A young man came up to me at the reception for Tom Eblen a few weeks ago and told me he was in the last class I taught at Kansas University. I almost wanted to say "No, you weren't," but I'm sure he was in that class. He told me he received an "A," and I told him that's why I didn't remember him. In those days, the only ones who came to see me were the ones who were having grade problems or didn't know how to study for an exam or wanted to know what I meant by "term paper."
But I've also realized that I remember the students of long ago better than I remember those in the '80s. The old-time classes were small. I was news adviser of the Daily Kansan for a while and adviser of the editorial page for years after that. When there was trouble (and there was trouble), I had to be right on top of it. Last week I mentioned the boys who dared to endorse Adlai Stevenson instead of Dwight Eisenhower. There also were the ones who published the Sour Owl in 1956 and the ones who had the gall to oppose bringing Wichita State University into the state system. And in the '60s, we had an editor whose writings placed my academic aspirations in peril because I backed his right to speak his mind.
I remember many of my students, and there are good (and bad) memories of the ones I knew in the first years at KU. One of my first classes was one of the liveliest I ever taught. That was a mighty knowledgeable bunch. They were like some of the World War II veterans I taught at Utah State and Denver. These Kansas people knew Kansas and national politics. They dared to tackle problems of the day. In the spring, I had a young woman who did a study of the St. Lawrence Seaway and went home at Easter and told her dad what she had been writing and almost got kicked out of the house.
My early students wrote comprehensive papers for class reports on editorial giants of the day, and their work was so good that I stole some of it and used it in later class lectures. I taught a class in editing, and I recall an autumn day in '51 when I went to class and found no one in the room. They were clustered around the Kansan Teletype to learn the results of the Dodgers-Giants playoff, the game when Bobby Thomson broke the hearts of the Dodgers and broke my pro-Dodgers heart, too.
Reporting met for lecture in a big classroom and then went to the Kansan newsroom for lab. Utter strangers came walking in, and also people like my wife, and Clyde Lovellette, who was there to be interviewed. There was a Kansan managing editor with big leering eyes who busily checked out the girls in my class.
It was fun teaching in those years. Some of these people still write me on occasion. One came last spring. Another, retired from being a publisher on several papers, lives in Duluth and comes to call once a year. Students would come to our house. Some of the girls were baby sitters for us. At commencement in '55, two showed up in their caps and gowns to say good-bye. One editor was such a close friend that he wanted me to be his best man. One of those baby sitters writes every year from Minneapolis.
We were together for the grand winter and spring of 1951-52 when we sat in Hoch Auditorium and watched our basketball team on the way to a national title and the Olympics in Helsinki. We also went to the football games and always to the Kansas Relays.
There was a night in '54 when we were headed west and a bunch of the boys came to our house on Tennessee. A couple from northeast Kansas gave advice on highways to take. These boys would sit on the floor in that small living room, and one of them even got our usually shy Kathy to sit by him and play a game of some kind.
Perhaps, in the view of some, we were too close to those students. Our little Carolyn used to ask, when school was out, "Where's Chuck? Where's Bob?" We always went to the Kansan picnics, which usually were at Lone Star Lake. And pretty often I'd head for the Union with some of the students to drink coffee. I'd usually ride to the Kansas City Press Club dinners for us at the Muehlebach, and in the summers, when I worked on the Star, I'd often ride with one of the boys.
I can see them all. I don't really need to hear from them, because I can still hear some of them, trying to imitate the Four Lads or the Crew Cuts, there in the Kansan newsroom, singing the pop songs of the day.
Calder Pickett is a professor emeritus of journalism at Kansas University. His column appears Sundays in the Journal-World.
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