University status
Covering the story 40 years ago today
By Roy Ockert Jr.
One of the best things about being a journalist is occasionally getting to witness history in the making from a good seat. Having held various positions in this field, as a student and professional, since the seventh grade, I’ve had several opportunities.
One of the earliest and most memorable was on this day 40 years ago — the day the Arkansas Senate completed action on legislation granting university status to Arkansas State College and Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller signed the bill into law.
That may not seem so significant today because almost every other 4-year state institution of higher learning later became a university, and even folks at ASU now take the designation for granted.
But it was a major milestone for A-State and a breakthrough that opened the door to 40 years of progress. And it happened in the face of considerable opposition from University of Arkansas officials.
They followed, I suppose, the Frank Broyles theory that keeping other institutions down is the best way to make the UA look better. An earlier attempt to gain university status had failed in 1959, and there was some doubt about the outcome in 1967.
It was my senior year at A-State when the Legislature convened that January, and optimism on campus began to grow. We planned a yearbook cover that would include the ASU acronym if everything went well, and we started organizing coverage for the weekly student newspaper, State College Herald.
When the ASU bill passed the House of Representatives easily, our plans went into high gear. As co-editor of the Herald, I became part of a 4-person coverage team that would make the trip to the state Capitol on the day the bill would hit the Senate floor.
Others on the team were Thomas Victor Dickson, a Jonesboro student who is now a journalism professor at Missouri State University; Joel Gambill, who was in his first year as adviser to the Herald, later to become head of the Journalism Department; and Tom Manning, then director of the college’s News Bureau and yearbook adviser, now retired.
Tom had the toughest job — not only taking pictures but also driving us to Little Rock early that Tuesday morning and then getting us home that evening. The latter would be much harder than we imagined when we set out.
Meanwhile, our staff in Jonesboro, headed by co-editor Pat Montgomery (later my partner in life), would start putting together a special edition of the newspaper, which was normally published on Friday. However, the college’s fall semester didn’t end until mid-January in those days so we were finishing finals, and the spring term would not start until the next week. Our determination to publish a special edition was further complicated by the fact that no one knew how long it would take for the Senate to act.
We didn’t make plans to spend the night. It was publish or bust.
Our newspaper was a 4-page broadsheet, the normal size of the Herald then, but without ads. Newspaper pages were much larger then — ours was four inches wider than today’s Sun — and we prepared to fill more than half of it with feature stories and other campus news of the week.
We also readied a new nameplate since State College Herald would no longer be appropriate if the bill became law. The newspaper’s name would change to The Herald of Arkansas State University with publication of the special edition.
We got lucky with the legislative process — everything went right that day, allowing us to publish the next day. The politics wasn’t luck, though. NEA legislators, A-State officials and patrons had been working in behalf of the change for years and had won much support.
Even when the director of the state Commission on Higher Education and the UA president spoke against the bill in a Senate committee hearing, the committee still gave it a “do pass” by a 6-1 vote. We heard a rumor that Rockefeller would veto the bill if passed, but he announced Monday that he would sign it.
The Senate convened at 1 p.m. Tuesday, and it soon became obvious that A-State would carry the day. At one point Fayetteville Sen. Clifton Wade rose to speak against it but decided not to read an 11-page text he brought with him. He explained: “I’ve got a touch of laryngitis, or rather, I guess it is a touch of the feeling that it won’t do much good anyway.”
Minutes later a vote was called on the House bill (No. 9) to speed up the process, and it passed overwhelmingly at 2:15. Two hours later Rockefeller, in the presence of dozens of sponsoring legislators, A-State officials and students and the press, signed the bill as Act 3 — to take effect the following July 1.
When we went outside the Capitol for the return trip, we were greeted by snowflakes, the beginning of a winter storm.
In those days the 4-laning of U.S. 67-167 ended at Cabot, and the remaining roads to Jonesboro were flat but narrow and somewhat hazardous in places under normal conditions. U.S 49 north of Waldenberg was especially bad, bowed upward in the middle, and, when icy, a vehicle could easily slide off into a ditch.
Neverthess, we needed to get back to Jonesboro. Tom kept the vehicle on the road somehow, though I recall his using the center half much of the time. It didn’t matter because nobody else was foolish enough to be traveling that night.
The trip, which was ordinarily about two and a half hours, that night took more than four. That gave me a chance to get much of the lead story written — on an old portable manual typewriter, with a flashlight my only source of light.
Covering such an event today would be a snap. With laptops, cell phones, digital cameras and e-mail, we could have stayed in Little Rock and zapped everything back electronically. And we could have dictated our stories by phone that night, but we had to get the film back somehow.
Meanwhile, our staff covered the campus celebration — in the snow, of course — and began putting the paper together.
When we finally got back, we still had a lot of work to do.
Since the Herald then was printed by letterpress method, the stories had to be set in metal type after they were written on paper, and the pictures had to be developed, printed and then engraved before mounting on wood blocks. Finally, all the metal and wood blocks had to be put together in a page form before going to press.
The lead headline on my story — “ASU A REALITY” — was created with huge wooden type because we didn’t have metal type that big. My mentor, journalism Professor L.W. “Tex” Plunkett, never said anything about the fact that it violated one of his main headline rules — to include a verb in every headline — but there’s only so much you can say in 180-point type and it told the story.
We didn’t finish until the wee hours of the morning, but when the press rolled we had the first details of the story in Jonesboro. The Sun was still an afternoon paper, and neither the Arkansas Gazette nor the Commercial Appeal had it in the editions that were distributed here. But we printed about 15,000 extra copies, and they were inserted into the Sun that afternoon, so some of you fellow pack rats may still have copies.
It’s one of those stories you want to keep forever. Jan. 17, 1967, was the start of an era.
royo@jonesborosun.com