The Rake (2 page)

Grand Forks, February 1967

In freshman year Reuben Castle had signed up to compete for a position on the
Dakota Student
. He resolved in a matter of days that, after duty served as a subordinate, he would one day contend for editor in chief. He was by nature competitive but also adroit about the expenditure of energy. Very early he reasoned that by a shrewd application of practical and psychological intelligence he could increase the prospects of success, while diminishing the pains of achieving it.

Elections for the senior positions on the
Dakota Student
were held in the spring, with juniors contending for the following year's top slots. Every junior on the staff had a vote. Reuben set himself the challenge of demonstrating his preeminence by the time junior year came around, demonstrating it not just by the discharge of his duties as associate editor but also by achievements in other campus activities. By May 1969 he'd be quite ready, he calculated while still a freshman, to take on the responsibilities of editor of the
Student
.

That position brought much prestige on campus. The paper, founded in 1888 as a monthly, became a weekly in 1904, and in 1928 it went to two issues every week. Its editor had been
dubbed by the college president the “uncrowned king of the campus.”

Reuben planned to receive such presidential deference one day. But now—spring term, 1967—he had to win one of the freshman slots. Aspirant journalists were expected to file two stories a week during the eight-week competition. They were also expected to forage for newspaper ads in the commercial corners of Grand Forks. There were 34,000 residents in Grand Forks, and 5,000 students at the University of North Dakota. “Never mind that ours is a small city, and that we have a small student body,” the business manager of the
Dakota Student
said. He was lecturing the eighteen freshmen crowded into the
Student
's pressroom for the briefing at the start of their competitive ordeal. “It won't get you into the
Student
if you write every day like Hemingway and do nothing else. We have to earn our keep—we have to pay for our paper, pay the printer. If you don't contribute to the business end, you're not going to make it.”

Reuben raised his hand to ask a question. “Is there enough revenue here in Grand Forks for the ads we need”—a less assured freshman would have spoken of the ads “you” need—“or will we need to bring in ads from national advertisers?”

“We get some of those—you've obviously noticed the travel ads and the cigarette ads. But mostly—like eighty-five percent—it's local business we live on. Five thousand students means a lot of hamburgers eaten and a lot of blue jeans and movie tickets bought. Your job is to bring in advertisements from these businesses. If they're already advertising, get them to increase their commitments.”

Reuben whispered to the intense young woman seated next to him on the long bench: “Maybe we should get the student body to eat more hamburgers?” She did not acknowledge his crack—Maria Cervantes was fully occupied taking notes, listening first to the business manager, then to the editor.

The managing editor led the students around the newspaper's offices, then back to the well of the pressroom. The entire operation was lodged in one wing of the student union. The following Monday, the competitors would receive their first assignments at one-thirty and come back later in the afternoon with their research material. Using the paper's battered inventory of old manual typewriters, they would bang out their copy. They would spend two long nights at the paper every week, Monday and Thursday. Some would tear up draft after draft, the slower students desperate, in the early weeks especially, to prove that they could produce a publishable 400-word story on the prospects of the Fighting Sioux basketball team, or on the message of a visiting speaker, or on a student committee preparing for the national political campaign coming up in 1968.

Checking in on the first day, Reuben surveyed the scene in the pressroom, the same room in which he and the others had assembled the previous Friday. This time he ran his eyes about the room, paying utilitarian attention to details. He quietly decided, looking over a dozen typewriters, to appropriate as his own the Royal standard sitting in a corner under a dust cover. Immediately after the editor had given out assignments, Reuben rose (the competitors had sat cross-legged on the floor) and walked over to the Royal. He turned it upside down and reached
into his pocket. Opening his penknife he gave the impression that he was tending to the Royal's innards.

It had the desired effect. The typewriter was taken to be the personal property of Reuben Castle. After wiping off the knife on a Kleenex, he sat down in front of the machine and started to type, his lips sealed, his eyes fastened on the stand that supported his notebook, his fingers moving confidently about the keyboard. (“Unless you can touch-type,” at age fourteen he had informed his father, a carpenter, “you may as well forget about professional life.”)

A freshman with thick glasses was looking about anxiously for an available typewriter. He had the air of a man with a scoop. But catching sight of Reuben, he paused to say, “You know your way around that typewriter, all right.”

Reuben arrested his finger action and smiled. “I put a little oil in the machine yesterday and wanted to see how it was working out.”

But yesterday had been Sunday. The
Dakota Student
office had been closed, the freshman competition not yet begun. What had Reuben Castle been doing in the paper's closed offices?

No one asked. There was something about Reuben that made the young people he mingled with uncomplainingly acquiescent in the things he did. This extended to stories he wrote, remarks he made, compliments he bestowed. Some of what he did, if done by others, might have been thought presumptuous or patronizing. Reuben managed to assume seniority without giving others any reciprocal sense of inferiority.

In a few weeks he was accepted as a junior master of the craft he was learning, so much so that some openly sought his counsel, submitting their own work for his comment. He helped
them without suggesting that there was now a debt someday to be repaid. He accepted gratitude, spoken or intimated, as a nice expression of the bounties of life and of the amenities of the University of North Dakota.

One of the few people apparently immune to his easy charm was Maria Cervantes. She was a determined young woman from Fresno, at UND to study agricultural economics. Maria was immensely fortified by her calm resignation to the shapelessness of her body and the plainness of her face. She was resolutely indifferent to her appearance, but not to her work. During the freshman competition, when students were expected to file two stories each week, Maria regularly filed four. She also did more than her share on the advertising front. When the eight-week trial was over, Reuben Castle, Maria Cervantes, and Eric Monsanto were recognized as the brightest stars among the elated newly chosen staffers of the
Dakota Student
.

Grand Forks, May 1969

As election day for senior positions on the
Student
approached, all eyes were on Reuben Castle. The national attention Zap Day had received and the ingenuity of his idea weren't lost on those who would be casting a ballot for editor in chief. They were—they prided themselves—journalists, after all.

It had been a smashing publicity coup, no doubt about it. But—was a stunt of that kind really appropriate for an aspirant editor in chief of the
Dakota Student
?

There were two schools of thought. The doubt worked to the advantage of Maria Cervantes. She was, in any case, the meritocratic favorite. Among the
Student
's staff, Reuben had evolved from companion to demigod to colleague with alien interests. His critics looked on him primarily as the president, secretary, and treasurer of Reuben Castle, Inc. His labors for the
Student
, after his super-successful run in the freshman competition, had been irregular—flashy, episodic, and theatrical, culminating in Zap Day.

Maria, meanwhile, was a week-after-week performer, punctual, thorough, accomplished. She had the problem that she
wasn't liked very much. Her comprehensive efficiency was accompanied by a certain sourness of disposition, though perhaps it was her prickliness that engendered her perfectionism. Shrewd judges on the senior staff doubted she would be elected. Eliminating her left as principal contenders Reuben, and Eric Monsanto—history major, partygoer, and UND enthusiast, who was fully conversant with the paper's commercial life.

Over a couple of beers at the Hop See Lodge's oily little bar, the outgoing editor spent an argumentative two hours with the outgoing business manager. Neither was (quite yet) twenty-one; still, they drank their beer safely at the Hop See. Minnesota had its blue laws, but like everything else undertaken at the Hop See, these laws were lightly observed. The dutiful monthly inspection by the Vice Lady (that was the name the student drinking community gave to Sergeant Lucille Grimmelfarb) took place without fail. She drove in to check up on the Hop See on the first Monday of the month, regularly, at six
P.M.
, and in anticipation the bar was squeaky clean in its clientele. Elderly tipplers knew they could get a free drink from management on those Mondays, when their patronage was especially valued. Today was not a Vice-Lady Monday, so Jack Bergland quaffed his beer without fear of interruption. He reaffirmed to his partner in power and fellow lame duck, Eileen Sanborn, his conviction that Reuben Castle was the best prospect for editor of the
Student
.

“You can have him,” Eileen said. “What I don't want is for you editorial people to reach over and draft our boy, Monsanto, to be editor. He's made to order for business manager. It did occur to you—didn't it, Jack?—that the
Dakota Student
depends
rather heavily on advertising revenue for our publishing operation?”

“Yes.—Yes, dear.” Jack retaliated against her condescending tone by calling attention to her sex. “And it may have occurred to
you
, Eileen, that advertisers want a student paper that's read, not a yellow page for the pizza houses.”

“Okay okay. What do you want to quarrel about? It's fine by me if Reuben gets your chair. But once he becomes editor, I think you'll find he won't be spending a whole lot of time on the paper. He's in a hurry for something else.”

“What else? They're not going to elect him mayor of Zap.”

That brought a smile. “No. But, well—almost anything else. There are other mountains for Reuben to climb. He's too young to run for Congress. Maybe he'll crank up a constitutional amendment to remove the age limitation.”

“So? On the matter of personal ambition, your boy Monsanto isn't going to spend all his life on the
Student
selling ads.”

“I'm not saying he will. And I don't deny he'd rather be the editor than the business manager. But after the first ballot—which will probably put Castle in the lead—the office of business manager will beckon, and he'd be a fine manager.” She looked up at Bergland. “But it's true, Jack. Rico
would
like to be editor.”

“So would three other guys.”

“And—if you don't mind—two girls.”

When Castle's column appeared on that Tuesday in early March, it did indeed catch the attention of his fellow editors on the
Da
kota Student
. But it caught, also, the attention of the entire student body, the entire town of Grand Forks, and by the end of the week what seemed like the entire world.
Zip to Zap!

Spring of 1969 was a restless season. A million male students, coast to coast, were coming upon a drastic fork in the road. One choice entailed the risk of being drafted and perhaps sent to Vietnam. The other—a self-protective alternative—beckoned to prolonged academic life, beyond what most of the young men in question had anticipated as freshmen, or desired as seniors, but keeping them out of reach of the draft boards.

The disposition of the majority of activist students, male and female, was to seek out sites at which to publicize their protests. At Harvard, a six-day strike initiated by Students for a Democratic Society called for the admission of more minority students, the expansion of minority studies, and the abolition of university-sponsored ROTC. Official Harvard soon capitulated. Harvard's administration pledged also to keep the door open to student protesters.

To the activists, these were steps in the right direction. But on the national scene, appetites were not slaked. E
XTRACURRICULAR
G
ENOCIDE
I
S
S
TILL
G
ENOCIDE
, one popular placard read. At CCNY, in New York, students blocked access to the campus. But few protests were as ingenious as the one in Grand Forks back in January, when the Students for Non-Violent Action called on everyone to tune in to the hated Richard Nixon's inauguration as president of the United States. When he reached the words “So help me God,” everyone was to flush the nearest toilet. “We hope,” the SNVA's circular announced, “to flush the toilets not only of all the dorms, apartments, and lecture
halls in and around the campus, but also of downtown hotels, restaurants, high schools, and private homes.” An alarmed city engineer called a press conference to warn that, there being more than 10,000 toilets in Grand Forks, “if they are all flushed at the same time, the pressure would break the pipelines.”

Reuben was of course a leading protester. When he sat down at his Royal standard one day in March to write his weekly column, he thought to fuse two engines of student concern: national affairs and social life. “I've been thinking”—Reuben's column began—“and when I think, well, it makes me want to do things. And what I thought about yesterday was the scene at Fort Lauderdale. (That's Fort Lauderdale, Florida, you jerks.)

“The scene there is big stretches of sand, warm sea water, and beer. You spend your days on the beach and have beers at lunch, and maybe before lunch, and certainly before dinner, and after dinner. This week's issue of
Life
magazine says there'll be maybe a quarter million students going down to Florida for the sun and for a relaxing time with other young Americans who know how to look after themselves. And have the means to do it.”

Reuben then surveyed the travel options.

“For the affluent, you can travel by airplane—Grand Forks to Minneapolis, then to Chicago, then Miami—and then catch a bus from Miami to Fort Lauderdale. Cost: $227. That'll buy you about half a semester of classes at UND.

“Sure, you can do it for less if you travel by rail, same route.

“Or you can do it by bus, same route, forty-one hours.

“Or, if you've got connections, you can borrow your favorite parents' less-than-favorite car, sign on three buddies, split the costs, and drive away.” Reuben designated to the printer, on the
typewritten copy, that at the end of that paragraph, a typographical “dingbat,” as compositors call little decorative ornaments, should appear in bold face. In the ensuing paragraph he plunged excitedly into his proposal:

“I say: Nuts to people who feel that to have any fun or to voice protests they need to go to Florida. Where we should go is—
Zap
!

“You're asking yourselves, Where is Zap? Well, Zap is in the center of our glorious state. It has a population not of 83,000, like Fort Lauderdale. Not of 34,000, like Grand Forks. But of 450! It's in a valley and there's a creek that runs though the middle of town. Zap is just twelve miles south of Lake Sakakawea. Boys and girls, here we come!”

He paused to deliberate such ancillary questions as would probably suggest themselves to his readers.

“What will we do after we have zipped to Zap? We'll celebrate a lot of things—including our independence from the Fort Lauderdale crowd. We'll protest the Vietnam War. We'll protest the anti-missile missiles—the ABMs—they're planning to put down in our state. We'll call for removing ROTC from the campus.”

There were practical questions, granted: “Where will we eat? Sleep?

“Well, we'll ask the farmers there with their great spreads to let us camp out. We'll need lots of things for the big weekend besides shelter. We'll need music. Lots of music. Lots of beer. Lots of hamburgers, maybe French fries, if anybody can figure out how to make these in the wild North Dakota spring. Maybe a Red Cross station for you jerks who get carried away. Yes, we'll need a lot of things.”

Another typographical embellishment preceded his final paragraph.

“Which is why,” he concluded, “I'm going to launch the Zip to Zap committee. Objective: A great three-day party in Zap, starting on May 2, when spring is really here. I need volunteers now to help organize everything. Write me at UND Box 1137, or call me at 777-2166. I'll meet with the early-bird volunteers—Zippers to Zap!—this Saturday, nine
A.M
., to get things started.”

Friday's was a great party. Over 3,000 students went to Zap. They ate their hamburgers, and drank their beer, and listened to three bands of musicians who performed using huge loudspeakers. The hospitality of the farmers was accepted, and soon abused. On Saturday it turned cold, much colder than was normal for early May. There wasn't enough food, though the beer supply was somehow uninterrupted. The good-hearted little Zap Café distributed Zapburgers but quickly ran out. Wood was torn from derelict barns to build fires to mitigate the cold. The national networks sent crews.

Saturday evening, at an emergency meeting, Zap's councilmen retreated from their official welcome and urged the students to go home. But the students weren't ready to go home. They sat, in their parkas and overcoats, and listened to the bands, huddling close together to stay warm.

At daybreak on Sunday, 500 members of the National Guard drove into Zap, responding to the first “riot” ever officially recorded in North Dakota. The crowds ebbed away. The town of Zap had suffered damage amounting to $25,000. On Tuesday,
Castle's column led off with a public apology for the misconduct. He volunteered a personal contribution of $100 to make amends for what the Zippers had overdone. “Where did you find $100?” Rico asked him. He knew that Reuben's father, the self-employed carpenter, paid his son's school bills and provided a monthly allowance of only $50. “You been rolling dice again?”

“No, Rico. I just took it from the paper's cash box.”

Eric Monsanto smiled and backed off. Not his business. Besides, Reuben Castle, on the eve of the
Dakota Student
election, was very nearly a national figure, the greatest entrepreneur in recent UND history. But he was also a statesman, willing to accept a share of blame, stepping forward to effect restitution.

The following Monday, the
Dakota Student
staff elected Reuben Castle editor in chief, and Eric Monsanto business manager.