Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday two weeks ago in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the third part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form.

In case you missed Part 2, Chapter 1:
Musical Chairs and The Summer of ’79

Chapter 2: The Pioneer — To Print or Not to Print

by Glynn Wilson

When I first stepped into a college classroom it was a true revelation. I noticed right away there were no bars on the windows or fences surrounding the property. There was no assistant principal watching from the roof, making sure no one left campus for lunch — or Tom Foolery.

When you make it to college, the schedule is not constrained to an 8 in the morning jump-start and a 3 in the afternoon cookie. Up on college hill, you could come and go as you pleased, even sign up for any course you wanted to take — at any time of the day or night.

And no one yelled at you for smoking. In fact, in those days, you could smoke right in the classroom while the professor lectured. You could bring your own portable ashtray to class. Sometimes the professor smoked too. I thought that was pretty cool.

Unlike my experience in high school, where let’s just say I was considered something of an outlaw or a rebel, I took to college life like a wood duck takes to water. I was a tad older than some of the freshmen, but still young enough to fit right in.

I met incredible English teachers who opened my eyes to the beauty and power of American and English literature. One professor was close to a surviving member of the Faulkner family from Mississippi, so I read more than my share of William Faulkner. She came to speak to us one day, so I got to meet Faulkner’s granddaughter, I believe she was. It’s hard to remember for sure.

I soaked up American history like a sponge absorbs salt water, and even got up the courage doing book reviews with my history professor to make a public speech. In political science, I remember making the highest score in the class on the final exam, a perfect hundred out of 100 on a test with a hundred multiple-choice questions. In fact, if memory serves, I also got the bonus points, so my final score was higher than 100. Needless to say I got the highest A+ in the class.

Biology was not my best subject, but I loved it anyway. In Physical Science I learned the most important thing was to get a handle on a “concept” of how the natural world worked in order to get a firmer grasp on the world. Memorizing all the little details to pass a test was not what mattered, in other words. Understanding the big picture was the key. Seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. I think that has helped me in synthesizing information and spotting broader trends ever since. Some people get hung up obsessing about the details. I look for the big picture.

Understanding algebra was difficult, not being a fan of math homework. In fact, I’ve never liked writing with a lead pencil, I think because I associate it with math. But somehow I squeaked through the required algebra course.

I also took typing and made a C, but by dog I learned how to type, a skill that would come in handy later.

I would sit for hours on one of the benches on campus and study the course catalog, plotting my future and figuring out what to study next. It was a two-year college, so the course offerings were limited, compared to what I would encounter later in Tuscaloosa and beyond. But I started trying to figure out what degree I could hold in my hands at the end of two year’s time.

I had always liked reading and writing, and they offered several journalism courses in the catalog. Plus, they offered a degree to go along with them called an Associate in Science degree with a specialization in print journalism. It seemed like a cut above the general liberal arts degree, the Associate in Arts, and my thinking was it might lead to a job as a writer. I had already figured out there was not much of a financial future in poetry. So I went to meet the professors in the communications department.

It was there I met a funny-looking fellow by the name of Jerry Hammond, who sported a beak of a nose and drank vodka in his coffee cup even in the morning in class. He was something of a genius. He was not such a great classroom lecturer in front of a group, but catch him one-on-one and he seemed to know everything about journalism and photography, as well as the world at large.

Glynn Wilson

The first print I ever made in a dark room, 1981

I took every course he offered and made nothing but A’s.

For his photography class, his specialty, the first picture I developed and printed in a dark room on the first roll of film I shot with my first 35 mm camera, a Pentax K1000, was a photograph of the University of Arkansas cheerleaders at the Liberty Bowl game at Legion Field. Hammond was prepared to laugh at me for botching it on my first try. He looked over my shoulder as the image emerged on the paper in the chemical tray, trying to tell me not to get discouraged when I didn’t get it right the first time. But as the picture came into view, it was perfect. The focus was sharp, the composition just right. And the exposure came out of the enlarger exactly right. A perfect print.

I saved it in an old scrapbook, not knowing how it would ever be used in the future. Now I know why it was important. Luckily, I also left it in the fixer long enough for it to survive to this day. I would be hard-pressed to find the negative.

Hammond couldn’t believe it, but by the end of the two years, he wrote me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship to study journalism at Troy State University. I was offered the scholarship, but it was my dream to attend the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. They had a much better-known journalism program with state-of-the-art computer equipment at the time.

I sent in my application and the letters of recommendation from Hammond, one of my English professors, and an old English teacher from high school. Even though I was not considered a stand-out in high school, as much due to my loathing of math as anything else, she was impressed with my work at Jefferson State Community College, where I actually started a campus newspaper that is still being produced today.

My name never appeared in a published version of The Pioneer masthead, but I am the founder as sure as it is still in print. In my second year in the journalism program, we were producing a little newspaper for class to publish our work and generate some clippings or clips we could use later to show newspaper editors when applying for jobs. I was not satisfied with the situation and decided to try to start a real paper on campus.

Here’s where the first lesson in dysfunctional democracy comes in.

I recruited a bunch of other students who shared my interest in starting a paper. Professor Hammond really didn’t want anything to do with it, since he had been involved in a student paper in the past and got in trouble for it. It was ignominiously forced out of business when the editor got mad at the college administration for something, I can’t remember what. In trying to live by the old adage, “If you can’t think of anything good to say, say nothing at all,” he published a lead editorial on the editorial page saying simply that about the administration, leaving the rest of the space blank and white.

Since Hammond refused to be our faculty adviser, we recruited an English professor who had been a copy editor at The Birmingham News for a while. Her name was Mildred Kuester, and boy did she turn out to be a bitch and a bad choice.

Co-editor Scott Hyche and I found an empty office in the student center to work out of and dug up a few typewriters on which to produce stories. We had no computers then. We even got some students to sell advertising.

We also obtained $500 in start-up funding from the Student Government Association, in which I also served as a senator. That turned out to be our first mistake. Co-mingling government and the press can have its drawbacks, although there is a long history of that in American journalism, I would later find out.

In any event, we all started working on stories and planning the first issue. By the end of the fall quarter, we had it all together. We took it to a printer in Trussville who published a weekly newspaper there, and got his help doing the layout and paste-up.

Then we made our second mistake.

We took the final galley proof of the newspaper to show the president of the college and she was none too happy. We found out our faculty adviser had gone behind our backs and talked her into killing the issue, because she did not have total say-so on the content. We were planning a story about the college bookstore manager who had been accused of embezzling funds. My first investigative story was about to give the college a public black eye. Whoops!

Along with the college president, the student government adviser asked us to resign as editors. We refused.

We threatened to go off campus and publish it as an alternative paper, but the entire staff decided to just walk away and not help the adviser put another paper together the next quarter. We felt double-crossed. Too bad there was no such thing as the Internet or the Web or blogging software in those days. We could have let them have it.

The saga ended with a write up in The Birmingham News, however, that ran under a Shakespearian headline, something like: “To print or not to print, that is the question for the new college paper.”

The next quarter, I just concentrated on making the best grades possible and getting my resume together to apply at four-year schools. I finished with a solid B-average, 3.10 out of 4.

I also got to live another dream — to play college sports.

I had been practicing with the college tennis team for a couple of years as a walk-on, but was never offered a spot on the team or a scholarship. But one of the young players quit before the spring season, and the legendary coach offered me a spot on the team.

Coach Bal Moore’s teams had won the two-year college state championships for the previous decade, and he recruited players from all over the world. There were players from South Africa and Canada, and I got to take them all on. By the end of that season, I could beat them all and got to play one match on the number one doubles team. We won, but unfortunately, the team came in second in the state championship playoffs. On the way home, Coach Moore stopped the van and threw the second-place trophy in the Locust Fork River. I guess he lived by the slogan, “winning is not everything, it’s the only thing.”

I wonder if that trophy is still out there somewhere?

One night the investigative reporter and syndicated columnist legend Jack Anderson came to speak on campus, along with a panel of other local journalists, including an editor from The Birmingham News. I was impressed with Anderson, but not the editor. That night I asked my first question in an open forum in public as a reporter. It was a bit nerve-racking and scary, but it would give me courage to develop a habit of it later in my career.

I honestly don’t remember exactly what I asked Jack Anderson, but I remember the subject had to do with the definition of freedom of the press and was most likely related to whether students should be allowed the freedom to publish what they found out, no matter what the college administration thought. Anderson, as I recall, had a pretty sweeping and sympathetic opinion on the subject. But the editor for the News had a view I found shocking at the time. He used some version of the quotation about freedom of the press being reserved for those who own one, a printing press, that is. And he said it was up to the owner, the publisher, to decide what makes it in the paper.

Now anyone who has followed the coverage by the Birmingham paper in recent years on the issue of the Bush Justice Department and the alleged bribery case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman will know immediately what I’m talking about. I will save a more detailed discussion of journalism objectivity for a later chapter, but let’s just say the term freedom of the press is relative — to who owns the press.

That’s one of the most beautiful and fulfilling things about publishing with blogging software on the Web as opposed to working for a corporate newspaper. Online, freedom of the press really rings true.

A few months later I would graduate and move out of the suburbs to the rural campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the Alabama Crimson Tide and the legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. For the next two years, it would be a hell of a fun ride. I was about to walk into a campus newsroom and become one of the first generation of reporters to train on and write stories on computers, rather than typewriters.

That experience would prove critical later on down the road in the era of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which is where this story is leading: In the end, I will be making a larger point about the power of the Web Press.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 2:42 am and is filed under Making Democracy Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.