“Above The Fold”

(Please click on pic for full image)

It’s that rarefied space on the first page of any newspaper.  It’s always the BIG news of the day.   It’s what you need to know right this very second and in print so big you couldn’t possibly miss it..   

It’s also, almost always, about loss.  People and things lost in wars, earthquakes, tornadoes, and more.  Not the jolliest way to start one’s day.

But, it’s what we expect and when it’s different, we sit up and take notice.  And so, just this last week, when the Above the Fold headline was: “Bluffton Students Break World Record for Cereal Box Domino Chain, I stopped cold.  Could anyone really give a hoot about a cereal-box domino tournament?  Surely it’s a stretch to greet us with that headline, even for our little paper.

But, if you read the article, like I did, you’d soon find out that 6,000….yes, 6,000….boxes of cereal were donated to the project. Nearly 5,000 of them were carefully lined up and subsequently toppled in domino form to grab the record for such an activity.  That’s a serious number of cereal boxes and a lot of hard work.  Those kids beat the record of 3,416 boxes set in New York in 2017.  Now we’re talking a big deal.

But they didn’t stop there.  Each box was then donated to a local food pantry.  And each box was tagged with a personal, handwritten note from a student.  How cool is all that?

It’s a win, win, win situation.  There’s a lot more Life (Quaker Oats), Kix (General Mills) and Vive (Kellogg) in that story than in our standard gloom and doom. 

So let’s give some Cheerios (General Mills) and Honey Smacks (Kellogg) to our little paper for giving them the above-the-fold space they deserved.

Picture from the April 6, 2021 issue of the Island Packet