How The Maneater got its name — the real story from the first editor
Published Feb. 19, 1985
NOTE: This originally appeared in the Feb. 19, 1985, edition of The Maneater.
I knew it would happen. It always does. Thirty years of walking the straight and narrow. Thirty years of respectability and reputation. Gone. My cover blown in one phone call.
There I was sitting in my office in the English Department at the University of Kansas, a typical, almost archetypal English professor — frayed tweed jacket, beard flecked with distinguished grey streaks, an unfinished article on 18th-century shorthand books in the typewriter.
The young man on the line wants to know if this is "Joe Gold." I want to say "No" and hang up quickly. For 30 years I had passed as "Joel J." But I guess you never escape your past. He says he is from The Maneater, something about a 30th anniversary — February 1955 to February 1985. For a while I keep him off balance by insisting that The Maneater began in 1954, not 1955. He is beginning to worry about the elaborate arrangements already set in motion for what I almost have him convinced is the 31st anniversary. But he won't hang up. These WATS lines, I think, are a real curse. In the old days we could hardly afford to call Jeff City. Here he is, Columbia to Lawrence, Kan., in the middle of the afternoon — peak rates.
He is describing the forthcoming celebration — a dinner, maybe a dance, a week's vacation for two on South Padre Island. He is too quick, I think, to let me know that they have no plans for the original editor and his wife to be the lucky couple. No, he wants to know the circulation of The Maneater back in 1955. I do not even know what my own circulation is — something like 160 over 65 maybe. Then he asks about the staff in the "old" days. Were we in Read Hall then? Yes. Did we have graffiti on the walls? No. We were too poor to afford graffiti.
Now, he tells me about plans for some kind of outside advisory board — past editors, perhaps. I am puzzled, but he explains that such "contacts" would be helpful to students who are now on the Maneater staff. I reflect on the mixed bag of nonconformists, malcontents and the one or two competent journalists who actually knew how to put out a newspaper. What would we have known about "contacts"? We were too busy fending off angry deans or retracting stories we had published the week before.
The caller wants to know about the name Maneater. I describe the old dull Missouri Student, replaced that February morning so many years ago by the new, fierce-sounding name and the purple-prose "statement of purpose" characterizing our new, rake-hell policy. (I do hope my writing students here at KU never get to see that paragraph.) It does occur to me, however, that five years ago, the last time my checkered past had caught up with me, the reporter for the 25th-anniversary Maneater had gotten the story wrong. (I rather liked the half dozen mistakes in that issue — they reminded me of the first Maneaters.) The reporter had opened his story with a snappy lead, based somewhat loosely on what I had told him:
A tiger becomes a Maneater when it is too weak to hunt for tougher prey.
That was the reasoning The Maneater's first editor, Joe Gold, used when he renamed UMC's campus newspaper.
Reasoning? Certainly not. I didn't plan it that way. But what did a lad from the suburbs of New York City know about tigers? I thought Maneater sounded dangerous — bold, fearsome, watch-your-step-in-my-jungle tough. Oh, I was really proud of that name.
About a week into the spring semester, though, I learned the truth. Painfully. Too much extra-curricular work, too little sleep, and too many drafts in Read Hall had sent me over to the University Health Clinic with a mild case of pneumonia. It was a place I usually tried to avoid — for all the reasons students do well to steer clear of university health services and for a special one of my own. The previous year I had been editor of Showme, the notorious, and later banned, campus humor magazine. In one memorable issue (a number of them had been memorable enough to have me on the brink of expulsion) we had immortalized Dr. George X. Trimble, director of the University Clinic, as "Tiny Trimble" in our parody of Dickens' "Christmas Carol." As I recall it 31 years later, we had Tiny Trimble being eaten up by a terminal case of athlete's foot. The last panel in our cartoon strip showed Tiny Trimble only a severed head on the mantelpiece, saying, "God bless us, every one." Well, you can see why I had my personal reasons to stay out of the clinic if I possibly could.
But walking pneumonia overcame even a nervous editor's reluctance. I checked into the clinic, and the next thing I knew Dr. Trimble stood poised with a long, sharp-needled syringe of penicillin above my bared bottom. That was the moment he chose to ask me about the newly renamed newspaper. "Why Maneater?" I explained all about fierce and bold, watch-your-step-in-my-jungle, and all that neat stuff. This, mind you, over my shoulder to a man with a legitimate grudge and a sharp needle ready to plunge in.
"Do you know," he asked, expressing the last drop of air from the syringe, "when a tiger becomes a maneater?" I did not, and, frankly, with the cool breeze wafting across my buttocks, I didn't care all that much. But Tiny Trimble was in his element.
"It becomes a maneater," he said, about to take the plunge, "when it is too old and too feeble to catch its regular prey. There!" And then he stuck the other needle in.
Well, you can be sure I did not pass that bit of jungle lore on to my new and eager staffers. No, they were content to go on, week after week, ferociously pursuing those stories. The years went on, staffs changed, respectability came. Awards for excellence, outside advisory boards, WATS lines.
And who, thirty years on, will have the nerve to change the fabled name slapped on by some dumb New Yorker who couldn't tell one cat from another?
I know I'll never escape my past. The one favor I ask: If this confession gets into print, please don't send any copies to Lawrence, Kan.. I'm too old to still be issuing retractions.