50 Years Later: Still Curious, Still Writing

More than one-third of our journalism graduating class showed up 50 years later. We didn't even use name tags.

You may wonder how this post and the last blog are directly related to writing a novel. Bear with me.

Last month I wrote about books I love (and please add Barbara Kingsolver's Partita to your list) because reading leads to writing.

This month, it's all about the 50th reunion of my Western University journalism graduating class, something I still find impossible to believe.

Curtis Rush, the tall guy in the back of the picture, had a much tougher job than his decades as a sportswriter and editor. He deserves the credit for organizing and herding our unruly group through a number of activities designed to reacquaint us.

We were a small class by the end of our fourth year. Many students were defeated by the demands of the course, personal challenges or financial pressures. The four hour labs where we hunched over manual typewriters prepared us for even noisier newsrooms. So did the language, because with no spell check to save us, mistakes were corrected with a lot of whiteout and cursing.

It was fun stepping back and forth 50 years, getting to know some of these fellow travellers for the first time again.

In the photo, we are posing in the university's modern new journalism building, a far cry from the former stately Middlesex College. But then, it's now the Faculty of Information & Media Studies. Today's facilities include high tech computer and media labs. The journalism program has evolved into a one-year Master's degree.

It's all very different, but some things never change. The parade of young, vibrant students heading to the football game, cloaked in purple and fuelled by beer, transported us back to our university days.

At an Alumni breakfast, graduates from 1976 gathered alongside those from 1966 plus one woman from 1956 (we can only hope). At my table there also were graduates from the inaugural one-year MA journalism program. As we compared notes, we discovered an interesting difference. Each of the four-year grads had some journalism career, however varied, while few of the MA grads became journalists, according to one man who had gone directly into union work.

He suggested that committing to an intense four-year journalism program showed a passion for the field. And judging by the updates from our classmates, we certainly had that.

And that passion and curiosity (some call it nosiness) has followed many of us throughout our lives.

Which brings me back to where I started. Reading feeds writing, but writing also grows out of a lifetime of observing, listening, questioning, and collecting stories. The journalism classroom may have been our starting point, but the lessons didn't end at graduation.

Fifty years later, we're still curious. Still passionate. Still gathering material. Some of us are even turning it into novels.

ellenwrites.ca

#Western journalism #writing #wrestling novel