Tonight I drove down the New Jersey Turnpike to Rutgers, for the annual Daily Targum dinner.The Targum is the university-wide newspaper [the second oldest college paper in the country], published five times a week--Monday through Friday. At the end of every year, the current staff [God, they're young] has a dinner and invites alumni to come back. This year, with the help of Facebook, a lot of my fellow staffers went.
Many of us haven't been back to the reunion for years. But whenever I go, I realize how much I miss the days of working shoulder to shoulder with those funny, smart friends, while the AP machine spit out stories and the heavy typewriter keys clicked, clacked and jammed to meet the evening deadlines. Some friends were my editors, and others came in as reporters under me. A who's who list from tonight:
Larry Kling: He was a year older than me, and I was in awe of his wise, concise writing. Keen and wiry, he'd zip in and out of the newspaper office to file amazing stories that used words I had never heard of, such as coffers, as in, the town was going to open its coffers to fund a new building project. Larry works in book publishing.
Joe Kane: Also a little older, he was clean-cut and preppy, with glasses and button-down oxford shirts. He was kind and smart, even to scared freshmen like me. He works in publishing and dabbles in local politics.
Herb Jackson: Herb knew it all, and felt it all strongly. He was a newspaperman to the core, even as an undergraduate. He was skeptical of the university administration. He was so informed about things that I would just quietly watch and learn. He had fiery convictions [he once even resigned from Targum but we got him back] and was kind of intimidating until he got to know you, and then he wasn't. His talent ran deep. It shows now: He's covering Congress as Washington Correspondent for The Record.
Chris Mahon: An attorney now for Deutsche Bank, Chris was also a true leader, a visionary, who seemed to have a business-world perspective even though we were still in college. He was our editor in chief. I remember him pledging a fraternity on campus [and going through rush] and having a nice girlfriend we all got to know. I must admit, I also had a crush on him. I'm pretty sure he knew that, especially since I once brought chocolate-chip cookies to his dorm when he was at NYU Law. God, how embarrassing that seems now. But this blog does have "truth" in the name, so I figured I'd address it. Full disclosure: Also had a crush on John Hutchinson, the older pre-law student in crewneck sweaters [who noticed and praised my front-page feature about Hattie Ashmore, the aqua-suited lady who cleaned our offices].
Thomas P. Costello: The guys called him Spanky, but I called him Tom. A perceptive photographer, he photographed for the Associated Press and on staff for the Asbury Park Press. He's still at the latter, now Chief Photographer/Video for the newspaper's website. He was a nice friend. Often, he'd be in the dark room developing film and I'd be finishing a story at night. Sometimes, he'd give me a ride in his cluttered car, and tell me about his family.
Meryl and Rob Feiner: They were a Targum romance! They met at the newspaper, and later married. I was at their beautiful wedding. Meryl and I took an investigative reporting class together, and we still vividly recall our project on old houses in New Brunswick. Meryl is a writer, and Rob's a photographer.
Bruce Goldman: Bruce has been my friend and colleague--when he was Copy Editor at Cigar Aficionado Magazine, he sometimes hired me as a freelance fact checker. But back at Targum, he was on the sports desk. The sports staff was mostly men with an occasional woman; they sat in the back of the office.
Rich Miller: One of the first personal conversations I ever had with anyone at Targum was with Rich. And it was blunt. It was near Christmas, and I was hurriedly writing a few cards. "You come to Targum to write your cards?" he said. I was embarrassed, but turns out he is a sweetheart. What can I say, I had a penchant to squeeze a lot into life [like a 14-minute nap, set on my alarm back on Douglass campus, before boarding the red and white bus over to the newspaper office]. Rich became a business writer and now runs datacenterknowledge.com.
John Petrick: Oh, John Petrick. A year behind me, he disarmingly charmed us all and kept us laughing. He had gone to a Catholic high school and always wore a tie. He was witty and talented, and often had a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Petrick was colorful. He once had a Hawaiian-theme party at his apartment off-campus. After college, he became a newspaperman in Jersey City and then rocked the world, writing two great plays that were performed in NYC--the first even reviewed in The New York Times. He's been at The Record for years now. He's a talented man with more, much more, still waiting to emerge.
Susan Todd: Susan, also a year younger than me, is a tall, beautiful blonde who writes for the business section of The Star-Ledger. She is a genuinely nice person with a genuinely great writer's ear, eye, soul--and vision.
Bill Strugger: If Joe Kane was preppy, Bill was the ultimate prepster. He just was, in oxford shirts and on rainy days, a rain slicker. He was younger than me, charming and cute. So clean-cut. Also earnest, smart, organized and personable.
Barbara Molotsky: I'm sorry I don't remember her married name, but I clearly remember when Barbara first came to the Targum office. She showed great potential right away. And as I told her tonight, I always admired her vintage sweaters with pearls, which she found at thrift shops. She has two teen boys now.
Lenny Melisurgo: He has a twin, and that always fascinated me. Lenny is an editor at The Star-Ledger [same paper Susan works at] and also writes the Ledger's wildly popular American Idol blog, which once got over 43,000 hits [unique visitors] in one day. Go, Lenny. I can't wait to check that blog.
Oh, I really loved seeing them all. I miss those days.
It was great fun, but also a hard learning curve sometimes, like when I covered a rape trial at the local courthouse and very stupidly and unforgivably published the name of the victim [an undergraduate] on the front page. It still makes me cringe. When I went to my journalism class that day, the professor even said something like, "I see you printed the rape victim's name. That's very unusual."
Before the story went to bed, I had asked my editor at the time, an upper-class prelaw student and fraternity man [not mentioned above], if I should publish the name, since it had been on public record during the trial. He said yes.
But that didn't help at all when the student's mother called me at the office the next evening to scream at me. I will never forget holding that clunky black rotary phone [we had one at each typewriter] and listening, red-faced, while she told me I would never, ever be a journalist. A part of me believed her. And another part of me learned a very important lesson: Follow your gut instinct if you think something is wrong. Or, to apply a rule that often relates to the comma: When in doubt, leave it out.
Modern Times
After the event, figured I'd drive by the Student Center on College Avenue; the Targum office was on the 4th floor. We spent our lives there.
At midnight, it was hard to tell if the Student Center is new--shorter?--but easy to tell that it's different. An Au Bon Pain is on street level next door, and signs in the main building shout Wendy's and Subway. I don't like that. If we wanted snacks, we could go buy the 1/4 pound minimum of jelly beans down at the candy counter. We couldn't afford much more anyway. Who needs fast food places right on campus? Aren't grease trucks enough?
The building also has two ATMs: PNC Bank and Wachovia. Again, you should be at college to learn, not to be groomed as a professional consumer of junk food and a spender of money gotten with a plastic card you carry everywhere.
Anyway, long live Targum. May it always bring out the best in tomorrow's journalists--and show them a really rich time along the way.
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