Celebrating 150 Years  |  Alumni Memories

David H. Close '76
Stentor Editor 1975-76

I attended Lake Forest from 1972 to 1976. I was on the Stentor staff all four years and was the executive editor during my senior year. Ours was one of the last Stentor staffs of the pre-computing era and I remember many all-nighters at the top of College Hall, pecking out stories on a typewriter. After that we had run downstairs and re-type everything on an old typesetting system to paper tape and run that through a primitive typeset process. We did the headlines one letter at a time, copy-fitting, with a wheel of plastic that exposed a film. And of course, we had to climb up and down the height of College Hall several times each night to get it done.

As 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. rolled past we’d get punchy and make errors, which meant that you had to start again, walk down to the first floor, re-key, re-glue….there was no word processing at Lake Forest College in 1975. After that we’d have to plow the back 40, hunt for our dinner, walk 10 miles through the snow to buy supplies and fight off the coyotes… I guess I sound pretty old.

Working for the Stentor was a wonderful experience and one of my best memories of college. It was an intense environment, trying to get everything done well, on deadline. We missed only one deadline in four years, when a swarm of bats emerged from a hole in the ceiling during paste-up and we had to flee. Sometimes just finishing the paper was the accomplishment. Writing fast under deadline is a skill I’ve used through my entire professional career; I learned it at the Stentor.

I sometimes think about what we covered each week in the Stentor, and how it reflected the nature of the times. My class started college during the ugly winding down of the Vietnam War. The oil embargo hit hard, driving up costs when the school could ill-afford the extra burden. I followed the unfolding of Watergate for three years of my college career with a mix of disgust, dismay and glee that the Nixon crowd was caught in the act. After the monumental crises of the 1960s, the problems of our time seemed somehow diminished and exhausted – government corruption, defeat in a war, gas lines, inflation…disco. Students seemed to turn inward, and looking back at old issues of the paper you can see that the hot topics of time were the campus pub, vandalism, sports, the academic schedule and things of that nature.

As wannabe journalists during Watergate the Stentor staff was alertly on the lookout for corruption and controversy. We were determined to find it. When we reported on a college committee meeting, no matter how trivial the topic, any mild disagreement became a “slam.” The slightest disagreement by a committee member meant that person had “hit” the membership with a criticism. At 4 a.m., full of pizza and beer, dizzy from writing stories on deadline, we’d joke that our book about the Stentor would be titled “Hits and Slams: Four Years with the Stentor.”

At some point in my tenure with the paper came a gift for the crusading teenage journalists: some actual corruption in the maintenance department. I don’t remember the details, but someone associated with the college had purchased surplus military equipment for the school -- plows and trucks, that sort of thing. Some of the money found its way into his pockets. Wow! The paper was on it! Hold page one! And thus was born Forestergate, a story led by the more senior editors at that time (not me), which went on for weeks and probably involved about a hundred dollars.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Lake Forest. My classes were interesting, it was true that you had close interactions with the faculty, and going to Chicago was always fun. I took on writing a senior thesis on the most obscure topic – it was voluntary at that time – and learned that I could complete a large project. I met my future wife at Lake Forest, which began almost 30 years of happiness together.

So, Lake Forest sent me down the path to my career, introduced me to the love of my life and taught me the pleasures of research and writing. Lake Forest is very small college, but to an 18 year old, a 20 year old, it was a full and interesting world.  It seemed big and varied enough to be intriguing and stimulating for four years and I’m very glad I had the experience.