During my visit to Fresno City College I had fun seeing what had occurred at the school since I had graduated. It was a great day to see how it had grown but it also seemed that the attitude change seems to be one of, what was done in the past was not good and that our presentation of the past must be the whole truth. An article in the school newspaper, the Rampage, that showed how little is known about what was going on in the past. When you try to think like those in the past you must first realize that those people are not living in today’s world. The article picks up on one day in 1963 that I will always remember and how we handled the events. It was November 22 1963 and the assassination of President John Kennedy. It happened that I was working for the Fresno Bee, the local newspaper, and left work before the events of the day and arrived on campus right after it occurred. My source of the news, was the head custodian on campus and my day seemed to go downhill from that point. Nothing was done on campus the rest of that day and not many public events occurred over the following weekend. The current article asked why we had so little coverage of the tragedy the next week. The author seems to ignore that part of our responsibility was to try to bring the school back to a more normal level. We were not just the mouthpiece of the college but we were trying to learn how to be journalists. We were limited, though, by the technology of the time. Our deadlines were days before the publication date and we had to plan most of the paper a week in advance. Not much of the country was back to normal for several weeks. That week consisted of much of the country watching their TV sets to see what was going on first in Dallas and then in Washington D.C. Most people just sat and watched the television network coverage that had very little to say but it put us in touch with the events. No one expected that Sunday that we would watch the live killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. LIVE TELEVISION not what we have today where everything is delayed to make it cleaner. Then we watched the funeral procession and the funeral. I can still hear the slow drum cadence of the procession and see the salute of John Jr. to his father. We did what we thought was best. Look at the newspapers of that day and of that week. They were so focused on the tragedy, itself. Our job was to try to help the attitude of our peers. It was hard, but part of what we did as a college newspaper. I noticed that it was not many years later that the attitude of some on campus changed toward the job of the school newspaper and I know that I would have embraced those changes. I worked at the local newspaper and I did know that both papers had their role in bringing information to the public that they were aimed toward.
As a partial aside, you should know that even news organizations were slower than normal because of the reaction of their staffs to the events of the day. The next morning when I arrived at the Bee to work, the place was covered in wire service copy that no one had taken off of the wire service machines. They just left it all on the floor and went on with their immediate work.
Maybe we should look at the past in light of the past and not in today's light.
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