{"id":5905,"date":"2020-03-18T06:27:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-18T13:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=5905"},"modified":"2020-03-18T06:27:13","modified_gmt":"2020-03-18T13:27:13","slug":"pioneer-pride-part-14-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/pioneer-pride-part-14-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Pioneer Pride: Part 14-Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Journalism was my life in high school. The staffs of The Elevator<\/em> my junior and senior years were the smartest, most talented, funniest, best read, most informed, and most bawdy group of people I have ever met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything was cut and paste with the\nnewspaper, and with the rest of our lives, too. If that doesn’t make\nany sense, then you never cut and paste putting anything together. It\nis a skill I still use in the digital age. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was nothing like the feeling of\nthe paper coming out and watching teachers and students read it\naround campus. Reading you!<\/em> Nothing! <\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein\nand expose corruption, muckrake with gusto, tear down the false\nfootball gods. Savage<\/em>. That was the word we always used,\nstraight from Hunter S. Thompson, whom we all had read. There was a\nwriter who wanted to be Hunter and ingested mescaline, walked down\nthe halls during passing periods, and wrote a column about it called\n\u201cJustin Buffalo and the Cows.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was the phrase \u201cmaking an ad\nrun,\u201d which was code for driving off closed campus to get stoned,\npark, and make out with the females on staff. There were political\ndebates that rivaled Buckley versus Vidal. I would regularly write\nseven or eight articles an issue, news, sports, movie reviews,\nfeatures and editorials. Yes, those scathing editorials ripping\neverything in sight: jocks, teachers, Republicans and Ronald Reagan,\nalways Reagan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From my senior year journal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2-18-82<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\ncan\u2019t stand to look at Reagan\u2019s face. There is no one on earth I\nhate. He is one. His policies, his family, his asshole face. I can\u2019t\nstand the man! How could he get elected?!! The American population\ncould not possibly elect this kind of man. I don\u2019t wish him ill\u2014\nonly that bastard would fade away\u2014 for good.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple editorials landed me in the\nPrincipal or Vice Principal’s office, but nothing ever happened. I\ngot straight A’s, had perfect attendance, and didn’t do drugs. But it\nwas a brush with censorship, THE MAN, and I sort of liked going up\nagainst…whatever it was. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One time I wrote a satire from the\nperspective of a cheerleader, as if she were keeping a diary and was\na secret, repressed intellectual. I commissioned illustrations to\naccompany the piece. Something happened when that paper hit campus. A\ncouple cheerleaders came looking for me. I liked that, too. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\nwas often a lot of downtime in journalism, so to waste away the\nhours, we held spitting contests out the third floor window of the\nold building, staged races with rolling chairs, played Vietnam War on\nthe IBM Selectrics, and wrote low-grade Penthouse<\/em>\nforums and read them aloud. For some reason, there were dozens of\nSears catalogs from the 70s in the room, and one staff member\nroutinely perused the ladies underwear and bra sections and made\ncollages with the photographs, illustrations and text, and gave them\naway as gifts. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another staff member was a boy, who was\neasily the best writer, and read nothing but read Zane Grey and Louie\nL’Amour novels\u2014during class, in all his classes. He never did a\nlick of schoolwork except his newspaper articles, and scored a\nperfect score on his SAT. I have wondered for decades what became of\nhim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We probably drove our adviser to a\nnervous breakdown of some kind. She despised us. She was in over her\nhead with this crew. We were grade-A assholes and wielded words like\nmachetes. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many years later, I became a high\nschool newspaper advisor and never let students pull the kind of shit\nwe pulled. Quite possibly because no one tried or even conceived of\ntrying! It just wasn’t in them anymore. Rebellious minds had been\ndirected elsewhere. They weren’t angry with the political system.\nThey found niches within popular culture that served their rebellious\nneeds. Perhaps that was a good thing. Or maybe it wasn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for Oregon City High School’s newspaper today…The Elevator <\/em>is gone….print there is dead, and that breaks my heart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride<\/em> is a \u201cbook.\u201d It is also my wish that the reader consider \u201cbuying\u201d the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journalism was my life in high school. The staffs of The Elevator my junior and senior years were the smartest, most talented, funniest, best read, most informed, and most bawdy group of people I have ever met. Everything was cut and paste with the newspaper, and with the rest of our lives, too. If that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-city","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5905"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5907,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905\/revisions\/5907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}