14
I SPENT MORE time working on the Daily Illini than I did studying. After selling the Spectator, I walked in cold and began writing a weekly column. I became the news editor, and then was appointed editor in my senior year. I can’t say it was the best job I ever had, but… well, yes I can. It was the best job I ever had. The Daily Illini had been from the earliest days a commercial enterprise and not a “student activity.” It was owned by the Illini Publishing Company, which also owned the yearbook and a campus low-power radio station. That was a great convenience in shielding the university from lawsuits and scandals involving the undergraduate editors.
The paper occupied the basement of Illini Hall at Wright and John. It was in every sense a real newspaper, published five days a week on an ancient Goss rotary press that made the building tremble. Something was forever lost from newspapers when their buildings stopped trembling. We had three union employees, two printers and Phil Roach the pressman, and we knew they were union men because there was a shop grievance approximately weekly. These usually involved disagreements between editors and printers about what could and would be set into type, and how. There were some tense moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Dave Harvey, a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, wrote a column questioning the facts we had been presented. Harvey later became a famous sociologist. I don’t remember if the column was printed. What I remember is Orville Moore, the shop foreman, astonishing us with his vocabulary in denouncing it.
Our words were set into hot lead on Linotype machines. Pages were composed on heavy metal tables called turtles. Orville and the student night editor leaned over them facing each other, both reading backward, one reading upside down. Each page had to be justified to fit perfectly within the form, and this usually meant words had to be trimmed. This Orville did with a steel tool that cut them from the lead. All cuts had to come from the ends of paragraphs, which could lead to puzzling lapses. Resetting a shorter version of a story was forbidden under Orville’s interpretation of the union rules.
I never saw Orville Moore without a cigar clamped into his teeth. He taught us as much about journalism as many of our professors, and it was all practical. He helped us understand that a newspaper, apart from being a stanchion of democracy, was a mass-produced product for sale at retail. It had to be produced on time and on budget, and the meaning of “deadline” took on terror when Orville would announce he would simply fill up remaining holes with something from the “overset,” stories set in type that had never run. This never happened. We were convinced Orville would choose the most embarrassing overset at hand, for example heat wave coverage in the middle of January.
The paper ran twelve to twenty pages most days, tabloid. The press printed one color, black, on huge rolls of white newsprint, but for an ad, a Christmas shopping issue or homecoming, Phil Roach would add red, green, or the school colors, orange and blue. This he did with an intimate understanding of the linear path the paper traveled through the print rollers. He would map his strategy to assign a red roller or a green roller, say, and then suspend himself above the presses in an aluminum lawn chair and paint the colored inks on those rollers with a brush. Wade Freeman, the editor before me, told Phil that if he ever fell into the press we could also hope for shit brown, which was what his daring scheme was full of.
We had an old-fashioned semicircular copy editors’ desk in the newsroom, a strange assortment of desks and typewriters, and an office up front ruled by Paul McMichael, the long-suffering publisher hired by the publishing company. He kept the books, handled the billing, settled disputes, and was the adult in the room. I have no idea how many speeches he had to listen to about freedom of the press, yet he tended to be permissive.
As editor I was a case study. I was tactless, egotistical, merciless, and a showboat. Against those character flaws I balanced the gift of writing well, a good sense for page layout, and ability as a talent scout. I took special satisfaction out of finding gifted writers and giving them a column. I found the young Liz Krohne, who was ahead of the curve on radicalism. I made a math student named Ron Szoke our film critic and learned as much from him as from anyone since. I recruited another mathematician, Paul Tyner, to write columns, and he was as funny as S. J. Perelman. He wrote a column based on his experiences as a waiter at the campus Spudnut Shop. Noticing a sign saying “No Reading,” he asked the owner if that was appropriate for university students. “Somebody could start reading some book and never stop,” the owner said. “My motto is, get ’em in, give ’em their Spuddies, and get ’em out again.” This inspired a celebrated Tyner column titled “The University is a Spudnut Shop.”
Tyner fascinated me. He wore his hair like the Beatles before they did. He was handsome in the Jean-Paul Belmondo manner. He largely supported himself, he said, by hustling pool in the Union’s billiards room. On every men’s room wall on campus he wrote: Autofellatio is its own reward. While getting a Ph.D. in math he sold a short story to the New Yorker and later expanded it into a novel, Shoot It, published by Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown. He was a romantic, the lover of spectacular women. He often joined one of the communal tables at the Capitol Bar on Green.
Before dawn one morning in Chicago some years later, he hammered on my door and entered drunk, carrying a bottle of vodka. “I need a place to drink this,” he said. I let him in and went back to bed. In the morning I left him unconscious on my sofa. At some later period—months? years?—he reappeared in my life on a Saturday afternoon when I was sitting at O’Rourke’s, my favorite Chicago bar, dazed with drink.
“Roger,” he said, “look at you. You’re drunk in the afternoon. That’s not good. It means you’re an alcoholic.” He told me he was an alcoholic and now was sober through Alcoholics Anonymous. He must have given me the kind of information any AA member would have shared, but I was in no condition to listen. I later learned that Tyner, still sober, had married and was working in San Francisco. The time frame for all this is hazy. At some later point I learned he was dead. On a flight from London to San Francisco, Paul had inexplicably started drinking again. He continued for a week and then shot himself in the head. I still have his novel on my shelf.
Another columnist I recruited was a philosophy student named Robert Jung. He was a good-looking, quietly funny guy whose column was somber and poetic about the big picture, which for him zoomed out to Existence itself. My sports editor was Bill Nack, the future Sports Illustrated star, who was no less poetic, and they spent hours huddled in the corner discussing deep matters. Jung’s weekly column showed a mastery of the personal essay; he led you inexorably to a conclusion you didn’t see coming. One of the professors who passed him on his Ph.D. oral exam was Frederick Will, a student of Wittgenstein and the father of George Will. Fred was as far to the right as Robert was to the left.
Nack followed me as editor. I stayed as a graduate student for the rest of 1964 and often saw Bill and Robert drinking coffee and explaining the universe to each other. Jung got his Ph.D., married, and found a job in the Philosophy Department at Southern Methodist. He stayed in contact; he was doing seminars around Dallas on existentialism. One day I got a call from Bill. Jung had checked into a hotel near Dallas to explore the border between life and death. As Bill understood it, he tried bleeding himself slowly. He was calling 911 when he passed out and died.
The DI was a real paper. We were a member of the Associated Press. We ran Walter Lippmann once a week and the comic strip Pogo every day. We had an ad department. We paid salaries; a night editor made three dollars, which would buy you a good dinner. Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, spoke on campus, and I interviewed him and asked if the DI could syndicate the column he wrote for the party newspaper, New America. This cost us two dollars a week. I got the impression he was not widely syndicated; once a week I received a letter from Thomas with a carbon copy of his new column. I ran conservative columns by Dave Young, later the transportation editor of the Chicago Tribune, and Bob Auler, who stayed in Urbana, opened a law office, and became famous for suing the university on behalf of athletes. For a time he owned the Champaign-Urbana minor league baseball team. We’re still good friends. He calls me the Mad Bomber and I call him a Fascist Baby Eater.
As editor I loved to cover campus characters, and one was well known to us, because he had found a bedroom for himself in the small room where lead was remelted into bars for the Linotypes. This was an earnest young man named Richard McMullen, who helped circulate the paper and explained he could sustain life on almost no money by eating gelatin dissolved in water and an occasional apple. He walked the campus with a billboard proclaiming “Good News for Jews” and was arrested by the campus police for handing out the Bible in front of the University Library. The Daily Illini found this an outrage against freedom of speech, and I addressed a rally on the steps of the auditorium, using a battery-operated bullhorn. Effortlessly changing from activist to journalist, I pitched the story to the Chicago Sun-Times and had my first byline in the paper, on page one.
I bought the paper on November 22, 1963, and read my front-page story again and again while sitting in the Reading Room of the Illini Union. The sound of a radio broke the silence, where not even music had been heard, with the news from Dallas. I ran to our basement office. Everyone was there. On the radio, WILL, the university radio station, was playing Beethoven’s Fifth.
In a dramatic gesture, I swept everything off the top of my desk into a large wastebasket and made it a command post. I deployed Dave Reed, the executive editor, to write a story of the mood of the campus, which he could have written by simply looking around. The news editor John Keefe went to interview Norman Graebner, the famous history professor, who had just been scheduled to address the campus that night from the auditorium stage. He was considered a Great Man. I telephoned Revilo P. Oliver, the classics professor notorious for writing an article in the John Birch Society magazine calling Kennedy a communist. There was no answer.
John Schacht, the journalism professor who was chairman of the Illini Publishing Company board, made his only visit in history to our offices and handed me a headline that would be a perfect fit in two lines of Railroad Gothic: NATION MOURNS SLAIN LEADER. Unable to improve on it, although I resented his trespass, I took it back to Orville Moore, who regarded it from under his green eyeshade and asked himself, “Where the hell is our Second Coming of Christ font?”
Kennedy had campaigned from the auditorium steps in autumn 1960, and I had run breathless beside his open convertible. An assassination was unthinkable then. In a second in 1963 America was turned upside down. Dave Reed sat in the copy desk slot. Our lead story would be from the AP. I went to the Capitol and ate dinner with Bob Jung, Bill Nack, Paul Tyner, Bob Auler, and others. It was as if someone had called a meeting. The bar was jammed, but hushed. At three a.m. I was back at the paper to watch Phil Roach push a button and start the press. The nation mourned its slain leader.