When I Was Your Age (Or Even Younger)

‘Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was a sophomore in high school, eons before personal computers and the Internet, some friends and I sat down and decided to create our own newspaper, a semi-underground publication that we called The Waterfountain. The official school newspaper bored the pants off us (and everyone else who read it), and the clique who ran it didn’t want any input from, how did they put it again? Oh yes: “a bunch of damn hippies”. So, keeping this appellation in mind, we decided we could do better. A lot better.

We got access to a mimeograph (or “ditto”) machine to produce our copies, gathered a cadre of writers and artists, and off we went. For an underground paper, we were pretty tame. Most of our articles were fairly mild opinion pieces about matters affecting the school, reviews of bands and albums (produced on vinyl, no less!) that we liked, Warhol-esque artwork, spoof advice columns and horoscopes. Occasionally we’d publish a piece on the Vietnam War or some other subject of interest, but the short stories and poems we solicited from the student body at large were far more popular.

Mimeographs, as you may know if you’re an old fart like me, are basically a cylindrical drum with a crank handle or an electric motor (we had to make do with the manual crank model). The images to be copied, whether writing, typed copy or drawn illustrations, are created by transferring the image to a special waxed tissue paper stencil. The resulting stencil with the reverse image is mounted on the drum of the machine. As the crank is turned, the stencil is coated with a fluid that allows the image to be transferred to a sheet of blank paper that is pulled under the drum by the rotation of the mechanism. Each stencil was good for between one to two hundred copies, depending on the quality of the mimeograph sheets used. (More details on how mimeographs work.)

Armed with a manual typewriter, a box of “ditto” stencils, a ream of paper and a stapler, we would gather on a Saturday at Betsy Baird’s house. Betsy was our Editor-in-Chief (after all, her parent owned the ditto machine). First we did our layout, making sure that page five would actually follow page four in the final product. Laying a newsletter out manually is more complicated than you’d think, not the automated process done for you by MS Publisher or some other desktop publishing program. For a sixteen page newsletter (four sheets of 8.5” x 11” paper, printed on both sides and folded in half), the layout goes: first sheet front, back cover/front cover; first sheet back, page 2/page 15; second sheet front, page 14/page 3; second sheet back, page 4/page 13; third sheet front, page 12/page 5; third sheet back, page 6/page 11; fourth sheet front, page 10/page 7; fourth sheet back, page 8/page 9. We’d figure out how to make everything fit, then type, write, draw and trace until we got the stencils created. Then we’d each take a turn at cranking the machine until we had churned out a hundred copies (being careful not to smudge the pages, an easy thing to do before the copying fluid dried). The copies were hand-collated; we placed the four piles of 100 sheets each in the middle of the table, and picked up one sheet from each pile, assembling them in the proper order. Then came stapling and folding, and voila! we were done. Each editor took a stack of the finished newspaper to sell at school the following Monday at ten cents (only one thin dime!) per copy.

As I said previously, we were only semi-underground, and barely controversial. We made sure that the first copy of each edition was delivered directly to the Principal (who even adorned the cover of one Christmas issue in a Santa hat and beard), thus assuring that our little collection of literary and artistic gems was sanctioned by the powers-that-be. Each issue sold out in a matter of hours, and it took only two or three issues to drive the school paper completely out of business. In our second year of production, we even got access to different colored stencil sheets, enabling us to create issues with three or four colors of inks, along with the occasional issue done in a paper color other than white, such as the Halloween issue we did on orange paper. We never made a lot of money from all our efforts, just enough to cover the cost of materials (and a couple of six packs of soda and some chips for the monthly publishing day gathering), but we had a lot of fun, and got a certain amount of fame for being “those guys who do the underground paper”. All of which was good for the ego.

Now to the point (you just knew there was a point to all of this, didn’t you?). What’s being done with the Stumblebum website and so many others today is analogous to what my friends and I did with The Waterfountain over thirty years ago. Someone sees a need, or a market niche, or an opportunity, and creates a product in response. Stumblebum is vastly more sophisticated than Waterfountain ever was, not only in media, format and layout, though these are only relatively unimportant technological improvements, but also in concept and content. Which is as it should be; our little mimeographed newspaper was created to serve an audience of high school students, who, no matter their opinion of themselves, were a group of teenagers in a rural New England area. Stumblebum has the potential to serve a minimum target audience of thousands who are interested in a variety of subjects ranging from comic books to music to movies and more. I thought it was important, and perhaps even interesting, to point out that the basic idea didn’t spring out full-blown from the god-head of the Internet, but has its roots in newsletters, newspapers and pamphlets dating back not just to my high school days, but literally back to the invention of the printing press and moveable type, which made mass production of the printed word possible. Communication is an important factor of education. My father used to say that you can’t enslave an educated man. And even though the primary purpose of Stumblebum is entertainment, it is also a medium of information and communication.

I look back at The Waterfountain and I’m amazed at the changes that have taken place over the past thirty-odd years. I look forward to see what will happen in the next thirty-odd.