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January 2011
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Remembering When
The Missouri Group: The four professors who became known as The Missouri Group for producing the first widely marketed series of textbooks bearing the School's name. From left: George Kennedy, Brian Brooks, Daryl Moen and Don Ranly.
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The School's Story, As Told by Its Professors
By Brian Jarvis
Master's Student
The best tales about the Missouri School of Journalism are told by those who lived them. Eight longtime professors reminisce about innovations, milestones, people and other achievements that have shaped the world's first school of journalism.
"Already Good, Made A Lot Better"
Like many undergrads, Brian Brooks, BJ '67, MA '69, enjoyed attending football games and palling around with his fraternity brothers in Delta Sigma Phi, of which he was elected president.
Brian Brooks
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But in the mid-1960s, the collegiate experience was continuously overshadowed by the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
"All of us were facing the military," Brooks says. "Back in those days there was compulsory ROTC. I had already done two years, but as I approached graduation, I kept getting letters from the draft board asking when I graduate. So I applied back to ROTC. I thought if I have to go, I'd rather go as an officer."
After earning his master's degree in 1969, Brooks did indeed go on to serve in Vietnam as an information officer. He ranks his military service as the "best leadership training in the world," which he brought back with him when he returned to the School in 1974 as a faculty member.
"Those of us who came in the 1970s took a place that was already good and made it a lot better," Brooks says. "Now the facilities are better, the quality of the faculty and students is better. I'm proud of the fact that we took down old buildings, painted the place and made everything more presentable."
In addition to his current role as associate dean for undergraduate studies and administration, Brooks played a key role in adapting to new technologies when he partnered with fellow professor Phill Brooks in the late 1980s to design a local computer network for the Columbia Missourian. Their work caught the attention of IBM Corp., which kicked in a $15 million grant in 1989. Inevitably the pair became known as "the Brooks Brothers."
"When I was the editor of the Missourian, Phill and I were sitting at lunch one day lamenting the fact that we didn't have our own computer system," Brooks says. "And Phill said, 'Why don't we design our own?' We got the dean to give us 10 computers, and Phill wrote the programs that created our own newsroom system to publish the paper. That really put the School in the modern era. The Missourian was the first newspaper in the world to run on a local area network, and now they all do."
"Editor is God"
The night before Don Ranly began his doctoral studies in 1973, he was already in bed when he received a phone call asking him to teach a section of beginning news writing.
Don Ranly
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Having taught the course many times at Calumet College in East Chicago, he was quick to say yes. When did the course begin? The next morning at 8:40.
"I always like college theater and being on the stage," Ranly says. "I'm a bit of a ham, and I like performing. When I found out that I could turn on people's minds to learning something, it was a perfect marriage."
After a year of taking graduate-level courses and teaching sections of beginning news classes, Ranly was asked to take over the year-old weekly Missourian magazine, then called Vibrations. "Little did I know I would be the editor of that for seven years," Ranly says.
Thousands of students know Ranly from his introductory "Principles of American Journalism" course. But magazine students remember him most for his "Magazine Editing" class.
On the first day, Ranly always wrote on the board, "Editor is God." "I would tell the students, 'I'm training you to be gods. You will decide what people will see forever. Writers are a dime a dozen; editors are rare. You will either make writers or break them.'"
By the time Ranly completed his doctoral dissertation in 1976, he figured that landing a teaching job would take him out of the state. But the School had other plans.
"One day Dean Roy Fisher tapped me on the back and said, 'You know, we're not going to let you leave,'" Ranly remembers. Even though he had a couple of other offers, Ranly had no hesitation making up his mind. "When the Missouri J-School offers you a job, there's nowhere else to go," he says.
Ranly was made head of the magazine sequence in 1976 and began building the program. At the time, two part-time faculty served the sequence; 28 years later, 11 faculty had come onboard, though Ranly was no longer at the helm. Eventually the faculty approved more and more magazine courses, and finally, the sequence became a department.
Ranly notes that when he started teaching, some faculty would tell students if they wanted to make it in the journalism world, they had to start by working at a newspaper. "That was utter nonsense then, and it is utter nonsense now," he says.
"You Guys All Know This Stuff"
For all its history, the School's faculty had never published a practical, hands-on journalism textbook in the marketplace, at least not until the Missouri Group came along.
Daryl Moen
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Though they had no way of knowing at the time, the fates of four professors - Brian Brooks, George Kennedy, Daryl Moen and Don Ranly - would become forever linked in the late 1970s.
"A bunch of us were riding to a Kansas City Royals game," recalls Professor Daryl Moen. "We had just turned over the Missourian faculty almost completely in two years, brought in new blood and well-experienced people from newspapers. We were all real young and fresh-caught. And one of us, a faculty member named Bob Terrell, said that we should do a reporting textbook because 'You guys all know this stuff.'"
Though Terrell declined to take part in the actual writing, the remaining four held a meeting and divvied up the chapters. In 1979, the manuscript was sent out to five publishers. Though none of the Missouri Group was a published author at the time, they received four contract offers immediately.
"We got a great response," Moen says. "They saw Missouri's place in the world of journalism as a good entrance."
In 1980, St. Martin's Press published News Reporting and Writing, which would eventually be used in more than 500 college and university-level classes. Other books by the Missouri Group soon followed: The Writing Book, Beyond the Inverted Pyramid and Telling the Story. Naturally, the Missouri Group continues to update the books periodically.
"It certainly forces us to keep current," says Moen, who served as managing editor of the Columbia Missourian from 1974 to 1983 and chair of the Editorial Department from 1983 to 85. "It's a reflection of what's going on in the marketplace and also an effort on our part to lead. I came here when many faculty members were nearing the end of their careers, and there was some lag or lack of energy among them. But when I had conversations with (Brooks, Kennedy and Ranly), I could tell that we clicked on what the Missouri experience ought to be."
"Bruised and Battered"
Professor Emeritus George Kennedy, BJ '64, Ph.D. '78, remembers well the days of translating handwritten edits into print during his undergraduate years.
George Kennedy
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"We used a strange device that you'd have to go to a museum to find these days, and that's a manual typewriter. If you screwed up, you had to backspace to X it out. A soft lead No. 2 pencil was what we used for copy editing. With stuff scribbled and lines crossed out, it was a fine art to be able to read those stories. It's amazing anything ever got published correctly."
Having clocked in a dozen years as managing editor of the Columbia Missourian, Kennedy says that operating a mechanical press required more human skill than typing away at a computer. But he doesn't pine for the olden days.
"Newsrooms today are much quieter, much cleaner and in many ways are saner and more humane," he says.
One of Kennedy's most vivid memories involves Dean Roy Fisher, who hired Kennedy as a professor in the mid-1970s. The previous dean, Earl English, was known to be a private man who encouraged faculty to wear dress shirts and ties to campus, even on Saturdays. Dean Fisher, former editor of the Chicago Daily News, however, seemed to exemplify a more casual spirit and held an annual picnic for students and faculty.
"Roy loved mixing with the students," Kennedy says. "The highlight of that picnic was a touch football game. It was the faculty against the students, and though Fisher was 60 years old, he insisted on playing quarterback. So my responsibility was to block for the dean and make sure no overaggressive students injured or knocked him down."
Looking back, Kennedy admits with a laugh that easing student-faculty tensions might have been better served in the classroom than on the touch football field.
"Attorneys and liability would never permit that to go on now, with middle-aged people out of shape playing against young people who were in shape," he says. "We'd come into work the next day bruised and battered, and maybe hung-over because we drank, too. But back then we just kind of did it."
"Sure as Hell Wasn't Any Google"
Rod Gelatt couldn't help noting the irony in how he learned that that he had been hired by the Missouri School of Journalism, by a phone call from the Columbia Tribune.
Rod Gelatt
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"One day the editor called. He told me, 'You're the news director at Channel 8,'" Gelatt says. "It still needed the approval from the Board of Curators, but now (the School) had to be sure to break the story before the Tribune did."
Having reported for WHO-AM in Des Moines, Iowa, Gelatt had the unique experience in 1953 of witnessing the station convert from a radio newsroom to a radio-television newsroom in the span of one weekend. By the time he was brought onboard to KOMU-TV as newsroom director a decade later, Gelatt was a natural fit to teach both radio and video, not to mention get in front of the camera himself.
"In one day, I would teach two courses, then I was the anchor as well as the news director for the six o'clock news, with students as co-anchors. I rushed home, ate dinner, shaved for the second time, went back and anchored the 10 o'clock news."
No doubt today's multimedia reporters would marvel at the technology of Gelatt's era, which included noisy teletype machines and manual editing with a razor blade and a grease pencil in order to cut film and splice it together.
"There sure as hell wasn't any Google," Gelatt says. "The only way to do it was to go to a newspaper morgue and look up the clippings, pull out handy-dandy reference books, look into encyclopedias or just ask questions of people who did know about something."
Though he officially retired in 1992, Gelatt continued to teach courses and created Views of the News, a media-commentary program that he hosted on KBIA-FM until 2008. Even now, people still recognize him on the street from his anchor days at KOMU.
"When you're in somebody's home night after night, you become almost an adjunct member of the family," Gelatt says. "There were always a bunch of folks who would say 'Hi Rod, I grew up watching you.' They still say that to me today, but now they're gray and bald and have big stomachs. You can be very influential in a town like Columbia, but go to a network and often you're just another face in the crowd. You don't have as much impact as you can on local television."
"Stick Full of Type"
James Sterling, BJ '65, first entered the School as a junior in 1962 when his lab instructor was then-TA and future professor Steve Kopcha. After completing the Principles of Advertising course, "ad-prin" for short, Sterling was promptly sent to the Missourian, where advertising students were required to lay out ads and drum up sales from local businesses.
Jim Sterling
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"Today you've got labs filled with computers," Sterling says. "Those days, you had a blank sheet of paper, three columns by 10 inches. You drew a picture, wrote copy and drew lines where the copy was supposed to go."
Students also learned how to hand-set type, which was entered in a linotype machine with a 90-piece keyboard and two alphabets, one for uppercase and one for lowercase. To this day, Sterling has more than a dozen type sets stacked in his garage as memorabilia.
James Sterling's student ID card from the 1968-69 school year.
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"If you want to see a girl cry, watch her drop a stick full of type after it had been set and then have to pick it up, get it back in the case and start over again," Sterling recalls. "I saw that happen once."
Then as now, Sterling believes the School provides students with the tools to go forth and conquer the media world. In his case, the School provided enough flexibility for Sterling to find himself along the way. In addition to teaching courses in publishing, he holds the Missouri Chair in Community Newspaper Management.
"I thought I'd be a reporter, and if I was really smart one day, I'd be an editor," he says. "But it turned out I was better at drawing pictures than writing stories, so I got into advertising instead. When I started journalism school, I had no idea all of the things you could go into."
"A Teacher Buried Inside Me"
Even as an undergraduate in the late 1950s, Roger Gafke, BJ '61, was studying convergence at the School. He just didn't realize it at the time.
Roger Gafke
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"If you were to ask me now what my major was, I'd say convergence, but no one called it that," Gafke says. "I took advertising, copy editing, reporting, broadcast reporting and photography. You thought about journalism at its core and how you were going to deliver it. Write headlines and copy? Do video interviews? Nowadays we're clearly coming back to a converged sequence."
Gafke earned his master's degree in arts and science from MU in 1962 and joined the radio-television journalism faculty in 1968. He believes he is the only individual to work for all of KOMU-TV's newsroom directors - Phil Berk, Duke Wade, Rod Gelatt, John Quarterer, Kent Collins, BJ '70, and Stacy Woelfel, BJ '81.
"One day I received a call that (the School) was putting a radio station on the air and would I consider being on the faculty?" Gafke says. "I had never thought about it, but I was a Boy Scout volunteer and taught Sunday school lessons, so I thought maybe there was a teacher buried inside me."
Though Gafke became news director of KFRU-AM - then a training ground for broadcast journalism students before the launch of the University-owned KBIA-FM in 1971 - he found success outside of the newsroom as well. In other words, Gafke is still converging.
As director of program development for the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Gafke helps advance journalism projects around the globe, from fundraising to the creation of Web-based training programs. He was the first American journalist to deliver training at the Aljazeera Media Training and Development Center in Doha, Qatar.
"Journalism is a pretty young institution, and it's still establishing its niche and profile," Gafke says. "We ask, what's the process? What's going on here? My role is to assemble resources for the guys with the vision to do it and make the work possible. That's how we can articulate new understandings of communication and define ways that it can better serve democracy."
"Like Pulling Teeth"
Having joined the School's faculty in 1967, Keith Sanders remembers a considerable spike in enrollment in the early 1970s thanks to the Watergate scandal, as young journalism students were eager to follow in the footsteps of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Keith Sanders
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But few students were interested in teaching, and up until 1980 the School was awarding only two or three doctoral degrees a year. Having earned his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, Sanders belonged to a minority of doctoral-level faculty during the first half of his career.
"Some years we didn't graduate any (doctoral students), and we weren't even at five percent as far as master's students going into teaching," Sanders says. "Students wanted to learn how to report and operate a camera, and then go out and get a job in journalism or advertising, which is the strength of the program. But Iowa at the time was graduating eight to 10 doctoral students every year, and it was hard to get the faculty here to buy into that."
A former sports reporter in print and broadcast, Sanders chaired the Editorial Department, which included print, advertising and radio-television, from 1976 to 1979. But he longed to teach classes that offered more depth than basic reporting and editing.
"It was like pulling teeth to get students to think in terms of terms of theory and research," Sanders says. "But if you don't have that perspective to put it all together, it's difficult to know what the truth really is."
Slowly, however, the School expanded its graduate courses to include research methods, communication theory and mass media and society, and to split qualitative and quantitative research into separate classes. Sanders served as interim associate dean of graduate studies in 1980, 1986 to 87 and 1990 to 91.
"I enjoyed dealing with bright minds, bright people who were excited and many of them looking for careers in education," Sanders said. "For anyone going through the doctoral program, I was on your committee. Every one of them."
Retired since 2000, Sanders is now the executive director of the Kappa Tau Alpha national honor society - the only one of its kind in journalism and mass communication - and oversees all 93 chapters. KTA was founded at the School in 1910. It inducts students in the top 10 percent of their class, promoting scholarship and honoring those who achieve it.
"I've always been terribly impressed by the caliber of our students and that so many of them come so far to the middle of the continent," Sanders says.
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