Given all of the hyperbolic wailing about Nazis and the media in the wake of Elon’s bid to take Twitter private and return it to its free speech roots, writing this right now may be a bad idea. But it’s all true. If you think I’m joking, just enter the terms “Joe Fields” and “Harbor College” into your search engine of choice and check out the old news stories.
So… I kind of stumbled into journalism by accident. I was never on the staff of my high school newspaper. In fact, I can’t even say for sure that I was really aware of its existence. I was a music major and music was really all I cared about deeply. About a year after I graduated, I left the US for almost two years doing my expected stint as a representative for the church I had been a part of for most of my teen years. When I got back in the Spring of ’81, I had no real idea what I wanted to do.
The general path for most of the guys who had trod the same path was to get back and head off to college, usually in Utah. My dad made it very clear that would not be my path unless I paid for it myself. Had something to do with a stunt I pulled at my high school graduation ceremony that involved a pair of Mickey Mouse ears smuggled into the ceremony inside the big, baggy sleeves of my graduation robe. Which is, yes, a Story For Another Day.
So I started looking for a job and bounced around in a series of weird gigs. I worked for a guy who made the wired intercom systems used in “manlifts” which is an old, probably now offensive term for the elevators mounted to the outside of the frame of a building under construction that was used by construction workers to move themselves and their gear between floors. I worked in the shop but also had to go out onto job sites to fix units that had stopped working. I didn’t work there very long. I had to go out to the site of a huge skyscraper under construction in downtown LA and then walk through the 60th floor—which had no walls—and then lie on my belly with my head and shoulders over the edge to haul up a cable that needed to be replaced. While I have overcome my terror of heights to a degree where I have actually done things like jump off the Stratosphere tower in a “controlled free fall” and am kinda bored by zip lines running 70 0r 80 feet above the Vegas Strip, just thinking about that day still makes my backside pucker up. I quit the next day.
I had a cool part-time gig where I went to the HQ of some think tank in the canyon above Malibu and washed a car or two then took a package to the nearest FedEx office back in Woodland Hills. Basically this meant I went to the beach by about 10 or 11 AM and hung out for a few hours and then made a stop at the think tank for less than an hour and dropped off the package on my way back home.
I eventually started working for the old Herald-Examiner newspaper managing a group of guys who delivered the paper in and around Malibu. I did those kinds of weird gigs for a few years. I was basically just another Valley Dude in his twenties with no idea what to do with his life.
In ’84, I finally decided that I needed to go back to school and—see the whole bit about family not being willing to pay for it—I went to the local community college to sign up.
I really had no idea what I was doing and had every intention on being a business major. I was just trying to sign up for basic classes. When it came to meeting the requirement for an English class, I had to take English 101 but I couldn’t sign up for it. As it had been more than five years since I had graduated from high school, it was evidently assumed that I had forgotten how to read and so would have to take a remedial English class before I could sign up for English 101. Which is, yes, ridiculous.
So I was standing in the very long line to register for classes. According to the big whiteboards that showed which classes were still open, all of the remedial classes were full. As were most of the classes I needed to get into.
So, as I was waiting in line, I was leafing through the catalog of classes when the phrase “equivalent credit to English 101” caught my eye. One of those weird moments when a seemingly random event set my life on a totally new course. I’ve had more than a few of those moments in my life.
The class that carried that little note in the catalog was Journalism 101. I had worked for newspapers on the distribution end since I was 10 years old and was a voracious reader of everything I could get my hands on including newspapers. So I signed up. (Note that it was not just the journalism thing that was life-changing here. It was in that same class where I met Jake Kelly who first dubbed me as Rev. Bill and with whom I started the first version of the Rev. Bill bands that continued in one form or another up until just before the plague.)
I don’t want this to be some kind of travelogue to my college years so, the short version is that I went from that Journalism 101 class straight to the staff of the student newspaper called the Roundup where I was an arts and entertainment editor and then an opinion editor and then the editor-in-chief of both the paper and the twice-per-semester student magazine called The Bull. The bovine references are all due to the fact that Pierce College was originally set up as an agricultural school and as part of its charter, the donation of the land (by the Pierce family which was best known for another land intensive business, cemeteries) was contingent on the agricultural school staying. The west side of campus—where the newspaper office was located—often smelled of manure and the derisive nickname for the college was “Cowtech.”
I still have a wall in my office covered with award plaques that I won while on staff and my name is on a bunch of trophies in the newspaper office for everything from “Best Cub Reporter” to “Most Dedicated.” But even with that history, I have never been graced with an invitation to a single alumni event. Which is all about who I married.
When I arrived on the staff of the Roundup, I had no idea that I was walking into a war between members of the faculty over grading policies and a tradition called Hell Sheet.
Being on the newspaper staff was a formal class. That meant that everyone got some kind of writing assignment each week and the unedited version was submitted to the faculty for a grade and at the same time sent into the copyediting and space budgeting process for inclusion in the printed paper. The class met on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The paper itself came out on Thursday and Friday’s class was dedicated to a critique session called Hell Sheet.
It could get pretty brutal. I can’t imagine anything like it existing today. Just to give a taste of what it was like… I remember the Hell Sheet after my first concert review was published. I don’t remember the headliner, but the opening act was Randy Newman who accompanied himself on piano without a band. In the review I had written that he “played solo.” I still remember sitting in class with one of the faculty advisors up front—a great guy by the name of Bob Scheibel—who said, “I’ve never seen anyone play solo before. But that is probably because they had the decency to close the bathroom door.” Yep, the first public critique of my writing was a masturbation joke.
That gives you an idea of the flavor of Hell Sheet. And as embarrassing as that was, it often got quite a bit more harsh.
On the grading side, it was all about something we called a GFE or Gross Factual Error. Basically this meant that any error in the Big 4 W’s (Who, What, Where, When), even if it was just an obvious typo, was an automatic 50 points off. Seeing as how that meant 50 off of a possible 100, it meant an automatic F on that assignment. I once wrote an opinion column about the original right-wing TV provocateur, Wally George. Wally was based in Anaheim and I referenced that location probably three times in the course of the column. In two instances, I typed it correctly. In one instance, I transposed the I and the E. Which means that the name of a location (a “Where”) was misspelled. I actually won a first-place regional award for that column, but my grade on it for the class was an F.
I actually agree with that policy. And I loved Hell Sheet. Yes, both were harsh. But they set us on the right course. Accuracy in journalism is paramount. (BTW, another basic tenet we were taught back then was that, in order to not even have the appearance of bias, journalists should not be a member of any political party. I’ve not done hard news in decades but, to this day, I am still unaffiliated with any party. I have not voted in a party primary since the early ‘80s.)
But those two items were the source of some contention between the journalism faculty. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it was a bit of a war with one person on the side of Too Harsh and the rest of the department on the other side. This argument had gone on for a number of years and by the time I arrived, it meant that the one guy on the “other” side—a lovely guy by the name of Jay Jacobson—taught journalism classes including magazine feature writing but he was not one of the faculty advisors for the newspaper or magazine. As I never took any of those classes, I honestly had no idea who he was.
At least me not being really aware of Jay was the case until the day I took over as editor-in-chief. At that point, I got called into a meeting where the situation was outlined. The reason they were telling me is that a student who had recently been in Jay’s feature writing class had signed up for the newspaper staff. And, seeing as how this student had also recently gone to a meeting of the board of trustees for the college district to file a complaint about how Jay was being “mistreated” she was seen by the advisors as a problem. I think the word they used in describing her was “spy.”
Can you see where this is going?
So the head of the department was a guy by the name of Mike Cornner. I may be misspelling his name. Oops, another GFE. And while all of this was happening, another event was going down at another campus in the system, a small college near the port called Harbor College. Pierce was probably the biggest campus in the system and had four faculty advisors to the newspaper. Harbor was much smaller and had just one advisor. Who died.
Keep in mind that this was the mid ‘80s when funding for things like community colleges was under a lot of pressure. So the leadership of Harbor College, faced with a hiring freeze that meant they could not hire a new journalism professor made the decision to just move an English professor laterally. If I remember right, this person had no formal journalism training or background.
At Pierce, we had the advantage of all of the advisors having done time as working journalists and editors before they went into teaching. This meant that we had long and intense discussions in our classes about the *responsibilities* of journalists. At Harbor, all they talked about was the *rights* of journalists.
Having been in the same seat, I know that the poor guy who was the EiC of the paper at Harbor probably had little idea what he was doing when he took the gig. And it’s not like people were lining up to join the newspaper staff which means that, in terms of staff, you kinda had to go with what you had. So when a guy named Joe Fields offered to be the opinion editor, the EiC snapped him up.
There was just one problem. Joe was a racist and a Nazi. This is not hyperbole. Again, check the old news accounts. The event that is the lynchpin to this whole story was his association at an on-campus event with the local leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
So, back to the main story bit. The ruckus kicked up by the student I mentioned earlier put the board in a tough position. Because while Jay had been kinda banished, he actually had more seniority than Mike did. At the same time, they had a PR crisis because the newspaper of one of their campuses was running weekly columns by a guy who was writing things like the Holocaust not being real.
So, in the manner of politicians and bureaucrats since time immemorial, they “solved” two problems at once. They transferred Mike to Harbor and made Jay the head of the department at Pierce. That meeting I mentioned earlier was not just to warn me about the spy in our midst, it was to tell me that the guy who had chosen me as EiC back in June was not around anymore in September.
And I did my part. I gave her the worst assignments, which she bitched about but came through on. But none of that lasted. By the end of ’86, I had started dating the “spy.” I finished up my associates degree in early ’87 and we got married in early ’88.
Now back to the whole reason I became persona non grata.
The time at Harbor was not easy for Mr. Cornner. I can’t say that he was given marching orders by the board to get rid of Mr. Fields, but not long after he got to Harbor, the student EiC fired Joe for being associated with said Klan guy at a campus event.
But this was back in the olden times. Back when the ACLU actually still stood for free speech instead of just being another fount of virtue signaling more concerned with identity politics than actual, you know, civil liberties. Yeah, Joe was a literal Nazi. But there is a little thing called the Bill of Rights—remember that?
Most people only think of the First Amendment as being about speech. But it also protects freedom of religion and freedom of association. All of which makes firing the opinion editor of a newspaper that is funded by tax revenue for hanging out with a guy from the Klan problematic.
And, again, politicians and bureaucrats being what they are, they hung Cornner out to dry. And then the ACLU sued him. That cost a bunch of money and strained his marriage and made him a regular in news coverage for all the wrong reasons for more than a year.
Jay never came back to the Roundup. Eventually, he moved from Pierce to Valley College in a much less nice part of the San Fernando Valley and Cornner came back to Pierce. I looked him up online a few years ago and he was still associated with Pierce. I think he had retired but was a big part of a foundation that worked on fundraising for the school. Jay died probably a decade ago.
We did show up uninvited to an event once. Probably in ‘89ish. Our friend Dina Douglass had told us about a gathering of alumni so we went. It was… awkward.
So, there ya go. I’m not sure why I felt moved to write this today. Probably has something to do with the fact that I’m trying to find a job writing again after being in the Apple Wilderness of Tech Support for more than 8 years and every morning I get a couple more “thanks but no thanks” emails. So the whole concept of rejection is on my mind.
Just to be clear, I hold none of this against my lovely bride. She was just going to bat for a professor she liked who she thought had been mistreated. That kind of willingness to stand up for others is one of her best traits and one of the reasons I’m still crazy about her after nearly 35 years of marriage.