Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

gossip column. They wanted a gossip column and I didn't think that it was
appropriate. I made the statement that there was enough gossip, and small
talk, you know, there already and we didn't need to formalize it with a column
and the gentleman, who was my dean and who was the person I reported to under
this project, said, "Well, I want to tell you something." He said, "Gossip
is a part of America." He said, "The highest paid journalist in America is
a man named Walter Winchell and that's what his column is. Really, if we get
right down to it, it's gossip. So," he said, "give them a gossip column."
And I relented on that basis.
I decided I would do it thoroughly, so I picked out about eight or ten people,
men and women, mostly women, who were persons who had had some disappointments
on that campus, like girls who had pledged a sorority and did not make it or
girls who were less attractive than others who had been pushed aside for one
reason or the other. I asked them, individually, and privately, to submit to
me gossip and to submit it to me at my post office box, anonymously. And I
got some real, juicy gossip. And I started to print it. And then I got
burned in effigy because they were mad at this column,it was so introspective
and devastating--but they asked for it.
Q: Was this the same people who had picketed in the first place?
A: I'm sure. I'm sure. The ones who insisted on its inclusion.
Q: How large a paper was it?
A: Eight pages and we had a circulation that would cover the campus. We
had about, I guess, about forty-five hundred kids on the campus. It was an
eight page paper.
Q: How did you have it published? Privately or was it . . .
A: No, it was published by the school, by the printing press there at the
school, yes.
Q: What was the name of the paper?
A: Tennessee State Collegian.
Q: So that was your second experience with writing up . . .
A: Yes, it really was, yes. I remember one of the editorials that I wrote
that the Dean was just really enamored of and it was "Are You in College or Is
College in You?"
Q: Oh? What was the tenor of the thing?
A: Well, the thrust of it was: "Were you just in college physically or was the
concept of college imbedded in your personality and in your thought process?"
If you were just in college physically, you really didn't care much about what
went on or how things went, you weren't really concerned about improving