My Major In College Was The Student Newspaper

Classes were just filler

It’s hard to believe that, at first, I wanted to be a Forest Ranger.

Living in California, Chico State University seemed to have the best program in forestry, so I figured that’s where I’d be.

Then I got an itch that didn’t necessarily come from out of left field. I had always been on the newspaper staff in high school — the Buena Vista at Buena High School in Ventura. I was the almighty advertising manager with a “staff” of three. It gave us time during school hours to go off-campus and sell ads and do things we weren’t supposed to do.

Oh, we’d sell a few ads. Then we’d head to Arroyo Verde Park, the place to hang out and smoke weed. I was in a constant haze in high school.

The summer before my senior year, my sister and her boyfriend moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, his boyhood home. They did this so he could finish his degree and start teaching. I decided to tag along with them.

I liked it! Or perhaps it was my sense of freedom, being that far from home. I ended up staying there for much of the summer.

Back in Ventura, I had enough credits to graduate mid-year. I’d already turned 18, so I was ready to conquer the world. I returned to Nebraska, where I had a row of bad jobs that 18-year-olds get stuck with. I hadn’t planned on staying, but something captured my attention.

In my spare time, I’d hang out in the student union at the University of Nebraska, pretending to be a big kid. One day, I picked up a copy of the Daily Nebraskan, the university’s student newspaper, where I met my future. There was an ad in it for advertising representatives for the 1976–77 school year. I raced downstairs to Room 34 and picked up an application.

This wasn’t your average application. The questions were essay-based, and they were pretty tricky. However, I had to have this job, so I worked on the application all weekend, responding in about a six-point font, printed.

I was ecstatic to be interviewed, but the advertising manager said, “we usually don’t hire freshmen,” and “you have to be attending the university to work here.” However, he did admit that he loved my answers on the application.

This occurred around the first of August, and I had to decide: should I stay or should I go? In the event I stayed, I did apply to the university and was practically instantly enrolled because I was from out of state. They were dying for some diversity: 95% of the student body were Nebraskans. My GPA wasn’t the greatest, but this was Nebraska. (However, in my last semester of high school, I got straight A’s, a feat that hadn’t happened since fourth grade!)

But how would I pay $900 a semester for the first year since I would have to pay out-of-state tuition? (Can you imagine having to pay only $900 for a semester of college?!)

This all meant I had to call Dad and ask him to pick up my tuition bill for the first year, as there was no way I could afford it. It put him in a Catch-22 position, but he went along with it as long as I had a job to pay for my rent and expenses.

With my acceptance letter in hand, I returned to the Daily Nebraskan office and pleaded with the manager for the job. I must have been persuasive enough that he thought I’d be a pretty good salesperson, and I got the job!

There are so many tales to share about my time there. One of the best things was the camaraderie: there were always about a dozen sales reps on the staff, a secretary, an artist, a proofreader, and an assistant advertising manager. It meant instant friends I didn’t have, as we’d see each other daily. Of course, things would shake up between semesters, and the seniors would leave us each May. Then we’d get a crop of newbies. As well, we’d associate with the editorial staff and always the photographers.

There was once a semi-battle going on between the editorial staff and the ad staff. During one of our pinches, when the university threatened to cut our funding, the editorial staff felt the ad staff made too much money, so they came up with the saying, “no guts, no glory.” We countered it with “no ads, no paper.” In the end, we did not get a pay cut!

One of the best parts of the week was FAC (Friday Afternoon Club). We’d pick a downtown bar and go as a group. Most of the bars had specials, like “twofers” and “threefers.” One bar went to “fourfers.” We’d get hammered on the $5 we’d just withdrawn from the “Bank in the Box,” how the ATM was known! In Nebraska, the drinking age was 19, which I turned in October of my freshman year. At the time, Nebraska had paper driver’s licenses with no pictures. Imagine my angst when I went home to California after I was 21 and could not buy liquor because my ID was just a piece of paper!

In-between classes are when we’d do most of our business of creating the ads with our typewriters, clip-art, and pica poles, all tools of the advertising trade back then. My first manager decided to call me Clip Art, then I just became Clip! A lot of our business was from the downtown area, so we could walk to our accounts, but we also sold in the rest of the city, so we all had to have cars. We’d try not to be in class after 2:00 pm as our deadline was 3:00 pm two days prior to publication.

We worked on a commission basis, so we never quite knew what we’d make, and we were only paid once a month (kind of like Medium)! I always had second or even third jobs. I don’t know how I survived, but kids are resilient! Still, most of my jobs were in the vocation. For instance, I was a copyboy at the Lincoln Journal-Star on the weekends. I’d assist in labs on campus. I worked for an electronics store designing their weekly ads. I liked having money.

As the years wore on, I stayed at the Daily Nebraskan, eventually becoming the assistant advertising manager, then the advertising director for my last two years (I was on a six-year plan). I was amazed at how much money I made there as a manager, and I still needed part-time jobs! Guess it was all the booze and drugs. But in reality, it was clothes and records. Okay, maybe some pot and some booze too. The highest I ever paid for rent was $225 — in the student ghetto, of course. By the time I was the director, I made enough money to live alone.

For six incredible years, I lived at the Daily Nebraskan offices in the Nebraska Union (we just called it the union). It was my second home. I’m unsure if many others stayed that long (besides the general managers, who were “professional”). Since almost everyone was at the union every day, my friends would stop by and say hi. Maybe we’d get some lunch upstairs. It was a meeting place. It was a place where we shared our lives.

In my sixth year of college (by this time, I was in grad school), computer screens began making their way into the newsroom. Times were changing. Those computers were the beginning of the end for print media as we know it — we just didn’t know it then. Who could have imagined something like the internet?

This is merely an overview. But, as they come to mind, I’ll have to share some of the shenanigans we had because we worked for “the Rag” (our not-so-popular nickname).

All that, and I didn’t even mention the Cornhuskers! It’s not such a good year to talk about the Huskers.

Here are a couple more stories about my life…

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