Gilford Eagle Tribune

It's so noisy at the fair/
But all your friends are there

                                        Neil Young, "Sugar Mountain"

It became clear to me when I heard "Burning Down the House" playing in the Gilford Eagle Tribune production room that the yearbook was lame and the paper was cool—so I was desperate to make the switch. My main obstacle was Harry Proudfoot, whose standards were infamously high, and who (understandably) resisted the prospect of an untested yearbook quitter joining his staff. He ended up leaving after our junior year, and the word was that the paper would never be the same without him, like Van Halen after David Lee Roth.


 The production room was loud. People were always bursting through the double doors and making pronouncements. Across the hall was where journalistic magic happened: Dick Dumais' computer lab by day (hey, do you know he's back at Gilford? And that he looks exactly the same, except for a slightly shorter haircut?) and the press room by night. There was always someone around and it was the opposite of every job I’d had: instead of everyone doing nothing and trying to look busy, everyone appeared to be goofing off but stuff got done. 


I loved the way the paper staff was nostalgic for their adolescence even in the very midst of it: they listened to Neil Young's “Sugar Mountain” as they collated the copies at the end of each production cycle, and they told stories about the year before, and the year before that--crazy stories about all-nighters and working under Harry and students who had graduated.


I started on copy staff and moved to features. I don’t remember getting any formal instruction for writing the stories, but everything went through the editors who instructed as they saw fit. My friend Jill was the copy editor in our senior year. She had all of the qualities of a good copy editor: impatience, a sense of humor, and a deep and enduring hatred of bad grammar. She even ended up correcting letters I mailed her during our first year of college--she couldn't help herself.

I have advised a literary magazine at the college level, and in the process I have seen missed deadlines, misuse of funds, and all sorts of incompetent boobery. I don’t remember the Eagle Tribune missing an issue, and people actually read it (and least I remember reading it, cover to cover, each week).

When I did a one-day series of lectures at Gilford High a couple of years ago, about college writing requirements,  I brought a few old copies of our paper, for fun. The AP English class had just finished taking the big AP exam—the one that determines whether you get college credit-- and were arriving back to Rhetta’s classroom, relieved but still jumpy, speculating about how well they did. It was a strange, bittersweet moment—she was the same, they were the same, but I was not the same:  my AP test had been long completed and forgotten, and what mattered in that room was not achievement but pure, untapped potential. Suddenly, Rhetta called out to me: “I remember what you got on the test!” I felt briefly triumphant as she mentioned this in front of them (“that’s right, kids—that’s how it’s done!) until I realized how ridiculous it was. Really, had the test score mattered at all? And here they were, so anxious and hopped up, going through the exam question by question.

Anyway, I showed them the newspaper. I expected laughter, jokes about how old school it looked compared to their current paper, and comments on the front-page story about the smoking area (“you had a SMOKING AREA?") But that didn’t happen. They were, to my surprise,  genuinely impressed. They wanted to know how much time it had taken each week to produce an issue, and how we got people to read it.

“That looks great,” one of them said, after they took the time to sift through the copies, “I wish we had a paper.”

I wondered when it went away, and why, and whether it was another casualty of the internet age. Do high schools have newspapers anymore? As I left that day, I felt a little sorry for them, not because they didn’t have a paper necessarily but for the way they all bounced along the halls, listening to their own music, out the door after school to their own separate lives,  never listening to the same song in one room after school, telling stories about last year and the year before that.