Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

College of St. Benedict

After deciding that the financial and physical loads of operating a multi-newspaper group were too stressful, I decided it was time to move on to something less demanding. It must have been an ad in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that caught my eye. The College of St. Benedict wanted a news director. College public relations at a Catholic institution seemed like something I could do and it might prove interesting. I also thought the collegiate atmosphere would be stimulating. How wrong I was.

My interview was with one of the vice presidents, Tom Elman. I was a bit disillusioned to discover that he was their man in charge of getting bequests and grants. That seemed like an unlikely area in which to publicize the achievements of the university. It turned out that my job consisted mainly of putting out a weekly campus bulletin and sending out news releases to home town papers of students to publicize their achievements.

I also was interviewed by the president of the university, a lay woman, Dr. Miller. All she wanted to know was why I wanted to be there. I told her I thought it would be an interesting job and that the university atmosphere might be conducive to doing some writing. Both she and Elman seemed to be easy to work with.

I attended the large faculty meetings and administrative staff meetings looking for something to publicize about the school. It was here that I began to learn something about collegiate people, lay and religious. Their intellectual property, the knowledge stored in their brain, is all they really own, and they guard it with a religious fervor. People with doctorate degrees seem to feel they are the final authority on any matter. There is as much backbiting and jealousy at such a place as in the business world.

The College of St. Benedict was also the convent for the Benedictine order of nuns. The order had two classes. One included the intellectuals who did the teaching at the college and elsewhere. The others were the housekeepers and cooks who performed more menial tasks.

When we took up residence at Beaver lake south of St. Cloud, near the hamlet of Luxemburg the parish had a parochial school staffed by four nuns from St. Benedict. In the short time we were there the number of nuns teaching at the school dwindled from four to one. Their salaries went to the Benedictine order and consequently as the number of teaching nuns declined the income to the order also dwindled.

Yet with the number of nuns decreasing and consequently the income to the order, that did not stop the order from spending $7 million to remodel the college chapel. That seemed like a poor decision to me. With less income to maintain the elderly nuns living at the convent, it didn't seem a wise business decision to splurge $7 million on a frill, that, while beautiful, did not pay the bills.

Another thing that astounded me when I was at St. Ben's was the financial mismanagement that went on. After I left I learned that the college treasurer was forced out under a cloud and there seemed to be some other hanky-panky that went on.

The nuns had some quirks that they wanted followed precisely. One was that instead of writing a news release that mentioned a nun as Sr. Colman O'Connell, the style was to be just S. Colman O'Connell, a single letter for their title. The nuns might understand what that S. meant but to use it in a news release to the public could be confusing, I thought. For all the public knew the S. might be the initial for a first name. So I did as they bid on campus but I fudged a bit to use Sr. in news releases. If the priests were known as Fr. why shouldn't the sisters be called Sr.?

The nuns also seemed fussy about the name of the college. They didn't like such slang as St. Ben's. They wanted the name spelled out in full, as the College of Saint Benedict.

A fussy nun in the English department let me know in no uncertain terms that she didn't like my style of writing. She objected most about my use of the word couple for two. I told her that I had written that way for newspapers for many years without objection and that I thought it was correct for the job I was doing. She didn't buy it.

When the second year rolled around I was startled to see that the man who hired me, Tom Elman, was dismissed by the board for poor performance. There went one of my links to the school. Shortly thereafter the board did not renew the contract of Dr. Miller as president. There went the other of my links to the school. It became apparent that there had been a growing sentiment among the nuns that one of them should be heading the school. The one chosen was Sr. Elizabeth Renner, who happened to be the sister of Robert Renner, a state legislator who sat behind me in my first term in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

I got along well with Sr. Renner and took her to a meeting of the St. Cloud Kiwanis club, where I was a member, to be the guest speaker at one meeting. I approached her to ask if it would be possible to have my office attached to her office so I could better report on important activities of the school. She said it was the decision that I be assigned to the Admissions office where Mike Ryan was in charge. That is another story.

Mike ran the Admissions office. He had a crew of young, beer-drinking recruiters, recent grads of St. John's and St. Ben's, who went around to college fairs held at high schools to explain the virtues of the two schools and get some of the prospects to sign up. Mike organized picnics and games for them to keep them pepped up and unified.

I didn't fit that mold. I was like a fifth wheel. I suppose the connection I was supposed to have with his department was that I wrote news releases about the students while his young cadre went into the field to contact the prospects.

Mike didn't like to have me, as an older man, in his department. It seemed to make him feel uncomfortable. On one occasion while I was driving him to a meeting in the twin cities he asked me how long I planned to stay on the job. I told him I hoped it would be when I retired. That wasn't what he wanted to hear.

Late in the spring of my second year there, Mike came to my office and said he planned to make a change. I probably could have charged him with age discrimination. If I resigned quietly he would provide me with a letter of recommendation for a new job. There wasn't much point in making a fuss about it so I used up what was left of my vacation and was done July 1.

As a replacement Mike hired a young woman reporter from the St. Paul paper who lasted only eight months before she quit.

Mike actually did me a favor. I soon signed on with Volkmuth Printing in St. Cloud as an account representative at a much better salary. As for Mike, several years later the campus security came to his office, took his keys and drove him home unceremoniously. I never heard why he was terminated in that fashion.

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