Reunions

Don't know what I was thinking when I held up the giveaway and determined that new T-shirt would fit on this old body. 

I can't even blame the disconnect on alcohol. My drink of choice at The Temple News reunion had been a diet soda. A lot of us were drinking sodas. 

Maybe it was the adrenalin from reconnecting with my newsroom buddies. The weekend visit to the campus and Temple-Army football game was more than a flashback. It was quantum leap back for a lot of us who have raised our own college students. Some of the AARP card carrying Temple News crew had children raising children. 

The reminiscing about putting our all important (at the time) college paper to bed four nights a week got our juices flowing. We were once the infantry of the Fourth Estate. Very few of us assembled last month were still in the newspaper business, but we still had great affection for it. 

And those of us from the 70s were sad to see very little of our work on exhibit, during the party, with the selected archives of the school newspaper's storied history.

Hey, stuff happened during our watch. Nixon resigned, the Vietnam War ended, tuition  increased, Gene Banks picked Duke over Temple and the city's Big Five basketball programs. Philadelphia newspapers went on strike, and for three days The Temple News changed our on-campus focus to provide the entire city with a printed local paper. 

We romanticized about punch cards, cropping wheels and pica poles. The slide rules of our time. 

The kids mingling with us were more interested in careers as social media specialists, than bringing down the university administration in a three-part reporting series for a newspaper. 

Some of them could not wrap their heads around one of the round table speakers -- a Hall of Fame professional beat writer for more than 30 years and a News alum -- not owning a cellphone. 

Apple computers graced the tabletops of their work spaces as we toured the Newsroom earlier in that day. Editors are now being paid for getting the paper out and reporters are being paid for stories per published bylines. And the paper only comes out once a week. Today's News reporters stream news live by tweeting to their followers between deadlines and post editions on line. 

When most of us worked at The Temple News back in the mid 70s we practically lived there. If you didn't have work-study money, you worked for free. Most of us commuted to our urban campus from the suburbs. No way, after rush hour, could you take the subway safely. At least you would never tell your parents if you did.

We cooked out of the blue box mac n cheese dinners and soup to sustain ourselves, drinking the worst coffee for days while editing the paper late at night. We started our days before class -- some of us remember going to class -- with coffee and breakfast off food trucks ( a fixture on campus even before they universally became trendy and fashionable), while reviewing the morning's edition and thinking about the next one. 

At the reunion we talked about now dead professors and  colleagues. We vowed to make other staffers come to the next gathering and to make sure our work was represented next time in the archive display. 

Funny, most of us had time-faded, hard copies of our editions buried somewhere at home. 

I bet I am not the only one who will exhume the yellowed copies this winter. 

In the meantime, I am going to hand wash my Temple News t-shirt in cold water and get back into shape to wear it more comfortably. I am going to Link-in with former staffers -- including that cub reporter I sent out to wrestle a bear for a soft sports feature, who is now the editor-in-chief of a famous tabloid.
I vow to stay in touch and follow the careers of current staffers. Especially the kind media specialists who handed me their Temple News business cards and attempted to teach me a trick or two on Twitter.
And I am going to continue blogging.  And maybe some of them will join me on my new writing adventure.