Alumni
Ups and Downs
The same could be said for the entire history of the newspaper, which was first published in the 1886-87 school year. In those early days it carried such items as an 1886 announcement of a newly organized football team, President Roberts’ inaugural address about the reorganization of the college, Professor Grey’s attempts to secure foreign patents for his teleautograph, and Mrs. Durand’s efforts to influence Mr. Henry Durand to build a gymnasium.
The early 20th century continued the newspaper’s insular approach to covering the school, as stories included how sports teams fared, an admissions recruiting trip by the Glee Club, and a Scarlet fever and diphtheria scare on campus. A testament to the power of the written word came in 1919 when the Stentor published a comment made by Acting President Henry Wilkes Wright about whether professors were becoming more critical of the government. “This does not mean that the majority of college professors are Bolshevists, but it does mean that they feel that the criticism of big business which was begun before the war should continue,” Dr. Wright said to the outrage of several trustees who almost closed the school for implying that some professor might be Bolshevists.
As the political situation escalated in Europe in the years prior to World War II, Robert Katz ’38 began writing briefs of news from around the world, providing content with more of a global focus.
Editors began using pictures more extensively in the 1940s. In 1942, under editor Bob Patterson ’42, the paper’s platform was “to arouse school spirit, abolish library noise, support the Student Center, promote better fraternity rushing and clean up fraternity and sorority politics”—in that order.
Don Levy ’52 wrote for the Stentor during his junior and senior year at the College, when Dr. Arthur Voss was its adviser. Levy’s Delta Chi fraternity dominated the paper. “In those days everything revolved around the fraternities and sororities,” says Levy, an aspiring muckraker who “only wrote about controversial stuff” including a mean-spirited prank prompted by a parking crisis in which “a bunch of Phipes kidnapped this guy and drove him 20 miles away and left him there to get home.” He also wrote pieces about the inter-sorority sniping that erupted in the wake of a “sex scandal” after a couple of girls stayed out all night and missed curfew. He also remembers someone in the administration raising a stir with a piece about prejudice within the fraternities and sororities. “At least people read it,” he says.
Former editor Sig Gissler ’56 recalls his time at the paper as relatively calm during the Cold War Era. “There was a wave of anticommunist activity in the United States; Senator McCarthy was on the rampage,” says Gissler. “I wrote a few editorials that related to some of those issues. In general it was a pretty placid campus. But it was also pivotal in that things were beginning to change.”
Gissler took a job at the Independent Register in Libertyville while he was still a student, and credits adviser Gordon Mine with helping him become a more sophisticated writer. His American civilization major gave him grounding in history that made him a better reporter, and he went on to went on to edit the Waukegan News Sun and the Milwaukee Journal and now teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York, where he also serves as administrator of the Pulitzer Prize.