Warning: Newspaper at Play (featuring “Patty Hearst” )
The Magic Blue Editor’s Dress. Did you have it around during your own years at The Ubyssey?
Anyways....people at The Ubyssey used to have the money, editorial space and inclination to overtly try to have fun with what they were doing.
For example, in 1964-65, future Prime Minister Kim Campbell was a darling on campus as the first year student’s representtative on the AMS council. She was always getting covered in the paper, had her picture taken, and such.
In March 1965, she turned 18. In the March 11, 1965 issue there was a photo of a male student holding up to her a giant sign saying “18 Now you’re...”with a picture of the silhouette of a back panther that they used to use to show that a film was “RESTRICTED” and only those 18 an above could go see it. Fortunately it was a big sign that the possibly naked guy holding the sign right in front of him was showing to Miss Campbell...
Campbell took life with the ‘geers’, UBC’s Engineering students, in stride, As part of her AMS responsibilites, she had an office. She quipped to a Ubyssey reporter that she had “an open door policy” because the ‘geers had swiped the door to her AMS office.
The Ubyssey played along with another prank by the ‘geers. In February 1963, several abstract statues of nude seeming figures appeared on campus.
Late that month a picket appeared beside the statues. “Ralph the mystery picket” was protesting with signs around the statues complaining that they were indecent. “Ralph” and some friends put clothes on the statues.
In September 1963, eight brand new statues mysteriously appeared on campus. Some of the statues were near or next to the genuine ones that UBC had put out in the spring.
On Ctober 2, the engineers struck. Several dozen of them took crowbars and sledgehammers to the brand new statues, not, please note, the old ones. Photos of the destruction were run in the Ubyssey.
The Ubyssey revealed that it had been a glorious prank and the paper had been in on it. Students and faculty had been talking about the newer statues for weeks, but, The Ubyssey reported “no one had bothered to find out if they were real.”
The paper added that the statues “were fakes put on the campus by the engineering students to prove that UBC didn’t know junk from art.”
The Ubyssey also used to cover the T-Cup football game in the spring. Surely, this tradition is long gone...Female students in the Nursing and the Family and Nutritional Sciences faculties would suit up and play a game on a big field.
The ‘geer’s love of shells of old Volkswagen Beetle cars, was usually covered by The Ubyssey. Such as the amazing places they would be put, such as on the top of Buchnan Tower, the student residence, or hanging from the Lion’s Gate Bridge.
The Ubyssey scored big in 1975. The Engineering Undergraduate Society used to have a newpaper called The Red Rag. The Red Rag was typeset at College Printers, the same place where The Ubyssey was also typset and printed. [My very first year at the paper, we did “contra deals” with restauraunts. The Ubyssey will trade an ad in the paper for the restaurant feeding a table of Ubyssey staffers on production night. We’d eat and then carry on to Collge Printers where we’d “put the paper to bed “.]
So, 1975. The Ubyssey staff gathered at College Printers. They noticed that a special edition of The Red Rag was laid out on “flats” to be put out soon during “Engineering Week” So, they got out a typewriter, hand drew some cartoons and had some new “headlines” ypeset and all of a sudden, The Red Rag had become Maoist.
The Red Rag was published before the next Ubyssey. While students laughed at the Red Rag complaining that the UBC administration was “revanchist” The Ubyssey primly had a story wondering who had done the foul deed.
From the 1920s to 1940s, the Ubyssey had regular humour columns, Eric Nicol got his start at The Ubyssey before becoming a famous Canadian humorist. In 1947, Nicol had a prank played on him by fellow Ubyssey staffer Les Bewley--the latter would become a judge and then a ideologically conservative Vancouver Sun columnist.
During my own time at The Ubyssey, I did a story on one of Nicol’s later books. I’d heard of the prank and asked Nicol about it for a sidebar story.
Bewley, Nicol told me, took a donations can and collected money. When he had enough money, Bewley went downtown to Birks and had a plaque made. It was erected in Brock Hall As of the 1990s, the plaque was still up and I took a photo of it for The Ubyssey, which it ran with this story.
Nicol remembered that UBC professor G.G. Sedgewick was persuaded to officiate at the grand unveiling of the plaque, which read : “In Loving Memory of JABEZ (Eric P. Nicol) beloved campus humorist who for a full decade gave to his fellow man the precious gift of laughter.”
Sedgewick was not impressed.
Nicol remembered: “It was a very small gathering., around lunchtime, and Sedgewich was fed up with the whole thing too, and figured that it was some kind of a lark. All he could do was tear the cloth off the plaque, mutter a few obscenites, and stride off back to his classes.”
The Ubyssey has always had a sense of humour about itself.
For example, when The Ubyssey’s offices were much more of a place to hang out and get to know people than it seems to be these days. They would have year end dinners.
There. staffers would get joke “awards” that gently teased them in good humour. Over the years, I got and kept several of them..
I can’t forget The Magic Blue Editor’s Dress.
At the very top of this post, you’ll see a photo of an innocent Ubyssey staffer who had been dared to try on the dress, went to the bathroom and came back wearing it.
He had to know that a camera was witing for his return.
Anyways, several swarthy guys were featured in various staff recruitment ads over the years wearing the MBED. It has to be long gone, and current Ubyssey staff probably have no idea that it ever existed. Just like the framed photo of Enver Hoxha that we had to use to illustrate a news story one night.
Cub reporter Tom Wayman (yes, *the* Tom Wayman) found SFU in 1963, as it was being built. A series of “gag’ photos followed Wayman on his quest over the next two weeks on his quest to find “Simon Fraser Academy” or SFA” as the waggish Ubyssey dubbed it.
The series ended with a composite faked picture of future SFU chancellor-to-be Gordon Shrum isitting at a desk in an otherwise empty clearing.
“Shrum” is quoted as saying: “This, all this is mine. All this is SFA” (Hint: not “Simon Fraser Academy)
The Ubyssey still likes to do parodies of print media today. During my own years there, it parodied The Completely Straight (Georgia Straight), The Vancouver Stunned (Vancouver Sun) The Gripe and Wail (Globe and Mail) and The Provincial Enquirer (Province).
I’ll finish with an old Ubyssey tradition that it doesn’t have the space for any more, the “joke story”.
It read as if it could be plausible...until you read the “turn” of the story on another page. In my time, there were two phone lines in SUB 241K, with two different phone numbers. One year, we did a “joke story” that students were going to get an extra GST cheque. We gave a phone number for getting information about the cheque and it was the second number, which we never printed in the paper. We got calls for two months on that line after the “GST” “joke story ran. I know. I fielded lots of them.
Of course, the kicker was to read the “turn” of the story.. When The Ubyseey went on to quote The Queen, Moammar Quadaffi and The Pope all saying ridiculous things, the penny was supposed to drop.
The story that ran on page one of the Nov. 26 1974 Ubyssey succeded spectacularly. People neded to “read the turn” and think about it. But they didn’t.
A journalist should have smelled a rat. First, the story is the bottom one of the page instead of trumpeting a scoop.
Here is a hyperlink to that paper as saved on the UBC Library’s online PDF files:
http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_1974_11_26.back
Heiress Patty Hearst, older readers may recall, had been kidnapped in February by the Sybionese Liberation Army. After participating in a bank robbery, the FBI was avidly looking for Hearst.
Then The Ubyssey was naughty. It reported that Hearst had come to campus for a couple of hours and given an impromptu speech to ‘students in “Totem Park cafeteria”.
A murky photo of a long haired woman--shot from the back and cradling a shotgun in one arm--ran withe the story. A Ubyssey staffer of course.
A cassette recording of “Hearst’s” speech reportedly mysteriously appeared in a Ubyssey mailbox. in it she says “The dark majesty of proletarian oneness could not be shaken loose.”
The “story” goes on to note that “Hearst” got a standing ovation for her speech. However, the “turn” of the story quotes the UBC “Food service director as being asked why cafeteria workers hadn’t noticed “Hearst” in the cafeteria. And some other people being silly. A tip off that it is “fake news” as the term is today.
So there you go. Two days later, two letters in The Ubyssey had fun with the story. One letter says “I happen to know personally that Patty Hearst is dead....So stop looking for her. Sign me ‘anonymous’ Patty Hearst Windsor, Ontario.”
One last piece of Ubyssey lore about this “joke story”. In my day, there were huge plywood desks in SUB241K. One had a big gash in one side. I was told that it was where an angry news cameraman, part of a crew that had driven up from KOMO TV in Seattle, had kicked it.
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
2087
jacobvanloon
titsay
dailybridgerton