Working Together
Ann Lane
— We lived in the Vanguard office. It was your life. The classes became utterly irrelevant. You went there immediately after school and you spent the day and night there because you were going to put the paper to bed at three in the morning. I learned how to drink beer, which I hated. I suppose I was smoking already, but I smoked more. And it was — it was a wonderful experience. And I know, when the teachers now complain about students who are not spending enough time in class, they’re doing activities, I look back and think, “I don’t remember ever going much to class.” It was all Vanguard.
Geri Stevens
— It was a stimulating group of people and I just enjoyed being with them. I just felt a tremendous kinship with some of them. Some I didn’t care for.
Myron Kandel
— Over the years that I worked on Vanguard I think I spent more time working on the paper than I did going to class. I was an English and History major, but maybe it would be better to call me a History and English minor and I majored in Vanguard journalism.
Bill Taylor
— People played bridge all the time. I'm sure you heard that. And it was, you know, a constant stream of smart-ass repartee going on. I think there was a very good spirit and very good camaraderie. You know, age may improve one's memory somewhat, but that was the general ambiance there. You had the feeling you were with really interesting, good people, fun people to be around.
Myron Kandel
— Vanguard staff members were obviously very intellectually curious and active and so on. So that was part of the excitement of being there. As far as the paper was concerned, being anti-administration? I don't know anti-. We didn't want to overthrow it. But we were certainly critical.
Geri Stevens
— I remember one of the very first issues that came up — I think I was a freshman and knew from nothing — is there was some talk about putting ROTC on campus. And everybody on Vanguard, which I had just joined, was violently opposed to it. I don't think I even knew what ROTC was, but I went right out with them and demonstrated. I had no idea what I was demonstrating against but I was very excited about it.
Gene Bluestein
— One of the great things we used to do — Gideonse always sent spies in to watch us in the Vanguard office. So we used to play dead. That meant everybody in the office would pretend to die and they’d be hanging out of the wastepaper baskets, hung up on the hooks, on the floor. And this janitor would come in to spy on us and everyone was dead. And we did that constantly and that was a great bit. The Vanguard was just all kinds of wonderful nuts.
Herb Dorfman
— We devised a thing called "playing dead." We’d go as a group to somewhere and we'd say, "Okay, do it!" and everybody would drop dead. This could be in a restaurant. This could be in a classroom. This could be in a hallway or wherever. What was the point of it? I don't know. I guess you'd have to be there in a way. But it was a discipline we put upon ourselves, are you loose enough to be able to do it, you know? And one night we were working at Vanguard and someone said, "Let's do dead and get the maintenance man to come in and see his reaction." You know? People cleaned up at night. So we all went into dead and he came in and he looked around this room at these people. He just shrugged his shoulders and he walked out. The maintenance man couldn't care less. He wasn't going to scream and yell and carry on. So it was a strange exercise and not many people have understood it, but for us it was something very funny. One kid, we had him hanging by his shirt from a coat hanger. And he got caught up in it and somebody saw it so he took him down, and someone said how would we explain this to his mother if he died? “Well, Mrs. Schwartz, Jerry was hanging from a coat hanger.”
Harry Baron
— We were one big happy family, in spite of anything else. We had that one thing. You know? It was like being a Mason, maybe, or an Elk. I don’t know. But it was even closer than that ‘cause we were culturally alike. We were compatible in so many ways, we had the same interests, and we respected each other. You know? We were smart and smart-alecky, and we knew everybody inside out.
Ann Lane
— I do remember being aware that women didn’t play very prominent roles. But in our relationships I didn’t feel it. We were all buddies. We were not men and women together, males and females. We were all guys together. And so they could feel free to say anything, do anything. They’d slap you on the back. I mean, we’re talking about the early ‘50s. To have that was already a great step forward.
Herb Dorfman
— That fidelity was there. I mean, we were together all the time. You know? It was truly amazing. I think I had myself a weekend off once in a while. But even so, we went to parties and so forth. But it wasn't an enforced kind of socialization, it just sort of seemed to happen. That contributed, I think, to what was reflected in the paper. We demanded that we be good people and that we be smart. And that emerged in what we were doing.
Myron Kandel
— A number of marriages resulted from Vanguard.
Harry Baron
— Most of them were Jewish so you could relate to them. I would not have felt as comfortable with Irish or Italian people until later on — I was younger then. We would hang around the Vanguard office a lot in our free periods and afterwards and what have you. We’d see our friends there and it’d be a place to park.
Myron Kandel
— What's interesting is all the newspaper people and the political people, since we covered their meetings, we all knew each other. We were all sort of active types on campus, rather than belonging to fraternities and sororities or being, you know, athletes. And so we knew each other. Some of us were friends socially, and it was great. It was a time of real terrific discussion and whatever.