By Joan McQueeney Mitric
I arrived at The Lantern in late 1974, the mother of two, and a new faculty wife. I was in quest of an M.A. in Journalism and remember so clearly my tentative early visits to the newsroom to drop off my copy to City Editor Tom Loftus. Daycare was a scarce commodity, so a nine-month-old babe was glued to my hip. Later, when I rose in the ranks and got a slot as editorial columnist, and later as assistant city editor, my eldest child would sometimes walk to the newsroom from nearby Indianola Elementary.
The Lantern newsroom – with all its free-wheeling fun and an incubator for 50-plus year friendships — was critical to the journalist I became. Taught by some of the best in the business — experts who took time to inspire us to do good work, I felt — how could we fail?
It was a heady time in journalism: Nixon finally gone, following the dogged drip, drip, drip investigation of Washington Post Watergate reporters Woodward & Bernstein; Vietnam still raged, but in its final bloody death throes.
We were lucky, indeed, to be led into the computer age by Dr. John Clarke, of the Providence Journal. Stuart Loory of the Chicago Sun-Times taught me the importance of cultural and linguistic literacy, especially if one aspired to be a foreign correspondent. And Lantern Adviser Paul Williams, a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter, instilled in us that old-school, boots-on-the ground reporting always beats sitting in an office. He was sure that a student newspaper such as The Lantern could one day win a Pulitzer.
Czech dissident and journalist Jiri Hochman drilled grad students on the intricacies of international reporting, along with Paul Underwood, the former New York Times’s man in Belgrade.
My first assignment was the campus police beat, with a stunner of a case, after an 80-year-old woman’s car went airborne as she hit a divider at a new intersection nearby, killing two OSU students. Williams taught us to treat ALL stories with a probing eye, to turn over every possible lead, and to double-check the motives and veracity of all sources — in this case, OSU spokespersons, car mechanics who examined the driver’s reportedly defective brake system, or sticky pedal failure, surviving passengers, and medical reports on the driver.
On this, and many other stories, Lantern reporters ran circles around Columbus’s two dailies.
The scariest and deepest pieces I wrote were the series Rena Wish Cohen and I did as we uncovered a heinous local slum lord, Paul Rine. We visited dozens of un-maintained and over-priced rental houses Rine owned, many just a stone’s throw from OSU’s south side. We painstakingly deposed all tenants, photographed leaking roofs and ceilings, defective outlet wires, toilets leaking raw sewage, basement rat infestations and other unsafe and unlivable conditions. Most renters were low-income whites; many had pre-school children crawling near potentially lethal exposed wires. Professor Williams insisted the pieces be extensively “lawyered” and said the point was to “show readers how things really work around here.” He believed in local newspapers as key to a truly engaged and informed community.
We scrutinized five years of previous housing code violations and showed how Rine had evaded responsibility except for a rare $250 fine, a mere slap on the wrist. Mr. Rine got many renters we’d interviewed to recant their sworn statements by threatening them with eviction.
In the process of our months’-long investigation, we were followed, our car was rear-ended in the parking garage across from the J-School, and Mr. Rine even drove his truck up to the door of the Kenny Road printing facility the night the story was inked, in a desperate attempt to stop the presses.
Most terrifying to me was the phone call I got late one afternoon at our rental on Westwood Road. A menacing voice told me: “I know where you live, and how your daughter walks home from the High Street bus, so . . . ”
I was fortunate to get several assignments, while still in school, with national publications to cover the Columbus desegregation trial and to write about a controversial nuclear spill into Lake Erie. Also thanks to Professor Clarke’s cutting-edge “Literary Journalism” seminar, I did a long interview with the newly famous Joan Didion.
Paul Williams died suddenly one noon when he went home for lunch with his wife.as he regularly did. But he and others had trained me so well that in my first job after OSU, as editor of the Dublin Forum, I could lay out columns, write headlines, shoot decent pictures, and investigate local dump sites in the Olentangy and Scioto rivers with no problem. And do it all using the latest computerized technology.
In 1978, when my husband and I moved to Washington, D.C., we had an informal Lantern reunion. Cherie Fichter sent me her regrets from Southeast Asia, along with an envelope containing several “Thai sticks.” Clueless, I asked around. My present was illegal Schedule I drugs. Not sure how they slipped through the postal service. And NO, I did not try them.
When things got tough much later, as I joined The Washington Post, I always remembered what Williams told me one day as he handed me his extensive scribbled comments (in red) on that day’s Lantern. “You’ll be a good journalist; you have a low threshold for indignation.”
Editor’s Note: Joan McQueeney Mitric (M.A. Journalism, 1977), went on to specialize in covering national health and international issues. She wrote op-ed pieces for The Post and The New York Times and covered the ouster of Serbian president and war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. She also taught journalism for IREX, UNICEF and other independent media groups all over the Balkans.
