The Michigan Daily Caper
History Short Story
Pranksters and college create a strange, and in many cases unwanted, alloy. Boys finally out from under their parent’s eye attempt to unsettle the world around them in an embarrassing display of teenage behavior, when they ought to be growing up and making their way in the world. But this is not a story of college pranksters and some foolish and too clever for their own good behavior which makes us smile nervously. This is a story of young men taking their place in the world, whether their bettors liked it or not, and actually coming out on top, to the great embarrassment of those once above them. The reader will remember the law of nature’s physics: To every action their is an equal and opposite reaction.
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By the way, the names have been changed to, well, protect the innocent.
Well, this is ridiculous, Neal thought, as he read the review of a movie from the 70’s, Bread and Chocolate, that a film coop had brought back to campus. Neal had seen the movie, which was about an Italian immigrant’s repeated attempt, and failure, to make a new life in Switzerland. Hilariously, the article tried to make the point that the main character was the ‘Everyman’ of film, a man whose suffering was universal. Neal rewrote it very differently. “Immigration is not always a triumph,” he posed, “it can just as likely defeat a man,” while making the ancillary point that “the film also depicts the demoralization and stagnation of post war Italy, lost in a haze of Socialist delusion, a country in the heart of Europe from which men are forced to emigrate to make a living.”
The re-written article was published, and amazingly, no one seemed to notice, at least no one at the paper, not even the original writer. Neal took this little success in hand and pondered it, smiling to himself at its absurdity, but with no delusions about the spitefulness of his unethical action. He held a brand new golf ball in his hand, rolling it around, looking out the window, remembering his first few months at the paper.
The chief editor, reading a paper held by both hands, looked at him without raising his head. “You want to write at The Michigan Daily?”
“Yes.”
“What, like investigative reporting, sports, what?”
“Hadn’t really thought about it, anything would be fine to start.”
“Huh.”
He continued to read. Not in any hurry to ask further questions. The girl, a staff writer, who had led him back to the editor’s desk walked back to her desk and took a seat, but continued to stare at the two of them, anxious, Neal thought, to see the editor put the screws to the newbie.
“Well,” the editor said finally, “you can start in copy if you want. It’s two hours every evening reading articles of our choice for errors, typos, you understand, and if you do alright there, maybe you can write, like next year.”
He still hadn’t looked up, and the girl, satisfied that the newbie received no special treatment, returned to typing.
“Ok.”
“Tonight at 9.”
“Ok.”
That night Neal took his place in the copy room, sharing a desk with a woman who had no patience for introductions. Then, a minute later, out of nowhere she began, leaning forward and speaking in the low tones of the conspirator: ”So all these juniors and seniors have worked internships, you know, and then they come back and turn this little paper into the Times or the Post. It’s ridiculous! And the editors, don’t even get me started, they’re doing their best impersonation of a hard crusted newspaperman in the big city. It’s a joke.”
Neal hadn’t sought her opinion or advice, but he understood her need to commiserate. He nodded with a little enthusiasm, and looked for a few words to utter, but none came to mind, none creative at least. Finally, he said “yeah.”
“Right?” She was determined to forge a fellowship with her new cell mate.
“Yeah,” he repeated, but more enthusiastically.
She seemed comforted by his agreement. They had given him seven stories to work on and he was anxious to get started. He lowered his head to start reading, again.
“Be careful the first couple of weeks, I mean, I think they put some errors and stuff in the stories just to make sure you’re on the ball, right?”
“Yeah, Ok.” He was aware that he had said ‘yeah’ at least three times, maybe four, like a tongue tied loser Freshman. Well, he was a Freshman.
“I really should be writing this year, right, but I had to take winter semester off last year with mono.”
“Huh.”
“Right?”
The first two weeks sped by quickly. Neal found errors and typos and highlighted them and wrote in the margins when necessary. He was surprised by the poor quality of the writing sometimes. But the more time he spent in and around the newsroom, the more sympathy he had for the writers. They were jerks to him at first but after he saved them from embarrassment without himself copping an attitude they relented. He also started to see them for what they really were, just students like himself rushing around between tests, papers due, applications for grad school and internships and newly important relationships with the other sex, while trying to write an article or two every week.
The discord he heard from his desk partner was shared throughout the copy room. No one was happy there; they felt put upon and distressed until they gave up. The writers laughed about the turnover, but as experienced copy people left there were openings. Neal talked about how great it was to work at the paper to his friends at the dorm because his work load from week to week became too much. Eventually a few guys from his dorm joined the paper, and then a few more, and pretty soon they had a small working group of six that split up the work and got it done without a lot of drama.
After several weeks of copy editing, the girl he met on his first night and who worked alongside him just stopped coming in. The entire writing staff thought he had something to do with it, asking “Where’s your accomplice,” not once or twice but every day for a week. Neal raised his eyebrows and lifted his shoulders to this question reflexively, like he’d received a miniscule electric jolt from the question. They stopped asking after a week, but he sensed a little residual suspicion that he had something to do with the girl’s absence. The group from his dorm split up her work and the work of others as they left.
A month later, as the semester drew to a close, The copy room was down to about 8 editors. He took his last and most important exam on a Thursday - Calculus and got a 92/100. It meant that his final grade was going to be a B+ and his dreams of Michigan Business School were likely gone. He went to the holiday party at the Editor’s house that night, thinking that maybe he could have a word, you know, with the editor, about writing at the paper. But everyone was surprised to see him there. He stood off to the side while the senior group sat around a large table and told war stories. He finished half a beer and when he thought that the hallway between the kitchen and the front door was clear for a moment he slid out.
Over Christmas break Neal and his Dad had a heart to heart and he decided to finish out Freshman year at Michigan, then transfer to a local university for business school. He started on the applications right after Christmas.
When he returned to Ann Arbor for Winter semester, he hesitated to go back to the paper, but finally decided to give it one more shot; it had actually been fun to work there with the group of guys from the dorm. He approached the editor before classes began.
“Yeeees.” The editor was still in the same position as four months earlier. Neal asked about getting a writing assignment or two.
“Ahh, well do you know any copy editors that you could persuade to come in 5 nights a week for two hours and proof copy?”
“No, I mean I already like recruited five copy editors, I don’t have a closet full of others.”
“Well, that’s what’s gotta happen, right?”
Neal raised his eyebrows and lifted his shoulders. And after an embarrassing thirty seconds he turned and left, thinking how absurd it is to expect him to backfill his role, but evidently the chief editor had become used to Neal’s ability to find new copy people.
At a new semester hall kegger Neal told the group about the editor’s demand, which Neal called a “smart ass” move. One of the guys, Joe, spoke up: “I only did this because I thought it would be fun, hang out, have some laughs, but I’m having second thoughts. I mean they treat us like crap, right? And it’s not like we’re getting credit or anything.”
“Well,” answered Neal, “it’s not like we couldn’t take matters into our own hands. I mean, so many of the articles we read are lousy, we could just rewrite some and publish them. I don’t think anyone would notice, really.”
They all leaned in and laughed at the thought of becoming writers on the low down. The more they thought about it the better the idea became. Beer is helpful in these cases. It also occurred to them that a lot of what they read in the paper reflected a one sided view of the world, which now as experienced college men, they could not only question but easily denigrate with arguments and opinions of their own. They decided to go for it. They would rewrite the paper to their own liking.
The first full week of classes gave them their first chance. Neal did the movie review first, Bread and Chocolate, since by coincidence he’d gone to the movie with a few kids from the dorm. The rewritten article was published and not a word about it was heard. The group laughed hysterically about this and their confidence in the scheme took root.
Joe was anxious to rewrite an article and found the perfect one a couple of days later. It was about a kerfuffle at a church that adjoined campus. The new minister had started a free lunch program for the destitute which the neighbors complained about since their children now shared the sidewalk with assorted bums and low lives, many of them high or drunk or both. Of course the article slanted against the parents who were suspected of un-Christian attitudes by the writer, an atheist; a writer, Joe knew, who came from a neighborhood of million dollar homes and had never been accosted by an aggressive drunk. The rewrite removed the slant, posting a more realistic view of the vagrants and especially the minister who Joe quoted from copious notes taken by the original writer, hinting that she was more interested in her own self-aggrandizement, and finding new parishioners for the collection plate, than the plight of drunks in need of a meal.
It went on like this. Neal, Joe, Rick, Myles, Ted and Will rewrote all the back page articles providing a more balanced reporting on work that had originally been written as fashionable and thinly disguised editorials. They called the writers “punks” when they talked among themselves, laughing at their audacity. The code for a rewrite was the article “got punked.” Soon, it then became the writer got punked, as in “Ethan got punked,” or “Nora got punked.”
The paper was published time and again with all the rewritten articles and without so much as a word of rebuke. Neal’s ambition, apparently unbounded, drew him to rewriting the front page, too. There was a long article about “Unilateral Disarmament,” a big topic on campus that year, the first year of Reagan’s presidency. Of course the article’s writer could find no possible objection to such an obviously sane and rational idea; getting rid of nuclear weapons in the face of Soviet belligerence was extraordinarily appealing to the “nitwit editors,” as they were now known by the merry band of rewriters.
Neal cut some of addled opinions of the writer and added several paragraphs denouncing the idea with quotes from a Professor Mendelson, a man who left the Army after WWII an avowed communist, but as an historian of the Soviet Union had done an about face on the regime and the ideas that had produced both Lenin and Stalin, not to mention Berea, the infamous head of their secret police. “Reagan was right to call them the evil empire,” and the rewrite noted the professor’s studied opinion.
Another article on Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s interest rate hikes to break the inflation consuming the country’s energy and pocketbook was also rewritten to include a few reminders of how inflation hurt working people the most, and again adding several quotes from a university economics professor named Shapiro that the paper had on file; he was also the current President of the U! Yes the recession was deep and hurtful, but the inflation it meant to deal with was not new or benign, the rewrite noted.
This went along for several weeks. Will, from Chicago, announced the completion of each edition’s rewrite by singing “Daily’s final market,” mimicking the boy’s on North Michigan Avenue selling the Tribune. Spring break came and went, and the paper became more popular (many fewer of them were thrown out when not picked up and read). But a problem none of the rewriters had thought of eventually surfaced. The readers of the paper, prior to the rewrites, were used to one particular point of view. When the rewritten articles appeared, not much was made of it. After all it was just a student newspaper and new writers came and went as you would expect. But when many weeks passed and the paper’s new band of rewriters took root and their confidence increased, the letters to the editor suddenly increased as well. The lethargic editor suddenly found himself knee deep in vitriol from readers upset at the changes. Those who sported the No Nukes pins were incensed, as were the Socialists and Communists who expected, as the history of the paper suggested, a stronger renunciation of the Reagan administration at the very least. Instead, their letters denounced the “pablum written by business and engineering school rabble soused with their own material self-interests” and “unable to produce a single thread of empathy for their fellow man.”
At first the Editor, a portly fifth year senior whose desk was littered with used paper plates in and amongst the pile of papers and notes, was delighted to receive a few letters from the normally moribund readership. But his drowsy imagination, long on siesta, finally awoke and he went back and reread the front page and several of his own editorials. He started padding around the office, noticeably agitated, questioning all the writers currently in the building. They all in turn started to reread their work and with the same outcome. Anger, some if it performative let’s be honest, shot out of every mouth in the newsroom. Some of the writers actually quietly thought their work improved with the inclusion of alternative points of view, of which they had not previously been aware, while still livid over the abuse of their byline. Some of them, hoping to procure internships at big city papers over the summer, were aghast that they’d clipped out their work, rewritten and unread, and included it in the portfolio they’d sent to prospective employers. A general meeting was called immediately and all the writers assembled that evening to go over how this happened, who was behind it, which, in their rage, they had not actually thought through yet.
Neal and his merry band were on their way to the paper from East Quad, crossing the diag in the center of campus when they caught up to a couple of the writers going in their direction. Whoa, they said, overhearing the convo up ahead, they’re on to us! The writers walked on in the direction of the paper’s offices, angrily discussing the rewrites of their articles, and the amigos veered due north to a coffee shop near State and Liberty.
Amazingly it still took a couple of days before the staff understood what happened, and that turn only came because Neal’s copy editor group stopped coming to work. That the copy editors had rewritten stories, editorials and even posted a few original items under false names finally dawned on the editors and their faculty advisors. While the rewrite effort was universally denounced, several people, including faculty, admitted publicly that the paper was better off after the rewrites. Why the original writer of a long column on unilateral disarmament hadn’t sought out the University’s own expert on the Soviet Union was an embarrassing question, but to the paper’s credit, it was publicly asked.
The end of the term finally arrived. No one ever approached Neal or the other volunteers who had aided and abetted the whole rewrite scheme. There was no interest from the faculty, or the staff or the leadership at the paper, to keep the caper in the headlines. They memory holed the whole affair as quickly as possible. Neal left the University that April at the end of exams and a last night of wild drinking with the rewrite band.
He enrolled at Wayne State the next September and continued his business and life experience at the Detroit campus. He enjoyed a fine career and just this year, at age 65, sold his partnership in a local engineering firm. He still writes the occasional letter to the editor and hopes one day to see a letter, a single letter, published. He has renewed his friendship with several of the other copy editors on social media. They meet every year for a friendly round of golf. It is when they relax at the 19th hole that the subject inevitably returns to their great caper of rewriting the Michigan Daily. Of course it’s not like they’re the ‘band of brothers’ at Shakespeare’s Agincourt, but they do share a part in a great caper and there’s a certain pride in having pulled it off, to have brought the arrogant writers and editors down a peg by improving, not harming, the paper. And to this day, it’s really their secret, not something to brag about to family and friends - how could they understand? - and you certainly couldn’t add it to a resume. But among themselves, their laughing faces framed by missing or greyed hair, they take pride in having bent the universe of ideas in their own direction, if only for one semester.
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This story won Top in Fiction for third week of April!
Delightful memoir in itself, that also brought back memories of seeing Bread and Chocolate at that time mid-late 1970s …. in the USSR…. 🥹😄☺️😉 Thank you 🙏👏😍