In the early-morning darkness the smell of the late-spring air filled my head with anticipation of summer as I awaited the Rocky Mountain News delivery truck.

The glow of dawn was still an hour away and the chill that blankets that hour forced me back into the house for a jacket. When I returned, the bundles of newspapers were already sitting on the sidewalk and the Rocky truck was puffing toward Colfax Avenue on Ulster Street in east Denver.

It was 1963.

I dragged the bundles of soon-to-be- delivered Rocky newspapers to the garage to be folded. I considered waking my older brother Dan to help with the folding. After all it was his paper route. But the last time I woke him before he was ready I suffered a bruised arm and ego. So I went about "our" business alone - snipping, stacking, folding and loading. By the time Dan appeared all that was left to do was jump on our fully loaded bicycles and deliver the morning paper to "his" customers.

I felt a sense of freedom, excitement and responsibility as we pedaled through east Denver tossing the paper; and a sense of pride when the paper actually landed on the porch. Our paper route ended when we tossed a paper on our grandmother's and our great-grandmother's porches. They both lived in the same block as we did. I saved a paper for me so that I could read it with my bowl of Frosted Flakes.

Thus, began my love affair with reading the Rocky Mountain News. I read all the big events and saved some of those newspapers. I read the Rocky after President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. I read the Rocky when we landed on the moon and when the Broncos won the Super Bowl.

I read the Rocky after my friend and partner, Denver police officer Patrick Pollack, was shot and killed as he chased a robbery suspect just two houses away from where I folded those newspapers many years earlier. I read it front to back. I still do.

Now, the Rocky Mountain News is for sale and might not survive the Internet era. The loss of this journalistic icon will leave a vacuum that the Internet cannot fill. I know Gene Amole is turning over in his grave.

I will miss walking outside to pick up the Rocky and anticipating the headlines. I will miss sitting peacefully in a soft chair and wrapping myself around the words of dedicated journalists who brought me the world in their gifted prose. I will miss arguing with columnists who thought differently than I, but who offered insights I didn't contemplate.

One day soon, I will drive over to Ulster Street where this love affair began, park in front of Grandma O'Shea's house and read the morning Rocky Mountain News - for the last time.

Dave O'Shea-Dawkins is a resident of Denver.