First editor looks back on 30 years of history
Published Feb. 19, 1985
NOTE: This originally appeared in the Feb. 19, 1985, edition of The Maneater.
On Feb. 18, 1955, an MU sociology student from Long Island, N.Y., ended a campus tradition with five simple words: "The Missouri Student is dead."
On the same day he killed the Student, the old campus newspaper, Joe Gold brought forth from the third floor of Read Hall his new baby — The Maneater. And thus was a 30-year tradition born.
"I still remember my first headline," Gold says. "DU Student Dynasty Falls."
Gold's new paper was a bold, brash change. He had two objectives, according to Volume 1, No. 1. First, to double the ailing Student's circulation and second, "to make the student paper a respected and feared publication of the University."
To accomplish his goals, Gold, now Joel J. Gold, a professor of English at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, made sweeping changes. His first act as editor was to change the paper's name.
"The name, Missouri Student, reflected the editorial policy of the former paper quite well," Gold said in The Maneater's first lead story. "It signified nothing."
His second move was to institute a biting editorial policy designed to capture readers.
"The Maneater by its very name cannot content itself with merely presenting the news," Gold wrote in the first issue. "For a newspaper to attempt to walk the fine line of impartiality or to present both sides without indicating where it stands is to commit suicide both in circulation figures and in the minds of its readers."
Gold's new editorial policy differed vastly from that of the Student, a publication that had become a Greektown rag and society paper through a succession of six Delta Upsilon editors.
The Maneater's new staff, mostly imports from Gold's days as editor of Showme, the campus humor magazine, was looking for "news stories and pseudo-news," Gold says. "Sometimes accuracy went a little by the boards.
"We had to be as different from the old Missouri Student as possible," Gold says. "The paper had been in a lot of trouble. It had to be rescued. We weren't trying to be respectable journalists; we were trying to save the paper."
Responsible journalism, Gold says, "sounds a little more pretentious than I think we ever were. We were trying to write interesting stories."
The writers behind the "interesting stories" were intelligent, fun and sometimes radical, Gold says. Few were journalism students. Lee Athmer, the managing editor, "was one of the few who knew anything about putting out a newspaper."
Gold says his role as editor was primarily that of idea man. He says his real contribution to the paper was "to bring in bright and lively people and let them write."
"It was one of the best times of my life," he says. "I was working with bright, lively and occasionally wild people. In that group, we all had a sense that we were accomplishing something. It was almost like a family — but I don't want it to sound that mushy."
It was Gold's ability to come up with ideas that landed him the editor's job. The UMC Board of Publications approached him to save the dying Student. The board liked what he had done with Showme, even though his work had put him in a few scrapes with UMC administrators, and it supported his changes.
"I was invited to apply for the job," he says.
Thirty years later, Gold says he seldom thinks about his brainchild. He has lost touch with many of the people who helped him put out the first issues. He maintains close contact with only one former Maneater writer — his wife, Ellen.
"She wrote one story that was so wild even I wouldn't let her print it," he says.
In fact, Gold enjoys his anonymity. He disdains dredging up his past. "The communists must talk about Lenin like this," he says.
"I think I got my taste of power with The Maneater and Showme," Gold says. He now leads a quiet life in Lawrence, teaching English literature, writing for scholarly journals and preparing a book of short humor essays.
"I try to keep my past a little quiet," Gold says. "I'm now a gray-bearded old professor, and I'm not sure I want my students to know what I was doing as a student in Columbia, Missouri."
