History in the making

Not a lot of regular work got done today after campus was shut down at 10 a.m., but there was still plenty of work to do. Really, a snow day is pretty much the happiest crisis to report about, but it still meant a few dozen hurried phone calls, a few frightening near-slips with camera gear, and a few hours of numb fingers and even colder feet.

In the course of all this, one question kept coming up: When was the WSU campus last closed due to snow?

As far as we could tell, no one really knew for certain. People remembered Mount St. Helens for sure in 1980, and there was something about closure in 1996 due to weather, but it wasn't snow. I'll be trying to track down the answer more definitively by Monday, but I was able to find out that the last confirmed snow days were Jan. 4 and 5, 1982. It was the beginning of spring semester and students weren't able to travel back to Pullman. Those two days had to be made up the following two Saturdays, a plan that obviously didn't earn many fans among the student body.

So that's the history bit. But today was more about now, a little bit of community Zen as everyone dropped regular schedules and did whatever seemed fun. For us, fun meant documenting what everyone else was doing.
Fortunately, the university handed us a second chance. With Friday classes cancelled as well, the Evergreen staff will take a break from reporting (maybe) and enjoy the day more like normal people.

Poll: something hot to drink

After braving the wind, ice and snow while walking to campus the past few days, this is a question that's been on my mind. For the record, I prefer peppermint tea or soy chai. How about you?

A Robert Capa interlude

The other project I have this semester is my Honors thesis, regarding the conflict of loyalties in crisis photography. Maybe I'll start posting about that, too.

In the meantime, the New York Times has a good feature about war photographer Robert Capa, who did for photojournalism what Hemingway did for writing.

There's no point in me getting too giddy about this, at least here, but the article is about several cases of long-lost negatives from the Spanish Civil War – which is, as some of my friends know, my second-favorite civil war. The cases were found, and the negatives they've examined so far include images of Hemingway and Federico Garcia Lorca, along with photos taken by Gerda Taro and Chim Seymour.

The associated slide show is a nice way of getting the main points of the article.

Starting at the beginning, whenever that was

"The student voice of Washington State University since 1986."

This was the motto beneath the Evergreen flag when I first started working as an editor in the summer of 2006. Simple, noble, straight to the point – a pretty nice motto, I suppose. Except that it was wrong.

The first issue of the Evergreen came out in March 1895. Washington Agricultural College (known as W.A.C.) had about a dozen faculty members and no more than 200 students. The only building on campus still standing today was Thompson Hall.

So yeah, it was a long time ago, and a difference of one year isn't all that long in the course of a century. But that one year is the difference between being correct and being wrong about our history, which is why it matters to me.

I figured out the error that summer when looking through the first Chinook yearbook (appearing in 1899, just a few years after the paper). I double-checked against the first issue of the Evergreen on microfilm in the library, and it was corrected to 1895 for the first fall issue in 2006. (Click on my crude little infographic to check out the actual difference in the Evergreen flag.)

It makes me wonder when the "voice of the students" motto was first used, and why the first person to type in "1896" got it wrong. Is it listed incorrectly somewhere else? Too lazy to check the original source? A simple typo that slipped into the template? Perhaps I'll stumble across the answer as I go along.

Stumbling upon a timeline clue

I came across a nice tidbit about Evergreen history in the 1940 Chinook today.

"Strikes and walkouts in the Evergreen office kept Editor Lloyd Salt constantly changing the masthead till order finally arose from chaos, with an editorial staff revision at the start of the second semester. For the first time in campus history, the paper and journalism department worked in close co-operation.
Journalism students were assigned to beats as reporters and proof-readers. New copy rules were devised and deadlines were vigorously enforced in the successful effort to improve the paper's efficiency."

A major question in reconstructing Evergreen history is determining oversight. The Daily Evergreen is currently a part of Student Publications, which falls under the new Division of Student Affairs, Equity and Diversity. Back when WSU wasn't a university yet, the Evergreen was a part of student government. I previously knew that somewhere in between it got absorbed by the journalism department for a while. Now I know when that started: 1940.

499: Special Projects

As I alluded to previously, I'm working on a project about the history of the Evergreen, WSU's student newspaper. During this semester I aim to compile enough information to write a comprehensive institutional history.

Why? Well, like Everest, because it's there and no one has done it before.

Check out the full plan by clicking on the page image to the right.

Themed blogs assignment

There are two local blogs I read regularly that balance each other well.

The first, f-words, focuses on "feminism, food, fact and fiction." It's written by Moscow resident Sara Anderson with a generally liberal view. The posts about feminism in real news events are the most thought-provoking.

The second, Palousitics, is a local conservative political blog started by Pullman resident Tom Forbes and now joined by a number contributors. The well-written arguments sometimes posted are unfortunately overshadowed by anti-Democrat polemics, but it's still interesting and creates a community for like-minded residents.

Both these blogs have led to actual social gatherings in some form, which raises interesting questions about the effect of online communities on traditional ones.

The lost art of pie delivery

There are a few things I am not the slightest bit interested in, like marine biology. Then there is a whole broad category of things I'm curious about, from landlord/tenant law to poetry in Spanish.

The project I'll be documenting here will be about the other end of the spectrum, the things I'm passionate about: stories and history. Combine these in the wrong way and you get historical fiction or a Jane Austen fan; combine them in the better way and you get a somewhat bizarre love of The Daily Evergreen archives.

Primarily I'm devoted to journalism. But it makes me a better journalist to know about the history of the area I'm covering, and I like seeing how things have changed and feeling that connection with people in the past who did the same things I do now.

Plus the archives are funny. Students and the administration have been doing zany things since the beginning of time, apparently, or at least 1895 when the Evergreen started printing. This is where pie delivery comes in. One of the first times I pulled a large, dusty archives tome from the shelf, I came across an advertisement from the 1920s offering pie delivery all around Pullman. Not like pizza pies but actual cherry, apple, pumpkin, etc. with a flaky pastry crust.

So this is the value of getting lost in the archives, finding out where we've come from to better determine where to go in the future. Like pie delivery, only more useful.