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Spring Fair 2021, which included virtual, hybrid and in-person events, was held Friday, April 23 through Sunday, April 25. In addition to pandemic-related changes, University administrators, rather than students, planned Spring Fair this year. They organized the weekend with input from the student body via groups such as the Hopkins Organization for Programming (HOP) and Hoptoberfest.
The annual Out of the Darkness Walk, hosted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), took place virtually from April 24 to 25. It was Hopkins’s ninth year participating in the walk.
The University announced the creation of the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) on April 22 to commemorate Earth Day. ROSEI is meant to serve as the University’s center for research and education focused on creating clean, renewable and sustainable energy technologies.
I joined The News-Letter as a freshman in 1964. One of my assigned tasks, in addition to turning out profound, satirical, highly principled journalistic gems, involved going to our printing plant on Thursday evenings to proofread, an odious task reserved for rookies.
I still walk past the Gatehouse sometimes, 20 years later. Its arched windows and vestigial chimney still stand sentinel over the students who pass through its gently creaking doors, clicking their words onto screens late into the night. The sameness is somehow comforting.
The News-Letter emailed over 800 alumni to ask if they would be interested in contributing to this magazine issue. Many responded to simply say yes, they would, but David Hawk went above and beyond and replied with a 1350-word reflection about his time at the paper — before we even asked him to write anything! What follows is his email to us, edited only for length and clarity, to preserve its enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and beautifully impromptu nature.
As we celebrate The News-Letter’s 125th birthday, it seems crazy to think that we have been up and running since 1896 and that we have covered everything from the everyday shenanigans of Hopkins students to earth-shattering global events and movements that have impacted the present day. I went through the archives of The News-Letter’s website, which go back to 2001, to find some of the weirdest, most interesting and most important headlines covered by our predecessors. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and read what the Hopkins community has been up to over the past couple decades:
From 1980 to 1984, when I was very young and very thin and absolutely adorable if your vision was blurry, I wrote a silly humor column for The News-Letter. It was called Ham on Wry. I still don’t know why it was called Ham on Wry. That’s the name the paper’s scruffy editor came up with (hello, Andrew Hurley), and it stuck for four years through a couple more editors (hello, Steve Eisenberg). I probably should have asked one of them what the name of the column meant. They probably would have explained it to me if I’d asked.
I’ve always fancied myself a writer. That’s why I responded when The News-Letter called for more voices, urging, “If you want to say something, write it down, and bring it in” (Friday, Oct. 4, 1974). Congenitally unable to pay careful attention to directions and details, I anonymously sent my article by campus mail and included my campus box address. Russ Smith (A&S ’78), one of the Features Editors, soon paid a visit to Hollander House.
The dream is always the same. I’m writing a screenplay about a teenager fantasizing about his babysitter when my wife flings open the bedroom door. Writing is risky business. Or is it dreaming? I do more than my share of both, and The News-Letter, where I first let my imagination run wild on the printed page, must bear some of the blame.
When I began college in the fall of 1966, I wanted to do well in some extracurricular activities. I tried out for the football team and lasted two practices. Then I ran cross country during my first two years. I worked on the speech team for a year. I was involved in a campus community service program for three years.
It’s 1981, a few months after U2 released their debut album Boy. Perhaps the editors at The News-Letter knew a good joke when they saw one, so they assigned a boy to review it. That’s how I, a freshman and not even 18 yet, got to pen a review that’s not quite as embarrassing as I feared it would be upon re-reading it 40 years later. “Since all members of this group are under 21, musical history could be rewritten if this act gets itself together,” I offered in a bet-hedging opening graph.
It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly 25 years since the two of us were spending every Wednesday night in the Gatehouse basement, churning out the Features section late into the night and developing valuable skills and a lifelong friendship. After polishing stories from our writers, putting the finishing touches on our own features and laying out pages, we would use our last bit of sleep-deprived, slap-happy creativity to put together the “Cartoons, Etc.” page. This included constructing a quirky Word Find — with themes such as “Parsnip (And Other Words We Like)” and “After This, I Get to Go to Sleep (And Other Things to Be Happy About)” — and of course, writing “Eat This!,” the recipe column.
Walking into the Gatehouse, to the right sat a long table with mismatched chairs. On a good day, pizza had just been delivered. On a bad day, half-empty boxes sat with grease congealing on cold slices. The paper had an arrangement with local pizza places: free pizza in exchange for ads. For hungry News-Letter staff, it was mutually beneficial unless you were a discerning eater. Cokes and Pepsis, regular and diet, were the fuel of choice.
The Office of Diversity and Inclusion hosted “Addressing Hate During COVID-19” on April 23 to discuss nationwide calls for racial justice. The event was sparked by the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd last summer, and followed the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, in Brooklyn Center, Minn., on April 11.
“The message I took from this whole process was this: They know he’s guilty, but they’re letting him off the hook because they don’t want to ruin his life. What about the fact that he almost ruined mine?”
The Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) hosted activist, academic and author Angela Davis to discuss racism and policing on April 22.
The Hopkins Student Organization for Programming (HOP), a student-run social programming group that contributed to Spring Fair planning this year, released an online matchmaking survey on Monday, April 19 via an Instagram post.
The University hosted a town hall on April 19 to discuss its plans for the fall semester.
The Student Government Association (SGA) discussed its budget requests for next year, the Pronouns Resolution and several other bills at its last meeting of the year on April 20.