For tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun

The Beatles

In the summer of 1974 a group of friends and I put out a newspaper at the University we were all attending. I’ve been thinking about those times lately since it’s 2024 and 50 years have passed since I made those wonderful memories. I have never forgotten that experience.

I had moved in the summer of 1973 after graduating that May from the University of New Orleans with an English degree and a determination that I was going to make journalism my career. I rented a furnished room and an old suburb of the city near the university, and started taking classes in news writing, journalism law, copy editing, and like so that I could prepare for work on a newspaper. I had no previous experience, having written only one or two guest comumns for the student newspaper in New Orleans, where I tended undergrad college and got my degree.
What transpired over the next year and a half would decidedly set me on a newspaper course and a series of future jobs that I loved doing, not for the salary or status, or anything like that, but because I genuinely felt I had found what I was suited to do. That understanding came to me most emphatically during the golden Sunmer of 1974, when, under some remarkably “coincidental” circumstances, that group of eight of us came together, and quickly grew dependent on each other in the crucible of late production nights and deadlines on the third floor of the student center where the student newspaper offices and production area were located.

Surrounded by hamburger wrappers, soft drink, cans, coffee, and cigarettes, our small staff manned the clunky computers into which we fed perforated tape to produce the copy and headlines. We then labored to wax and paste up the pages on dummy gallery sheets, feverishly making corrections with exactly knives, bleary-eyed and exhausted, until the final pages were rolled down tight and assembled to be delivered to the printer early the next morning.

I met my two of my once closest friends that summer. He was the editor in chief and his wife worked alongside us. We kept in touch for many years. I’ve visited them on a number of occasions since we moved from the university town. Back in the 1970s we were tight. There was nothing we couldn’t discuss for hours on end. That’s long gone, but how I miss the friendship and the social and intellectual stimulation.

All of us were editors, reporters, and production staff – we did everything it took to put out the paper. During the week we interviewed, made phone calls and wrote our news and feature stories, columns, and editorials. Although we were all journalism novices, we were fiercely laser-focused on our mission that summer.

I had finished my bachelors degree the year before and the others had all been in the military and were in their mid 20s. We all shared a newly found m, deep passion for newspaper work, and we liked each other immensely, from the beginning. We formed an amazing team that set the campus buzzing about this upstart student newspaper filled with investigative stories, in-depth features, commentary, original artwork, creative writing, photography, reviews, and letters to the editor. We were out to make some waves, and, as with so many journalists at the beginning of their careers, we were fearless and ready to ruffle feathers. And that we did.

I had some of my black and white documentary photography published in one issue and wrote lengthy feature stories, as well as some news stories. I couldn’t get enough of it. Each issue was more exciting to work on than the previous one. We’d open the bundles of papers when they arrived back from the printer and exult in our efforts, knowing that several all-nighters had been necessary to get the paper out and distributed on campus by Wednesday.
Every day during the summer I woke up in my big bed in the second-story furnished room I rented thinking about that weeks paper and rushing to get out the door each morning so I could get to the newspaper offices at student center and Immediately we start working on that week’s paper.

All of us felt the same way, and we became so close, so quickly, that it amazed and startled us. We knew that this was something very important and vital, and that we would remember that summer for years to come. There couldn’t be any question about it. We just loved life that summer because we had something we believed in so passionately.

A little while ago in preparation for writing this, I went through a box of our newspapers from that now long past golden era of youth and possibility. They’re 50 years old now, and yellowed with age. And that’s just as it should be. As I looked through them, those days of my youth come back, and I marvel once again at the enthusiasm and idealism, the paper represented and brought out at in us. But perhaps best of all, I made some lifelong friends that summer, and I was changed forever.

Written January 14, 2000

25 years later: Postscript, August 10, 2024

I felt I had to compose and post this entry, drawing upon my memories from both 25 years ago and today, 50 years after a summer cherished and always looked back on fondly. Lots of memories get a bit cloudy over time, but a two-month experience that summer of 1974 never became dimmed with time. Until now.

I’m still tenuously in touch with three of those old friends I’ve known for 50 years. That fact alone is kind of mind-blowing to me. We were planning a reunion, and a few months ago I got really into the possible get-together by sending them an email full of photos from that time, including images of the student newspaper we poured our hearts and souls into. But nothing in return except, “Yeah, let’s get together…Set a day and time.” But it seems now to have all been for naught. It’s past. I have my memories, but I find the intensity is worn off. I’ve always had a tendency to reminisce too much and mistakenly think others share my own reverence for the past and all the experiences and lessons it teaches us.

I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised. I had always built up that summer in my memory and imagination as something too good to be true. Considering the friendless, solitary life I lived as a teenager all the way through high school and college, this coming together of future lifelong friends was an epochal time for me. I opened up. I blossomed. I had to pinch myself that it was real.

But now, decades later I am finally realizing that my view of the experience might have been quite different. I always used that summer as a benchmark of what a truly happy period of life is like.

I still feel that way. But I’ve changed, and they’ve changed. There’s been no more comeraderie and long talks late into the night. While I’ve poured my life out in my online journal for the past 25 years, and although they know about it, there’s been no feedback.

In the past few days, as this summer starts to draw to a close, I realize that I’ve been clinging to the past, wishing I had friends like that now in my old age and retirement. But that’s not the case. Our lives don’t intersect in any meaningful way anymore. It’s still a lifelong friendship because our past times together cemented that. But it’s a friendship in hiding now, and that makes me sad.

Time now to close that chapter in my life and realize that merely holding onto the past, and hoping it somehow comes alive again, rather than cherishing it, is a fool’s game.