THE ONCE AND FUTURE EDITOR

I had to go to my yearbook to pull out this bit of masthead from The Viking View

I’ve been the editor of our community magazine for several months now. (You can view the latest issues of the magazine here.) The other day it dawned on me that I’d been an editor once before in my life. What a hoot! I was sports editor of my high school newspaper, The Viking View. We could find no guy who wanted to do the job that year, so I volunteered. I did have to change the name of the editor’s column from “The Locker Room” to “Grandstand Seat.” I really enjoyed that year, especially because I was allowed to travel on the team bus for away games. I also remembered that I was a stringer for the New York Times, and I earned a mere pittance from calling in the results of the games.

Editing the copy is much the same job: correction grammar, usage, and punctuation. We must still check the content and rewrite for clarity and the overall feel of the article. And spelling too – Spellcheck doesn’t catch everything.

Putting together the final product is quite a bit different these days. Then it was rearranging the printed copy and pasting up dummy sheets. The Publications Room was usually a mess, as recall. Today it’s all done electronically. The final proof process is much the same though, corrections made right on the printout, and, frustrating as it may be to find errors that get through, I really enjoy the job.

While I was scanning things from the yearbook, I copied my senior picture.
That's me at age seventeen.
The blurb under the picture said my goal would be medical
research - that was then.
I finally went into banking and computers, a far stretch from the medical field.