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.