It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here.
As mentioned in the write-up I did for the previous issue, the space shuttle Challenger disaster happened mere days after the January 1986 issue, and I think it shows here: February 7th puts this issue barely three weeks after the January issue. Clearly we had things to talk about.
- And one of those things is a tragdey. A real tragdey. Gah. I’m sorry. That was me. I missed that.
- I wonder how dramatically seriously anyone took the Love Ads back then? Is it better to have loved and lost, or better still to have been funky live?
- Interestingly, there’s no by-line on the front cover space shuttle piece. I have a feeling that one was either me (big shocker, I know), or me writing with Rob or with John (or perhaps all three of us ganged up on it). Looking at it now…whoever did it, it’s actually pretty good. Whether or not anyone was even remotely interested in reading that in a junior high newspaper is a question whose answer is, one suspects, lost to the ages.
- Page two brings an interesting bit of errata: a poem run in a previous issue was misattributed… and yet we failed to correctly attribute it in the correction, which is really odd – it’s like a “real” newspaper printing “There was an error in Thursday’s edition on page 14. Trust us, it’s there. We’re not actually going to tell you what it was.” (Another tragdey, no doubt.) Also, Rob H. ably takes over the Halley’s Comet Beat as of this issue.
I’ve mentioned before that The Newsroom, the program we used to make the paper, could import and print graphics generated by other Apple II software, and in this case the odd space-filling Garfield comic on page 2 was created in a piece of software called Create With Garfield!, which I had on my Apple II at home, and saved pictures in a format that The Newsroom could incorporate into the layout. Somewhere between school and weekends at Westark, I was no doubt hauling floppy disks around in my backpack as a matter of habit, bringing stuff from home for the newspaper. (These days I use a thumb drive.) The “road to victory” graphic on the last page would also appear to be a space filler; I don’t remember exactly, but something tells me we were holding as much space open as we could for a potential glut of Love Ads, and would up having to fill at the last minute because, perhaps, our classmates didn’t love one another as much as we anticipated. Funky. Live.
That’s all I remember (or half-remember) about this issue.
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