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My old college newspaper, the Mirror, is again in trouble with the administration of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
Chad Blair, the editor, says the Mirror often prints stories and commentary that displease Robert Dickeson, UNC president. Besides that, UNC officials could end up in court if anyone should sue over something written, edited and published by students.
Dickeson apparently wants to solve these real and imagined problems by putting the Mirror under the university administration or journalism department, rather than student editors, even though students have run the paper for years.
It would be nice to say that I worked my way through school at the Mirror, but that isn't true. I never got through school. Although I drew a monthly paycheck from the Mirror off and on from l969 to 1974, and was the editor in l970-71, it never seemed like work. The Mirror was sheer, undiluted fun.
In l970, when I was news editor and Rita Johnson was editor, we ran into a slow Sunday with no news for the Monday paper. So she ran a story supposedly based on the rantings of two hitchhikers.
They explained how hippies were going to settle in unpopulated Wyoming and use their votes to expropriate the state's oil industry, ban the carrying of loaded firearms by drunks in pickups and otherwise disrupt the traditions of the Equality State.
Some crew-cut student from Casper read this. He called the Casper Star-Tribune to see what they knew about this subversive plot. Monday evening an editor there called the Mirror. I read the story to him. He didn't ask if it was true, so I didn't tell him. After his story came out in Casper, the Associated Press picked it up.
Before that week ended, the Denver papers carried sensational warnings of the impending invasion of Wyoming by unshorn degenerates, and the canard had spread to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
My tenure as editor was less spectacular in that my major story was true. Darrell Holmes, then president of UNC, was applying for the presidency of San Diego State College in California. Holmes hadn't told anyone, not even his vice presidents, that he was looking for other work. People had trouble believing that, yet they gladly swallowed the Wyoming hippie hoax. There must be a lesson in that.
I did learn about threatened libel suits when I was
editor. At least once a month, I received a certified
letter from a prominent Greeley law firm. A state senator
did not like being called a yellow dog,
and wanted
my assets. A dean was distressed by a story which pointed
out that only 60 percent of the courses listed in the UNC
catalog had actually been offered during the preceding two
years. A store wanted some Mirror money because its phone
number, instead of a rock drummer's, appeared in a
classified ad: stud service. Registered Mayflower
descendant.
Our attorney took care of such threats; we never paid anyone anything and never went to court. If the Mirror wasn't nailed for libel then, I can't imagine how it could ever be successfully sued.
But editing the Mirror is like being Cinderella. Your time of glory runs out. When you have to enter the Real World and look for a job, having the Mirror on your resume does you about as much good as a dishonorable discharge from the Army.
Editors of the college papers in Boulder and Fort Collins always seemed to go on to the metro Denver papers, or at least small-city dailies. Mirror editors generally landed at remote weeklies -- if they were lucky.
My Mirror experience was so valuable that I was able to work my way up from extractor boy to full washman in an industrial laundry, where my educated back lifted 10,000 pounds of sheets every shift. Lance Ritchlin, one of my Mirror successors, got into an exciting career as an installer of tile window sills. B.J. Plasket, another successor, drove a truck in Commerce City after his graduation. He picked up dog carcasses and hauled them to a rendering plant.
So if President Dickeson has a problem with the editor of the Mirror, he doesn't need to clamp down now. All he has to do is wait a few years and check on the editor's fate. It should be satisfaction enough for Dickeson to be sitting in a comfortable office while the retired Mirror editor is washing clothes, window sills or wrestling with dead dogs
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