Off the press!

My life and good times in alternative journalism  
By CLIF GARBODEN  |  November 15, 2006

I can write the alternative press’s history — or one passably passionate version of it — because the institution’s trajectory matches my own. As a hard-core baby boomer (no apologies), born in 1948, I hit college in 1966, Walpurgis Afternoon, as it were, on the 20th-century cultural calendar. I was greeted there by the first issue of the redesigned and recently radicalized BU News. The cover overhead: rotc vs. education, accompanied by a photo of a ROTC cadet printed as a negative image. The editorial: abolish rotc; page-one story: president case, houston condemn war, slums.

The latter pieces quoted university president Harold C. Case saying the US is “more alone in the world than we know” thanks to the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies, and cited student-body president Julian Houston (who became a respected Boston judge) calling for “a total re-evaluation of our educational purpose, and perhaps even a revolution.”

There was also an invitation to try out for the paper’s staff, codedly promising that “cool heads prevail” at the News . Needless to say, I headed straight to the BU News office and offered my services as a reporter and photographer, skills acquired in gentler times working on high-school publications.

There I met the strangest and most wonderful cast of characters I’d encountered in all my 18 years. Secular-humanist nerds on dope. Hyperventilating social activists. Blue-collar scholarship geniuses and eccentric millionaires’ children in mutually gratifying solidarity. Love at first sight. I became an overnight BU Newsnik, anxious to subvert and bedevil the university, its president, the government, the military, the church, and every other authority dedicated to holding back the flood of over-educated young people inadvertently created by America’s post-Sputnik frenzy to out-school the Russians.

I was not alone. My generation’s distinguishing shared experience was media; our common characteristic was a determination to do things our own way. Inspired by Elvis and Kerouac and Ed Murrow and Dylan and betrayed by the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam draft, we saw every advantage in re-invention and none in convention. And, thanks to the Cold War Space Race, the World War II establishment — the infamous hand that fed us — had given us the tools to re-work just about anything.

As budding know-it-all journalists, we threw out every playbook and rulebook in sight. One by one, we transferred out of the communication school that had admitted us and re-enrolled as English or poli-sci majors. We cozied up to progressive profs like Mad Murray Levin and Howard Zinn and made fun of the J-school instructors who limited the art of reporting to “who, what, where, and when.” We went straight to that most elusive “w” — why.

In the darkroom, we pushed standard black-and-white film to wantonly high speeds with specialty developing concoctions so we could shoot everything with available light — imparting an atmospheric, realistic look to our pictures and abandoning the flat, grain-less, over-lit direct-flash intrusiveness of standard press photography.

1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |   next >
  Topics: News Features , Civil Rights, Lee Harvey Oswald, Howard Zinn,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY CLIF GARBODEN
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   PBS LOOKS AT THE DARKER SIDE OF CHANGING THE WORLD  |  January 11, 2011
    Sometimes you want to give PBS a big grateful kiss just for staying the course while most of TV, losing ground to the interweb age, hovers between cultural hemorrhage and commercial death.
  •   REVIEW: GOD IN AMERICA  |  October 10, 2010
    For all our bragging about separating church and state, throughout our nation's history, religion has never been on the sidelines. If
  •   A BLOOD-BOILED APPEAL TO THE YOUNG AND BEWILDERED BOSTON NEWBIES  |  August 31, 2010
    You students are back. We locals, many of the best of whom began our lives here as scholar-transplants from that Other America ourselves, know this without consulting a calendar.
  •   REVIEW: THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS  |  August 17, 2010
    Some marketing wizard gave Oxford-based historian Alex Butterworth's exhaustive history of the international anarchist movement a fun title it doesn't deserve.
  •   FASHIONABLY GREAT  |  August 10, 2010
    New-York-born-and-based photographer Richard Avedon (1923–2004), who's rightly credited with revolutionizing fashion photography, was more than a couturier-mag genius.

 See all articles by: CLIF GARBODEN