Alumni
The Glory Years
The late 1960s were the real glory years for the Stentor, which carried stories about a sit-in by black students hoping to bring black faculty members to the campus, the liberalization of rules at the girls’ dormatory Moore Hall, and controversy over an intergenerational conference that had little student input.
One issue featured huge cover photos of street battles during the 1968 Democratic National Convention taken by Ron Pownall ’69; his photograph showing a policeman clubbing Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis was picked up by the wire services. Pownall continued with photography, and spent 15 years working for Rolling Stone. He was one of the campus photographers who worked for Director of Publicity Ellen Mosey in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s and were paid for their work.
Former editor Jim Kidney ’69 said the Stentor’s length doubled from six pages to a dozen during his time at the College, and that by the time he was an upperclassman it was a must-read that focused almost exclusively on campus issues. “We kept folks high and low upset much of the time, which a good college paper should do,” he says.
Kidney recalls hearing the balls bouncing on the girls’ basketball upstairs while working on the paper in the basement of North Gym. After graduation he and co-editor John Norton ’69 were invited by advisor Forest Hansen to produce a special edition “to help calm a lot of rumors about a possible black student rebellion and on the burning of North Gym, which some attributed to black students, but which likely was either the local Nazi party or maybe even a student sleeping in the building,” he says. The cause of the fire was never determined. “It wasn’t heroic, but was the kind of thing newspapers are supposed to do,” says Kidney, who landed a job at UPI and worked as a reporter before becoming a lawyer in 1978. He says that his experience “made me a more clear and cogent writer.”
Black power was another major issue on campus in those days, and some students from Black Students for Black Action began publishing the stylized political tabloid Black Rap from the late 1960s through the early 1970s (if College yearbook pictures are accurate, African American students were historically not involved with the paper).
A new, neo-traditional look was adopted in 1984, including a banner and the maxim, “Magna est veritas et praevalebit,” or “Truth is mighty, and will prevail.” That’s when I wrote a column for the paper, called “The Poison Pen.” A major controversy erupted after I addressed the Greek organizations’ preferential housing privileges—which were being reconsidered by the administration—by rewriting the lyrics of “The Superbowl Shuffle.” I was hazed during dinner in Commons and my friends were harassed. I bought a locking gas cap and walked around campus with an informal bodyguard before the administration eased tensions by calling a campus-wide town meeting.
During those years there was an editorial called “Should Pledging Guidelines be Reviewed?”, regular All My Children updates, a piece about the broken dishwasher in Szabo, and a plea for sports writers.
In the early 1990s the Stentor won a second place national certificate from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. In the 1990s it had a sporadically published conservative competitor, the Forester Review, which was started by some republican students and stuck around for a few years.
Previous Stentor staffers, like Kidney and Gissler, went on to pursue jobs in journalism. More recently, former editor Tony Bertuca ’05 earned a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University, where he became the first intern to be published on the front page of USA Today with a story he wrote about the memorial for civil rights leader Rosa Parks.