Acne-faced at 15: the 'Herald' looks back on a time when it wasn't so big

• Early Pagemaker foibles
• Love and newsprint
• Want a bite?
• Still more Pagemaker foibles
• Photographic memory
• Wait...computer problems?!
• Opening day at Shea?
• Gin 'n 'Herald'
• Why McFly never got a date
• Prank this
• Glad this didn't happen
• Heard by the 'Herald' Walls

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  Early Pagemaker foibles

  First, let me say that it is not true that back in the old days we had to walk through heavy snow (uphill both ways) September through May to get the paper out. But when I worked for the Herald (1986-1989), we did have to wear a Thursday night path between the lone laser printer available to students—conveniently located at a computer center on the far side of Science Hill—and the Kinko's on Broadway, where we all felt like honorary employees on the graveyard shift. One of the more memorable nights occurred in February 1989, when Aaron Rubin, DC '89, Jeff Small, DC '89, and I foolishly agreed to lay out the special Valentine's Day insert. The YDN charged a buck, so we didn't charge a penny and furthermore stationed staffers in all the dining halls to promote this bargain to beloved and lovelorn alike. The resulting flood of messages ultimately filled 24 pages using barely legible eight-point type. A somewhat staged photograph of Aaron completely buried in Valentine messages was taken to commemorate the event. We only made one mistake—a small block of text swallowed by Pagemaker. How did we know? Within five minutes of delivery to the dining hall, our fellow Davenport seniors had scanned through the thousands of messages and determined that theirs were not there.

  —Dave Applegate, DC '89,
  Executive Editor

  
  

  Love and newsprint

  a) Newsprint is a strange place to apologize, but it works. As A&E editor, I was constantly dragging Yahlin Chang, BR '94 (an ex-A&E editor, then columns editor, and my girlfriend, though we never quite admitted that) to see plays at the Long Wharf. We went to go see Steven Soderberg's King of the Hill so that I could review it. She was bored by it; I was transfixed. She started talking during the teary climax and I shushed her rudely. She tore out of the theater at the end, furious, our relationship on the brink. I went back to write the review. Somehow the movie became a footnote to what was a rambling public apology from me to her. It was romantic, she loved it, and I think a singing Valentine might have been involved. Nevertheless, the Herald saved us.

  b) The Halloween cover story from 1994 was written by me and a woman named Rebecca Neuwirth, SM '95, about a "haunted" sleazy strip-club somewhere out by the Interstate. She'd heard about it, I was game, and we went out there to do interviews while men sitting around the stage had The Origin of the World shoved in their faces. It was very raw, Rebecca was brave, and we got great stories about a ghost that levitated beer steins, goosed the dancers, and brewed up "cold drafts" in various places. Supposedly a fight had broken out between two guys when the place was an iron forgery, and both had died. Now they were back, reveling in the skin. We wrote the story together, and when we were halfway through, I yanked out the cord to her Mac and the thing wasn't saved. We re-wrote it, this being Yale and we being dogged Yalies, and just generally started to make up stuff as we went along to intensify the narrative. Supposedly, business improved.

  —Austin Bunn, JE '95
  A&E, Muse Editor

  
  

  Want a bite?

  The Herald Fridge. The name alone strikes fear in the heart of nutritionists everywhere. For years, a tiny office refrigerator sat on the floor next to the oldest of the old Herald computers, Herald Machine. Editors, writers, and random people who wandered into the office at 4 a.m. on Wednesday mornings would use the Fridge to house their most recent half-eaten falafel from Mamoun's. By summer of 1997, the Fridge had seen better days. Scientifically, I'm not sure how this is possible, but some of the items in the Fridge were actually hot. You could burn your hand if you weren't careful.

  On May 26, 1997, then-publisher Fabian Rosado and I decided that the Fridge needed some new life, and took on the task of cleaning and restoring it. With a little hard work and two of those suits people use when dealing with radioactive material, we cleaned the Fridge and left it outside the office to dry. We then went to check out some of the graduation festivities that were happening in Pierson College. Upon return five minutes later, no Fridge.

  For the next 30 minutes, the scene around New Haven consisted of 5,000 graduating students and two sophomores running through the streets, convinced they could outrun some guy with a refrigerator on his back. We then hatched the bright idea that maybe the thief tried to pawn the Fridge, but couldn't get into any pawnshops since they were closed for Memorial Day. You've probably already guessed that two guys who lost a refrigerator on Park Street weren't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree.

  At the end of the day, the Herald office was Fridge-less. I'm not sure its whereabouts will ever be discovered, but if you read a story about someone who bit into a 17-year-old falafel and nearly croaked, we have our first lead.

  —Christopher Burke, PC '99,
  Editor-in-Chief

  
  

  Still more Pagemaker foibles

  I "met" the Herald in the form of lanky Editor-in-Chief Dave Marko, TC '89, at the freshmen organizational rally on Old Campus. The Herald had existed a mere part of a term in spring 1986, and Dave was the first full-semester editor. He was standing there all alone behind this tiny rickety card table, and I felt a combination of pity and interest. I knew the Daily wasn't for me. The paper was so ugly and poorly written. The Herald had the spark I was looking for, and, better yet, it was new and needed editors. I was Calendar editor in days, and later News, Features, and A&E editor, all within a year.

  Some other random moments: Aaron Rubin, DC '89, a publisher and later editor-in-chief, running over my foot with a car (and no damage to me or the car) while delivering papers. Rich So, TD '87, one of the founders, coming over to my room at about 2 a.m. after a nasty Mac crash that destroyed a special four-page A&E theater review section after hours of editing in PageMaker (PageMaker 1.0!). Stapling condoms to selected issues (about 1,500 out of 5,000, I think) of the Herald for our special safe-sex issue in the Woolsey Rotunda.

  
  —Glenn Fleishman, ES '90,
  Calendar, News, Features, and A&E Editor

  
  

  
  

  Photographic memory

  It seems like yesterday that we were building that first issue—an all-nighter spent at Kinko's on monochrome Macintosh Pluses, flowing text into columns, and feeding floppies into insistent disk drives (long before gigabyte hard drives). I was in the Trumbull darkroom printing the first of many photos for the Herald. One of the fondest memories that I have was the weary smile and handshake that Richard So, TD '87, and I exchanged that next sleepless day when the first stacks arrived—it's a smile I'm still wearing today upon news of our 15th anniversary.

  Great times, great stories, great people—onward to the next 100 years. Congratulations!

  —John "Samurai John" Fujii, TC '87,
  Photo Editor

  
  

  Wait...computer problems?!

  I was editor of the humor section for the very first run of the Herald, and editor-in-chief for the first half of its second year before handing the reins over to Michael Paranzino, PC '88, out of sheer exhaustion.

  In the mid-'80s, desktop publishing was in its infancy, and we used a demo version of Aldus Pagemaker 1.0 on MacIntosh 512K computers for the first two years of the paper. There was no hard drive on the Mac, so everything was stored on 3.5-inch floppy disks (programs and data), and you literally spent hours swapping disks containing the text files (MacWrite 1.0!) in and out of the external floppy drive while a Pagemaker disk ran in the internal drive. The deadline for a Friday edition was usually 5 or 6 p.m. Thursday night, and we'd be at Kinko's (we didn't have office space) until 3 or 4 a.m. laying out the paper and laser-printing the pages. Our computers would crash at least once an hour, so production always seemed like a frantic, nerve-wracking experience. Of course, we felt like we were on the cutting edge of technology back then, and we were immensely proud of our clean, crisp layout compared to the YDN's archaic, messy look.

  I am extremely proud of the Yale Herald and am delighted to have been involved in the paper from day one. I still remember when I first met Richard So, TD '87, and Steve Lange-Ranzini, TD '86, and they recruited me to work on the paper. I'm thrilled that the paper continues to thrive and uphold such high journalistic standards. Congratulations on this 15th Anniversary issue!

  —David Marko, TC '88,
  Editor-in-Chief

  
  

  Opening day at Shea?

  It must have been fall of 1996 when Matt Morgado, CC '98, and I were Sports editors. One day we took some masking tape and made the outline of home plate on the carpet in the Herald Office. And à la Stephen Park, TC '97, we used to bring a baseball bat to production night in case we needed a little "inspiration" or had to track down writers who hadn't submitted on time. Well, one night things got particularly rowdy and Matt and I invented the game "Hit the Photo Editor." You see, sitting diagonally across the room from home plate was Fabian Rosado and the scanner. We took some leftover tape, made a makeshift baseball, and used to pitch it to one another and see who could actually hit the Photo editor. Like most of our shenanigans, they went completely ignored, but one night, everyone got into the act and the office was really wild. The next thing I know, the phone rings. A Heralder picks it up, and the person on the other end is wondering what the hell is going on. The Heralder says, "Oh, everyone's playing 'Hit the Photo Editor.'" The person on the other line says, "Umm...I'm a photographer, I'll call back later."

  —Mike May, BR '98,
  Sports Editor

  
  

  Gin 'n 'Herald'

  I'm finding that the farther graduation fades into the past, the more those Herald memories stick. You share two straight nights a week, cardboard pizza, hour-long printouts, goodies from Hein Garden, lakeside retreats, caffeine galore, snickering at the Daily's antics, mistaken identities (I did not hit on that editor), thinking we were big-time, and typos galore (Bandy, Beasty)...serves to reason you'd make a few memories. Even if we thought it was just a newspaper at the time. At the risk of sounding like President Kumbaya, Yale is much more the people than the books—and those hours at the Herald will forever drive that point home. One whiff of a Gin Blossoms tune and I'm back in the Herald office, turning the Shorts page into a blue-penned Picasso.

  —Erik Lien, JE '97,
  Executive Editor

  
  

  Why McFly never got a date

  The fledgling Yale Herald drew on innovative technology-desktop publishing on 512k Macintosh computers—to provide lively, varied coverage of campus life. And most importantly, unlike the other major newspaper on campus, it was free.

  With no offices and no computer equipment, Kinko's (then on Broadway above Store 24) became our first production office. In exchange for helping the Kinko's staff on the Thursday overnight shift—and a little flirting—we earned a "special cash discount." Eventually, we saved up $3,200 to buy our first laser printer in 1988, a 300 dpi NEC.

  Winning the contract to publish the 1988 student telephone directory was critical—the $20,000 in ad sales almost paid for a year's worth of eight- to 16-page Heralds. To get the contract, we promised to publish the directory in November, months earlier than it had ever come out before. This required cutting-edge computer work to transfer data from a mainframe to our Macintoshes. We published the directory in record time—though we left out all students whose last names began with Mc, O, and V.

  We could never get the Yale Co-op to advertise in the Herald or the phone directory. Perhaps, if they had, they would have been around to celebrate the 15th anniversary.

  —Aaron Rubin, DC '89,
  Publisher, Editor-in-Chief

  
  

  Prank this

  The YDN had a banquet one Thursday night and kept making dim-witted drunken prank calls to the Herald office. We decided we'd put an end to it the next time the phone rang. So when a call came at 2 a.m., my buddy Greg drew upon a recent A&E review of a mediocre Al Pacino mob flick and screamed into the receiver at the top of his lungs, "You think you're big time??!! You're gonna die big time!!" Pleased at our cleverness and feeling the giddy effects of another sleepless Thursday night with Uncle Herald, we frenetically high-fived each another in approval. Little did we know that on the other end of the line was a brand new and highly distraught graphics editor who had overslept her shift at the Herald and was calling to check in/beg forgiveness. Oops. The following morning, like every Friday at 7 a.m. (or whenever the flats finally were in the hands of Turley Publishers), Greg and I recounted the night over bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches at the Doodle.

  —Josh Sevin, SM '96,
  Managing Editor

  
  

  Glad this didn't happen

  

  Heard by the 'Herald' Walls

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