Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

University of Missouri

In my junior year at Notre Dame I decided the Journalism department did not offer much. It had only three courses, none of which seemed to be of any value. The Journalism department at Notre Dame has since disappeared. My cousin, Bill McGowan, of Benson, was at the University of Missouri in the Journalism school and either through a Christmas visit or by letter he made it sound practical to join him.

When I moved to Missouri the state university would not honor my religion courses. When I enrolled in Journalism School I took History of Journalism and courses in advertising and news writing. When I decided after one semester in Jay School that such courses were not what I wanted or needed. I felt I cold learn those techniques on the job at my father's paper. What I needed then was the liberal arts courses to gain the knowledge to write news and editorial material.

So I returned to a liberal arts program. In that program the school would honor only History of Journalism as a liberal arts course. All this transferring put me behind in obtaining my degree. It finally took a summer session and two correspondence courses at home to get my degree in History and Political Science in January, 1943.

I didn't have much discussion with my father about this move. I don't think he was excited about it. It may have helped that the school at Missouri was named the Walter Williams School of Journalism, named after a country editor like my father. I didn't know until after my father's death my stepmother, Elizabeth, said that he would have preferred that I finish at Notre Dane, and maybe that would have been best. I graduated with a liberal arts degree which I could have obtained had I stayed at Notre Dame, but there were other extenuating conditions.

At the time Missouri had perhaps the most famous journalism school in the country. Northwestern and Columbia had schools of journalism but they were more at the graduate level. The University of Minnesota School of Journalism later became higher rated but then fell off badly when it changed to a School of Mass Communications.

The head of the school at Missouri when I was there, Dr. J. Edward Gerald, later became a lecturer at Minnesota. At Missouri he taught History of Journalism five days a week. After I lost all my journalism credits when I switched back to liberal arts the only credits I could save were for that history course. In fact that is what led me to get a history major.

The Jay school at Missouri was unique in one respect. It put out a daily newspaper competitive with another daily paper in Columbia. We had courses in how to lay out an ad or how to write a news story. The grade for classes in reporting were based on covering assignments for the Daily Colombian.

I found this arrangement unsatisfactory. It was teaching me the mechanics of how to lay out an ad and how to write a news story, but the courses did not teach me what to put into those news stories. I felt I could learn the mechanics on my father's paper, but if I was going to be a reporter and editor I needed more background information, more work for the brain and less for the hands.

Another situation occurred at this time. I became engaged to a high school classmate, Helaine Schendel. Although she sat behind me in one of our senior classes, we weren't socializing at the time. We became closer during college vacations and one Christmas. At the request of Helaine's father, my farther put the announcement on the front page of the Appleton Press.

That old adage about absence making the heart grow fonder didn't work in our case. Just the opposite occurred. She was a graduate of Miss Woods Kindergarten School, the same school connected with Macalester that the wife of Gov. Elmer Benson attended. Helaine was teaching at Verdi, a small town in southwestern Minnesota. She was enjoying the social life there and I was having a great time at Missouri, with a reputation as the play school of the Midwest. So we decided to call the whole thing off.

When I transferred to Missouri I first lived with my cousin, Bill McGowan. He was attending the Journalism school there and played a part in my decision to go there as well. I joined him in a two-bedroom apartment. The other two in our apartment were Curt Hurley and Bob Jones.

Hurley was a jolly fellow who was a waiter in a local café. Sometimes his girlfriend named Nell Hurley-no relation-slept over with him. I heard that Curt was later killed in the war.

Jones was a heavy set young man who spent the entire semester trying to write a paper for his English class. Every day he would sit down at our dining table, light up a cigarette and ponder. This went on day after day and we did not see any progress and became worried about what would happen. I met with his girlfriend at Christian College in Columbia to see what we could do to motivate Bob, but nothing worked. Finally, the year ended without the paper being completed. Bob went back to Iowa, I believe, and nothing further was heard from or about him.

Bill was the nearest thing I had to a brother. He was just two months older than me. He was also a bit more daring than me. I don't recall how it happened but one time at Christmas he and I were at the home of my closest friend at Notre Dame, Ken McNevin, from Edina. There was a fire in the fireplace at Ken's house and for some reason Bill tossed a large log on the fire. The flames shot up and I thought they were going to burn the wood mantel over the fireplace. Ken was a bit concerned but no serious damage resulted.

Bill's parents sent him to St. Thomas Academy for his final years in high school, hoping to instill some discipline. It didn't work. When his folks went to Arizona for the winter, Bill took off to go skiing. We received calls from his father asking if we knew where he went and to look out for him. Bill was "campused", or confined to campus, for skipping school. His folks asked that any time we went to St. Paul we were to take Bill out to give him some relief from his confinement. When we went to get him one time and were walking down the hall to his room, somebody chastised us for walking on the newly cleaned central runner in the hall.

Another of Bill's escapades at this time to get away from the St. Thomas regulations which chafed him involved taking off to go hunting in his home area. I don't recall where he obtained the gun but he had a double-barreled shotgun. It may have been an accident but I believe he wanted to see what would happen if he pulled both triggers on the gun. That would be typical for him. The result was an explosion which blew open the gun and took away part of his right trigger finger. After that accident I never could understand how he could get in the Air Force without a full trigger finger. He must have hidden it during a physical examination.

We led a rather active social life in Columbia. There was Christian College, a small school for girls; Stephens college, then a two-year finishing school for girls, which we joked taught young women good manners and how to ride a horse. but now a four-year school; and the usual complement of University women. Our apartment became a hangout on Sunday afternoons for Stephens girls.

The Black and Gold café, where Curt worked, had an elevated area in the back where music was furnished and dancing went on each afternoon after 4 o'clock. Next door was another hangout called The Shack-and it really was a shack. It was a firetrap made up of bare wooden booths and the building held together somehow. A nighttime spot was Springdale Gardens where some serious imbibing went on. Rum and Coca Cola was the favorite refreshment. Now I don't know anybody who drinks that mixture. The fraternities added their share of the campus merriment. All this ratified the play school reputation of the university.

Bill met his wife during this time. She was a lovely young woman at Stephens named Suzanne Schaefer, nicknamed Suki. They were married before Bill went overseas. Their marriage ended tragically when he was shot down while strafing a railroad yard at St. Lo, France, on D-Day in June, 1944. His plane apparently was hit by machine gun fire from the ground and broke out in flames. He was not seen ejecting and the plane crashed. He was listed as missing in action for one year and then declared presumed dead. There is now a memorial marker near the spot where he went down and his family and other family members have visited the memorial.

Bill made a point of coming to visit me before he went overseas. He looked quite dashing in his uniform with the white scarf. We had a serious talk but I never realized that would be the last time I would see him.

In my senior year at Missouri I took up residence at a board and room place on Rosemary Lane in Columbia. It was operated by Mrs. S. S. Creed, a grandmotherly type lady. I shared a room with two different fellows. One was a lady's man who occasionally described his conquests from the previous night. The other had such poor vision that he had to reach under the bed to get his glasses before he could get up and move about. Mrs. Creed fed us well with home cooking and she didn't mind if we raided the refrigerator at night.

There must have been about 10 of us in the house, nearly all Missouri fellows, quite different from the ones I knew at Notre Dame. There were two of them who knew some of the girls on campus and we all used to go out together occasionally.

On one of those dates, before we could go out I had to answer a call to the library. I had committed the cardinal sin of taking a book on reserve home for the weekend to complete a paper for class. It was a stupid thing to do but I was desperate to get the book. I didn't think it would be missed over the weekend. For that offense I was kept out of class for a week. I enjoyed the vacation and didn't seem to miss much class work.

Somebody in our group at the home suggested that we become affiliated with a national fraternity. We were given the pitch and agreed to become a chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon, the "Tekes". We went to Washington University in St. Louis and were officially initiated.

Then we had to recruit some new members. We scheduled a day to invite some likely prospects to the house to convince them to join us in the home. The day we chose to do this was Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. As I was making some final arrangements just before noon to receive anybody planning to come, we heard reports over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The first details were sketchy but with World War II just underway, our "rushing" party was canceled.

All of us at that time were likely candidates for military service. I began to think about which service I would like to join. I came up with the Coast Guard Academy for officers' training. To enter that service, I needed more mathematics than I had accumulated to that time. With all the religion credits I lost from Notre Dame when transferring to Missouri and with the journalism courses I lost when I switched my major from journalism to liberal arts I needed more credits to graduate.

So, I enrolled in summer session to get credits in algebra and trigonometry. I never cared much for math but I surprised myself by getting the top grade in the class in trig. When the professor announced the grades everybody in the class turned around to see who accomplished that.

I soon learned that summer in Missouri can be brutal. The heat and humidity were enough to melt everything. To meet this challenge classes were scheduled to start at 7 a. m. to beat the heat and were all done by noon. I had another roommate that summer, a chubby fellow. It was our custom when we finished lunch we went to our room, stripped down to our shorts and played chess on the bed all afternoon.

At the end of the summer I went home to Appleton, still short of credits to graduate. But I did take the train to Chicago, sat up all night in a coach and went to the Coast Guard recruiting station. The examiner said my heart beat was not good, probably after the allnight train ride. He told me to get a good night's rest and come back the following day. I got a room in the YMCA for the night and went back as instructed. This time the heart beat was all right but I was ruled out for asthma and hay fever.

While in the examining station we took off most of our clothes and left them on benches in front of lockers. As I walked through there I looked over a room divider. I spotted two black fellows going through the pockets of the clothes left lying around. When they saw me looking at them they dropped the clothes and moved on.

Later that fall I was called up for the draft. I rode a bus with other fellows from Swift county to Fort Snelling for the exam. One of the fellows going with me was an older man who was the Linotype operator for the Swift County Monitor and News at Benson, Larry Matthiason, who wrote a popular column under the name Larry Em. My fate there was the same as in Chicago. I thought Larry was too old to be accepted but he passed and I was rejected. This meant my uncle Joe at Benson had to find another Linotype operator.

When I mentioned my failure to be accepted by the Coast Guard and the reasons, the examiner wanted some proof. I said I could do that easily. If he gave me about two hours I would go out to get a beer and some cigarettes, two of my worst allergies, the ones that made me breathless at Notre Dame, and return with a shortness of breath. He said to go ahead and do that.

I returned in about two hours but no asthmatic condition was evident. I happened to have a sheet with me that listed all my allergies. The examining doctor looked at the sheet and he said if the well-known allergist said I had a problem I must have it. So, he rejected me. I went home and, on the way, I became extremely sick and stayed that way for a week. I hadn't allowed enough time for the allergies to take effect.

I still thought I should give it one more chance. I wrote to the recruiting office in Winnipeg to see if the Canadians had any interest in me. They responded that if the United States military didn't want me they couldn't use me either. I was put in the 4-F draft classification and never bothered again.

My military service was served in what was called the State Guard. When the Appleton National Guard company was called into active duty that left the Appleton armory without anybody in charge. I don't know who was responsible for this development but some of the remaining men in town took over. My Dad, who had about three months of military service at Camp Dodge, Ia., at the end of World War I, became company commander and captain. Other older men joined him as officers and still others not quite qualified for active duty filled out the company. I became the company clerk. That meant I wore an ill-fitting khaki uniform and typed forms and reports. This continued for about two years until World War II ended.

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