Could the Green Sheet return to the Journal Sentinel?

While I was busy wondering when “Beetle Bailey” will introduce a gay character – in Sunday’s strip Sarge, Beetle and Killer are going to a “club in town where the guys hang out” – or for that matter get sent to a war zone, Journal Sentinel editor George Stanley dropped a bombshell.

greenphoto“How many readers,” he wrote Sunday in a column adapted from his online chat last week, “would like us to bring back the Green Sheet if we could manage it?”

Anyone 21 and under must have wondered what he was talking about. The Green Sheet appeared in the old Milwaukee Journal and was once as much a part of the Milwaukee landscape as Gimbels.

It was four page insert that contained puzzles, comics and feature stories and columns by writers like Gerald Kloss and advice columnist Ionne Quinby Griggs.

And it was simple to find inside the paper because, well, it was green.

(Full disclosure: When I was in high school Mrs. Griggs printed one of my letters. I carried it in my wallet for years.)

The Green Sheet was published from 1910 until 1994, shortly before the paper was merged with the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1995. The combined papers adopted the Sentinel’s Good Morning feature and comics section. Last year the Milwaukee Public Library featured a Green Sheet retrospective .

Reader response was critical of the move to drop the section.

“The Green Sheet is a Milwaukee tradition” and then-editor Mary Jo Meisner, “is a short-sighted fool to drop it,” . “The Green Sheet was my childhood introduction to the Journal,” wrote another. “It was the one part of the paper the whole family could enjoy.” And wrote another: “I think you guys are nuts” for discontinuing it.

Whatever happens when the paper merges with E. W. Scripps papers to form the Journal Media Group April 1, expect the daily comics section to remain sacrosanct. Anytime a strip is dropped or the comics or puzzles are altered in some way the feature editors are harangued by angry villagers.

But the return of the Green Sheet? Only if they can figure out a way to print money.

A previous version of this story referred to the Milwaukee Public Museum instead of the Milwaukee Public Library. 

Tags: Green Sheet, Journal Sentinel, Mrs. Griggs Posted by Duane Dudek
  • George Hesselberg

    If I recall, the Green Sheet in the Milwaukee Journal, a similar themed green section in the daily Capital Times in Madison, and the unique sports “Peach” section in the daily Wisconsin State Journal in Madison were all victims of the paper-makers decision, I believe, to either no longer make those available or at a considerable higher cost.

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