I served on the Daily 49er staff from 1983-85 in several capacities: reporter, news editor and editor in chief. Diversity of experience was the norm at that time in the newsroom; we regularly switched positions each new semester in order to learn new skills. Just about everyone I worked with then carried those skills into a newsroom and continue in successful journalism careers.
I like to think the Daily 49er under my editorship was relevant, informative, entertaining and, in some way, made campus life better for our fellow students.
Coverage ran from the usual issues of a large university community—problems with course registration, battles between the Associated Student Union and the administration, crime on campus, etc.—to the extraordinary. I recall a series of articles we did about the Child Development Center on campus regarding how the children were supervised.
We also covered the ongoing immigration issues of Cal State Long Beach students from Iran. We were still fresh from the hostage crisis in the later 1970s, and nationwide Iranian nationals were deported, including many students. These stories drew strong reaction from readers, some who supported deportation and many who did not.
The most important stories we covered, of course, were those that directly impacted the lives of students; some of them are listed above.
CSULB is the largest state university in California; there were more people on campus in the mid-1980s than live in my current hometown today. Those not-so-exciting stories about problems in course registration truly prepared Daily 49er staffers for the bread-and-butter issues they cover today in towns and cities all over the world.
The technology of the time was archaic compared to today! It still makes me laugh. My generation used the first “computers” in the newsroom.
They were glorified typewriters with a tiny display screen—think first Apple computers. We were grateful to be able to write a story and save it to a 5 1/4 floppy disk, but I can’t tell you how many times we “lost” stories on deadline. We also had an old Associated Press teletype machine in the newsroom, bells and all. The floppy disks went to the typesetters for output on film, which was pasted, using hot wax, onto layout boards. It probably took us a good five to six hours in production to get the newspaper ready for the drive over to the printer in Los Alamitos.
The two memories of the Daily 49er newsroom that really resonate with me are of the fellow students with whom I enjoyed working so many long, long days and nights, and of the teachers who cared enough to make sure we were prepared for professional newsrooms. I fondly remember professors Dan Garvey, Ben Cunningham and “Wild” Bill Shelton, who regularly ripped us a new one if we misused AP style or forgot the name of a Cabinet secretary, and production supervisors Carol Hendricks and Jamie Eggleston. We never sat in a class with Carol or Jamie, but they taught us every night by challenging our perceptions and forcing us always to do better.
After graduation I worked as an editor at the Long Beach Press-Telegram and Los Angeles Times, where I was a news editor on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Metro staff until 1996, when I moved to Massachusetts with my family. Ever since, I’ve worked in educational advancement, although I’ve also taught journalism at Wheaton College and currently serve as ombudsman of the Cape Cod Times. I am also an administrator at Falmouth Academy.
