Boston

Shortly after I was laid off from my last journalism job, I went to visit Marlow at Columbia in New York City. The comic highlight of that trip was me giving my ankle a severe twisting while hailing a cab, but the part I particularly remember if flying out on the red eye and promising myself that I had reached the age where I wasn't going to do that anymore. It is uncomfortable, I don't sleep well on airplanes, and I had already done it enough. It wasn't like in the old days, when Pan Am and TWA flew half empty planes from San Francisco to New York which gave you an entire center section as a "bed." Every time I have taken the Jet Blue red eye from Oakland to Boston, it has been full. Not just nearly full--but full.

Yet, here I found myself last week, on the Red Eye to Boston again. The temptation is great from this direction of course--you get a full day in San Francisco, and then you have the prospect of a full day in New York. The other choice is to leave SF at 7 or 8 and get to Boston or New York at 4 or 5. But the fact is, if I arrive in the East at 7am now, I don't go to work or out on the town, I go to bed, in the room I paid for on Thursday night so it would be ready for me on Friday morning. I stayed, by the way, and the beautiful, centrally located and intelligently managed Lenox Hotel. When I say intelligently managed, what I mean is no charge for 800 calls, no charge for WiFi access. When you're paying $219 a night, should you really be nickled and dimed? The Lenox says no, and believe me, I will be staying there again.

I picked it because it was across the street from Morton's, where the current staff of The Tech decided to hold its annual dinner, and devote part of the evening to a celebration of the newspaper's 125th year of existence ("Continuous News Service Since 1881"). I chose my words carefully here, because the huge (more than 100) newspaper staff of college students far outnumbered the alumni, and held what I recognized as a completely unmodified annual dinner. The staff of my old paper treats themselves to a fancy restaurant meal each year, topped off with an hour or so of "toasts," in which staff members roast each other in an allegedly good-humored way. Some of the toasts were obscure even to the staff, but 99% were baffling to the alumni in attendance (1% were clever enough that you didn't have to know the staffer to get the joke).

A half dozen of us old coots (myself included) were permitted to make a few remarks about our era on the newspaper. I could have gone on at some length, but chose not to. The oldest editor in attendance, a graduate of the class of 1949 told about efforts to rename the Harvard Bridge as the Technology Bridge, which led an editor from the early 1950s to explain the famous picture of the band in the car on the bridge with the sign that said "The Tech Dedicates Technology Bridge." There was discussion of tuition riots back in the days when $1,000 was "too damn much." By my era, it was "$2,750 is too damn much," or even TFM--today tuition is $20,000 and they don't riot any more. Apparently, the MIT Campus Patrol was created in response to manhandling of students by Cambridge Police during a tuition riot. We had a spread of editors from the five decades, the 40s through the 90s. Disappointingly, I discovered the stories I had been told about Pat McGovern '59 as an undergraduate were not true; they were knocked down by former editors who were also fraternity brothers of his.

What particularly struck me was how much better the alumni attendance was at this meal than it was at the Centennial in 1981; on that occasion, if memory serves me (and it may not serve me…), Dr. Killian, president-emeritus of MIT, Eisenhower science advisor and editor of The Tech in 1926, was joined that night by editors from the 60s and 70s. What's changed? The students now have access to an e-mail database, collected for them by MIT, comprising more than 1,200 former staff members of the newspaper (obviously, participation is higher from recent grads than older grads). I was proud to be in attendance with the second-ever female chairman of The Tech (the title was formerly general manager), but I have still never met Linda Greiner Sprague '60, the first female chairman. Some alumni of my vintage were disappointingly unable to come, including Storm Kaufman, John Hanzel, Mike McNamee (just started a new job) and John Kavazanjian (family conflict). I would have enjoyed seeing Tim Kiorpes and Dave Searls ("the carpet in Burton, when wet, smelled dankly of old beer), but I can only assume they somehow weren't on the e-mail list. Lee Giguere, '73, my predecessor, showed up from Connecticut, where he has been a journalist for all the 33 years since graduation--and is still married to his college sweetheart. Most of the usual gang of idiots was there--Barb Moore (I'm still the only person who calls her chief) and Norm Sandler--as well as our chairman, David "Plymouth Duster" Tenenbaum. Among those I saw, however briefly, were Roger Goldstein, Brian Rehrig, Neal Vitale, Sandy Yulke (our first female sports editor), David Boccuti (long-time Indexing Project Representative), Carol McGuire, Julia Malakie, Bob Nilson, Dan Gantt… but not Diana ben-Aaron (who led the centennial), Barry Surman or Robert Malchman from the generation just after us.

Update April 30, 2006: Within minutes of this post, Diana ben-Aaron, a long-time reader, as well as a friend and former colleague, wrote to say: "I didn't lead the Centennial, Stephanie Pollack '82 did. She wasn't there, according to the list, nor was Jerri-Lynn Scofield '83, the Rhodes scholar of our generation." So far as I know, Diana was right, neither was there.

I can't list the name of every alumnus who attended, but it was a star-studded evening. I hope to be more active in the arrangement of the 150th, 25 years from now, and will endeavor to convince the young' uns to hold a separate dinner for themselves so the alumni have more of a chance to shine.

We paused to mourn a few colleagues who have already died. We topped off the evening with a champagne toast, among the 22 of us in attendance that knew him, to Edwin Diamond, the godfather of modern journalism at MIT. He was a great man whose loss is as fresh today as it was nine years ago when he died, too young, at age 72. Then we took our The Tech mugs with the mysterious inexplicable date from the 1920s on them, and wandered into the night.