddle with my bolt of bonnet material. A few would congregate and point then disperse to adjust the locomotive sized press, then regroup. By the time I was through digesting my ham on rye, I tried my creation on for size. The thickness of the plate glass and the roar from the rotating drums and folding machines would drown out any human sound from the galley below, but judging from the body language and arm movements I think the crew was cheering.

As I bite into my apple, I noticed a gentleman who had been waiting for someone in the vestibule walk down the corridor glancing in sequence from my Gucci shoes, to my Pratesi Italian Leather Briefcase, to my Brooks Brothers suit to that silly paper box on my head. As he passed he said, "You must be Polish."

I could have taken offense if I believed for a moment he was condemning my ensemble. But, I'd seen this guy's face before, in a photograph next to the by line in his column. "Those guys down there, been there from the time we printed the same size as the 'Trib'," he said. "Lujak, Barciniak, Dudek, Stawecki. Shrinking the paper was a hard thing for most folks upstairs to accept, till we saw those pressmen's caps down there reappear one day, defiantly adapted to the new reality."

Conceivably, I am lucky to have had such a great teacher in graduate school, or perhaps it's the symbolism in the cap I have come to appreciate - adapting to the new reality.

This Website, this polishtoledo.com - to me it is not so much a publication as it is a broadcast of symbols rather than sounds. I was never a newspaperman. Nor do I want to be one now. Just every now and again, I think it's fun to find that now yellowed paper cap to cover my brain and then the too much seriousness seems to fade.