THE JMC 10TH ANNIVERSARY TABLOID (1975)
R. Sue (Smith) Dodea
R. Sue Dodea (then Smith) was one of the key players in compiling and publishing the tabloid distributed during JMC's 10th anniversary celebration in April 1975.
Selected materials from the tabloid appear throughout this website.
This is R. Sue's reminiscence of the process through which the tabloid was created.
If anyone has additional 'hard-core' data on JMC, its operations, its performance, or its outcomes, please Contact the Editor
.The 10th anniversary tabloid was a group activity. I was nominally in charge though I had no college publication training or experience. Odds are good I bluffed my way into the assignment. My volunteer colleagues and I worked collaboratively with staff participation limited to Dorothy Rhines at the typewriter. There was no criteria whatsoever for participation. Everyone could participate as valid, qualified writers/photographers/editor since we believed that you were what you said you were. Thus if you owned a camera, you were a photographer.
We initially met as a group, I gave deadlines and some direction though I know not what -- then went on our separate ways to fulfill those tasks. As you might suspect, the entire production was pasted up and sent to the printer within breathing distance of the actual production deadline. I would suspect that the only person who reviewed the final product before printing was me. I was too young to value collaboration, so immature that I easily mistook experience and wisdom as an intrusive authoritarianism -- in short, much like my peers of the time.
It reflects the residential college advantage ("We are a community") as well as the pro-isolationism disadvantage: while we knew we didn't know what we were doing, making it up as we went along, we didn't take the step of drawing on the resources, guidance or talent of the University's own publishing department or journalism program. Those folks might have suggested tips like identifying people in photos, appropriate attribution of the quotations, adding page numbers and other professional basics.
To my limited recollection, reasons (or excuses, take your pick) for not doing the above included: if we didn't have the accurate attribution for everyone, then we shouldn't do it for anyone. There was also a poetic intention that the statements not reflect a specific person's experience but an Everyman point of view. Today, this is a loss for the nostalgic though not necessarily for history. Studs Terkels' best-seller "Working" was a significant influence with the narration entirely through first-person reflection, giving the illusion that no editor skews or colors the content.
The quality of the final product reflects our faith, however misplaced, that whatever we came up with was going to be valued. Though it was a commemorative piece there was no sense of creating a document for eternity. Just as the medium is the message, the tabloid format didn't suggest longevity.
In my opinion, the Tabloid is an extremely valuable artifact of the mid-70's JMC experience. While its inadequacies may be the bane of scholars or historians it provides significant "evidence" of the community that disappeared.
R. Sue (Smith) Dodea
JMC '76
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