I started at UW in 1971 and was drawn to the Cardinal by my friend Pat McGilligan. The newsroom was a great laboratory in organizational training. My first assignment was to profile the Primate Lab and right away I was picking up skills that would serve me for years.
Two things come to mind immediately'feedback techniques and teambuilding.
Consultants will tell you that for most of us, success is built on a foundation of feedback. Try something and then see how it goes. Assign a task, assess the results and then communicate. The Cardinal was a hothouse of functional feedback. Wisconsin Student Association officers would commence their attack first thing in the morning, campus conservatives would chime in during the 4 p.m. Frisbee game on Henry Mall and then the People's Party would be handing out pamphlets on their way to film society. Around midnight the printers Phil and Orv would complain that the front-page layout was asymmetrical. In the end, our faculty adviser'a rumpled genius from the J-school named Lester Hawkes'would provide the best feedback of all: \You probably could have done better. It's a good thing there's another paper tomorrow.'
Teambuilding'the secret to editorial success is creative collaboration.
Salinger can closet himself in a farmhouse for 20 years and emerge with a manuscript, but so far as I can tell, that won't work for most of us.
The Daily Cardinal of my day was a roiling exercise in collaboration'with colleagues, with sources, with advertisers, with friends on the faculty and foes at the Herald. There was always a lot of chaos, but there is nothing quite like a daily deadline to focus your attention. You learn to juggle three appointments and four phone calls to finish a project on time'and pitch in to a hot debate that's just getting underway at the copy desk. Thirty years later it's still a pretty good way to spend the day.
I got my start in Wisconsin journalism exposing feather-brained politicians as a reporter and columnist for The Daily Cardinal in the summer of 1946.
I continued my hell-raising career as a reporter and editor for The Capital Times of Madison, starting in 1951 and for the next 44 years.
Two of the stories I wrote for the Cardinal were on very diverse women: Sally Rand and Ingrid Bergman.
The Sally Rand story was an interview. In spite of her somewhat lurid career, the fan dancer tenderly spoke of her little boy who traveled with her. Rand was plain-spoken and delightful.
Ingrid Bergman had left her husband to take up with the famed Italian director Roberto Rossellini and'shockingly to many'had a daughter by him.
In spite of nationwide criticism heaped on Bergman, I defended her in my column for choosing to have the ""illegitimate"" baby instead of an abortion, as film stars were often forced to do at that time.
I wrote my first story about Joe McCarthy while on the Cardinal and went on to cover him for The Capital Times until he died in 1957.
Life at the Cardinal was hectic and exciting. We sat around dusty tables in the old offices at 823 University Ave. solving the world's problems and getting a head start on the best career'journalism.
My view of four years at The Daily Cardinal, 1938 to 1942, is now informed by 60 years of retrospection.
Our greatest excitements of that moment, both trivial and profound'the campus politics, the good-natured mischief of lawyers and engineers on St. Patrick's Day, the delightful adventure of choosing life-works and life-mates'we can now see as no more than our turn in the mundane cycle of generations.
But in that time, we also were beginning a momentous historic transformation. I am awed now by the prophetic power of youth. Our inchoate thoughts and sentiments and small rebellions against the limitations from whence we had come foretold a veritable revolution in human affairs.
For me, it was to break loose from ethnic boundaries, from Lutheran orthodoxy and social propriety, while traditional moral requirements for personal salvation into national patriotism and concern for the larger human welfare.
A farm boy fresh from a rural Wisconsin cow barn, at UW-Madison I gloried in meeting and knowing and loving and living and working among the first I had ever seen of Catholic and Jewish and black young men and women'even a Nigerian Muslim Cardinal writer with 27 sisters and brothers'and equally strangers to me, children of the urban professions and big-city factory workers.
The most significant thing about this is that those young strangers met and embraced me and each other in the same spirit that I embraced them'in a manner unthinkable for the diverse adult societies from whence we came.
The war'The Daily Cardinal declared it a ""global civil war,"" not a commonplace nation-against-nation spar'crystallized and focused our sense of what we wanted human society to be. As successful war-fighters, we were emboldened to assert our transforming values, to empower reforming leaders and soon to take charge of the country. We ended official racial and religious segregation. We formed (but still have not perfected) a welfare state committed to equal justice and equal opportunity for all. We dismantled colonialism and led the whole world to give official sanction and at least lip service to our humane goals and values.
My sense of the prophetic power of youth leaves me to regard the Cardinal 2002 and its generation with awe. What miracles lie before us? What goes on in your minds and hearts of the wonders that you yourselves barely guess you might achieve?
