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Making the News
They lost sleep, ate badly, sometimes got into trouble. But as the Northeastern News celebrates its seventy-fifth year, current and former staffers say it’s always been a labor of love.
By Karen Feldscher
They remember the long nights—boy, were they long! At two, three, four in the morning, they’d squint at the words crowded together on the pages, hoping to catch all the typos, running on flat Cokes and stale Doritos. Bleary-eyed the next morning, stumbling into class, they sometimes wondered why they’d bothered.
But then the newspapers would appear in neat bundles. They’d slip one out, catch a whiff of the newsprint and fresh ink. They’d read what they’d written over the past week about tuition increases, co-op wages, financial aid, the football team. And they’d think: This is why I do it.
Talk to the men and women who have worked for the Northeastern News since its genesis seventy-five years ago, and you’ll find a crew of people still brimming with passion for getting the news out. There’s Nat Hentoff — regarded with something approaching awe by those who came after him —who quit his post in 1943 rather than submit to then president Carl Ell’s demand that he stop printing controversial articles.
There’s Jack Driscoll, who went on to become Boston Globe editor-in-chief. David Haskell, who can’t imagine retiring, even after forty years of covering New England news for United Press International. Margie Peters, who had the time of her life working for the News (though she never did learn how to crop a photo), then went on to become a topflight writer/producer for prime-time television. Martin Beiser, who, when asked if he likes being managing editor at GQ magazine better than being managing editor at the News, says, after a pause, “The pay is considerably better.”
These are just a few of the dedicated folks who spent huge chunks of their college years chasing down leads, editing verbose copy, sizing headlines, and, yes, losing lots of sleep. Sometimes watching their schoolwork suffer. More often, watching their hard work pay off with good journalism jobs.
“The News was the best fraternity on campus,” says Dominic Cerulli, who served as News editor-in-chief in 1951 and went on to become the New York editor of the jazz magazine Downbeat, handle public relations for three record companies, and serve as creative director at several advertising agencies. “Everybody was close, and everybody was crazy about one thing: journalism.”
The Beginning
The News was born on February 24, 1926, the product of a merger between two existing campus papers, the Tech and the Bulletin. The Tech had reported weekly on news of Northeastern’s School of Engineering since 1920; prior to that it was called the Co-op. The Bulletin had been published monthly by the School of Business Administration.
In its early days, the News was pretty tame, even quaint. Front pages were filled with news of the junior prom or the sophomore class dance. The lead story might be about the annual pole rush (when scores of undergraduates raced toward a greased pole and tried to climb over each other to get to the top), student-council elections, or the latest Silver Masque production. Sports were covered extensively (as they would be for years to come). Ads urged students to relax at the Huntington Club (the bowling alley/billiards hall a block from the quad), smoke Chesterfields or Old Golds, or rent Stetson hats and tuxes for formal dances. Photos were generally small or not used at all, and page one was sometimes crammed with as many as fifteen articles.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the News remained parochial, reporting mostly noncontroversial campus news. But Hentoff’s attempts to broaden the newspaper’s reach in the early 1940s led to the first, and certainly most legendary, of several run-ins between the News and the Northeastern administration. The episode also signaled the start of the News’s slow but steady march toward near-complete editorial independence.
Hentoff, who became editor-in-chief in September 1943, wrote stories about racism and anti-Semitism in Boston—topics that had never before appeared in News pages. “We had a really good staff of reporters,” recalls Hentoff. “We covered real stuff. Boston was the most anti-Semitic city in the country at the time. We found out that the plant that printed the Northeastern News was also the place that printed a lot of anti-Semitic literature.”
The News’s forays into the outside world were likely an irritant to Ell. But Hentoff thinks what really bothered the president was the paper’s criticism of the university itself.
“We started calling the trustees to see if they had any interest in education or whether they were on the board simply because they had money,” says Hentoff. That did it. Northeastern was on precarious financial grounds in those days, according to former Northeastern history professor William Fowler, and Ell believed that negative publicity—or students who asked provocative questions—could damage the university’s fundraising efforts.
“Ell sent his hatchet man, Dean William White, to say if we didn’t stick to writing about things like the football team, then we’d be out,” Hentoff recalls.
Hentoff, along with most of the News staff, quit in protest. One student agreed to Ell’s terms and stayed on as editor. “There’s always a scab somewhere,” Hentoff grumbles, still disappointed in his former colleague.
Quitting their beloved newspaper left Hentoff and the other News staffers crestfallen. But for Hentoff, there was a silver lining. The Ell fiasco convinced him to stay in journalism (he’d toyed with becoming a professor); he became a prominent jazz critic, Village Voice writer, and syndicated columnist. He also turned into a fierce advocate for the First Amendment. In fact, Hentoff dedicated his first book, The First Freedom, to Ell.
“I’d had no interest in the First Amendment before,” says Hentoff, “but once you experience the effect of having that right taken away from you, you care about it a lot.”
The Best of Times
The News of the 1950s reflected the tone of the decade: earnest and fun-loving. Now and then, the paper touched on general news of the day —communism, the bomb, the beginnings of the space program—but campus news was paramount.
The News wrote about new buildings going up on campus, professors getting grants (a new trend), Carl Ell’s seventieth birthday, the growth of the freshman class, a business recession hurting co-op. A December 1957 front-page article declared that student-council elections had been canceled because of apathy; the accompanying photo showed a sad-looking group of student leaders.
On the editorial page and elsewhere, little could possibly offend. One columnist decried the wads of gum she found in campus drinking fountains. An article covered a rash of lunchroom littering. Occasionally, the newspaper veered toward plain silliness. One tongue-in-cheek story joked about a subway line connecting campus buildings; another waxed over a missing letter “g” in a headline.
A far cry from Woodward and Bernstein. But the student writers and editors were in step with the times, says David Blume, editor-in-chief in 1953, now retired after fifty years in journalism, half of them spent at the Los Angeles Times.
“We didn’t even particularly comment on presidential elections,” says Blume. “We just had the attitude that that was being well covered by others, that people weren’t reading the News to get opinions from those of us who, politically, weren’t even wet behind the ears.”
In those days, the News staff were often involved in other creative pursuits, such as the yearbook, the literary magazine, or the Silver Masque, Northeastern’s acting troupe. In fact, for a couple of years a crew of senior editors were writing original musical comedies. Cerulli would write the book, Blume the music, and the late Bob McLean the lyrics. They even produced a musical about the news business called The Fourth Estate. Sometimes, they pulled zany stunts on campus to, as Cerulli puts it, “manufacture school spirit.”
But in the newsroom, the students were all business. “If you saw us making up the front page, you would say, ‘These people are totally loony,’” says Cerulli. “We wouldn’t permit any tombstones [headlines that bump together]. We would use only certain typefaces. The front page always looked like it had been designed by Matisse.”
“When we were putting out the News, it was like we were putting out the Globe or the Herald,” adds Blume. “We were dead serious. We had great fun doing it, but it was no joke.”
Advising the fledgling journalists through much of the 1950s and the early 1960s was English professor Everett Marston. The staffers had great respect for Marston, who had an office next to the newsroom and was available for advice. “He was knowledgeable, a good psychological leader, very gentle, and he very much allowed us to go our own way,” recalls Blume.
One of the best things about the 1950s, former News staffers agree, was that the combination of working on the student paper and working on co-op often provided a sure meal ticket after graduation. “At the time, Northeastern had almost all the papers locked up,” says Blume. “The Herald and Traveler used Northeastern kids as copy boys or girls. The Globe did, United Press did, and the Boston Post did, too. All the papers were on ‘newspaper row,’ on Washington Street near City Hall. If a kid was any good when he graduated, he went right on to the staff.”
Growing Pains
News editors found themselves in yet another scrape with Ell in the late 1950s. This time it was Jack Driscoll’s turn.
Driscoll had begun working for the paper in 1953 doing rewrites; Blume recalls him as “a nice kid.” Driscoll, for his part, says the News was an important experience in his life because of its high standards and its talented senior editors, who’d cut their teeth at United Press, the Globe, or other news organizations. “I’d done newspaper work before, but I’d seen nothing like the caliber of Dave Blume and Dom Cerulli,” says Driscoll.
In his middler year, Driscoll was editor-in-chief for Division B; his
counterpart in Division A was John Connelly. (For years, the News has used two groups of editors to accommodate the co-op work schedule.) In the summer of 1955, the News pursued a story about the death of Northeastern’s mascot, the real husky that was brought out for special occasions.
“The husky dog had been replaced without anybody’s knowledge,” says Driscoll. “We had done quite a bit of reporting on the story. We found that the dog had been kept in Boston over the summer, where it’s really too hot for a husky, and it had died. We had the story written up for page one, and the page was all made up at the press, in East Boston.
“I was called to the vice president’s office,” Driscoll continues. “It was William White—a wonderful man. But he informed me that we were not to publish the story. When I asked why, he said, ‘Because President Ell said so.’
“I said, ‘Well, technically speaking, you are the publisher, so I don’t really have any control. However, I want to tell you a couple of things. One is, I’m going to resign. Two is, I don’t know if others are going to resign. Three, if you want to run a top college newspaper, you should give scholarships to your editors.” Driscoll also informed White that the story would probably wind up in the Boston papers anyway.
Connelly, Driscoll’s Division A counterpart, also resigned in protest over the decision. So did several other editors. But before they left—ever the professionals—they pulled the dog story from page one and got the paper out on time.
The Boston Post and the Boston Globe both ran the husky story on their front pages, as Driscoll had predicted. And Northeastern began providing stipends for its student editors—even though Driscoll never got to take advantage of them. But he still got to be a journalist, working both on co-op and part-time at the Globe. After a brief stint at the Manchester Union-Leader, he wound up at the Globe for good in 1958, staying thirty-six years, eight as editor-in-chief—another student editor who achieved notable success after being censored by Ell.
Testing the Limits
Given Ell’s distaste for controversy, it’s probably a blessing that he retired in 1959, leaving his successor, Asa Knowles, to deal with the paper during the highly charged years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not that Knowles was any happier with News staffers than Ell was, but—amazingly—he never censored them.
He came close, though, according to David Haskell, editor-in-chief of the News in 1962. “If the administration didn’t want something printed, they let us know,” he says. “They were unhappy with a number of editorials we wrote. For example, we spoke out against a mandatory retirement age for professors. We felt it was an awful waste of potentially good talent. These teachers didn’t stop being smart just because they turned sixty-five.”
Knowles called Haskell into his office to tell him his position was wrong. “It was like a child being chastised by a parent,” Haskell recalls. “I didn’t back off. But we had already made our point. There were no further incidents.”
The latter part of the 1960s would prove a watershed for the Northeastern News, as for other student newspapers across the nation. As society’s anger over the Vietnam War spilled onto college campuses, student reporters covered what they saw: protests, sit-ins, riots, bloodshed.
News reporters went to Washington, D.C., in 1967 to cover an antiwar march, where protesters were teargassed. The paper reported on the Northeastern chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which urged a ban on campus recruiting by companies involved in the war, such as Dow Chemical Company, the makers of napalm.
Other articles covered student efforts to oust ROTC from campus. On the editorial page, the News ran dozens of angry letters each week, about the war, racism, police brutality, the Pill. One editorial demanded, “Legalize pot.” Another: “Amerika—shut it down.”
In September 1968, a front-page photo showed a student burning President Knowles’s written response to a long list of student demands regarding grading policy, student input into tenure decisions, and birth-control information, among other issues. A two-page photo spread in May 1969 covered an SDS sit-in in an Ell Building lounge.
The following month, the News dropped its tabloid form, switching for a couple of months to a magazine-type format; the first cover photo, reflecting the height of the “free love” era, showed the silhouette
of a kissing couple. Subsequent issues featured coeds with flowers in their hair, hanging out during the many moratoriums that kept students protesting on the quad rather than sitting in classrooms.
In fall 1969, the News ran a four-page first-person account of clashes between the Weathermen and the Chicago police. Later, a three-part series reported on Northeastern’s drug culture. When San Francisco State College president S. I. Hayakawa—whose strong opposition to student strikes had made him extremely controversial—spoke at Northeastern in February 1970, the News ran pages and pages about the riots that followed. (During the melee on the quad, a News photographer got thrown through a Frost Lounge window by a policeman; amazingly, he wasn’t hurt.)
And in May of that year, the News published special “strike editions” for four days straight, with extensive coverage of a “night of terror” on Hemenway Street, during which police, on hand to break up student protests, lost control and began beating innocent bystanders.
Martin Beiser, managing editor of the News at the time, remembers that night all too well.
“The News played a critical role in that event,” he recalls. “The police had their little riot at about two a.m. No other newspapers were around. We had reporters and photographers out there, and we got what actually happened.”
In the thick of it all, Beiser’s girlfriend, Kathy Kepner (whom he would later marry), called the mayor’s special assistant—an aspiring politician named Barney Frank—to see if he could call the police off. “He tells her, ‘It’s two a.m., and I’m in my pajamas—what do you want me to do?’” Beiser recalls.
The News coverage of the police brutality on Hemenway Street caught the attention of the New York Times. The local papers didn’t pursue the story, probably because they didn’t want to cross the police, Beiser says. But the Times coverage led to investigations by the state attorney general’s office. “There were hearings and hearings and hearings,” Beiser recalls. “We considered it a major victory.
“What I learned from being in the thick of that,” he adds, “is that even a small truth-telling news organization can make a difference.”
Media Adviser Extraordinaire
Often, after those provocative issues of the News hit the streets, Harvey Vetstein would steel himself, waiting for the inevitable phone call from President Knowles requesting a face-to-face meeting. Adviser to the News from 1966 to 1983 and himself a former News staffer, Vetstein had made it clear when he took the job, at the request of dean of administration Kenneth Ryder (who would later become president), that he wasn’t going to censor the students.
But that didn’t stop Knowles’s famous temper. “Friday morning, my phone used to melt,” he says. “Knowles was politically astute—he knew that other college presidents were getting in trouble for trying to stop student papers. But he wanted to vent. I learned not to go rushing down to see him. I went for a cup of coffee and let him cool off for a little bit. His aides-de-camp would be there cackling when I went in for the slaughter.”
Vetstein didn’t mind taking heat for the students’ coverage of controversial events. For the most part, he saw the students as incredibly dedicated. “They worked long days and nights to put out a paper for the campus,” Vetstein says. “People said they were anti-administration. But they were never anti-Northeastern. They really loved the university, or they would never have taken the time.”
Still, Vetstein was less than pleased when the News “ego-tripped,” as he puts it, or published things that were downright embarrassing. One freshman-orientation issue went over the top. In the recollection of Fowler, the history professor who is now director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the paper was “filled with four-letter words—just raunchy, raunchy, raunchy.” Knowles was furious. “He was actually going to go out, gather up all the newspapers, and burn them,” Fowler recalls. Once again, he called Vetstein to his office and raked him over the coals. “It wasn’t Harvey’s fault,” says Fowler. “But he did talk Knowles out of it.”
Mistakes, Milestones, Marriages, Munchies
Printing an issue full of four-letter words was certainly not the News’s only mistake. It is, after all, a student newspaper, by its very definition a learning experience. Still, that didn’t make Gilbert and Margie Peters feel any better about a mistake the News made in fall 1968.
They’d just gotten married that summer, right after her middler year and his junior year. They’d cut short their honeymoon in Bermuda so they could return to put together the first-ever freshman edition of the News. They sent a rather inexperienced reporter to cover the events of what was called “Black Freshman Week.” She came back and reported that she’d seen a band called Black and Alien at a coffeehouse.
The name struck the Peterses as a bit strange, but they didn’t check it. “We knew there was some anger among blacks,” says Gil. “It sounded like it could be the name of a group.”
But it wasn’t. “First thing the next morning, three very tall angry men show up at my desk,” recalls Margie. “And they say the name of the group was the Bacchanalians.”
“Nothing to do except say all the mea culpas,” says Gil. “Needless to say, we weren’t that great as journalists.”
Still, Northeastern administrators and faculty do credit the News with providing fairly solid coverage of the university over the years. John Curry, president from 1989 to 1996 and an administrator since the early 1960s, says he found the student journalists, particularly the editors, “to be mature and adult.”
“I think it’s a good student paper,” says journalism professor Charles Fountain of today’s News. “They don’t miss much that’s going on on campus, and by and large it’s a very able staff.”
Indeed, the News has won its fair share of awards over the years from college press organizations, including a slew of awards in the 1950s and 1960s—and, more recently, the New England College Newspaper of the Year in 1993 and an award for best nondaily college newspaper in the country in 1996.
For News staffers, the personal benefits of working as student journalists were as compelling as the professional benefits. There were the marriages—the Peterses, Cerulli and Dolores Costa (student office manager at the News in 1952), Beiser and Kepner. And some friendships lasted years after the budding writers and editors parted ways.
It would have been hard not to forge strong bonds, given the amount of time the staff spent together. As Beiser puts it, “This was a special group of people who hung out together, socialized together. It really became the center of my existence at Northeastern. These are people who care about things. They’re passionate, funny, smart, well-read—they’re the kind of people you want to hang out with.”
In every decade, News staffers have had their favorite pastimes, favorite hangouts, favorite foods. Hentoff, Blume, and Cerulli are lifelong jazz fanatics. In the late 1940s, writers and editors would play an almost round-the-clock game of blackjack to fill in the downtimes, says Hentoff. Blume says that, every now and then, he and his colleagues would escape the News office to play a little pool at the YMCA next door.
Haskell, recalling long deadline nights in the early 1960s, says, “Don’t tell anybody, but we’d sip a little juice—rum and pineapple juice.”
The Peterses hung out at the Windsor Tap Room on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and St. Botolph Street, where a Symphony Towers apartment building now stands, downing beers and greasy food. “By the time we finished the paper at four-thirty in the morning,” jokes Gil Peters, “we were sober.”
And, of course, there was the newsroom itself—perpetually grungy, but always home. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the newsroom was on the third floor of the student-center building (now Ell Hall), a few small offices crammed with old desks and typewriters. “We didn’t go anywhere else,” says Blume. “We didn’t use lockers. We’d go there first thing in the morning.”
After the new section of the student center was finished in 1964, the News moved in. In the summer of 1994, while the student center got a makeover, the paper had to camp out in the journalism department. Then editor Patrick McGee says the staff was stuffed into two small rooms. “But our space was bigger, better, and cleaner after the renovation,” he adds.
Today, the newsroom is even more comfortable, says senior Kimberly Roots, who has worked at the News since she was a freshman. Staffers finally have a couch, a refrigerator, and a coffeemaker. There’s still the grunge factor, though: fluorescent lights, industrial carpet, piles of books and CDs, old mustard packets from takeout food. And “when there’s a lot of people up there and the heat is up really high, it can smell kind of bad,” Roots admits.
Still, “it’s the hangout, the clubhouse,” says Roots. “It’s where you go when you don’t have class. It’s definitely like a second home.”
Into the Present
After the turbulence of the antiwar period, the News again settled into covering the typical campus goings-on. But something had changed for good. It was now understood that the students would print the news as they saw fit, without interference from above, even though the newspaper was supported by the university.
In the mid-1980s, the legal relationship between the paper and the school “was probably exactly the same as in Hentoff’s day, but due to people like Hentoff, and changes in society, it was unlikely that Ryder or Curry would stop the paper, or force us to write certain things, unless we did something completely egregious,” says Alex Hahn, editor-in-chief in 1989.
“We would try to push the envelope,” Hahn says. “We would run editorials on the front page; we would try to be very investigative, covering sexual harassment or the presidential search.
I think we did it very responsibly, but aggressively.”
In fact, Hahn realizes in hindsight that editing the News gave him the type of authority he may never have again. “I don’t mean to suggest that life’s all downhill after graduating,” he says. “But it was akin to being not just the editor, but perhaps even the publisher and owner of the paper.”
These days, News staffers feel they have complete independence, even though the paper is not a freestanding corporation, as some student newspapers are. Northeastern provides office space, heat, and electricity, and cleans the newsroom. But the News pays for everything else with ad revenue, including its own computers.
“We try to put out a good paper,” says current editor Mike Trocchi. “And we try to compete a little bit with other area papers.”
It’s a unique opportunity, and present-day and former writers and editors acknowledge that. When they talk about working for the News, they exude a sort of reverence—for their colleagues, for the chance to have learned journalism by the seat of their pants, for the sheer joy of the experience.
“I loved it,” says McGee. “I loved the paper, loved the people I worked with, loved the school, loved covering it. A group of us really bonded, and we fell in love with journalism together.”
Thirty years earlier, Blume had the same experience. “It was a lot of work,” he says. “But we ate it up.”
They lost sleep, ate badly, sometimes got into trouble. But as the Northeastern News celebrates its seventy-fifth year, current and former staffers say it’s always been a labor of love.
By Karen Feldscher
They remember the long nights—boy, were they long! At two, three, four in the morning, they’d squint at the words crowded together on the pages, hoping to catch all the typos, running on flat Cokes and stale Doritos. Bleary-eyed the next morning, stumbling into class, they sometimes wondered why they’d bothered.But then the newspapers would appear in neat bundles. They’d slip one out, catch a whiff of the newsprint and fresh ink. They’d read what they’d written over the past week about tuition increases, co-op wages, financial aid, the football team. And they’d think: This is why I do it.
Talk to the men and women who have worked for the Northeastern News since its genesis seventy-five years ago, and you’ll find a crew of people still brimming with passion for getting the news out. There’s Nat Hentoff — regarded with something approaching awe by those who came after him —who quit his post in 1943 rather than submit to then president Carl Ell’s demand that he stop printing controversial articles.
There’s Jack Driscoll, who went on to become Boston Globe editor-in-chief. David Haskell, who can’t imagine retiring, even after forty years of covering New England news for United Press International. Margie Peters, who had the time of her life working for the News (though she never did learn how to crop a photo), then went on to become a topflight writer/producer for prime-time television. Martin Beiser, who, when asked if he likes being managing editor at GQ magazine better than being managing editor at the News, says, after a pause, “The pay is considerably better.”
These are just a few of the dedicated folks who spent huge chunks of their college years chasing down leads, editing verbose copy, sizing headlines, and, yes, losing lots of sleep. Sometimes watching their schoolwork suffer. More often, watching their hard work pay off with good journalism jobs.
“The News was the best fraternity on campus,” says Dominic Cerulli, who served as News editor-in-chief in 1951 and went on to become the New York editor of the jazz magazine Downbeat, handle public relations for three record companies, and serve as creative director at several advertising agencies. “Everybody was close, and everybody was crazy about one thing: journalism.”
The Beginning
The News was born on February 24, 1926, the product of a merger between two existing campus papers, the Tech and the Bulletin. The Tech had reported weekly on news of Northeastern’s School of Engineering since 1920; prior to that it was called the Co-op. The Bulletin had been published monthly by the School of Business Administration.In its early days, the News was pretty tame, even quaint. Front pages were filled with news of the junior prom or the sophomore class dance. The lead story might be about the annual pole rush (when scores of undergraduates raced toward a greased pole and tried to climb over each other to get to the top), student-council elections, or the latest Silver Masque production. Sports were covered extensively (as they would be for years to come). Ads urged students to relax at the Huntington Club (the bowling alley/billiards hall a block from the quad), smoke Chesterfields or Old Golds, or rent Stetson hats and tuxes for formal dances. Photos were generally small or not used at all, and page one was sometimes crammed with as many as fifteen articles.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the News remained parochial, reporting mostly noncontroversial campus news. But Hentoff’s attempts to broaden the newspaper’s reach in the early 1940s led to the first, and certainly most legendary, of several run-ins between the News and the Northeastern administration. The episode also signaled the start of the News’s slow but steady march toward near-complete editorial independence.
Hentoff, who became editor-in-chief in September 1943, wrote stories about racism and anti-Semitism in Boston—topics that had never before appeared in News pages. “We had a really good staff of reporters,” recalls Hentoff. “We covered real stuff. Boston was the most anti-Semitic city in the country at the time. We found out that the plant that printed the Northeastern News was also the place that printed a lot of anti-Semitic literature.”
The News’s forays into the outside world were likely an irritant to Ell. But Hentoff thinks what really bothered the president was the paper’s criticism of the university itself.
“We started calling the trustees to see if they had any interest in education or whether they were on the board simply because they had money,” says Hentoff. That did it. Northeastern was on precarious financial grounds in those days, according to former Northeastern history professor William Fowler, and Ell believed that negative publicity—or students who asked provocative questions—could damage the university’s fundraising efforts.
“Ell sent his hatchet man, Dean William White, to say if we didn’t stick to writing about things like the football team, then we’d be out,” Hentoff recalls.
Hentoff, along with most of the News staff, quit in protest. One student agreed to Ell’s terms and stayed on as editor. “There’s always a scab somewhere,” Hentoff grumbles, still disappointed in his former colleague.
Quitting their beloved newspaper left Hentoff and the other News staffers crestfallen. But for Hentoff, there was a silver lining. The Ell fiasco convinced him to stay in journalism (he’d toyed with becoming a professor); he became a prominent jazz critic, Village Voice writer, and syndicated columnist. He also turned into a fierce advocate for the First Amendment. In fact, Hentoff dedicated his first book, The First Freedom, to Ell.
“I’d had no interest in the First Amendment before,” says Hentoff, “but once you experience the effect of having that right taken away from you, you care about it a lot.”
The Best of Times
The News of the 1950s reflected the tone of the decade: earnest and fun-loving. Now and then, the paper touched on general news of the day —communism, the bomb, the beginnings of the space program—but campus news was paramount.
The News wrote about new buildings going up on campus, professors getting grants (a new trend), Carl Ell’s seventieth birthday, the growth of the freshman class, a business recession hurting co-op. A December 1957 front-page article declared that student-council elections had been canceled because of apathy; the accompanying photo showed a sad-looking group of student leaders.
On the editorial page and elsewhere, little could possibly offend. One columnist decried the wads of gum she found in campus drinking fountains. An article covered a rash of lunchroom littering. Occasionally, the newspaper veered toward plain silliness. One tongue-in-cheek story joked about a subway line connecting campus buildings; another waxed over a missing letter “g” in a headline.
A far cry from Woodward and Bernstein. But the student writers and editors were in step with the times, says David Blume, editor-in-chief in 1953, now retired after fifty years in journalism, half of them spent at the Los Angeles Times.
“We didn’t even particularly comment on presidential elections,” says Blume. “We just had the attitude that that was being well covered by others, that people weren’t reading the News to get opinions from those of us who, politically, weren’t even wet behind the ears.”
In those days, the News staff were often involved in other creative pursuits, such as the yearbook, the literary magazine, or the Silver Masque, Northeastern’s acting troupe. In fact, for a couple of years a crew of senior editors were writing original musical comedies. Cerulli would write the book, Blume the music, and the late Bob McLean the lyrics. They even produced a musical about the news business called The Fourth Estate. Sometimes, they pulled zany stunts on campus to, as Cerulli puts it, “manufacture school spirit.”
But in the newsroom, the students were all business. “If you saw us making up the front page, you would say, ‘These people are totally loony,’” says Cerulli. “We wouldn’t permit any tombstones [headlines that bump together]. We would use only certain typefaces. The front page always looked like it had been designed by Matisse.”
“When we were putting out the News, it was like we were putting out the Globe or the Herald,” adds Blume. “We were dead serious. We had great fun doing it, but it was no joke.”
Advising the fledgling journalists through much of the 1950s and the early 1960s was English professor Everett Marston. The staffers had great respect for Marston, who had an office next to the newsroom and was available for advice. “He was knowledgeable, a good psychological leader, very gentle, and he very much allowed us to go our own way,” recalls Blume.
One of the best things about the 1950s, former News staffers agree, was that the combination of working on the student paper and working on co-op often provided a sure meal ticket after graduation. “At the time, Northeastern had almost all the papers locked up,” says Blume. “The Herald and Traveler used Northeastern kids as copy boys or girls. The Globe did, United Press did, and the Boston Post did, too. All the papers were on ‘newspaper row,’ on Washington Street near City Hall. If a kid was any good when he graduated, he went right on to the staff.”
Growing Pains
News editors found themselves in yet another scrape with Ell in the late 1950s. This time it was Jack Driscoll’s turn.
Driscoll had begun working for the paper in 1953 doing rewrites; Blume recalls him as “a nice kid.” Driscoll, for his part, says the News was an important experience in his life because of its high standards and its talented senior editors, who’d cut their teeth at United Press, the Globe, or other news organizations. “I’d done newspaper work before, but I’d seen nothing like the caliber of Dave Blume and Dom Cerulli,” says Driscoll.
In his middler year, Driscoll was editor-in-chief for Division B; his
counterpart in Division A was John Connelly. (For years, the News has used two groups of editors to accommodate the co-op work schedule.) In the summer of 1955, the News pursued a story about the death of Northeastern’s mascot, the real husky that was brought out for special occasions.
“The husky dog had been replaced without anybody’s knowledge,” says Driscoll. “We had done quite a bit of reporting on the story. We found that the dog had been kept in Boston over the summer, where it’s really too hot for a husky, and it had died. We had the story written up for page one, and the page was all made up at the press, in East Boston.
“I was called to the vice president’s office,” Driscoll continues. “It was William White—a wonderful man. But he informed me that we were not to publish the story. When I asked why, he said, ‘Because President Ell said so.’
“I said, ‘Well, technically speaking, you are the publisher, so I don’t really have any control. However, I want to tell you a couple of things. One is, I’m going to resign. Two is, I don’t know if others are going to resign. Three, if you want to run a top college newspaper, you should give scholarships to your editors.” Driscoll also informed White that the story would probably wind up in the Boston papers anyway.
Connelly, Driscoll’s Division A counterpart, also resigned in protest over the decision. So did several other editors. But before they left—ever the professionals—they pulled the dog story from page one and got the paper out on time.
The Boston Post and the Boston Globe both ran the husky story on their front pages, as Driscoll had predicted. And Northeastern began providing stipends for its student editors—even though Driscoll never got to take advantage of them. But he still got to be a journalist, working both on co-op and part-time at the Globe. After a brief stint at the Manchester Union-Leader, he wound up at the Globe for good in 1958, staying thirty-six years, eight as editor-in-chief—another student editor who achieved notable success after being censored by Ell.
Testing the Limits
Given Ell’s distaste for controversy, it’s probably a blessing that he retired in 1959, leaving his successor, Asa Knowles, to deal with the paper during the highly charged years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not that Knowles was any happier with News staffers than Ell was, but—amazingly—he never censored them.
He came close, though, according to David Haskell, editor-in-chief of the News in 1962. “If the administration didn’t want something printed, they let us know,” he says. “They were unhappy with a number of editorials we wrote. For example, we spoke out against a mandatory retirement age for professors. We felt it was an awful waste of potentially good talent. These teachers didn’t stop being smart just because they turned sixty-five.”
Knowles called Haskell into his office to tell him his position was wrong. “It was like a child being chastised by a parent,” Haskell recalls. “I didn’t back off. But we had already made our point. There were no further incidents.”
The latter part of the 1960s would prove a watershed for the Northeastern News, as for other student newspapers across the nation. As society’s anger over the Vietnam War spilled onto college campuses, student reporters covered what they saw: protests, sit-ins, riots, bloodshed.
News reporters went to Washington, D.C., in 1967 to cover an antiwar march, where protesters were teargassed. The paper reported on the Northeastern chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which urged a ban on campus recruiting by companies involved in the war, such as Dow Chemical Company, the makers of napalm.
Other articles covered student efforts to oust ROTC from campus. On the editorial page, the News ran dozens of angry letters each week, about the war, racism, police brutality, the Pill. One editorial demanded, “Legalize pot.” Another: “Amerika—shut it down.”
In September 1968, a front-page photo showed a student burning President Knowles’s written response to a long list of student demands regarding grading policy, student input into tenure decisions, and birth-control information, among other issues. A two-page photo spread in May 1969 covered an SDS sit-in in an Ell Building lounge.
The following month, the News dropped its tabloid form, switching for a couple of months to a magazine-type format; the first cover photo, reflecting the height of the “free love” era, showed the silhouette
of a kissing couple. Subsequent issues featured coeds with flowers in their hair, hanging out during the many moratoriums that kept students protesting on the quad rather than sitting in classrooms.In fall 1969, the News ran a four-page first-person account of clashes between the Weathermen and the Chicago police. Later, a three-part series reported on Northeastern’s drug culture. When San Francisco State College president S. I. Hayakawa—whose strong opposition to student strikes had made him extremely controversial—spoke at Northeastern in February 1970, the News ran pages and pages about the riots that followed. (During the melee on the quad, a News photographer got thrown through a Frost Lounge window by a policeman; amazingly, he wasn’t hurt.)
And in May of that year, the News published special “strike editions” for four days straight, with extensive coverage of a “night of terror” on Hemenway Street, during which police, on hand to break up student protests, lost control and began beating innocent bystanders.
Martin Beiser, managing editor of the News at the time, remembers that night all too well.
“The News played a critical role in that event,” he recalls. “The police had their little riot at about two a.m. No other newspapers were around. We had reporters and photographers out there, and we got what actually happened.”
In the thick of it all, Beiser’s girlfriend, Kathy Kepner (whom he would later marry), called the mayor’s special assistant—an aspiring politician named Barney Frank—to see if he could call the police off. “He tells her, ‘It’s two a.m., and I’m in my pajamas—what do you want me to do?’” Beiser recalls.
The News coverage of the police brutality on Hemenway Street caught the attention of the New York Times. The local papers didn’t pursue the story, probably because they didn’t want to cross the police, Beiser says. But the Times coverage led to investigations by the state attorney general’s office. “There were hearings and hearings and hearings,” Beiser recalls. “We considered it a major victory.
“What I learned from being in the thick of that,” he adds, “is that even a small truth-telling news organization can make a difference.”
Media Adviser Extraordinaire
Often, after those provocative issues of the News hit the streets, Harvey Vetstein would steel himself, waiting for the inevitable phone call from President Knowles requesting a face-to-face meeting. Adviser to the News from 1966 to 1983 and himself a former News staffer, Vetstein had made it clear when he took the job, at the request of dean of administration Kenneth Ryder (who would later become president), that he wasn’t going to censor the students.
But that didn’t stop Knowles’s famous temper. “Friday morning, my phone used to melt,” he says. “Knowles was politically astute—he knew that other college presidents were getting in trouble for trying to stop student papers. But he wanted to vent. I learned not to go rushing down to see him. I went for a cup of coffee and let him cool off for a little bit. His aides-de-camp would be there cackling when I went in for the slaughter.”
Vetstein didn’t mind taking heat for the students’ coverage of controversial events. For the most part, he saw the students as incredibly dedicated. “They worked long days and nights to put out a paper for the campus,” Vetstein says. “People said they were anti-administration. But they were never anti-Northeastern. They really loved the university, or they would never have taken the time.”
Still, Vetstein was less than pleased when the News “ego-tripped,” as he puts it, or published things that were downright embarrassing. One freshman-orientation issue went over the top. In the recollection of Fowler, the history professor who is now director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the paper was “filled with four-letter words—just raunchy, raunchy, raunchy.” Knowles was furious. “He was actually going to go out, gather up all the newspapers, and burn them,” Fowler recalls. Once again, he called Vetstein to his office and raked him over the coals. “It wasn’t Harvey’s fault,” says Fowler. “But he did talk Knowles out of it.”
Mistakes, Milestones, Marriages, Munchies
Printing an issue full of four-letter words was certainly not the News’s only mistake. It is, after all, a student newspaper, by its very definition a learning experience. Still, that didn’t make Gilbert and Margie Peters feel any better about a mistake the News made in fall 1968.
They’d just gotten married that summer, right after her middler year and his junior year. They’d cut short their honeymoon in Bermuda so they could return to put together the first-ever freshman edition of the News. They sent a rather inexperienced reporter to cover the events of what was called “Black Freshman Week.” She came back and reported that she’d seen a band called Black and Alien at a coffeehouse.
The name struck the Peterses as a bit strange, but they didn’t check it. “We knew there was some anger among blacks,” says Gil. “It sounded like it could be the name of a group.”
But it wasn’t. “First thing the next morning, three very tall angry men show up at my desk,” recalls Margie. “And they say the name of the group was the Bacchanalians.”
“Nothing to do except say all the mea culpas,” says Gil. “Needless to say, we weren’t that great as journalists.”
Still, Northeastern administrators and faculty do credit the News with providing fairly solid coverage of the university over the years. John Curry, president from 1989 to 1996 and an administrator since the early 1960s, says he found the student journalists, particularly the editors, “to be mature and adult.”
“I think it’s a good student paper,” says journalism professor Charles Fountain of today’s News. “They don’t miss much that’s going on on campus, and by and large it’s a very able staff.”
Indeed, the News has won its fair share of awards over the years from college press organizations, including a slew of awards in the 1950s and 1960s—and, more recently, the New England College Newspaper of the Year in 1993 and an award for best nondaily college newspaper in the country in 1996.
For News staffers, the personal benefits of working as student journalists were as compelling as the professional benefits. There were the marriages—the Peterses, Cerulli and Dolores Costa (student office manager at the News in 1952), Beiser and Kepner. And some friendships lasted years after the budding writers and editors parted ways.
It would have been hard not to forge strong bonds, given the amount of time the staff spent together. As Beiser puts it, “This was a special group of people who hung out together, socialized together. It really became the center of my existence at Northeastern. These are people who care about things. They’re passionate, funny, smart, well-read—they’re the kind of people you want to hang out with.”
In every decade, News staffers have had their favorite pastimes, favorite hangouts, favorite foods. Hentoff, Blume, and Cerulli are lifelong jazz fanatics. In the late 1940s, writers and editors would play an almost round-the-clock game of blackjack to fill in the downtimes, says Hentoff. Blume says that, every now and then, he and his colleagues would escape the News office to play a little pool at the YMCA next door.
Haskell, recalling long deadline nights in the early 1960s, says, “Don’t tell anybody, but we’d sip a little juice—rum and pineapple juice.”
The Peterses hung out at the Windsor Tap Room on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and St. Botolph Street, where a Symphony Towers apartment building now stands, downing beers and greasy food. “By the time we finished the paper at four-thirty in the morning,” jokes Gil Peters, “we were sober.”
And, of course, there was the newsroom itself—perpetually grungy, but always home. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the newsroom was on the third floor of the student-center building (now Ell Hall), a few small offices crammed with old desks and typewriters. “We didn’t go anywhere else,” says Blume. “We didn’t use lockers. We’d go there first thing in the morning.”
After the new section of the student center was finished in 1964, the News moved in. In the summer of 1994, while the student center got a makeover, the paper had to camp out in the journalism department. Then editor Patrick McGee says the staff was stuffed into two small rooms. “But our space was bigger, better, and cleaner after the renovation,” he adds.
Today, the newsroom is even more comfortable, says senior Kimberly Roots, who has worked at the News since she was a freshman. Staffers finally have a couch, a refrigerator, and a coffeemaker. There’s still the grunge factor, though: fluorescent lights, industrial carpet, piles of books and CDs, old mustard packets from takeout food. And “when there’s a lot of people up there and the heat is up really high, it can smell kind of bad,” Roots admits.
Still, “it’s the hangout, the clubhouse,” says Roots. “It’s where you go when you don’t have class. It’s definitely like a second home.”
Into the Present
After the turbulence of the antiwar period, the News again settled into covering the typical campus goings-on. But something had changed for good. It was now understood that the students would print the news as they saw fit, without interference from above, even though the newspaper was supported by the university.
In the mid-1980s, the legal relationship between the paper and the school “was probably exactly the same as in Hentoff’s day, but due to people like Hentoff, and changes in society, it was unlikely that Ryder or Curry would stop the paper, or force us to write certain things, unless we did something completely egregious,” says Alex Hahn, editor-in-chief in 1989.
“We would try to push the envelope,” Hahn says. “We would run editorials on the front page; we would try to be very investigative, covering sexual harassment or the presidential search.
I think we did it very responsibly, but aggressively.”
In fact, Hahn realizes in hindsight that editing the News gave him the type of authority he may never have again. “I don’t mean to suggest that life’s all downhill after graduating,” he says. “But it was akin to being not just the editor, but perhaps even the publisher and owner of the paper.”
These days, News staffers feel they have complete independence, even though the paper is not a freestanding corporation, as some student newspapers are. Northeastern provides office space, heat, and electricity, and cleans the newsroom. But the News pays for everything else with ad revenue, including its own computers.
“We try to put out a good paper,” says current editor Mike Trocchi. “And we try to compete a little bit with other area papers.”
It’s a unique opportunity, and present-day and former writers and editors acknowledge that. When they talk about working for the News, they exude a sort of reverence—for their colleagues, for the chance to have learned journalism by the seat of their pants, for the sheer joy of the experience.
“I loved it,” says McGee. “I loved the paper, loved the people I worked with, loved the school, loved covering it. A group of us really bonded, and we fell in love with journalism together.”
Thirty years earlier, Blume had the same experience. “It was a lot of work,” he says. “But we ate it up.”