Last week I heard the news that after 70 years in circulation, Gourmet magazine would cease to publish. I was surprised and saddened, although I don't have a subscription to it (I have one to Bon Appetit instead). I hate and fear the death knell I hear sounding for print journalism of all kinds; I have no doubt that one day my favorite paper, the New York Times, will also fade away. But the death of Gourmet?? Too soon!

You might well wonder why I have a soft spot for a magazine I don't even receive, or buy except in airports. It goes back to my grandfather. He was a long-time subscriber to Gourmet, it came right to his house in West Virginia. It is a never-ceasing sense of amazement to me that this man, who grew up in a coal-mining town in West Virginia went to college, had a successful career as an engineer and photographer in WWII, and an even more successful career at a hideously ugly DuPont chemical plant less than a mile from his house in Belle, West Virgina, loved Gourmet. He loved all of life's gentler pleasures, but food and wine and travel and golf were right at the top.

And us. My sister and I were his only grandchildren, and the word "spoiled" really doesn't accurately convey the amount of adoration, time and attention he showered us with. We were very, very, lucky. Very. It was with him that I was able to, with his encouragement, override my parents' rules about ordering food at a good restaurant (never get the most expensive item) and tasted lobster for the first time; at another meal in Hilton Head, SC, where he and my grandmother spent their winters, he, my sister and I shared a plate of escargots, washed down the inevitable Shirley Temple, which was quite a treat for kids that had no junk food of any kind in their home.

But he also had a serious, seemingly endless string of health problems that stemmed from a heart that was strong in the emotional sense only: he suffered his first (massive) heart attack in his late thirties, then went on to have five or six more, bypass surgery, surgery for an aneurysm, a benign brain tumor, all before succumbing to lung cancer (he was a non-smoker) in his mid-70's. After his death, my grandmother slipped away into Alzheimer's, and died some years later. When we were clearing out their house, there, in the basement, were hundreds of copies of Gourmet, all in special magazine storage boxes. I wish they could have stayed there forever, or at least been transported back to Durham. But my parents' house has limited storage, and so they, too, were disposed of.

The house my father grew up in, the one right down the road from the DuPont plant was, along with the whole neighborhood, razed to the ground so the already-wide river could squeeze in a few more coal barges, bearing their load from another pillaged mountaintop. The
house, the magazines, all of it gone forever. But whenever I saw Gourmet in a store, at a friend's house, at a rack in the airport, I couldn't resist picking it up, and thinking of him, a natural gourmet from West Virginia. And so another print magazine falls (it certainly won't be the last) but it might be, for me, the saddest.

Leigh appears Fridays on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Leigh on her blog Flipper and Me.