Clever Cleaver

The chief philosophy during my years (1984-1988) at The Spectrum was never to consider it simply a "college" paper. Doing so would make it too easy to shrug off mistakes.

Maybe it's one reason (the other is that I'm likely crazy) that now, more than two decades after the fact, I still remember a misspelled front-page headline in the first edition of the first semester that I was editor in chief. An attacker was going after females on campus with a meat cleaver, not a "clever" as our headline blared.

That one mistake from that first edition drove a lot of us – particularly me – during that year to do better.

And now, looking back at my time at The Spectrum – a staff writer in my freshman year before moving up to assistant campus editor, campus editor, managing editor and finally editor in my senior year – it continues to amaze me how a university with no real journalism program supported a high-quality three-days-a-week publication.

The Spectrum also helped springboard many of us from that time-period into the journalism profession.

Ron Lesko, a Spectrum sports editor, went on to a long career with the Associated Press. Gerald Matalon, another sports editor and managing editor, is still a producer at ESPN.

Doug Oathout, former managing editor, is a longtime editor at the Erie Times-News in Pennsylvania. He's joined there by Gerald Weiss, a former Spectrum-ite. (I apologize to those I have missed).

I've carved out a career that has taken me all over New York, highlighted by a more than eight-year stint at the New York Post as a political reporter. During my time at the Post, I covered such things as the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the 2000 presidential recount, the 2004 national conventions, the 2008 Obama campaign (briefly), and the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case.

For the past three years, I've been the Albany bureau chief for the Daily News during a time of unprecedented turmoil at the state Capitol.

I think if you quizzed any of us who stayed in journalism – and many of those like Ralph DeRosa who succeeded in other careers – they would point to their times at The Spectrum as the highlight of their UB careers.

The late nights in the basement of Baldy Hall (the paper's old location). The 60-plus hours a week of assigning, reporting, writing (on typewriters, no less), editing and producing the paper so it came out on time every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Nerf hoop games to relieve stress. The happy hours to relieve more stress. The pizza calls. I won't even get into the number of classes missed because of the paper or the special skill you develop of begging for grades or make-up chances from sympathetic professors.

For a lot of us, The Spectrum was our fraternity. It was our real major. I was a communication major. But everything I learned to prepare for a career in journalism I learned at The Spectrum or from various summer internships my Spectrum experience helped secure

It wasn't all great. The paper was in financial trouble for much of my four years that almost cost us our independence. And we had one year when an editor in chief was busted for sending himself drugs from overseas. But even that, with time, became simply another funny story to tell when looking back.

UB was different during our four years there. It was a time of transition. There was no Student Union. There were no Division I sports. Hell, there wasn't even a pizza parlor on campus. I remember writing a good-bye column my senior year admitting that it would be hard for me to donate to a university I felt went out of its way to make it hard on students. There was little at the time to make people proud of being a UB graduate. But the one exception, I wrote, was The Spectrum.

I've softened over the years. I recall UB much more fondly and even find myself donating annually to the campus to help make up for years of state subsidy cutbacks.

But one thing that hasn't changed is my feelings toward The Spectrum.

We had a faculty advisor, the late Lee Smith, who was a former editorial editor for The Buffalo News. Lee was always there with encouragement so that we were able to see the quality of the total product – even when obsessing over embarrassing meat "clever" mistakes.

Happy 60th to The Spectrum. And thank you. Here's to 60 more.

Email: alumni@ubspectrum.com