What Happened in College

When we were in New Orleans last week, we took one day to head down memory lane and drove up to Baton Rouge to see LSU. I could write volumes on what happened while I was in college, but three things stand out.

First, I started LSU as a freshman in pre-med. I was going to be a doctor, which had been my father’s own career dream until the Great Depression short-circuited any hope of college (he graduated from high school in 1933). I came out of LSU with a degree in journalism, which was a much better fit for my personality and talents even if it would never put me anywhere close to the same socio-economic status as a doctor.

Last week, my wife and I walked though the Journalism Building. It’s radically rehabbed and redesigned form when we had classes there but recognizable enough to identify “This is where I took newspaper and design” and “they was the Law of Journalism class.” What had been the office of the school newspaper (The Reveille) is now a computer lab.

Second, it was in that office of the Reveille where I met Janet, and we were married seven months later. I was the newspaper’s managing editor for my last semester as a senior – responsible for everything except the editorial page. I had four copy editors, three photographers, an arts editor and a sport editor reporting to me, along with 30+ reporters. It was crazy, and I loved it.

I spent long hours in that newspaper office. Within a few weeks of the start of the semester, the campus was hit by a flu epidemic. All of my copy editors got it; my sports editor got it; two of my photographers got it; and several reporters. I was spared, but for weeks, I worked from 11 a.m. to 6 a.m., editing, running my one photographer ragged, writing, laying out all of the pages, cajoling painstaking reporters who were perfectionists about what they wrote (I won’t mention any names but I married one), and then delivering all of the finished copy and photos to the printing office at 2 a.m., waiting around while the typeset was produced, and then pasting up the paper for printing at 6 a.m. We published four days a week.

The third thing had to do with my faith.

Right across the street from the Journalism Building was Lockett Hall, housing faculty offices on the upper floors and large lecture rooms in the basement. Those were the classrooms I took two classes of U.S. history, Louisiana history, Russian history and “Introduction to Fine Arts,” a lecture class complete with slides always held in a darkened room and perfect for taking naps.

In one of those classrooms, on Jan. 26, 1973, about 9 p.m., I was led to Christ by the campus director for Campus Crusade for Christ. In the picture below, I’m sitting in almost exactly the same position I was that night (the seating is a lot newer but similar).

An interesting side note is that when we walked into the classroom last week, there was a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament/Psalms/Proverbs lying on the floor, very close to where I had sat that night. I left it on the desk near the podium.

Who knows, some student journalist might walk in and find it.