Eric Garland was a writer and editor for The News-Letter during his sophomore year and Editor-in-Chief as a junior. He graduated in 1978 and joined the City Paper startup. He went on to work on a number of magazines, and since 2009 has been a partner in Blue Heron Research Partners, a journalistic-driven due diligence firm for hedge funds and private equity firms.
Yuri Zelinksy (better known as “George” by his News-Letter peers) attended Hopkins from 1973 to 1977, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Social and Behavioral Sciences. During his time at the University, he worked as a staff writer and News Editor for The News-Letter. Today he works in Washington, D.C. as a lawyer.
I walked into the Gatehouse during orientation of what was my sophomore year in 1978 and immediately fell in love. I was a Hopkins legacy but a transfer, having spent a year in an experimental high-school-to-college program at the University of Delaware. I had a desire to write. I had been an editor at my high school paper at Wesley College where the Delaware program was housed, and I had even been a sports stringer for Dover Post, a local paper founded only a few years before.
Not long after the middle of the last century, I became an undergraduate at Hopkins. I had received a rigorous but rather unexciting preparation at Baltimore City College, after which Hopkins felt like an awakening. The courses, of course, provided much of the stimulation, but there was an extracurricular electricity too. It became evident one morning in my freshman year as I walked across the Upper Quadrangle. I looked up and saw that someone had decorated the Gilman Hall clock with a beautifully executed Mickey Mouse face.
My fondest memories of college are related to my time at The News-Letter. I had been an editor of my high school paper in Brooklyn, N.Y. that was released only six times per year. I already knew that I wanted to continue to write for my college paper, and then when I decided to go to Hopkins, the excitement grew, as I had been an avid reader of Russell Baker in the New York Times, and I knew of his Hopkins days.
During our senior year as undergraduates at Hopkins from 1959 to 1960, my News-Letter co-editor Stanley Handmaker and I, as well as our entire staff, did our best to call attention to several "major" issues of the day as we saw it.
I cannot remember a time in my life without newspapers. My parents always had them in the house, and my sisters and I would try to find the hidden Nina’s in Al Hirschfeld’s inimitable drawings. My first job, or at least my first real job where I did not work for my parents, was at Frate’s News Store in my hometown. I had to get there at 5 a.m. every Sunday to assemble the New York Times; back then, the paper was shipped in sections to be collated by kids like me at each store. This was three hours of intense shuffling, hands covered in ink, $5 in my pocket and a new pack of gum for the bike ride home.
My recollections of The News-Letter reach back more than 70 years to when I joined the staff as a reporter in the fall of 1949, my freshman year at Hopkins. I had been editor of my high school newspaper and had worked a couple of summers as a copy boy at the Courier-Post, a newspaper in Camden, N.J. So I was anxious to work for The News-Letter.
Bluish-gray stone walls. Yellow accents around arched windows. A slippery, rundown wooden bridge leads to a front door with white paint peeling off it. And mounted over the door, a plaque which reads “News Letter Office.”
The News-Letter had a very different and more important role during my years, 1953 to 1957, on the Homewood Campus.
Hello. I’m Eric Goodman — Hopkins Class of 2011. I worked on The News-Letter from 2007-2010, the first year as a Sports section staff writer and the last two years as a Sports Editor. Since graduating from Hopkins, I have worked in consulting in D.C. and New York, got an MBA at New York University and now work and live in Seattle with my wife who also went to Hopkins (Class of 2013).
In the fall of 1969, I was in front of Shriver Hall heading for sophomore-year registration when I noticed a tall, shaggy-haired guy approaching. “You’re coming back down to The News-Letter, right?” he asked.
I joined The News-Letter as a freshman in 1964. One of my assigned tasks, in addition to turning out profound, satirical, highly principled journalistic gems, involved going to our printing plant on Thursday evenings to proofread, an odious task reserved for rookies.
I still walk past the Gatehouse sometimes, 20 years later. Its arched windows and vestigial chimney still stand sentinel over the students who pass through its gently creaking doors, clicking their words onto screens late into the night. The sameness is somehow comforting.
The News-Letter emailed over 800 alumni to ask if they would be interested in contributing to this magazine issue. Many responded to simply say yes, they would, but David Hawk went above and beyond and replied with a 1350-word reflection about his time at the paper — before we even asked him to write anything! What follows is his email to us, edited only for length and clarity, to preserve its enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and beautifully impromptu nature.
As we celebrate The News-Letter’s 125th birthday, it seems crazy to think that we have been up and running since 1896 and that we have covered everything from the everyday shenanigans of Hopkins students to earth-shattering global events and movements that have impacted the present day. I went through the archives of The News-Letter’s website, which go back to 2001, to find some of the weirdest, most interesting and most important headlines covered by our predecessors. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and read what the Hopkins community has been up to over the past couple decades:
From 1980 to 1984, when I was very young and very thin and absolutely adorable if your vision was blurry, I wrote a silly humor column for The News-Letter. It was called Ham on Wry. I still don’t know why it was called Ham on Wry. That’s the name the paper’s scruffy editor came up with (hello, Andrew Hurley), and it stuck for four years through a couple more editors (hello, Steve Eisenberg). I probably should have asked one of them what the name of the column meant. They probably would have explained it to me if I’d asked.
I’ve always fancied myself a writer. That’s why I responded when The News-Letter called for more voices, urging, “If you want to say something, write it down, and bring it in” (Friday, Oct. 4, 1974). Congenitally unable to pay careful attention to directions and details, I anonymously sent my article by campus mail and included my campus box address. Russ Smith (A&S ’78), one of the Features Editors, soon paid a visit to Hollander House.
The dream is always the same. I’m writing a screenplay about a teenager fantasizing about his babysitter when my wife flings open the bedroom door. Writing is risky business. Or is it dreaming? I do more than my share of both, and The News-Letter, where I first let my imagination run wild on the printed page, must bear some of the blame.
When I began college in the fall of 1966, I wanted to do well in some extracurricular activities. I tried out for the football team and lasted two practices. Then I ran cross country during my first two years. I worked on the speech team for a year. I was involved in a campus community service program for three years.
