In late September 1938, The Daily was filled with talk of war. On the Sept. 29 front page, beneath a frantic story about the Munich conference, the paper reported that “there was a cloud of fatalism in the mind of John Q. Northwestern.” Inside, the editorial looked abroad and somberly warned that the world had “come to the fundamental issue of democracy versus totalitarian state.”
On the same page, a weekly columnist wrote about his own war fears: “With all the world tense in preparation for war, I can’t do any studying. I sit with many of my friends close to the loudspeakers intently listening to the Press Radio reports. Honestly, I’m frightened. We’ve never been so close to disaster before. We turn the dial to hear Chamberlain or Benes or even Hitler.
“I feel like going down to Fountain Square, where Evanston meets once a day, to give vent to my pent-up emotions. I want to protest. I want to denounce the system of human intercourse that can break me at will. I thought that I was living in a civilization.”
The columnist was my grandfather.
When I first found that column in the yellowed pages of The Daily’s archives last year, it was just an artifact, a relic from a distant time. Its sincerity touched me, but I couldn’t really relate to the rawness of the feelings or the immediacy of the uncertainty.
I photocopied it along with a few others and brought it to my now-82-year-old grandfather in New York. Slowly, his face lit up with recognition as the words fought their way back through the fog of age. He must have read those columns a hundred times that night, and now I hear he carries them with him whenever he travels.
A few things have changed since then. War has come again, and this time it has touched his own city. Now I can understand how a 19-year-old Daily columnist could be so terrified by the world seemingly collapsing around him. And I admire even more the way columnists like my grandfather channel their personal opinions — their fears, hopes and passions — into tight and powerful pieces a few hundred words long that manage to tap into the public consciousness.
That’s what columnists do. They tell stories, they rant, they whine, they expose and they praise — all in the first person, but with the understanding that the zeitgeist looms behind every column. They’re watchdogs and commentators, muckrakers and pundits, storytellers and satirists, and they make personal the stories the rest of the newspaper works so hard to make impersonal. It’s a hell of job.
Of course, not every column is that successful, but that’s the ideal for which we strive. All that’s required is a willingness to write honestly.
And if you can do that — can tell thousands of readers, “Honestly, I’m frightened,” you have the makings of a columnist. If you can castigate corrupt politicians or deride a police department as “available for class warfare to the highest bidder,” as my grandfather did in one Daily column, so much the better.
So, apply to be a Winter Quarter columnist today. The Daily wants to hear what you have to say.
And later, of course, so will your grandkids.
