From The Daily Californian
From the time I arrived at U.C. Berkeley in the turbulent 1960s, I worked for The Daily Californian. I started in 1967 and continued until 1969, when I got more serious about my academic work. I started as a reporter, worked my way up to night editor and some other editorial positions. I loved it all. On a daily basis, we would come in in the morning, get assignments, go out and cover them, come back and bang out our stories on ancient (even then) typewriters on half-sheets of newsprint, a paragraph to the page, so that editors could easily cut or rearrange the stories.
When the copy editors finished, the managing editor would mark up the issue, determining the placement of all of the editorial content. From there, it would go to the night editor and staff who would write headlines to fit the spaces allotted. We would then pile into the staff car and ferry everything down to our "Night Office" located at the printers off Shattuck Avenue. The printers would set everything in hot lead on Linotype machines. Next, they would lock up the galleys and take proofs by rolling ink over the forms and pressing sheets of newsprint to them. We would grab these and proofread them, then return them to the printers for corrections. When the corrections were done, the forms would be locked up and transported to the presses in Oakland.
There were many nights when the night staff would follow the trucks to Oakland and monitor the process at the printers. We would watch as the hot metal forms were converted to mats that were put onto the gigantic presses. Finally, the presses would begin to roll, and we were often there to grab the first pages, literally hot off the press. Then we'd go out for breakfast and return to campus.
You can see why I needed to leave the paper eventually so that I could actually start going to classes and learning something! I was very fortunate to be able to complete my Bachelor's Thesis under the great professor and author Thomas Flanagan, and graduate with honors in 1971.
Although I include the articles I wrote here, there was a lot of work as an editor that was very exciting too, but more difficult to document. For example, during one campus disturbance we got news that police were massing at Golden Gate Park. Wait, what? That didn't even make sense. But then we got the correction: the police were massing at Golden Gate Fields! Soon we were in the midst of chaos and teargas as students forcefully make their opinions known. And we were there in the thick of it to document what happened. Sometimes I would find myself in a location with a Time Magazine reporter on one side of me and a reporter from The New York Times on my other side. Heady days!
This page is currently under construction. As I add articles, perhaps I will be able to record some additional memories of those interesting times.
