Power 2 the Pupils

My senior year in high school I signed up for journalism class without realizing there were pre-requisites. The system failed to weed me out so, when I showed up in his class the first day of the semester, the teacher decided to make the most of the situation and made me office manager for the newspaper. I handled the advertising mostly (I had to both find and deal with businesses interested in advertising and also deal with composing and billing the actual ads) but eventually filled in as photographer and editorial writer. 

Working on the newspaper staff was the most fun I had in high school. My first photography assignment was a Maria Muldaur concert on a rotating stage. The school used twin lens reflex cameras. 

You have to have used a TLR to appreciate how difficult it is to keep something in frame on a rotating stage.

Muldaur proved to be a One Hit Wonder on the Pop stage with “Midnight at the Oasis” but actually had a long career and resides across the Bay in Mill Valley as do Bonnie Raitt and Tracy Chapman -- or at least that’s what I’ve heard.

Also, the newspaper and yearbook staffs usually overlap and socialize so you can have all the personal exposure you want. Until my senior year my presence in the yearbooks was limited to that one ghastly portrait each year. My senior year I’m all over the place (usually in the company of other people from the paper/yearbook staffs).

1st Earth Day and Kent State

This was 1970 and, besides the war in Vietnam, I was excited about the first Earth Day. Earth Day events were being planed at ASU so I went on campus to get information to turn into feature articles for the paper -- the first and only time I wrote articles. I ended up filling a two page spread in the paper with everything the average high school student didn’t care to know about Earth Day.

Then came the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State. Even ASU was shut down with buildings occupied and all sorts of excitement. I was still on campus working with the Earth Day organizers and got mixed in with the mob.  At the time, taking over university offices (usually the office of the president or a dean) was a thing, so at one point I found myself with a group occupying Dean W___'s office. Pretty advanced for someone not yet even enrolled in the university. We came in through a window and when I realized it was Dean W____'s office (who knew my mother and who I had met in her office) I bolted back out the window. 

The next few years I was involved on campus with a war resistance group organizing protests and counseling men who didn't want to get drafted. While there were several protest events on campus, never again was there the degree of student outrage and involvement I had seen in the spring of 1970. ASU was known as a party school, even a year after Kent State it was impossible to imagine the ASU student body getting excited about anything besides getting tan or getting laid. I found myself wondering if this strange episode had really happened.