Q & S
Winter 2012 Issue
Alumni Association
Quill and Scroll Society
Alumni Anecdotes
Two Quill and Scroll members look back on life since high school.
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By Sarah Larson
iterally cutting and pasting is what it took for Dolores Strauss and her fellow students to create their high school newspaper in 1947. The Quill and Scroll alumnus described the detailed process of typing everything and using make-up pages to actually paste the content on the page before sending it to the printer. Everything was done by hand. Strauss is just one of the many Quill and Scroll alumni who went through the process of publishing a high school newspaper without a computer. Jack Egan, a 1951 graduate, also understood what it meant to write without a computer – a foreign concept for many high school students today. As Quill and Scroll looks back at 85 years of service, the organization spoke with two alumni whose experiences differed greatly from current high school students. Strauss recently gave her grandson’s new wife, a schoolteacher, her Quill and Scroll pin on a chain to wear around her neck. The Quill and Scroll alumnus said the honor society is a great organization. She continues writing. “I guess I loved the use of the English language,” Strauss said. “I used to write to express myself with words. I just didn’t write a sentence, I used a lot of adverbs, a lot of expressions.” A 1947 graduate of Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, N.Y., Strauss was the managing editor of the student newspaper, The Crimson Echo. After graduation, she was planning to attend the Columbia School of Journalism in New York but instead got a job during the summer at Good Housekeeping magazine, a part of
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Learn More Dolores Strauss,18, after receiving her Quill and Scroll Achievement Award. Photo contributed by Strauss.
the Hearst magazine group. When a position opened in the makeup department at Harper’s Bazaar, the company sent Strauss there to fill in. She ended up staying in the position and writing for the magazine for several years. Strauss called it a “lucky break.” Strauss then went on to raise her family and also owned a Bed and Breakfast in the 1980’s. The optimistic Strauss also put together the special 50th reunion 1997 edition of The Crimson Echo. She keeps busy and is currently creating a scrapbook for her children. Continued on next page
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Alumni Anecdotes continued When she is not in New York, Strauss also spends six months a year in Maine hosting at a Bed and Breakfast. “I’m in my early 80’s but I’m still working,” Strauss said. “I’m enjoying life.” Jack Egan also appreciated his time in Quill and Scroll. Egan was the ninth member in the Big Inch Club, an honor Quill and Scroll presented to high school students who produced 10,000 column inches – the equivalent of writing an entire front page of a newspaper for three months. Egan was the sports editor for his high school newspaper at Joliet Catholic High School in Illinois. Most of his inches appeared in the Joliet newspaper, The Herald News, where he reported on Catholic High sports and
spent one summer working full time in the editorial department. After graduating in 1951, Egan attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne. He also later earned an MBA from Northwestern University. Egan worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a sports reporter for several years before joining the public relations department at J. Walter Thompson. After his time there, Egan went to work at the Continental Bank, the largest bank in Chicago at the time, and ended his career there as the senior vice president of corporate communications. “High school journalism was the key,” Egan said of his expansive career. For both Strauss and Egan, being on their high school newspaper staffs paved the way for their journalistic and related professional careers.
Preserving School’s Past
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maha Central High School is preserving its past by digitizing its newspaper archives. This is no minor task. The high school newspaper, The Register, is the oldest continuous student newspaper west of the Mississippi River. The archived pages were deteriorating rapidly until the Omaha Central High Archives project began. Now, every page dating back to 1886 is scanned and available online for anyone to explore. The project began in 2007 when Jim Wigton, a Central 1966 alumnus, and Barry Combs, a 1950 alumnus, decided The Register issues on file were in critical condition after years of use. The newspapers were bound together and guarded by the school treasurer. “The amount of work and dedication that had gone into preserving all the Registers really impressed me, and I thought I just wanted to be part of that line of people who helped preserve that,” Wigton said. Wigton and Combs, two members of the Alumni Association, were scanning all the documents and photographs from the Central High Archives. After a year of work and about 5,000 images scanned, Wigton, a retired
physician interested in history, said he knew they couldn’t scan The Registers because it was clear they needed larger, more sophisticated scanners. With funding from the CHS Foundation, Wigton and Combs contacted Curt Reiter, owner of Microfilm Imaging Systems Inc., to scan. The task proved difficult when they decided to keep the newspapers bound together in order to preserve them. Reiter even needed to purchase a new scanner to capture some of the larger format newspapers. “It was a really, really big job, and it was a lot more difficult than we thought,” Wigton said. Each newspaper is available on the website, http://omahachsarchives.org/. The Omaha Central yearbooks dating back to 1904 are also available on the website. “I would really encourage anybody who is able to scan the newspapers because that is going to be the most valuable historical source,” Wigton said. “It’s always nice to have a document to photo save. The school newspaper is going to be the best historical source and it’s nice to have that available, particularly now that we can have it online.”
Jack Egan, in high school, wrote more than 10,000 column inches during his time there. Photo contributed by Egan.
Scholarship Winners Six college freshmen are beginning their studies in journalism or communication studies with Quill and Scroll scholarships. George and Ophelia Gallup Scholarships were awarded to Jackie Tempera (Communications HS, Wall, NJ) Emerson College and Catherine King (West Henderson HS, Hendersonville, NC) University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. Edward J. Nell Scholarships were awarded to Zev Hurwitz (Shalhevet HS, Los Angeles, CA) University of California-San Diego, Logan Ponche (Francis Howell North HS, St. Charles, MO) Drury University and Elisabeth Dillon (Allen HS, Allen, TX) University of Texas- Austin. The Richard Johns Scholarship was awarded to Lauren Smith (Dwight D. Eisenhower HS, Blue Island, IL) Moraine Valley Community College. The deadline for 2012 scholarships is May 10. Applications are available at http://www.uiowa. edu/~quill-sc/, where donations to Quill and Scroll also can be made.