Mark Woodhams

Wildcat alumni employees date back as early as World War II

When Abe Chanin started receiving phone calls from the UA president's office, he figured he missed one too many classes.

He was wrong.

Chanin, former editor in chief of The Wildcat - the UA's school paper at the time - was threatened with expulsion by then-university President Alfred Atkinson because of an editorial he had written criticizing the internment of Japanese-Americans.

The year was 1942, and World War II was in full swing.

"He said, 'Mr. Chanin, you have to write a retraction or I have to pull you from school,'" Chanin said of his conversation with Atkinson. "I told him to go ahead and suspend me - I was in the reserves and just waiting to go to war."

Chanin never wrote the retraction and Atkinson never suspended him.

Fifty years later, Chanin and 12 other former reporters, editors, business managers and advisers will be recognized for their contributions to the Arizona Daily Wildcat as a part of the paper's inaugural Alumni Hall of Fame class.

The class will be inducted tonight at 6 at the University of Arizona Journalism Department's 50th anniversary banquet at the Doubletree Hotel, 445 S. Alvernon Way.

2001 class of the Arizona Daily Wildcat Alumni Hall of Fame Edith Auslander Gilbert Bailon Terrence L. Bauer Donald Carson Robert Cauthorn Abe Chanin Richard Gilman Hugh Harelson (deceased) Clyde D. Lowery Douglas Martin (deceased) Mort Rosenblum Frank Sotomayor Charles Waters

For many in the inaugural class, the banquet will serve as a chance to remember where their careers started.

"Oh, man - the Wildcat was a chance to do journalism," said Charlie Waters, a 1969 UA graduate and current executive editor and senior vice president of the Fresno Bee. "It's a great training ground, a chance to actually do it. For people to succeed, they have to have a chance to fail. That's OK."

Clyde Lowery, an inductee who served as managing editor of the Tucson Citizen before coming to the Wildcat in 1973 as the paper's first full-time adviser, said the experience of working with students far outweighs dealing with so-called professionals.

"It was much better," he said. "We would operate pretty much as we wanted. Student publications in general are the freest press there is. There's no publisher snooping around."

Members of the class include, among others, author and professor Don Carson, Associated Press writer Mort Rosenblum and the late Hugh Harelson, former publisher of Arizona Highways.

"The class says a lot about the Daily Wildcat as a training ground," said Mark Woodhams, director of Arizona Student Media, which runs the Wildcat, KAMP student radio and TV-3. "In newsrooms throughout the city, state and country, there are people who cut their teeth at the Wildcat."

The class was chosen by nearly 2,000 Wildcat alumni who sent their nominations this summer to a selection committee. The committee then narrowed the choices to 13 members.

Though there is no permanent location to honor Wildcat hall-of-famers yet, Woodhams said the Hall of Fame is already an integral part of the paper's new newsroom, which will open inside Park Student Union in the summer of 2003.

And though much has changed since Chanin's days as editor, he said the experience is still the same.

"The Wildcat was produced in a boiler room in the Engineering building," said Chanin, now 80 years old. "We loved it. We didn't know any better."