Joining
Harry Baron
— Naturally, the first thing I did when I entered Brooklyn was go down to the newspaper ‘cause that was what I wanted to be. You know? Journalism was my love. And I ran into a whole bunch of similar souls. They were all aspiring newspaper people and I was in my element.
Gene Bluestein
— I immediately got on Vanguard and it was the formative experience of my life.
Geri Stevens
— After about six months I gravitated toward Vanguard — I was interested in journalism and this was the student newspaper. And I was seventeen and very naive and very shy, and they all intimidated me and terrified me and I really had to talk myself into staying there because that was the first time I was in an environment where people used language that I wasn’t familiar with or wasn’t exposed to on a regular basis. And then it just almost became a matter of sheer will. I thought, “well, I’m just going to lick this,” you know? After I’d gone in there the first time I was quite intimidated and I thought “I’m never going to go back there again,” and then I thought Goddamn it, I really have to. This is ridiculous. And it was about a year or two before anybody even noticed me.
Harry Baron
— I was sixteen years old. I walked into the Vanguard office. I want to join this newspaper. They say, “Fine. You have to take a test.” So first you go to classes, you go to cub classes, then at the end, after several weeks of the cub classes, they give you a test. You go to a club and you write up what happened. You go to the Chemistry Club and they have a speaker and you just do the story. So I did it and I passed.
Ann Lane
— I can’t remember how I got onto Vanguard. It was my first semester. My friend Judy, who I went to high school with, said she wanted to learn tennis instead. So she did tennis and I did Vanguard, and then she joined Vanguard as well. I probably was on the high school newspaper is my recollection.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— If the people generally on campus were smart and smart-assed, the ones in Vanguard were the epitome of that. I mean, they topped everyone. And the people who applied for Vanguard thought that they qualified for that as well. And they were very smart, very funny, and very idiosyncratic people.
Harry Baron
— Brooklyn College, being a liberal arts college, didn’t have a journalism school — or a course, even. And the word was, from the people in the know, if you’re going to study journalism, liberal arts is a good thing to have. So I did my liberal arts and my journalism was Vanguard. The first story I wrote was — there was something wrong with the library clock. It wasn’t chiming. So I had to go and find out why. So I remember the headline was: “Hickory, dickory, dock! The mystery of the clock!” and that was my feature.