Maroon

              The Maroon 75 th ANNIVCE(RJDJL(R¥ISSVCE VOL. 77 NOVEMBER 1,1923 - NOVEMBER 6,1998 No. 8 ADVISERS ADD COLOR TO PAPER By JACQUELYN WILNEFF Editorial Editor Adviser Liz Scott paces around the office asking the students not to curse so much and promptly reminds them that it is not time to paint cups, eat Chinese food or write a history paper. It is time to put out The Maroon. Throughout its 75-year history, The Maroon has had some memorable advisers. From the eccentric to the intellectual, these advisers have inspired their staffs to achieve journalistic integrity, style and accuracy. Edwin Fricke became adviser in 1953. He led almost a double life as a college professor and a racetrack reporter. Before becoming adviser, he had served in the army in World War II and seen serious combat in Europe. He was wounded, and lost the thumb of his right hand. "Fricke was funny without intending to be so. He was given a lot of grief for his (missing) thumb, especially by the athletes who would go up to him and say 'Give me four, Fricke.' Thank God he was really tough skinned," Tootsie Williams Parks, class of '56, said. Fricke was a Loyola graduate, teacher and an old-school newspaperman. He was notorious for his ranting and raving and his soapbox-style lectures. The students took to imitating him by giving the "Fricke salute" (a wave of the right hand while tucking the thumb into the palm) and ranting in true Fricke style, using his favorite word, "bilious," in every sentence. Even though he was all bluff and bluster, his students said he was a big softy underneath his hard exterior. "He would do anything for his students. He found jobs for a lot of us," Scott said. "He would never let us use the word 'the' to begin a lead. He said it forced us to be more creative. "And in all the years I've been writing, I've been able to bring myself to start a story with 'the' maybe once or twice." If an editor hesitated too long in designing a page, Scott recalled, Fricke would snatch the page and draw a square in each corner—an 'X' formation. '"There's your layout,' he'd say. And of course the editor would object and start changing things. Fricke would walk off smugly. 'If you can't get started, put an 'x' Sports Editor Creates Pages, But No Teams By JIMMY SMITH Class of 1978 For two semesters, I had the most difficult job on The Maroon. Ad salesman, you ask? Production editor? Editor in chief? Temperance editor? All thankless tasks, certainly, each fraught with their own built-in problems. My task, however, was rather unique: sports editor at a school with no sports, save for the occasional intramural contest on the elevated floor of the old Field House on Freret Street. Somehow, I managed to produce a sports page each week, many featuring a column bearing the cherubic likeness of a smiling guy with glasses and a great deal more hair than he has now. Those old Maroon days, in the aftermath of Watergate when this profession beckoned many quixotic types who were hellbent on changing the world and exposing the tiniest shred of corruption, put together a group of talented people, too many of whom sadly decided printer's ink wasn't their cup of tea. The graduating class of 1978 was the last true group of journalism majors, having been absorbed several years earlier into the department of communications, a breeding ground for those pseudojoumalist-news-readers, some of whom wouldn't know a good lead if it jumped out of their pancakes and bit them on the nose. But one of those communicationstypes taught me more about writing than any writing professor ever had: former CBS newsman Peter Kalischer, who, by the way, got his start in the business as most did in his day, after working for a wire service. United Press. He came to Loyola with the mindset that none of us were good enough to earn an "A" in his class. After a semester of his feature writing course, at 8 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I proved him wrong. And he made me better. Then there was Tom Bell, the chairman of the journalism department, at whose home on Camp Street we often gathered on those odd Friday nights when we were in the mood to celebrate the end of the week. Which, it seemed, was often. WOMAN ELECTED EDITOR By ELIZABETH KEENAN Editor in Chief Girls couldn't wear pants to class. They couldn't wear anything low-cut, and God forbid if they thought of wearing jeans. They couldn't use the words "girl" and "bed" in the same sentence. But they could be editor in chief of The Maroon. Shirley Stoma Rhode, class of '56, was the first woman to edit the paper by herself, during the spring semester of her junior year in 1955. The previous semester, she worked with a male co-editor, John Nicosia. For Rhode, the transition was an easy one. She got along with her co-editor in the fall, but she wanted to do the job alone. She enjoyed the responsibility of calling all the shots, she said. "It's always nice when you're by yourself," she said. "It was so much of an honor to be chosen editor." Rhode said she never experienced any sexism while on the staff. "We didn't have women's lib, but the women on the staff were respected," she said. "It was never an issue of 'She's a girl, so she can't be editor.'" Before Rhode, a number of women had worked with male co-editors, including Jane Suhor Duffy, who was editor with Leo Duffy (unrelated) in 1953 and Joy Marie Landry, who shared the post with Pinky Vidacovich the following spring semester. And, after Rhode, women continued to fill the post. Her best friend, Tootsie Williams Parks, class of '56, followed in Rhode's footsteps, serving out the entire College Paper Teaches Many Life Lessons By MARY LOU SUHOR Class of 1949 What journalist does not treasure the thrill of that first byline? I still have my first article that was printed in The Times-Picayune, produced on an old typewriter in The Maroon office in Biever Hall. Journalism students were required to place a bylined story in the T-P, States or Item to pass an upper division course. Mine featured a Loyola student who operated a streetcar to finance his tuition. The streetcar, of course, was segregated. It was 1948. That streetcar was a portent of sweeping social change to come — and how The Maroon and Loyola's department of journalism were to become sources of growth MAROONER COMES BACK FOR MORE By CHRIS RAPHAEL Class of 1994 WASHINGTON, D.C. — I wondered what I would find, going back. In 19941 graduated Loyola, after having worked two straight semesters as The Maroon's editor in chief. For the past four years, I have worked in various capacities in the journalism field — as a crime reporter, editor and freelance writer. And for four years, in the midst of all this work, in the middle of say, talking with a fellow reporter or performing some routine task, such as driving to an interview, my thoughts have wandered back to The Maroon — back, as they occasionally do, to the glory days, and I feel a certain happiness and sadness all at once. Given these memories, impossible to shake, I felt a certain impulse to attend The Maroon's 75th anniversary celebration in October. I wanted to see old friends and to see the office where I has spent months sweating out edits, waxing pages and dreaming up ironclad articles that would, I presumed, make the small university crumble to the core until I and The Maroon staff stood atop the rubble. But chiefly, I wanted to see whether it was possible to go back, and what, if anything, I could learn from doing so. The drive over to campus was dismal. Interstate 10 looked much the same — discarded tires, trash on the side of the road. Looking at the depressed scene outside the window. I had the sensation of driving through a ghost town, looking for a parade that had long since passed, and friends who went with it. Old Maroon memories came to mind, such as the time when the newspaper ran a cartoon of a certain Loyola administrator and depicted him, in the tradition of George Orwell's Animal Farm, as a pig. The pig held a roll of "red tape" in his hand. MAROON FOUNDING The Maroon, Loyola's student newspaper, was founded in 1923 with Harold Dempsey at the helm. He put together a staff of friends to distribute the four-page first issue on Nov. 1,1923. Dempsey was active in social as well as professional organizations on campus. The editor in chief would go on to become vice president of the Beggars (now the Beggars chapter of Pi Lambda Phi) fraternity, which received its charter Dec. 20,1923, approximately three months after the inaugural issue. —With reporting by Larry Graham, Quiana Glapion, Kyla Gibson and David Masvidal MAROON DELAYED, EDITOR RESIGNS By MEGHAN COURTNEY and RICHARD CURCIO Contributing writers Maroon advisers and editors must work in close partnership to run the paper smoothly. Twenty years ago, that teamwork fell apart and stopped production for two weeks. In 1979, William- Hammel, communications chairman, and Maroon adviser Warren Schwed had serious disagreements with then editor in chief, Paul Dusseault. According to the Oct. 26, 1979 issue of The Maroon, the communications department and the editorial board decided to delay publication of the Oct. 5 issue due to the poor quality of its story content. The paper's Oct 12 issue was ready to go a week later, but at the last minute, the communications department held back the paper again—this time without consulting the editorial board. When Hammel, Schwed and Dusseault met to discuss why the paper did not go to press, Dusseault announced his resignation. The editorial staff was then restructured. The events leading up to the delay and Dusseault's resignation remain unclear, but Hammel said the decision to withhold the paper was largely Schwed's. "He (Schwed) and the editor had thorough disagreements.... He didn't think the editor knew what he was doing," he said. MAROON STYLE IN 1923, MAROON STYLE TODAY The Maroon has gone through a variety of looks from its inception in 1923 to the present. Pages 1 and 4 offer the oldest and the most recent styles to grace the front covers. (Continued on Page 3) (Continued on Page 2) (Continued on Page 4) (Continued on Page 4) (Continued on Page 2)