Written by Mackye Sandlin
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was a season of heady new-found freedom; it was a season of paralyzing worry about future plans. It was a period of procrastination over assignments; it was a period of socializing to the extreme; it was an era of anger over the hypocrisy of rules and policies; it was an era of fierce dedication and loyalty to the university’s mission. In short, for Harding students, the season was “far… like the present season.”It was an age of missed deadlines, headlines that wouldn’t fit, irate letters to the editor and not enough revenue; it was an age of camaraderie, common purpose and dedication to professionalism. It was a period of looking for a scoop and hoping for a great exposé; it was a period of just filling the pages so we could get our schoolwork done and finally have a date. In short, for the Bison staff, the season was “far… like the present season.” Whether best or worst, the times were certainly busy. Editorial staff members were always under a time-crunch and ever on the alert for topics that would make interesting reading for a student body that was often largely apathetic. Story ideas came from staffers who were involved in a wide range of studies; most of us weren’t journalism majors—in fact, our assistant editor was a Bison football player. We actually paid attention to chapel announcements, hoping for newsworthy items, and we solicited ideas weekly from the publicity office, then located upstairs in the administration building where the IT department is now, and from the Student Association, whose headquarters were right across the hall from the Bison office in what was then the new student center. (We moved in at the beginning of the 1974-75 school year. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Bison office was upstairs above the student. Story assignments for the following week were posted on the office door on Thursdays; nobody had even thought of electronic communication at that point.Some of the big stories during 1975, when Harding celebrated its 50th anniversary, included the appointment of Dr. David Burks to chair the Department of Business and Economics and the opening of the new preacher training school, then called the Christian Communications Center. Jeff Hopper was hired as an assistant professor of music, plans for building the Benson Auditorium were underway, and Harding had a record enrollment of 2,364.On Mondays, the editor and her assistants wrote columns and edited copy, which, of course, was typed on typewriters and then taken to Harding Press to be set in camera-ready columns. Like today’s Bison, the columns included opinions about campus happenings, political musings and spiritual concerns, with an occasional humor column thrown in. Our focus then was almost exclusively on Harding happenings, but during election years, quite a bit of space was devoted to political issues. One of the few editorials written about a national topic won an Arkansas College Press award when we expressed our outrage over Richard Nixon’s pardon in the Watergate affair.Involving our readers’ opinions was a big goal, and we regularly featured poll results on such topics as “Should women students be allowed to wear pant suits to class?” and “Are Pledge Week activities inherently un-Christian?” The birth of “investigative reporting” a la Woodward and Bernstein was a huge influence on our interests, and we longed for some scandal like a campus Watergate to shoot us into prominence. While being unwaveringly loyal to Harding, we seethed at what we found hypocritical and were eager to publicize double-standards – often unmindful of the fact that our publisher was the university itself.Tuesdays were the big work nights for the entire staff, all of whom would be involved in proofreading and writing headlines to fit pages that the editors graphed out after the business manager had placed the advertisements while a cartoonist and photographer worked on the week’s graphics. Like papers today, the number of pages in an issue wasn’t determined by the amount of news but rather by the number of ads that had been sold that week. The publicity office provided some pictures (Dr. Mike James was then the office’s primary photographer), but most were developed the old-fashioned way in the Bison darkroom. Chuck Hicks, who was then an artist for the publicity department, designed the paper’s masthead that year and sometimes provided other graphic design, all of which was done by hand at that time.A long-standing tradition of the time was for the editor to make sandwiches for the staff on work nights—peanut butter and jelly, along with tuna salad made in a blue plastic child’s potty that was passed from editor to editor with great fanfare at the annual staff banquet. The origin of that tradition was a mystery, and we have often wondered when and if it was discontinued.Late hours were put in on Wednesday nights after church services, when the editorial staff gathered again to proofread the entire paper “dummy” which Harding Press had put together from our layout designs. The Press shop, a far cry from the modern building on the edge of today’s campus, was located in an old building on the site of the present Mabee building. Harding Academy was directly adjacent to the print shop, between it and the Claude Rogers Lee building, which then housed the music department.The corrected dummy was returned to Harding Press on Thursday morning to be printed and distributed on Friday, and the entire process would begin again. Looking back at all that work, undertaken while being a newlywed and while taking a full load of classes, teaching a children’s church class and working the breakfast shift at the Heritage cafeteria six days a week, one might assume that it could only have been “the worst of times.” In reality, although it makes us tired just to remember it all, like most of our Harding experience, it was indeed “the very best of times.”MACKYE SANDLIN is a 1976 Harding graduate. She served as the Bison’s editor in chief from 1975-1976 and as assistant editor from 1974-1975.
