Celebrating 1(40) years

I decided almost on a whim last Monday to answer the emails inviting me to a reunion of staffers of the university student newspaper that I edited nearly 40 years ago. This year marks 100 years of the publication, which has always been one of the happiest memories of my life.

I served as editor during my junior year at Southwest Texas State University, which has long since changed its name to Texas State to try to attract more meaningful attention nationally. (I suspect the potential confusion with the University of Texas, which is only a few miles up the road, was planned rather than coincidental.) I had transferred to SWT in my sophomore year, partly because Houston Baptist, where I had completed my freshman year, didn't offer the degree in journalism I would need to become a high school journalism teacher and partly because my dad's health had left my parents in too great financial straits to continue to support the cost for me to go to school at all, much less at a private school in Houston.

I had started HBU as a nursing major for reasons that didn't make any more sense then than they do now; I had already served as editor of the HBU newspaper, and one thing I knew for sure when I transferred was that the career I wanted was in was in writing, not nursing. I had loved journalism in high school, and it was a much more rational choice for me for college, too. I didn't want to go to UT; I had been raised in Aggieland, and the little bit I knew about UT was that it was the enemy. Besides, it was already a big school, and I wanted to be on a smaller campus where I thought I had a better chance to succeed in life. And San Marcos is as beautiful now as it was then; the fit of school, setting, and major was perfect for me, and I was glad I landed here.

Since I hadn't started in journalism school, I jumped in headlong the first year with two courses a semester in the major, which meant I was in reporting and editing at the same time, both with enforced labs requiring me to contribute to the school paper. That was a no-brainer; I had come to learn everything I could about the business, and being part of the Star staff was just terrific with me.

The first semester I was in San Marcos, the Star editor and managing editor did their best to push the limits with the university's administration, and by the end of the semester, they had been summarily dismissed from their titled positions. They were allowed to stay in school but not in their positions of "power," such as it was for college editors then. Since I was still just trying to learn the ropes, I didn't get too much into what was happening, but during the second semester, the administration appointed a much more—er—"malleable" editor, and I found myself feeling much more comfortable in a news room where the atmosphere was much closer to my own conservative-leaning philosophy.

By the next fall, I was fully into the swing of things (or as much as I could have been in my own little space-cadet way), and I adored the editor, a sprite of a redhead who had a prototypical redheaded-tempest-in-a-teapot personality who was far more willing to take a chance on bucking the administration than her predecessor but not so much so that she risked getting the Star into trouble with the administration again. I liked her, I liked her thinking, I liked her leadership style, and I liked her willingness to stand up to the adviser to do what she thought was right.

Her private life was a bit of a different matter. By the time I knew her, she had hyphenated  her maiden name onto her young husband's. I don't know much of the story behind her marriage, but it split up during the time she was editor, and I knew that she was troubled by the frustration of what felt to her like failure.

Between her private battles and those with the adviser, her nerves wore thin before the end of the semester, and she stepped down as editor. She had had a managing editor who was the logical next choice, but for reasons I didn't know, Jane recommended to the adviser that he not appoint the managing editor but give the job to me. I really didn't know that Jane had left the job reluctantly; the adviser never said more than that the fiasco a few semesters earlier had led the administration to limit editors' terms to one semester, hers had ended, and she had picked me to take her place. In my fog, I believed and accepted that, organized my little staff to suit my needs, and set out to see what I could do.

My first and most important choice was a managing editor who was still only a sophomore, but he was brilliant and talented; my news editor was also a sophomore, and her brilliance and talent were different from but complementary to Don's; most of the rest of the "critical" staff were also sophomores, but they were a hugely talented crew who were full of brilliant ideas, and any one of them probably had twice the nose for news that I had. But I had somehow won the heart of the adviser in ways that none of the editors for several semesters before me had, so I was able to play the foil with him and turn my staff loose to do pretty much whatever they wanted to do.

One of a handful of changes I made in the Star was to bring some order out of the chaos of putting the paper to bed. At the time, the most modern equipment available to us was a machine called a "Justawriter," which was an early computerized system that worked with a couple of machines that resembled early electric typewriters. One of them was an "encoder"; a typist typed the text into the machine, which output a punch tape about an inch wide and up to yards long, and the other machine "read" the tape and calculated how to distribute space to make the text print out in justified columns. It was primitive and ugly, but it was far better than trying to set justified type on an ordinary typewriter and the best solution at the time for the emerging offset printing technology.

At any rate, the local newspaper's typists set most of our type on Justawriters and typesetters set most of the rest on even older Linotype machines, and then the student staff went to their offices after hours to "paste up" the pages (literally cutting out the printed text and gluing it to page-size sheets with rubber cement). During my first semesters on the staff, the paste-up work typically really didn't begin until 6 or 7 o'clock on Thursday for a Friday paper (we were only weekly back then), and the presses didn't roll until 9 or 10 hours later. I wanted to change that.

One thing I did was arrange my classes so I could get to the print shop by mid-afternoon on Thursday. That way, I could find out how much of our text was ready to go and pitch in and type some if I needed to. I had taken a printing class just for fun the semester before, so I managed to sweet-talk the Linotype operators into letting me hand-set the headlines for our first and second pages; I was the only staffer they remembered who knew how to sort a California job case. Mostly, what I did during those afternoons was get the space organized so that the staff could come in and get directly to work.

And work they did; they'd show up around 6, get to the workstations, and get the work done. After a couple of weeks of working out the kinks, we walked out of the shop one week—and for the restof the semester—with the papers ready to deliver shortly after midnight.

I made some changes in the newsroom, too. With Don's help, I modified the way we designed our pages, and he and Ann commandeered some super writing. When staff had ideas for stories, I told them to track them down; I don't know that I ever had any leads for them of my own.

It wasn't all roses; I wrote a pro-choice editorial that drew the wrath of a solid Catholic professor who wrote long dissertations for weeks until we finally told him we couldn't use our space for any more of his stuff. Before the student body officer elections the staff was torn about the candidates, but I wrote an editorial endorsing one (whom Don didn't particularly like), and he chewed me out over it. Once I teasingly called Don a wetback, knowing full well that he was from a well-connected Hispanic family that had every right to resent the term, and he ran-not-walked out of the office determined never to come back or speak to me again. I chased after him and tried to apologize, but I was never sure—until tonight—whether he had ever been able to forgive.

Through it all, we turned out a good product; at the end of the year, we won several awards from the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association, and the staff were hugely—and rightfully—proud. And I was proud of them.

And tonight I saw my very favorites of them again: Jane and Don and Ann all showed up at the "70s crowd" get-together, and Jane hugged me as if she wished we had never gone separate ways. She told me a lot about the reasons she had left when she did and how much she regretted that; I told her the good that had come of it was that her favorites on the staff—me and Don and Peggy and Barbara and Linda and Joanne—had all had opportunities to serve as editor because she had moved on, and I for one have been forever indebted to her for that.

When I walked up to Don, he took only a second to recognize me and wrapped me in a bear hug that assured me anything I ever said had long since been forgotten. In fact, he told me that he had just been telling a couple of current staffers about a letter I had sent him when he became editor telling him what I thought his responsibilities were as editor of the Star; the reason he still remembers it, he said, is that he still has it, and he pulls it out to read from time to time to keep his job on track. I didn't even remember having written such a letter, but I am nothing short of dumbfounded that he still has it: for 15 years he was editor of the El Paso Times, and he currently considers himself an "independent newspaper consultant." Don has never been small potatoes—and he still has a letter from me.

The Star has changed tremendously in the past 40 years. When I pulled into the campus to ask for directions for parking, the attendant pointed me toward a garage and assured me that I'd recognize the offices as I got near them. I laughed out loud as I told her I had graduated 40 years ago, and the building where the Star offices had been back then had been torn down probably more than 30 years ago.

I did find my way to the offices, though, which from the outside was a disappointing step down from the iconic central building that had housed the publication the last time I was here: although the young staff proudly showed off their banks of bright monitors and their webcasting facilities, I kept having a vague feeling that I was back in the space where I had taken my printing lab 40 years ago. Sure enough, at a later reception, a student from several years before me said cheerfully that during her school days the Star had been printed at the campus print shop, which ironically is the same building where the staff is housed now—and where I had learned printing several years after the older group had moved on.

After I got "checked in" and toured the Star offices, I hiked back up the steep hill to the old main building where the paper had been a few years ago. My interest was not as much in comparing the old offices to the new as in seeing whether the old building still had some odd, onion-shaped ornaments around the space that had been the school's chapel in the days when all students were expected to show up for daily services. My knowledge of the ornaments had come from the semester after I edited the Star, when the original editor, a man named Fred Adams, had returned to the campus and led me and a couple of others on a merry chase into the rafters above some temporary offices that had been dropped into the old chapel space, leaving the "onions" to decay in the airspace between the office ceilings and the old chapel ceiling. Fred was 80 at the time, and I was horrified by the possibility that he might lose his footing and fall, but I have never forgotten his excitement at seeing a few decrepit "onions" still there.

I knew the building had been significantly remodeled/modernized before the Star had moved in, and I had long been curious as to whether the "onions" had been preserved or destroyed. I was happy to see six years ago—and again today—that at least for now, the "onions" are still there.

From the main building on top of the hill, I walked down the long, gentle slope to the mall area that once was a main drag through the campus and stopped to take a picture of a horses statue that has been pushed another block or so up the other side of the hill. I turned back toward the parking garage and saw the steep hill up to my old dormitory, but I settled for snapping a picture instead of making that demand on a much older pair of legs. I loved being back on campus, but I was amused at how much being there reminded me of going back to my old elementary school when I enrolled my children; somehow it looked so much bigger and more daunting when I was the student there.

I remember running these hills from dorm to classes and meals and even to the town square where we bought yarn for crocheting vests and Manske rolls (which we considered the world's most wonderful cinnamon rolls) and everything else we needed to survive our years in school, and I remember thinking it was just the price I paid for going to college; in fact, the hills, the hours I spent on the Star, and the lack of spending money since mine all went to paying for school left me in the best physical shape of my life, although I often felt as if the walking I did was probably enough to take care of the rest of it.

Today, it all looked so much smaller. I wouldn't have wanted to walk from the current journalism building up the hill to my dorm, but in the long run, it wouldn't have been much different from the walk I used to make. Looking from the Star offices toward downtown didn't make me eager to make that walk with the heavy bags I saw kids carrying today (I hardly carried anything when I was in school), but aside from the hills, it was really only a few short blocks. I don't know how my heart would deal with my old routine today, but maybe just the feeling that it was home made me think nothing was much more than a heartbeat away.

Best of all, Don and Jane are here, and for a little while this evening, they both were just a heartbeat away. I should see them both tomorrow, but tonight I'm already thrilled that I am here.