Thursday, May 01, 2008

Librarians Rock

After seeing "Hearts and Minds" last night I remembered where I was at 33 years ago. I was working as a typesetter, keyliner for the Post, the student newspaper at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. We worked on IBM selectric composers typing onto a thick clay-backed paper that was then pasted down on keyline boards with rubber cement. It was ridiculously tedious work and required a special skill with an Xacto knife. In addition, we were all full-time students working until all hours of the night to get a daily paper out.

When we received Van Es's iconographic photo over the AP wire, we knew we wanted to use it for an editorial. I remember spending hours cutting and pasting individual lines of type to get the story to wrap around the image. This is, of course, incredibly easy to do these days. Back then, I had to output entire columns of type in each of the different line lengths and then cut one from each column size and paste them into place. It was a weird way to be spending the night that meant so much to so many of us.

Around midnight last night, I found that OU student newspapers are archived and available at Alden Library at Ohio University. They have an "ask a librarian" page and I e-mailed. This image arrived in my e-mail tonight. Unbelievable. Thanks are due to Mike, the librarian who said they don't usually do this sort of thing but he decided to make an exception.

Sai gone - Photo Hosted at Buzznet

Oddly enough, I'm still a typesetter, and the guy who wrote the article, who was the second love of my life, is still writing about television. Here's the blog of John Kiesewetter from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

3 comments:

Frank Partisan said...

Mayday Greetings

Daisy Deadhead said...

Wow Raven, we were only 30 miles from each other! We used to go to Athens to umm, hang out during the Meigs County harvest. It was LEGEND! :P (excellent, very cheap domestic weed)

Various colleges (Alabama and Auburn, USC and Clemson, to name two pairs) have been known as "Culture and Agriculture"... and Columbus and Athens were jokingly called "Agriculture and Agriculture"! (lol)

Ravenmn said...

Oh yeah, there was a LOT of pot there. In fact, people walked around smoking pot openly on campus and in the three blocks of "downtown". The only time you could get arrested for pot usage was if you started growing the stuff on your front porch.

I never could get very high on the stuff, though. I don't have the chemistry for it.