Training
Myron Kandel
— I immediately joined the cub class. This was part of our work on the newspaper. When I call it a class — it was not any kind of credit operation. It was given for those people who wanted to join the paper. It was taught by the editors of the paper.
Harry Baron
— The editor and the managing editors [trained us]. There was a faculty advisor because the bylaws of the newspaper required it. But it was a hands-off kind of thing.
Ann Lane
— The first year you’re a cub reporter. And Stanley Aronowitz was the President of the Brooklyn College Philosophy Club and I got sent to cover a story about something he was saying. I wrote the piece and it was a very political piece. And college newspapers in those days had faculty advisors who had to approve everything. The faculty adviser, Mr. Portnoy, called me in and told me that I was a dupe of Stanley Aronowitz’s, and that he shouldn’t be doing those things ‘cause he’s the President of the Philosophy Club and he should only talk about non-political activities. The article ran, apparently, as best I can recall. But he was alerting me.
Bill Taylor
— We had a printer down on the Lower East Side, Avenue B, right near Katz's delicatessen where we would sometimes go to eat.
Myron Kandel
— And it was a treat to be able to go down to the printer — every week they would go down to the printer and actually, as we say, put the paper to bed. And the print shop was on the Lower East Side, someplace around East 4th Street and Avenue A. It was really an old fashioned print shop. They printed some other newspapers, I believe City College, maybe an NYU paper. They printed a Ukrainian-language newspaper. And it was great to watch the senior editors put out the paper and make decisions at the last minute, and those old printers, you know, hovering over them and giving them a hard time and saying, "Come on! Hurry up!" and so on. So I really learned the newspaper business literally from the ground up, both from the editorial end and the production end. And it was great training.
Geri Stevens
— We’d have to go to the printer that was in the East Village and in those days that was not exactly safe territory. We’d have to go in the middle of the night, practically, on the days that the paper was coming out. And I was still living at home and my parents weren't happy about that. They were from the school — especially my father — that you go to school to get an education. They didn't know from extra-curricular stuff. But, you know, my grades were okay, so ...
Harry Baron
— I gave cub classes, and there are people now who still remind me of this corny joke I used to use. I’d get up there and I’d say to these cubs, I’d say, “Okay. Let’s see how smart you guys are. What’s the difference between radio and newspaper?” Nobody knew. Thinking. So finally I’d have to give them the answer. I’d say, “Well, you can’t wrap a herring in a radio.” And they all remembered this for years and years, and that was, you know, my legacy.
Geri Stevens
— My first year there I did some very minor little articles — just little fillers. By my second year I think I’d gotten one or two bylines and I think I started feeling a little more self-confident. And I kind of liked the people. And I stuck it out, and by my third year I moved up in the ranks and it really became kind of a consuming passion for me. I had joined various other clubs and I, one after another, dropped them and pretty much devoted my time to Vanguard.
Harry Baron
— This was, remember, during the war years. The women were in command and they adored us ‘cause we were little children. We were seventeen-year-old kids and these were twenty-one-year-old women. And I had an editor, Mildred Strung, who I thought was brilliant. She really was! I learned a lot from her. And all of a sudden the vets are back. The men are taking over the show. And that’s pretty much what happened. You had a veterans’ world, by and large.
Myron Kandel
— I remember particularly one editor, a returning veteran. And I remember his teaching this cub class and my looking at him and marveling at how smart and mature he was and wondering if I could ever emulate him.
Harry Baron
— I could write a who-what-when-where, but the idea was to write it with style. The magazine kind of thing. I collaborated with Sy Lieberman, we were in the same year. And we would do Miss Subways and stuff like that, anything that lent itself to human interest. We’d look for it. We knew how to dig. We were good at that thing. In our early days we had a sense of what’s the angle. I was a feature writer because I wanted to get a little fancy, and it was good training. I needed it. We were all in training then.