Print Technology

The Kui Ka Lono was published using the latest photo-offset printing technology.

There were no computers but our electric/mechanical typewriters had reached their highest state of development. For example, they could self-justify columns of copy--but to change the size of type we had to use another photo-based machine.

Cutting and pasting were done by hand with sharp knives, real scissors and a hot, waxy layout paste.

When the full-sized page layouts had been completed by my students, with black patches where the photographs would be inserted later in the process, I would take them into Honolulu where  professional Hawaii Hochi newspaper technicians would photograph them, insert the offset-ready photographs and print as many copies as we wanted.

Creating our weekly newspaper was a team hands-on arts and crafts project--now gone the way of the buggy-whip and high button shoes--but lots of fun in it's time.

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Confusion

As the war in Viet Nam raged on, all over America sit-ins and demonstrations at universities and colleges became daily occurrences.

And another peculiar thing happened in this country--a "generation gap" developed.

The older people--the parents of the rioting youth--seemed to think the war was OK. They re-elected Richard Nixon president by a landslide--Nixon who was absolutely despised by almost all young people. The youth side of the generation gap supported a mellower man named McGovern who, I think I remember, promised to lower the voting age to eighteen and end the war.

Kui Ka Lono  staff had voted to publish their student newspaper as a collective, a sort of leaderless team governed by consensus--that is, no Editor.

This was very convenient when some irate reader came into the office to punch the Editor out for some offensive article about the war because he just couldn't punch everybody! 


Some of my journalism students decided to protest the war by chaining themselves to the flagpole in the center of the campus and I watched them being arrested and dragged away to police paddy wagons. 

What textbooks there were on mass communication and news writing were not much help to me under these chaotic conditions.


I believe in the old-fashioned "freedom of the press" and thought the students had a right to  speak their mind in the Kui Ka Lono but I also tried to encourage them to keep their articles balanced and to avoid lawsuits.

These were exciting times for this new Associate Professor!

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Kui Ka Lono

I have arrived at this personal high ground--Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at Leeward Community College in Hawaii--just as America is coming unglued.

It's the Viet Nam war and the Greening of America.

There is tremendous palpable unrest and anger among the youth of the country--especially at the colleges and universities: riots, occupation of university offices and campuses by excited students, tear gas and a student demonstrator shot to death at Kent State by a National Guard soldier. Student organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground are able to direct mass movements of young people.


"Question authority! Hell no we won't go! Old enough to die for our country, but not old enough to vote!""


Eighteen year old men are running away to Canada or burning their draft cards.

It's a confounded mess all over the country. 

Everywhere--even polite little Leeward Community College in Hawaii where I am now a faculty person--still young but now on the other side of the desk from the rioting youth.

Young men have been drafted into the army for years--in fact the reason I am in Hawaii is because when I was eighteen I registered--as every young man (not woman) in the country HAD to register for military duty. You had a choice back then--volunteer for the Navy, Marines or Air Force or be drafted into the army and I had chosen the Navy Reserve and was luckily sent to Hawaii.

This draft registration was a duty of American citizenship and no-one, except the halt, the lame and the blind, was exempt.
 
Now young men were being drafted into the army and sent to Viet Nam to fight. For what? Still unclear, but young men were killing and being killed or maimed for whatever reason.

One method of "communicating human thought" was and is the newspaper and I found myself the faculty adviser of the weekly student newspaper, Kui Ka Lono which changed radically from a highschooly "Cutie of the Week" publication to a meaningful, hard hitting  journal of disenchanted youth--and this was mainly because Leeward Community College had an "open door" policy for student admissions. 

Anyone could be a student at LCC--"give everyone who wanted at least a chance  to get a higher education."

But there was a new law that college students were exempt from military duty for as long as they were students. 

As long as a young man was passing his college courses or wasn't kicked out for some other reason--he would not go to Viet Nam--so if, as a professor, you failed some young man, you just might be sentencing him to die overseas. 

Not so good.

And the most disaffected youth were drawn to Kui Ka Lono like steel filings to a magnet--one publication where they could freely speak their mind. A newspaper not controlled by monied or political interests--paid for by Student Activities fees and loosely overseen by their own elected Student Council. 

And they could re-take my news writing class several times--for credit.

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LCC at Last

There is a period of frantic youthful alarums and excursions--B.A. Degree from UH--always playing rock and roll to finance my way--back and forth from Hawaii to mainland-- take teaching courses at Sonoma State in Cotati, California--first year of teaching sixth grade at Penngrove School, Penngrove, CA.--how to get a decent job that I like?--back to Hawaii--hired by State Dept. of Ed. to be Chairman of the English Department at Kapaa High School on Kauai--Drama, Speech, English, Yearbook--direct Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story to local critical acclaim--back to the mainland for a year at Northern Arizona University and over to Honolulu again to teach at Dole Intermediate School (The Wizard of Oz) and Kalani High School--(The Music Man and West Side Story again to rave reviews)-- and finally--my big educational and employment break--I am hired to teach Journalism and Mass Communication at LCC, Leeward Community College, the branch of the University of Hawaii in Pearl City, Oahu, Hawaii--near where the battleship Arizona slowly rusts away on the bottom of Pearl Harbor.



I am an Associate Professor at Leeward Community College and Mom is so proud!

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Happy Thanksgiving

Thanks to all of you.

Though we are celebrating by ourselves this year, we feel the loving presence of family and friends who have shared our lives-- who helped us and wished us well over the years, the many Thanksgiving Days.

Thanks.

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Lualualei Report

Twenty years old and I am a Navy man assigned to shore duty at Radio Station  Lualualei on the Leeward side Oahu. Hawaii.

I arrive just in time to help celebrate statehood.


Hawaii is wonderful! Smells good. So WARM. So very beautiful--and the people seem so lighthearted.

I am a "Ship's  Serviceman" rating which means I work at the little store which takes care of some of the basic needs of the sailors and their wives who, with their kids, have joined their husbands to live on the station--there are no female sailors at this time. I also work at the little bar where some of the sailors spend most of their off-duty hours and drive a liberty-bus some nights.

I ask my officer boss if I can write and publish a station newsletter in my own spare time --just for fun and as long as I am off the clock.

He gives me the go-ahead and I am an editor again. I can use Navy paper and their copy machine free.

My "Lualualei Report" is filled with information I think my fellow swabs would like to know about--the liberty bus schedule to Kaneohe Marine Base where they can catch the liberty bus on to Honolulu and Waikiki and how they can get to the navy R&R (Rest and Recuperation) bar at Waianae Beach.

I put in some touristic tips and a little history of Hawaii and things like that.

Why do I do it? It's fun. Keeps me busy and my mind on literature instead of Navy griping. And mostly I guess because I am just another driven journalist!''

Since I am serving my active duty time as a Navy Reserve man, I get permission to take a local discharge after serving twenty-one months of a two-year hitch and head for the University Of Hawaii just across the island of Oahu in Manoa Valley.

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Fremont and College

Eighteen years old and I am at Midland College in Fremont, Nebraska.

I have a shared space with two other guys in the Men's Hall dormitory which makes me feel real collegiate.

I am a full-time student and land a part-time job with the local daily newspaper--The Fremont Guide and Tribune--but am no longer the editor or even a writer.

I collect the ad layouts from local businesses and bring them to the office and I clean and help maintain the Linotype machine.

What I remember about this, the outdoor walking around the little town ad collecting part of my first real newspaper job, is the bitter Nebraska cold.

It gets cold in Albuquerque too--even snows a few flakes every winter, but I had never experienced the realio trulio boreal blasts until I came to Fremont.

My goodness!

The Linotype machine, in a basement I seem to remember, was a huge, clattering mechanical wonder that was essential to newspaper publication in the old days. It created lead slugs in the form of a "line of type", get it?

All these slugs were bolted together and pressed into a flexible cardboardy matrix that could be wrapped around a steel cylinder so a lead cast could be made to fit into the big printing press that could be inked and printed onto newsprint paper and voila! Your daily newspaper.

Part of my job was to hook silvery ten pound lead ingots onto chains which slowly lowered them into a melting pot that was a part of the Linotype machine.

Linotype Operator was a union job with a good, high salary and the operator I worked for was a nice old guy with both hands and arms completely covered with burn scars to the shoulders because the lead in the pot would often splash up when you were cleaning the melting area and skimming off the impurities from the molten metal.

After a month or two at this journalistic job, I proudly carried a few burn scars on my arms too.

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Editor

At about sixteen years of age I became a newspaper editor.

I don't remember how I got the job but it might have been connected to some other elected office of the Luther League--I remember being Secretary, Treasurer, Vice-President and even President at different times. (Frankly, there wasn't a lot of competition.)

The newspaper was the official publication of the Rocky Mountain Synod Luther League and my task was to find content, write stories and print a couple hundred copies and distribute them monthly in batches or individually to the few far-flung Evangelical Lutheran churches from El Paso, Texas to Casper, Wyoming.

As Editor, first you had to find something to write about--like election results for the local Luther League or parties or the Annual Synod-wide Summer Youth Camp--and write the story, but then the real work started because the Editor of the Luther League newspaper was also the entire production staff.

To justify the  rows of type into neat orderly columns like a real newspaper, you had to count the letters and make sure you didn't have too many or two few in a column. This was all done by hand and eye, of course. Computers would not be invented for years.

You had to "cut" stencils with the typewriter and put them into a mimeograph machine and crank the handle until you had the number of copies you wanted--and be sure to check the fluid to make sure the machine doesn't run dry.

The final product was a two or three page stapled-together document on possibly colored letter paper.

Cool, but much too much labor for a sixteen-year-old boy with other fish to fry so I always missed my deadline which meant a scolding from my boss Bunny K., the President of the Rocky Mountain Luther League.

I thought Bunny was very cute. She was a year or two older than me and ran with a faster group of kids. She dressed in fitted western-style shirts with  fancy yokes and pearl buttons and always wore skin-tight Levis set off by a wide hand-tooled leather belt with a silver buckle and "Bunny" tooled large on the back.

Every time Bunny saw me--and I tried to stay away from her as much as I could--I would get a cold scolding for something or other--the paper's content, style or just that it was late again.

The lofty name of the paper was "The Crusader" and my happiest day as Editor was the day my year- long term  expired.

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Life Goal

It was the first day of my seventh grade year and I was sitting in a brand-new classroom in Garfield Junior High School, an easy bike ride from our half-acre Three Willow Ranch on Tenth and Candelaria--still in Albuquerque.

My new classroom had such interesting green blackboards--the last word in school design in those days.  

The class was English. Our second short in-class writing assignment--right after the obligatory "What I Did During Summer Vacation" was "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up".

I was a pretty sincere kid who usually told the truth to grown-ups--so I thought about it a few minutes and then wrote my piece on "I Want to Be a Writer When I Grow Up."

I really hadn't given it much thought before-- maybe a cowboy, a pilot or a fireman? But there I was in an English class and I loved to read and why not be Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London or Edgar Allen Poe or Jules Verne or even Longfellow though I didn't much like that funny name.

When the teacher returned our graded papers the next day, mine had an "A" penciled in red. The teacher obviously was delighted to have a young Mark Twain in her classroom--and I never looked back.

So if you don't like the words you are reading on your monitor right now, you can blame a nameless English teacher at Garfield Junior High half a century ago who should have straightened me out and changed the course of my life with an "F".

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Another Newspaper Lesson

I was about twelve years old. 

Albuquerque, New New Mexico. 

Dad and I were walking toward the Twelfth Street Extension bus stop.

There was a newsboy standing under the big bank clock on Second Street and Central Avenue with a sack of newspapers and Dad asked him for a copy.

When he got his paper, Dad said: "I've only got a quarter and I need my change." (That would be 15 cents.)

The kid said: "I'm sorry, Mister. I don't have any change."

Dad said: "Look in your shoe." The paperboy took off his shoe and it was filled with coins!

Continuing our walk to the bus stop, I asked Dad how he knew the kid had change in his shoe.

"Oh, I used to do the same thing when I was a newsboy." he said.

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The Newspaper Business

Good old Brother Joe, three years older than me and always a mile or two ahead in everything, had a bicycle paper route delivering the morning Albuquerque Journal to the people in our neighborhood who had ordered them. 


Joe had to take a couple of weeks off one  summer--I was about nine at the time--and he let me throw his route.


I had a bike and he showed me how to hang the newspaper bag on the handlebars and fold the papers so you could sling them up unto porches in a very professional way.


Then he took me over his route, showed me the houses where people had ordered and explained the business to me: "Try to get the people to pay in advance--'cause sometimes they move away or can't pay for some reason or other and you have to buy the newspapers yourself. (The paperboys bought their newspapers from the publishing plant downtown and they were delivered by truck to the houses where the paperboys lived every morning.)


"And if you have any newspapers left over, take them over to Tony's Bar on Fourth and Candelaria. There's always some drunk there that will buy them from you because he feels sorry for you. Sometimes they will even give you a quarter for them." (Newspapers cost a dime back then.)


At the end of my two weeks as a newspaper boy, I had earned about seven dollars-- enough money to buy for myself a most cool Micky Mouse wristwatch with a red plastic band from Walgreen's Drug Store. The hour and minute hands were Mickey's cartoon hands telling the time. It was so cool, I wish I had it now!

I see there is something called a "PhD in Journalism" now but I think it could all be pretty well summed up in Bro Joe's advise to me all those years ago.

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Sunday Funnies

I got to thinking about my life as a journalist.

My first memory of newspapers in general takes me back to Los Angeles during WWII.

I was five or six years old. My cautious parents, moving from New Mexico to paradise, had bought a nice little brand new bungalow in Hillside Village near Pasadena. Dad worked at Plumb Tool Company making the screwdrivers and such for the army which would soon be scattered all over north Africa and Mom with her hair done up in a bandana (Rosie the Riveter) worked part-time in a nearby factory making aluminum rivets for airplanes (Really!).

Sunday was a Big Day with everybody home, Dad and Mom sleeping late and Bro Joe and I having fun as always.

The Big Thing for me was a Sunday morning  radio program: "Uncle Bob Reads the Funnies". It was great.

The Sunday paper was delivered to our doorstep as was the milk in bottles with cream on top in those primitive days and I see on my morning bile rides that newspapers. now wrapped in plastic, are still delivered to homes--but not the milk (and certainly not the cream!)--though most of us get our news from the Internet these days.

The Sunday funnies were printed in color on big sheets of newsprint and "Uncle Bob"--a man who seemed to be a real nice guy-- would read the words in the voice balloons and sometimes explain some arcane adult things to us eager pre-reading listeners.

There was one comic strip  called "The Little King" which I sort of scorned because the artwork was so rudimentary I could have almost done it and it was not so funny to me. I liked Maggie and Jiggs, Snuffy Smith, Popeye and Dagwood and Blondie  though I didn't always understand their humor.


I really liked 'em ALL, but I think my favorite was Prince Val--because the detailed artwork was so very carefully done by a REAL artist and the story-- which was not funny-- was set in the days of old when knights were bold.

I also think I started to get an underlying deep main idea--that the printed symbols in the voice balloons were WORDS which made the characters come alive somehow and talk.

And, oh, this was a fascinating idea!

I would just HAVE to learn to read!

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President's Prize

President Obama looked so happy last night at the Navy aircraft carrier basketball game.

His job is certainly one of the most stressful occupations in the country so it was nice to see him relaxed and enjoying himself for a change.

I had an idea this morning that might make him more relaxed and popular.

He could start a President's Prize giveaway--using his own money.

Every month he could give a thousand dollars to some member of the armed forces--absolutely at random--maybe just add it to someone's paycheck--not to an officer or to anyone in particular--just a nice bit of money to someone serving: Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine.

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Salton Sea

Off to Salton Sea just a short drive east from Anza Borrego National Park with high expectations and hopes. 

We have never visited Salton Sea and don't know much about it except it is a very big lake and was created by accident about a hundred years ago.

Here's Salton City. Oh my. A pretty depressing sight: nothing much-- a gas station-- a home supply store-- a cafe.

We drive toward the lake. We can see the flat sheet of water in the near distance. There are a few more widely separated houses--they look like fifties ranch-style lookalikes--maybe three bedrooms and two and a half baths--each on a good-sized empty dirt lot. Not much in the way of trees or landscaping. 

There's a new-looking bright orangy-yellow high-school gym and related buildings.

Here's a disintegrating four-lane street called Yacht Club Drive.

Sounds promising so we take a right and follow it a block. It ends suddenly in a disused beachside parking lot. There is no yacht club. Sand is encroaching and sad, blackened stumps of Mexican fan palms are all that remains from someone's dream of tropic splendor.

We park and get out of the car. No people. No traffic. Far out on the water, which now is about thirty yards away, we see a line of sea birds--maybe pelicans--none flying. 

There is an odd smell in the air--a bit  like sewage--a bit like road-kill. No breeze. Everything still.

We have been talking gaily about "...dabbling our toes in the Salton Sea," and now we are close enough to be thinking about doing it--but, Holy Smokes!--there is a brown line of something at the water's edge and when we get closer we see that that brown line is thousands of dead fish--fish about nine or ten inches long--past the fresh rotting stage but not yet totally decomposed. Dried skin and fish bone skeletons. An awful sight!

I know it is some kind of die-off, but since we never heard about it it is a miserable shock.

Looking at the skeletons I immediately think: it is the future of the human race. This is how it ends. So many people--not enough whatever it is that killed these fish. Polluted water? Polluted air? Not enough food? Toxic waste? Atomic war?

Subdued, we drive home and I Google Dead Fish Salton Sea and find that a massive die-off of tilapia, the only fish that can live in the lake's warm, salty, fairly poisonous fluid these days,  had occurred recently.

Unusually high summertime heat had done something to the chemistry of the salty water which had somehow taken the oxygen out of it. Millions of fish had literally suffocated. A horrible death.

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Anza Borrego Park

Since we will be leaving the hot dry part of California for the cool wet part soon we decided to tie up a few loose ends by visiting one of the parks and one of the peculiar places in the sunny southland.

So we made a driving tour of Anza Borrego National Park and the Salton Sea yesterday.

We covered the round-trip distance from Temecula in just one day mainly because the motels listed near the park are so expensive we would not enjoy our sleep there and because there is really nothing near the Salton Sea except miles and miles of dirt.

But besides satisfying our curiosity there were lessons to be learned both places.

You drop down a couple thousand feet quickly from the west on Highway 97-- a wide, paved switchbacky piece of engineering--to a flatish plain which is the main portal of Anza Borrego Park--the largest National Park in California.

Anza Borrego Park is one of the hottest, driest places anywhere, but we picked a cool overcast fall day for our visit so the temperature was very pleasant.

Nice new restrooms near the parking area--very dark for some unknown reason--but classy and clean, and the visitor's center museum is fascinating--actually built underground--a little like the burrow of some desert animal, and it's free.

There is  nice gift shop with a lot of good books about the desert, some artifact cases and a nicely done cave-room for the display of archaeological finds and an explory "hands-on" room for kids which was the best place for me. 

I got to heft a borrego skull and, you know, that thing with its two huge curved horns was heavy! (A "borrego" is a wild mountain sheep as you probably know--the white, noble-looking kind that sometimes decorate the high cliffs of this park .)

There are tanned hides of some of the furry critters that live here too and the bob-cat, fox and coyote skins are so soft you wish they were more human friendly like cats and dogs so you could pet the living animals.

There is a very comfortable small theater where a poetic fifteen-minute movie is shown periodically.

And surrounding the Visitor Center a good "nature walk" has been created with living examples of the various plants which are native to the park--I especially like the palo verde and the smoke trees--but I was surprised to discover that the creosote bush is the longest lived plant in the world with individual examples living even longer than the famous bristlecone pines of the central  California mountains. 

This whole desert valley area was once--long ages ago--a sea bottom, and, according to the information in the museum display, the ocean-type sediment beneath the present surface goes down five miles deep.

Can you imagine how many human lifetimes it would take to accumulate so much detritus? I didn't think so.

...

Devil's Island Stew

My wife, Miz Fish, (Because she calls me "The Big Fish" sometimes!) finished a good read the other day: Papillion, the story of a French prisoner's escape from Devil's Island or somewhere  like that years ago.

One of the foods mentioned in the book as prison chow was "lentils" which we had never eaten but when we saw the dried little guys in our local market we bought a half pound to try as an experiment.

We cooked 'em up and the way we did it made a very tasty stew, so here is what we did in case you want to sample some French cuisine like they had on Devil's Island.

You take a cup or less of dried lentils and boil them about 15 minutes until they are soft enough to eat, drain and hold 'em warm until the fried ingredients are ready. 

Chop and saute a nice little brown onion (about the size of a hand-ball) in butter. I know--they didn't have butter on Devil's Island--but we do. 

You might as well chop in half a nice yellow bell-type pepper with the onion and don't forget to dice in two small tomatoes.

Then chop up some fresh spinach or such and maybe a couple of fresh young green onions too and toss them in with the round onion when that onion is fried to a golden brown.

Mix in the cooked lentils and, voila, you have some pretty good "prison" food. 

(Feeds two prisoners)

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Welcome

Hi.

So happy you have found me here!

I am writing this for you and I am smiling as I imagine you reading it.

You can call me Tommy Morganstern. 

Lets be friends!

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