By Jim Schaefer
Looking back, it was a pretty wild idea.
Could two guys from The Lantern run for and take over the Undergraduate Student Government? SHOULD two guys from The Lantern embark on such a venture?
Scot Zellman and I did. We won in 1987 in a squeaker of an election, besting the second-place team by just 36 votes.
You may be wondering WHY we wanted to run for USG. Good question. Like most Lantern staffers, we’d taken our shots at the student government. This was a natural thing. They had some power and we were the watchdogs. It’s the same thing with the news media and government in the real world.
But I admit we did it – at least I did it – because it sounded like a fun thing to try. And the job paid pretty good money.
Zellman was a very well-known Lantern cartoonist at the time. His rendering of Cletus Buckeye in his comic strip “Potshots” was legendary. Cletus, distinctive for his spikey buckeye-shell-head that never fell off, was the forgotten brother of Brutus. While Brutus was wholesome, Cletus was devilish, smarmy and always had a cigarette dangling from his lips.
I had been Lantern editor, held other staff positions and was a longtime columnist. Zellman asked me to run with him and I jumped at the chance. With his artistic skills, he created our campaign literature, with recognizable Cletus on the front, and I’m sure that’s what put us over the top.
I wouldn’t say we got a lot of things done at USG, but we did have some success, including working on improvements to student safety on campus. Mainly, I just wanted to root out “corruption,” as I saw it back then. As I view it today, we were all just a bunch of college kids learning about life, how systems work and how systems can be played. I met some great people along the way. Most of us had good intentions.
Running for and winning the vice presidency of USG helped me do two things: extend my undergrad stay an extra year (for a total of six years? Oh, my), and learn that I don’t think I ever really want to be in politics. I’d rather watchdog politics, like we did at The Lantern.
The year went by very quickly. USG was memorable. But it wasn’t The Lantern. Those years in the newsroom, where I met friends I still keep in touch with today, were tremendously impactful for me and helped me know that I was on the right career path.
I’m grateful for my time at USG, and prouder of my time at The Lantern. Long before Zellman and I became candidates, in one of the greatest stings that may ever have been pulled off by a college newspaper, our Lantern staff busted members of a fraternity stealing thousands of our papers just after they’d been printed and distributed to racks all over campus. We staged photographers at several locations in the early morning, and caught the thieves red-handed.
The motivation for their crime? The Lantern that very morning had printed an endorsement for the upcoming USG election and the team that won the paper’s support was not from that fraternity. Someone on our staff had a hunch this would happen. That’s good watchdogging!
Jim Schaefer was Lantern editor in Fall 1986 after holding several other editing positions. Today he is an executive editor at the Detroit Free Press, where he and his reporting partner M.L. Elrick won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for their reporting on the mayor of Detroit.
