The newsroom of a newspaper has got to be the most stimulating place on earth. Every day holds serious moments of digging for news and keeping the public informed, but between deadlines there is no funnier – and at times strange – place.
I learned that first during my time at my high school newspaper, then during my 10 years as a reporter at the Memphis Press-Scimitar. But my past 30 years as the faculty adviser to the UofM Daily Helmsman has been the funniest, strangest and most fun of all! Perhaps that is because there is no better combination than serious young journalists and the exuberance and zaniness of college students.
Nights at the Helmsman newsroom have always been especially lively with deadline pressure and the freedom of having the building mostly to ourselves. One of my favorite memories is the time that three Helmsman editors — Donna Ogle, Lisa Miller and Renea Leathers — went over to the Tiger Den to pick up some dinner. As they were about to leave the building, they glanced into a classroom where a naked man was standing. They knew immediately that he was the notorious man who had been stripping down in various parts of campus for several weeks.
Instead of screaming or running away, these three tough women were determined to catch the streaker. One editor took off to get the police while the other two chased the nude man until they and the police caught and arrested him. They came back up to the newsroom, wrote the story and ran it on page one the next day.
Other nighttime adventures were less dramatic, but nonetheless noteworthy. Like the night when UofM lost in the final seconds of the basketball championship, and Helmsman editor Nevin Batiwalla, a devoted Tiger fan, in frustration and anger jumped up in the hall and sent the lighted exit sign crashing to the floor.
Editor Josh Cannon was well known among the staff for his ability to do impersonations of everybody, from the SGA president to faculty members. He was standing in the newsroom, his back to the door, doing a spot-on impersonation of one of our faculty members with the rest of us laughing, when who should walk in but said faculty member. The rest of us who saw what Josh could not see were trying desperately to get him to stop before the faculty member caught on.
The ancient elevator in the Meeman Journalism Building has been known to occasionally get stuck with people in it. I have been stranded in that elevator once alone and the second time with editor Jonathan Capriel, but he was carrying a giant bucket of fried chicken to feed the night staff, so we knew that if it took a while to rescue us, at least we wouldn’t starve.
Helmsman Antics
In the daytime over the years, the newsroom has often been the site of fun, games and pranks, especially during the time that Kimberly Rogers and Danny Linton were on the staff. They, along with me, were (and are) avid players of board games and cards. One day we were waiting for the reporters to finish their stories and decided the three of us would kill a little time playing Scrabble. Unfortunately, we were playing it on a desk right by the door and the chair of the Journalism Department came in to show a visiting dignitary the newsroom and found the faculty adviser and two paid editors playing a game during work hours.
Even more embarrassing was the time when, to our surprise, the chair brought a group from the Dallas Morning News to visit the newsroom and found Kim and some other staffers writing racial slurs on the white board. There was an innocent explanation — they were discussing Kim’s upcoming three-part series on racism on campus — but the chair and visitors couldn’t have known that at the time.
Danny, who was our arts and entertainment writer for 13 semesters during his undergraduate and grad school years, once won a trip to the Oscars in LA because he had successfully guessed all the Best Picture nominees. When he returned, Kim and other staffers had come up with a prank to make Danny think a famous movie expert, Roger Ebert, had called and wanted to interview Danny.
Another newsroom gag was Danny and others coming up with a Candy Justice Joke of the Week. Of the many jokes made, two stay imprinted in my mind: “If Candy Justice married Roseanne Barr, she'd be Candy Barr” and “What do you call it when you get lots for your money at the candy store? Candy Justice.”
Newsroom Equipment Is a Lot Better Now
Now our newsroom has new, top-of-the line Mac computers, but there was a time where our computers were so old that Danny and Kim –during a visit to the Smithsonian in D.C. – found a computer just like ours on display as a historic relic.
And before our newsroom TV was replaced with a flat screen TV, we watched breaking news, like 9/11, on the really pitiful newsroom TV that Kim and Danny sometimes also watched General Hospital on. For years we thought it was a black and white TV and then one time turned a certain knob and found it was color — not good color, but color nonetheless.
Some Serious Stuff
It has not always been fun and games at the Helmsman. A UofM student once was arrested by federal agents who suspected he might be planning to assassinate the president of the United States. The Helmsman covered it like all other media in the city did, but when the student was released, he blamed the Helmsman for his problems and threatened me and the reporter who wrote the story. The journalism department had to get a restraining order to keep the student away from our building and away from the staff and me. Pictures of him were posted around the building.
In another incident, a Helmsman staff member intentionally left a student organization off a calendar of events and that led to six months of the Helmsman being accused by the group of discriminating against women – even though all of our top editors were women – and the offended group even got famous feminist Gloria Steinem to speak out against the Helmsman.
You Don’t Like Us. You Really, Really Don’t Like Us
Like all news organizations, the Helmsman has had its share of detractors, but a few instances stand out in our memory, like the Native American who accused us of stealing his soul by publishing his photograph taken at a public event. And there were several incidents of football players getting mad at sports writers, which led to one sports writer escaping out the window and another’s camera being smashed by a player.
When editor Michael Paulk accumulated a lot of unpaid parking tickets, he was tried by a student court in absentia and sentenced to pick up trash on campus. The staff and I encouraged him to appeal the sentence since it was obviously retribution against him and the newspaper, but Michael very wisely chose to accept his sentence in a good-natured way, and the campus has never been cleaner.
A Place Where No Subject Is Off Limits
When I think back over 30 years with the Daily Helmsman, two incidents, that some might consider unremarkable, stand out in my mind. I was driving three students —Kim Rogers, Danny Linton and Amulya Malladi – to Jackson, Mississippi for a convention, and we ended up on the side of I-55 with a flat tire and no jack to replace the tire. We all got out of the car and joked about how we might not be safe in Mississippi, considering we resembled a United Nations poster — one Black woman, one Indian woman and two white people. Just as we made that joke, a white man in a beat-up pick-up truck pulled off the highway and offered to help.
Because my Jeep had to have metric tools to do an otherwise simple tire replacement and my tool box had been stolen weeks before, that good Samaritan had to spend more than an hour piecing together tools from the bed of his truck, but finally got my Jeep into a drivable state. His wife, with seemingly no annoyance, had sat in the truck the whole time waiting for him to get our tire fixed. When I offered to pay him for his help, he refused to accept anything and just drove away.
When Kimberly, Danny and I were recently talking about that incident, we said how touched we had been by that man’s kindness, and Kim said it made her think of our newsroom which has always been wonderfully diverse, and as Kim said, “Nothing was off limits in our newsroom. We could talk about anything.”
The other incident that lingers with me took place one night about 7 or 8 years ago. It began sleeting and snowing hard while editor Josh Cannon, managing editor Jonathan Capriel and I were staying late to get the paper out. We had sent the others home because of the weather. We went outside and found it very difficult to get our cars cleaned off because the sleet was frozen hard on our windshields and we had no scrapers, just my credit card.
Everything was going wrong, when I said something they thought was out of character for me. We all started laughing and couldn’t stop and when we finally were able to leave for our respective homes, Josh said, “This is a night I will never forget for the rest of my life.” Jonathan and I agreed, and so far, the three of us never have forgotten it.
