7. The Hard Road to Grad School

In my last year of college, after having read a number of books about the decline of the Protestant Church, I made a decision about my own future vis-à-vis the Church. I would not, as I had always planned to do, go straight into a seminary to prepare for what had already become my compelling ambition: to teach in a church-oriented college or seminary. Instead, I decided, I would go to graduate school and study communications and mass media. What the Church, and seminaries, truly needed, I had come to believe, was to become as effective as possible at communicating to themselves and their “messages” and to the world.

Protestant denominations and churches were in serious decline—there was no question about that. It was well documented. And what I had found in my reading was a general sense that the decline was not because of a failure of theology as such, as diverse as theologies were, but because of a failure of connection, of “relevance,” a failure in being able to relate to and touch people, a failure of communication, both in the pulpit and in the use of new media, with a rapidly changing world.

Even when many of my friends from college were going off to seminary, I would pass on it in favor of getting into a first-rate communications graduate program, get my doctorate, and take that kind of communicative expertise into the seminary world where Protestant preachers—or preachers even within the kinds of undergraduate schools I had attended—were educated. Preachers had to learn about communication and media, and develop real skills in those areas, I believed, if they were to lead their churches out of their downward slumps. That seemed a given to me. That’s what I was going to work on.

So, no sooner had Linda and I moved from Loami to Broadwell and I had both graduated from Lincoln Christian College and been ordained to the ministry at Lincoln Christian Church, my home church, than I applied for graduate school at the University of Illinois’ College of Communication. That was where I really wanted to go to grad school. I filled out all the forms, got all the necessary materials and letters together, and naively sent them off to Urbana-Champaign.

I quickly got a letter back from the graduate admissions office rejecting my application out of hand. The reason given was that I did not have a legitimate undergraduate degree, since my little religious school did not have the appropriate accreditation. I was, of course, disappointed and angry. I made a telephone call to the person whose name was on the letter. The conversation was friendly but firm. There was no way, I was told, that I could ever be admitted to graduate school at Illinois—at least not without having a communications-related undergraduate degree with good academic standing from a legitimate college, as he emphasized the latter words. When I had that, I should reapply.

I realized, given how my life had started, that that was an impossibility. Undergraduate school was already behind me. Then he said something that I would never get out of my mind. He said that the only way that someone without an accredited degree could ever be admitted to graduate school at the University of Illinois was to have such a strong professional reputation that the faculty would deem them ready for graduate status. But, he was quick to add, that was very rare—and, given my youth and background, it was simply out of the question in my case.

I did not know what to do. What I thought would be my goal was now simply gone. By this time the summer of ’64 was slipping away. Linda and I had a new baby, I was the minister of a small church on Route 66 between Lincoln and Springfield—and my hope of starting graduate school that Fall had evaporated. I was deeply discouraged. There did not seem to be much to work for beyond that.

Then, the first week of August that summer, a strange thing happened out of the blue. My dad liked to work at the Logan County Fair during his summers—the week long fair in Lincoln, just a few miles up 66 from Broadwell—and knowing we needed whatever extra money I could make, he got me an afternoon job taking tickets at the fair’s grandstand. About the third day that I was in my place taking tickets for people going into the harness races, a man that I knew only vaguely from around Lincoln came through and abruptly spoke to me.

“You’re Joe Webb, aren’t you?” I said that I was.

He said, “Do you know me? I’m Ken Goodrich, the editor of the Courier.” I nodded. “I’ve know you from the high school plays and your radio stuff,” he said. “Come and see me next week if you are interested in working at the Courier.” And with that he was gone. He had a distinctive shock of snow white hair and walked with a large bucking limp left behind by polio in his youth. He got along well, though, despite his awkwardness, and never used a cane.

I was startled and wondered if he was serious. The Courier was the daily newspaper in Lincoln. I knew the Courier. It was small paper, but it was my hometown paper and I knew exactly the corner of the downtown square where its elegant building had stood for years. It was all I could do to wait until the following Monday to call him. When I did, he invited me to come in for an interview. I had not done anything on the radio for more than two years, having quit in my sophomore year of college to devote more time to school and the youth ministry work in Moweaqua.

When I went to see Mr. Goodrich he put me at a large desk and asked me to write a couple of paragraphs from information he gave me. He liked what I did, even though he and I both knew that I had never had a journalism class in my life. Beyond some sports stories for the high school newspaper staff, I had really never written much of anything. On the spot, Mr. Goodrich hired me as a full-time reporter, said he didn’t care if I worked at the church on weekends, and offered to pay me $75 a week.

So, as September started, instead of being in graduate school as I had planned, I was the new staffer at the Lincoln Daily Courier. The newsroom had five large desks, two in the middle of the room that were pushed side by side together. Mr. Goodrich occupied one and I was given the one that abutted his. There was the sports editor’s desk along the wall to my left, occupied by Bill Martine, and in front of his was the photographer’s desk. To the front of us was a desk for the receptionist and one for Mabel, the society editor.

Mr. Goodrich, abrupt and gruff about everything he did and said, was an old-school journalist, not a good writer but a meticulous and demanding editor. He liked me and had decided to teach me how to be not just a reporter but, as he liked to put it, a journalist. And within those first couple of months, I knew that this was not only something I could do, but something that I liked doing very much. I liked preaching and my little church—but every morning when I went to work at the Courier, I could hear the words of that admissions person at the University of Illinois saying that if one were a first-rate professional that might, maybe, be grounds for admission to graduate school there.

All of a sudden, actually, I was on a mission. The door had been opened, and I began to work harder than I had ever worked in my life. Strangely, I knew that it was not my vision of someday teaching communications in a seminary that was changing. It was that I was driven by a desire to reach a level as a journalist that would get me some day into grad school at the University of Illinois, get my Ph.D. and make my way into church-related higher education. For whatever reason, I had been given an opening and I was determined to take advantage of it however I could.

A couple of months later, by early 1965, as I was turning 23, Mr. Goodrich wanted me in live in Lincoln to be more accessible and made arrangements for Linda and me and our new baby Joe to move to a small apartment above the back of the Courier building in downtown Lincoln. So I left the Broadwell church to really become a “full-time” reporter, though I was still being paid $75.00 a week. The intensity of the work, though, meant that I was picking things up about as fast as was possible. I made rounds at the Courthouse twice every day, gathering the news and writing it up. In the afternoons I worked on feature stories and profiles of local people, both of which I enjoyed very much. I liked my spot next to Ken Goodrich and my by-line became known around town.

After a year or so, I thought I was ready to try again on graduate school, but instead of deciding to try the University of Illinois, I though I might have a better shot at Southern Illinois University, down in Carbondale. And, most importantly, I knew that I might be able to get work, since I was now “experienced,” at the daily newspaper in Carbondale, the Southern Illinoisan. I learned that it was owned by a newspaper company in Decatur, just a half hour drive from Lincoln. The company was Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers and it owned several daily newspapers covering the state. If I could get on at the Carbondale paper, I thought, then I would be in a good position to go to grad school in communications at SIU.

I applied to Lindsay-Schaub in early 1966, asking for assignment at the Southern Illinoisan. I was interviewed in Decatur and sent to Carbondale to interview. But Howard Hay, the personnel manager in Decatur told me that if things did not go well in Carbondale to come back because he had some good openings right there in Decatur. I went to Carbondale, was interviewed and was flat-out rejected in no uncertain terms by the editor who ran the Southern Illinois. He was not impressed with either my education or my experience. It was back home to Lincoln and the Courier, pretty well crushed again.

I remembered, though, what Howard Hay had said, and I called and went to see him again. This time I was sent two floors down from his fourth floor office to the newsroom of the Decatur Herald. Before I left I was hired as a reporter for the Herald. I was moving to the city paper.

My resignation and two week notice of leaving the Courier and moving to the Herald in Decatur caught me off-guard. They were a disaster. Ken Goodrich was furious that after all he had done for me, giving me my start in journalism and “grooming me,” as he liked to say it, I was leaving. During my last two weeks, I continued my reporting duties as usual in Lincoln, but, even though I sat desk to desk beside him every day for those two weeks, he never spoke a single word to me. He wrote me a few notes, mostly short, hand-scrawled angry ones, but he never said a word, not even on the day I finished and we moved to an apartment in Decatur. It was one of the bitterest experiences I can remember from those years. I owned him everything in Lincoln as well as for what would become my future, but it ended as badly as anything could end.

Being a reporter for the Herald took me from small-town to city journalism. I was a general assignment reporter, working hard, learning more than I ever knew about reporting and writing, and then, three months after I started there, abruptly the paper’s well-known city hall reporter resigned to take a high paying hospital job. It was the paper’s plum reporting job. For reasons that I still do not fathom, even with a newsroom full of seasoned general assignment reporters, I was appointed to Norm Puhek’s city hall assignment. I found myself covering city council meetings, interviewing the mayor and city manager, investigating and writing about the city budget and taxes and so forth. For someone as inexperienced as I was, it was a crash course. I relished every minute of it.

But even that was not going to last very long.

The Decatur Herald newsroom was on the second floor of the four-story Lindsay-Schaub Newspaper building in downtown Decatur. Above the Herald, on the third floor were the offices of the six-member editorial writing staff not just for the Decatur Herald, but for all six of the company’s daily newspapers, scattered through the State. Two papers in Decatur, the Herald in the morning and the Review in the afternoon, the one in Carbondale, one in East St. Louis, one in Edwardsville and one in Champaign-Urbana, where the University of Illinois was. While I did not know any of the editorial writers on the third floor—that world seemed far removed from mine—I was aware that the short balding man who every afternoon picked up a package of mail from our second floor boxes was the company’s editor of all of the group’s editorial pages.

One day in late January of 1967, he appeared next to my typewriter on the second floor and introduced himself as Ralph Johnson, editor of the editorial pages. He asked if I could “come upstairs” with him. In his very nice cubicle on the third floor, he told me he had been following my work on the Herald, and liked it very much. And even though they had a rule about not appointing an editorial writer who did not have a master’s degree, he thought I could be the exception to the rule—would I be willing to move upstairs and become an editorial writer for the Linsay-Schaub group?

I was stunned, to say the least. I had been at the Herald for less than a year. The next week I moved from the second to the third floor, with my own private cubicle, one with windows looking down on Main Street through the city of Decatur. I would still be a “reporter” for part of the time, except that now I would cover statewide stories; in fact, my first assignment would be to cover higher education in the state of Illinois, which meant, for one thing, going to the state’s Board of Higher Education meetings once a month in Chicago. I would then be responsible for writing editorials about higher education, as well as other subjects of my own choosing.

It took me a while to realize it, but everything I wrote then was to be published not in one newspaper, but, under a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer byline, in all six of the company’s newspapers. That meant that my byline and everything I did would be published on the editorial pages of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, one of two daily newspapers that was read across the sprawling campus of the University of Illinois. Oddly, it also meant that everything I wrote would also appear on the editorial pages of the Southern Illinoisan, in Carbondale, the paper whose editor a year and some earlier had flatly said that I was not a good enough reporter to be hired for his newspaper. Perversely, I will never forget the first time that the six editors of the company’s dailies had to come to Decatur for a meeting with us six editorial writers—and I got to sit across from that editor at the big conference table.

Strange, looking back, how that all would have made a wonderful life-long career, one that turned many of those early colleagues of mine into successful journalists and even influential editorial writers. Even though I relished the work and learned enormously from it—as I will discuss in my next installment—through it all I still kept my eye on my goal to getting into the University of Illinois’ College of Communications, doing as much graduate work as I could, and then trying to work my way into a church-related teaching career.

I have no idea, even after all these years, why that did not change with my early newspaper success, why I was not pulled, given the extraordinary responsibilities and opportunities I had, toward a full-fledged newspaper career. The opportunity for that was certainly there, but that just did not take hold within me. This does not mean that I did not enjoy newspaper work, particularly working for the editorial rather than the news pages—I did. But teaching seemed to be in my DNA in a way that I cannot explain. The challenge for me, the real challenge that I was anxious to take up, was in some way tied up with both the church and with higher education, with the academic world and not the newspaper world. And I still saw my newspaper work, challenging and rewarding though it was, as a way to get into graduate school.

After a year and a half as an editorial writer for Lindsay-Schaub, I thought it might be time—again—to try for admission to Illinois. It was mid-summer of 1967. I had been in the “working world,” away from school, for three years, having graduated from Lincoln in 1964.

I decided to try to be admitted by dealing first not with the admissions people but with the administrators of the College of Communications itself. I wrote to Dr. Jay Jensen, head of the Illinois’ journalism program. I told him who I was, sketched in as innocuous a way as possible my background educationally and in newspaper work, and asked if he would be interested in having me as a student. The response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, not only from him but from a couple of other journalism school faculty members. They all, they said, knew my work well, having read it in the Courier for a year and half, and they would welcome me into the program. Bingo! Get all of the paperwork done, Dr. Jensen said, get the materials together, and they would love to see me in September.

I was excited as I did that. I talked with Ralph Johnson, my editorial boss at Lindsay-Schaub, who supported my desire to get a master’s degree and agreed to create a schedule for me that would let me commute from Decatur to Champaign-Urbana, an hour’s drive away, for a day or two a week. I could go to school and keep my editorial writing job.

Another odd thing, though, happened shortly after that. We were all at work in our cubicles one day in early August when a man who said he was with the Associated Press in New York appeared on our third floor. He wanted to see two of us, if he could, Coleman Mobley, my colleague who wrote about the arts for our editorial pages, and me. We want with him into our little conference room and closed the door. He said he kept track of journalists at places like ours, and, after following Coleman’s work and mine, he wanted to know if we would both move to New York to work at the AP headquarters. Coleman’s answer was immediate. He was from Washington DC, had his master’s from George Washington University, and was more than ready to head back east for the big time.

I was caught in an enormous dilemma. I said I would think about it, since I was now on the verge of entering the University of Illinois. A week later, I called the AP man and said it wasn’t something I could do. I had other plans and goals. Countless times over the years I have wondered what life would have been had I accepted that offer and moved my family to New York and a life in the big-time world of newspaper journalism there. A few weeks later, Coleman was gone, and even though I heard from him a few times in the months that followed, our paths never crossed again.

I was going to graduate school at the University of Illinois. But even in the last two weeks before I was to start commuting to Champaign-Urbana to work on my master’s degree, things came unraveled. When my application file and materials reached the admissions office of the university’s graduate school, I still had no properly accredited undergraduate degree. So the letter came a day later that I would not be admitted to graduate school. Here we would go again.

This time, though, I did not call someone at the graduate admissions office as I had done a few years earlier. Instead, I called Dr. Jensen in the College of Communications, explained what I had received, and told him that it looked like I would not be showing up for school, as I had hoped. He said he would get back to me. For the next full week, now only four days before school was to start, I heard nothing. Then came another letter, again from the graduate admissions office. I qualified for admission under the special “professional” exemptions available to individual graduate Colleges on campus. For one semester I would be on “probation” to ensure that my grades would be acceptable—but I was in. The following week, on Monday, I registered and began classes at the University of Illinois on the following day. I was still an editorial writer, as difficult as that was going to be, but I was a graduate student, too.