Alyssa GregoryIt was 1976 and for as long as anyone at Washington University could remember, Student Life was under the domination and control of the Revolutionary Student Brigade. Like a rare Ming vase, the editor in chief slot was carefully handed down from one student disciple of Chairman Mao Tse-tung to the next. While other student newspapers struggled with Republican or Democratic ideologies, our editorial page was decidedly “worker.”
But through some quirk of fate at the end of the 1975-76 school year, there was no heir to the emperor’s throne. The lower level editors aligned with the Washington University Chinese Communists had all flunked out, or perhaps they were on a pilgrimage.
The beneficiaries of this changing-of-the-guard were Greg Freeman and me. We were co-editors in chief in waiting, ready to take on the 1976-77 year.
Greg was an intelligent and gregarious junior with a reporter’s eye on life. If he were born a racehorse his name would have been “Relentless.” He was a young black man from St. Louis who knew he was going to be a famous newspaperman in his hometown, and that was all there was to it. Greg knew the politics of St. Louis and the politics of (don’t call it) Wash U.
I was strictly New York then. White, Jewish and one of those East Coasters who had come here to tolerate St. Louis for a few years in revenge for not getting into the University of Pennsylvania. To show you just how far Student Life had fallen, the Mao editors reached down into the cesspool of student journalism-the sports department-to find me. When word came that the Revolution was over and Student Life (a.k.a. the Most-Red Newspaper on Campus) was being liberated, I was eagerly recounting an intramural basketball thriller between ZBT and the Phi Delts. My domain was the last page of the paper.
Greg and I hit it off famously. He was a man possessed to change Student Life’s editorial policies and I took on the day-to-day assemblage of the news, sports, features and photography. He found a student voice for our newspaper and I found great editors and surrounded myself with them.
Among my treasured possessions to this day is a bound volume of every issue we published that year. When asked to write this column to commemorate the 125th anniversary issue, I pulled out that book-the largest if not the most scholarly work I own. As an avid reader of the current Student Life I was struck by how much things change and stay the same.
Our first issue was published on Aug. 31, 1976 and the lead story trumpeted a shortage of student housing. Students also were complaining about a lack of parking. That seems familiar. It was also news that a brand new campus radio station, KWUR, was transmitting 24/7, though of course the term “24/7” had not reached popular culture yet. Left Bank Books and Art Mart were regular advertisers, like now, but ads for cutting-edge technology lured students to buy the latest calculators, not computers.
Our best issue was published on April 29, 1977. It also happened to be our last issue and we wanted to go out with the proverbial bang. The three stories on the front page (we were a tabloid then) all were hard hitting investigative pieces we had been working on for some time.
In the lead story, we had used the newly enacted Freedom of Information Act (which has become a staple for U.S. news-gathering organizations) to obtain the Washington University federal tax return and published the names, pictures and salaries of the highest paid WU employees-all doctors at the Medical School. This news may seem tame by today’s “full disclosure” standards, but in 1977 it caused quite a stir.
The second front-page article reported that WU’s nationally recognized darling of liberal, environmental issues, Barry Commoner, had accepted $49,000 from the government of Iran-a dictatorship with a long history of human rights abuses. According to the article, Commoner could not be reached for comment, but Chancellor William Danforth, to his credit, took the heat in stride. He said, “It used to be said that if you went to Iran you couldn’t walk around the streets without seeing several university presidents over there with their hats out trying to money through this program or that program.”
Dr. Danforth was always there for Student Life, both in times of pride and times of embarrassment.
The final front-page piece detailed two potential conflicts of interest that existed on the WU Board of Trustees. It seems that McDonnell Douglas Corporation (Boeing) and Interco Corporation had given WU real estate, presumably for the tax write-off, and WU leased it back to the companies at what was hinted to be a favorable rate. The McDonnell Douglas and Interco CEOs were on the board. Dr. Danforth denied the conflict of interest, stating that the two CEOs were not involved in the decision to lease the properties back to the companies.
The 1976-77 Student Life also made some journalistic history in other, more whimsical ways.
In November 1976, Doonesbury was easily the most popular comic strip in the United States-at least among young readers. Many newspapers had moved the strip off the comic pages and on to the editorial page. Suffice it to say that Doonesbury was big, with a price tag to match, and it was out of the financial reach of all but the largest paper in each city. Here, it was the private domain of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
But on Nov. 15, 1977, Doonesbury’s author, Gary Trudeau, pushed the envelope of family newspapering. In his series of strips for that week, he had two of his fictional comic characters who were not married to each other (now get this!) in bed together. This was such a steep departure from morality that the Post-Dispatch, and most other daily newspapers, refused to run the strips. Their refusal became national news.
You might find it surprising to learn that then, as today, Student Life had a slightly different approach to morality. The entire week’s Doonesbury strips were smuggled out of the Post-Dispatch by a reporter there who will be my “Deep Throat” to my grave. (Note to current students: “Deep Throat” is a reference to an anonymous White House inside source who helped the Washington Post break stories that led to the resignation of President Nixon. See your history books).
Since Student Life only published on Tuesdays and Fridays, Greg and I decided to run the whole week’s strips on Tuesday, days before their licensed publication in the newspapers that actually paid for them. This bold move was quickly followed by a lawsuit-threatening call to Student Life from King Syndications. Luckily, the best defense to any threatened lawsuit is insolvency.
Later in the year we were the only newspaper in the entire Midwest to publish verbatim the highly offensive comments of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. The statements got him fired and got us double the circulation that week. We “exposed” a small football coaches’ junket at a time when all other sports at WU were being drastically cut. We covered the annual tuition increase announcement. We were kings of our domain.
I have not had another year like my senior year at WU and likely will not ever have so much fun again.
I have been faithfully reading Student Life since those years, and what has not changed is the commitment to excellence by the volunteer corps of editors and reporters. I will always feel like a small part of Student Life. Yes, we miss the mark sometimes, but sometimes we get it just right, and that feeling lasts forever.
Mitch Margo, Student Life co-editor in chief in 1976-77, is a lawyer in St. Louis, Mo. He is the current president of the WUSMI board of directors.