Long-lasting impact of the unsigned editorial

During my stint as The Miami Student’s editorial page editor in 1974, I put considerable energy into opposing the university’s proposal to build an ice skating rink. I was paying my own way, and considered a $20 student fee for an ice rink to be an extravagant waste.

The administration ignored my advice. And, of course, Miami hockey became so popular the university eventually built a second, much larger, rink.

I’m reminded of that every time I visit Oxford – along with the wonderful times I had working at The Student as a reporter and editor. I also recall, with particular fondness, the long nights in the offices of the Oxford Press doing the production work that translated our fervent ideas into ink on paper.

Younger readers of this epistle might not know the joy of typewriters nor machines that created ribbons of punched paper tape and produced justified columns of print which then had to be waxed, cut and laid onto a page. Corrections were made with razor knives.

My hands-on experience at The Student served me well in my career.

I started on the bottom rung. After graduation, I got a job as a copy clerk at my hometown Cincinnati Enquirer. Then, a friend who ran its Indiana bureau in Lawrenceburg invited me to freelance under his tutelage. I’d get $10 for filing copy about a city council meeting, $45 or so for a feature story with a photo.

Before long I got an internship in the Enquirer’s Northern Kentucky bureau, covering Newport three days a week and working alone on weekends, making the rounds of the cop shops and praying I didn’t miss anything that would show up the next day in the dominant Kentucky Post.

After that, it was off to the big leagues: a reporting job at the Daily Journal in Franklin, Indiana, where reporters carried cameras and took police radios to parties. Then came reporting stops in Evansville, Indiana, and Charleston, South Carolina. In 1981, I returned to Cincinnati for a job at The Post, where I covered public utilities and politics before going onto the city desk.

In 1986, I moved to Columbus and opened a one-man Statehouse bureau. It was heaven. I got to cover anything I wanted, be it a legislative session, statewide political race, Board of Regents proceeding or Ohio Supreme Court decision. The Post also gave me space on the Saturday editorial page for a weekly column. It was a heady time, full of bi-partisan struggles over K-12 accountability (and funding) reform, human services overhauls and the beginnings of vast changes in the regulation of public utilities.

I married a Cincinnati native while in Columbus; both our children were born there. By 1992, we were driving down to see family so often that I asked my boss if he could find something for me to do there. He asked me to move back and run the editorial page.

It was a second audition for heaven.

I gave up the thrill of seeing my byline for the anonymity of writing unsigned editorials. But it was fun; even better were the editorial board meetings, where folks who were making things happen would come in and wrestle for an hour or so. College presidents, judges, politicians, hospital leaders, do-gooders of all stripes, even the occasional business executive.

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Eventually, however, the downsizings that came with the death march toward the Dec. 31, 2007, expiration of The Post’s joint operating agreement took a toll.

When I started on the editorial page, I had a full-time assistant editor, a letters clerk and a cartoonist; there was also a wholly separate opinion page staff across the river for the Kentucky Post, our sister publication. The copy desk wrote headlines and handled word editing; they also executed the paper layout sheets I’d draw the way I had learned at The Miami Student.

By the end of 2007, I was putting out opinion pages for both the Cincinnati and Kentucky Posts pretty much by myself. I’d lost my assistant, copy clerk and cartoonist to buyouts and, thanks to the arrival of pagination, was producing and copy-editing the opinion and oped pages myself (with oversight, thank goodness, from the equally beleaguered copy desk.)

Getting back into the production end of things repeatedly brought to mind my time at The Student. I even got to relive the late nights and early mornings, thanks to a VPN connection that let me get my pages out from home after the kids had gone to bed.

More than anything, my time at The Miami Student taught me the importance of thorough reporting, even for – especially for – unsigned editorials. In reviewing pages from that era, I was glad to see ample space given to opposing points of view. Those were enduring lessons.