We love these editorials by old codgers who are stunned to hear that, say, Captain America has died and Horatio Alger is no longer a best-selling author. This one is from Foy Evans in the Houston Home Journal:

I was with a group in my age bracket and we indulged ourselves in nostalgia. We had just learned that Captain America, who has saved this country many times in comic books, is being killed.

It is difficult to imagine them killing off the man who saved us from the Nazis in World War II and in the intervening years has been a stalwart in the defense of our country.

But it is happening.

Reading about Captain America reminded of the exploits of Jack Dawson, Dave Lowell and The Hardy Boys.

This is the kind of high adventure my generation grew up on … plus, of course, those wonderful pulp magazines The Shadow, Wild West Weekly and Street & Smith’s Sports Magazine.

I spent many an afternoon and evening reading about the adventures of these bigger than life mythical heroes, as well as Tom Sawyer and Frank Merriwell and Horatio Alger.

The heroes were all good and the villains were all bad. And you knew when you picked up a book or magazine that between the opening sentence and the last word would be excitement galore and that everything would come out all right in the end.

Blah blah blah. Did you hear they closed a great old man bar? Rassem frassem…