High School Journalism
Harry Baron
— I was on the high school newspaper. I wrote a column called "Behind The Baton," which was about the music of the day. I belonged to a club called Campus Press Club which was set up by Swing Magazine as a promotional thing then. They got all the high school writers, and they could arrange interviews with celebrities. The kids would turn in their written pieces and the publicity guy would make his money. It was a very, very smart way of doing things. It was a big kick for us. And I got to meet Sinatra. I got to meet, you know, all these guys — Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor.
Myron Kandel
— I got on the high school newspaper and discovered that this was my calling. I became Sports Editor of the Erasmus Hall Dutchman. I worked after classes in the office of the faculty advisor who was a very irascible teacher, and he fired me as Sports Editor of the paper. When I got kicked out, I started an insurgent newspaper. Right across the street from Erasmus Hall on Bedford Avenue was the Flatbush Boys Club, and I put out an insurgent sports newspaper, a mimeographed newspaper. I had to type it myself. I taught myself to type. I also did for a while the play-by-play announcing of Erasmus Hall basketball games.
Bill Taylor
— I was the Sports Editor of my high school newspaper and then was the Sports Editor of the Brooklyn College Vanguard before events thrust me into the position of being the Editor in Chief. But unlike a lot of my colleagues on the Vanguard, when I was on the paper I didn't have the feeling that I was necessarily going to be a journalist. I was already thinking about law school.
Geri Stevens
— I wasn't on staff but I contributed articles and I think I wrote a poem once. I was on the staff of the yearbook.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— I was very involved in the high school newspaper. It was a nice newspaper, very good, and a good group of kids. I always had the sense of engagement and activity and wanting to be involved and I can't tell you where it came from. I think my idealism, which became in college more political, was that I was very affected by World War II and by all the propaganda that was leveled at impressionable people. I believed all the heroism, all the movies, all the tragedy and all that. I learned about America and what it stood for, and I believed it then - and believe it or not, I believe it now. It took hold and I just never separated from it.
Herb Dorfman
— The paper demanded your presence every day, as all those school papers do, and you soon learned that you were writing for a large school population and every faculty member and the principal, and so forth. I remember writing something one time — it was just an opinion of something, nothing earthshaking — the goddamned principal spent two days looking for me. So I learned a sense of responsibility about it. I was on that paper for about three years and finally I was editor at the end. A nice bunch of people.