South Bend, Indiana, February 1989
The spring term of freshman year at Notre Dame was full for Justin Durban, Class of 1992. He was enrolled in the requisite five academic courses. He was competing to join the staff of the student newspaper, The Observer. And for ten hours every week, he waited on tables. The system at Notre Dame was straightforward: bursary students would work for ten hours a week (in freshman year this always meant work in the dining hall) in exchange for their meals—twenty-one meals a week.
A fair enough bargain, Justin thought, but add to it the three or four hours required every day at The Observer, and this meant an hour or two chopped away from sleep time.
But it was exciting to Justin, and he thrived on devising stories about campus news, interviewing visiting celebrities, conspiring in fun and fancies, and learning to type without looking down at the keyboard. The accepted attitude toward the senior editors was a balance between servility and independence. Some competitors, he thought, traded openly on their affability, but Justin was naturally forthright. On one occasion he told the managing editor that he did not wish to follow a certain visiting politician around when he came to campus. “I’ve read up on Senator Castle in the morgue, and I heard him speak a couple of years ago in Boulder. No thanks.”
It was not unheard of for a competitor to ask for a substitute assignment, and the managing editor, Mark Howard, gave the Castle story to another freshman. But at ten that night, as copy was making its way to the editors’ desks, Mark looked up at Justin, who was at hand with the story he had taken on. “What’s this about Senator Castle? He’s a very hot number on the political scene. You got a personal problem there?”
“Yes,” Justin said. “At least I think so.”
Mark said nothing more. He took Justin’s story and put it on the pile of copy he had to read, correct, and send down to the printer before the one A.M. deadline. “Okay, Justin. Just curious.”
Late in the afternoon on election day at The Observer, the student candidates were lined up in the production room. Justin’s election as an assistant editor was announced, along with that of ten other competitors, six of them girls. Their rankings were made public on the bulletin board, and Justin had come in first. “That means,” said Janet Rudo, who ranked second, “that you’d have to buy the beer tonight. If we could get beer. And if we were allowed to drink it.”
Although he prided himself on his skills as a reporter, Justin would not have been able to report what exactly had happened in the three hours after dinner. What emphatically happened after that was that he woke at six with a hangover, and the breakfast platters of sausages he had to serve out in the dining hall made him swear that he would never again willingly look at a sausage. But at eight-fifty, just before the hour on classical civilization with Professor Pfansteil, he made it to a public telephone and rang his mother’s number, collect.
She said she was very very proud of him.