The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #2

And so it continues.

To get the meat and potatoes out of the way – you can now download all of the 1985-87 Raider Record issues in PDF form from this page, or you can just look at or downloaded this issue here. Since the previous installment of this series was so well received, in addition to the catch-all page with every issue, I’ll post whatever scattered memories I’m able to dredge up from the dark and dreary recesses of my mind on each issue’s anniversary.

Last time, I discussed how Kimmons had leaped into the future by adopting an Apple II computer program called The Newsroom just in time for my eighth grade year, the first year I was eligible to take part in journalism class. I had already gotten well acquainted with the Apple II at home, as well as its high-resolution graphics mode (if you can call 280×192 pixels high-resolution – at the time, if you were 13 years old or so, it was pretty amazing stuff to be manipulating pixels). The Newsroom exceeded that resolution significantly for the purposes of printing an entire page, but it could import saved images in that hi-res mode. (This will become a bit more significant later.)

Apologies up front if some of my reminiscences are more technical in nature than anything else – sometimes, that’s the stuff that comes flooding back to you. Or to me, at any rate. Another thing that comes flooding back is that the world could be a scary place in the mid-1980s. I cringe a bit at this first of many attempts at doing an editorial cartoon with The Newsroom‘s built-in bank of clip art, though it’s not the technical side of it that bugs me as much as the simplistic worldview behind it – parroting what I was hearing from the adults around me. The world’s a bit more nuanced than that (he said, posting this on Election Day 2016, hopefully closing the door on an election cycle that has seen all semblence of nuance and civility whizz down the drain).

Then, as now, I preferred to distract myself writing about things I enjoy. Check the contrast on the front page – Suicide! Teenagers’ legal rights! And…Halley’s Comet?

In retrospect, I think it’s marvelous that Deon Starks wrote the peer pressure piece on page 2. Deon was always one of a kind, and was perfectly qualified to write that. Also fun is the sheer presence of my home neighborhood of Eastwood in these pages: John Remington, the editor-in-chief of the 1985-86 year, lived in a yellow house immediately behind mine (one literally had to climb the fence and brave his dog to go visit); Alan Maxey lived a couple of streets away from me. Paul Udouj was one of the voices of the school’s in-house “radio station” (heard, I believe, every Friday on the morning PA system announcements). I’d been in grade school with all three, we’d all known each other forever. Still do in some cases; it’s interesting how many of us in that immediate area graduated school and aimed at various jobs within what one would broadly call “the media”.

I laughed out loud to see that I had written maybe all of a paragraph on the subject of fishing on the sports page. However, the mention of Gaston’s fishing resort on the White River made me realize that this tiny paragraph connects to some other treasured memories that have nothing to do with the newspaper – watch this space for more on that. (Everything, it turns out, is interconnected.)

There’s a mention of John, Rob and myself hoofing it – well, John and I hoofed it because WCC was within shouting distance of Eastwood – to what was then Westark Community College (now the University of Arkansas Fort Smith) – on weekends to put the paper together at Westark’s Apple II computer lab. As it turns out, the Raider Record wasn’t the only local school paper to mention this – enjoy this excerpt from an issue of the Westark paper, the Lion Pride, published at roughly the same time:

Yeah…more computer programs each day than most people will in ten years. Modest bugger, wasn’t I? (On the flipside, this humbling realization: I’m older now than Susan Haines was in that photo.)

And where was I after ten years of running all those programs? Well, give or take a year or two allowing for the fact that I don’t exactly have a scrapbook swimming with pictures of myself (this was in the pre-selfie era, kids), here’s me at Christmas 1984 (seventh grade, playing Activision’s outstandingly cryptic game Hacker by the look of things), and in early 1997 (with a PC graphics workstation and an Amiga running Video Toaster and Lightwave, doing video production stuff with computers ahead of a lot of other folks in town…kinda like doing school newspapers with computers ahead of a lot of other folks in town…spot the theme if you can).

What I wouldn’t give to be as thin as in either of those pictures, and I was never a skinny kid. 😆