I barely knew Fred. He worked more on the clever side of the paper - writing editorials, columns and reviews. I toiled on the hard news side - gathering and examining facts, writing dry articles, dotting every I and crossing every T.
Our lives twisted together for one day that summer because of a paperwork mix-up at the South Bend Tribune. Both of us had applied for summer internships there. I was hired. He was not.
As I found out much, much later, my job offer was a mistake. The intern coordinator had told Fred he would be hired, but the personnel office sent him a rejection letter instead of me.
Fred had committed to spending his summer in South Bend but didn't have any income. He convinced the editors at The Observer to let him keep the paper running those three extra months. He basically would be its Editor-in-Chief with a skeleton crew handling all aspects of the publication.
I didn't know about any of this until I received a call from Fred during one of my 9-to-5 copy-desk shifts at the Tribune.
For his first edition, June 12, The Observer had accepted an advertisement from National Health Care Services of Cleveland, Ohio. The ad, which covered about a third of Page 14, included lines like “You're not a baby machine” and “If your period is over 14 days late, call us for counseling, legal abortion or other medical and emotional help.”
Some 1,500 copies were printed and dropped off in a 5-foot-high bundle at Stepan Center, where alumni were registering for their annual reunion. Tom Pagna, the alumni association director, thumbed through a copy, noticed the abortion ad, probably said “Yikes” and had his staff move the stack of papers into a back room at Stepan.
When Fred noticed the copies of The Observer weren't available, he tracked them down. After convincing a secretary that Pagna wanted him to take them all back, Fred took his bundle instead to the Huddle, an on-campus hamburger joint for students and staff at the LaFortune Student Center.
Minutes later, the bundle disappeared again.
This controversial advertisement from the June 12, 1975 issue of The Observer sparked a debate... and a lot of pilfered papers.
Fred had heard murmurs that this surreptitious snatching was about the abortion clinic ad, and he decided to confront the university provost, Father James Burtchaell, about what he considered an “out-and-out case of censorship.”
He had a good argument. Four months earlier, The Observer had published a four-page ad, accompanied by signatures of many university officials, asking for a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion. He believed that the clinic's ad provided information about the other side.
Fred needed a writer who was not involved in the controversy, so he asked me to do the reporting. The university's top officers had left for vacation, but I found Robert Ackerman, director of professional development for student affairs, who backed Pagna.
In addition to the abortion ad, Ackerman said, the Notre Dame brass was troubled by an article raising issues about parietals violations at Cavanaugh Hall and a selection of letters on controversial topics Fred had chosen from throughout the school year.
Great, I said. Alumni could see that even Catholic universities like Notre Dame are facing tough issues, including abortion. They could talk this through in peaceful dialogs together and take new perspectives back to their communities. Wouldn't that be a good result?
I don't have my notes from 50 years ago, so I don't know who exactly said it, but the verdict from administrative officials was this: If The Observer's' editors wanted to claim censorship or even sue, that was their prerogative. However, the university could pull in its loans on all The Observer's equipment and stop giving the newspaper rent-free space in the student center.
We would be broke and homeless. Fred and I had both seen the first two Godfather movies by then. We knew the satisfaction of having the moral high ground wasn't worth sleeping with the fishes.
“The University is worth more to us than $94 (the income from the ad),” Fred said.
The June 12 papers were destroyed and the contract with National Health Care Services was nullified. At Notre Dame, Freedom of the Press was going to have some limits.
Fred's career wasn't ruined by this hubbub over an abortion ad or by the fact that I got his internship by mistake. A few years after graduation, he was writing for the National Lampoon. He also wrote jokes for David Letterman, In Living Color, Cheers, Jon Stewart and MTV. He has Emmy Awards. He has a Wikipedia page.
Me? I spent three-plus decades putting words together for the South Bend Tribune. No Emmy Awards but a lifetime's worth of people met, stories written and lessons learned.
One important lesson was that there isn't really a villain during this abortion ad episode. Fred was right. The pro-life advertisement in February and the pro-choice advertisement in June were an equal balance.
Tom Pagna was right. His staff had put enormous effort into organizing the summer's biggest alumni fundraiser, and this stuff with The Observer wasn't going to help.
Father Burtchaell and Bob Ackerman might have been right, too. They held the money and the office keys. And with so few students attending summer school in those days, that dumb little advertisement wasn't likely to actually reach anyone anyway.
Still, it's something to think about. Notre Dame's hierarchy knew that freedom of the press is a constitutional right, protected by the First Amendment. They knew the reason: Access to information is essential if we are going to make good decisions on issues big or small.
Yes, but just not on that day.
This was 50 years ago, and I struggle to recognize the completely different society we have now. Few people subscribe to what we in the business called “the daily miracle.”
In the not-so-long ago, every day, newspapers provided on a reliable schedule the essential, verified, non-partisan truths our readers needed and wanted. Because of that, something like 95 percent of the households in St. Joseph County chose to subscribe to the South Bend Tribune.
This bound our community together. Readers may have disagreed about our community's direction, but we all had access to the same facts.
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. Nixon authorized the Watergate break-in. We saw it, we heard about it, and we found out more by reading the newspapers. It was all true.
There was more. We could choose to read about meetings of local school boards, common councils and drainage commissions. Traffic accidents galore. We shared the same wedding announcements, Little League scores, and Fish Fry advertisements. Those were true too.
Our newspaper and others nationwide have been in decline for the past 25 years. It's no coincidence that our sense of communal truth has vanished as well. We don't know what we know anymore.
We all watched the same riot on TV but, four years later, half of us say it probably never happened. Were we saved by a vaccine or were we imprisoned by a so-called pandemic that was just an overblown outbreak of the flu?
On the local level, do any of us know which South Bend schools are still open and which have been closed? Is it safe to sit at the South Bend Cubs stadium or at the downtown public library? Why were there sirens at 2 a.m. last night?
Do kids still play Little League? Do churches still fry fish?
We have newspapers but they don't inform, enlighten, entertain, and involve. And that probably is why half of your neighbors hate you.
Newspaper publishers will say it was the internet's fault. They saw early on that people were less likely to pay a dollar for our paper when most of the information was going to be on the World Wide Web for free.
That's what publishers say because they don't want to blame themselves. The truth? What newspapers provided was totally different from what we see on the web.
Free internet news information, in most cases, isn't reliable. It isn't verified or non-partisan. It has not been put through the wringer of professional editors who would put the kibosh on a story if the writer hadn't done the real work.
We can talk all day about why this essential profession declined. It might have been a capitalist plot. If people are ignorant, it's easier to convince them to surrender their freedoms.
But at the top of my list is that newsroom leaders, instead of being committed journalists, were business school grads. And instead of listening to readers or journalists, they hired consultants.
They fell for dumb gimmicks. They didn't understand our devotion to accuracy. We would nearly have fistfights in some sections of the newsroom over commas and semicolons. Too loud. Instead, they chose a business model that eliminated disagreeable employees.
When profit margins shrank, we lost newsroom jobs, and publishers hired more consultants to tell them why. The consultants were still there, even after the newsroom was reduced in size, reduced in size again, and reduced in size again.
I could say more, but I can never say enough.
There are few pleasures as great as swapping stories among crusty old news reporters. Some are knee-slappers. We could have gotten ourselves fired or killed. Others are poignant, of moments that we carry with us always, of brave or scared people on the worst days of their lives.
In those moments we share, it's like we're remembering a childhood home as it was, long before a bulldozer knocked it down. For me, one of those stories is about someone in a university van following Fred Graver around, confiscating papers because he ran an item they didn't like.
And we have to admit, the newspaper was never really our family's house anyway. Someone else had the money and the keys.
Ken Bradford was a writer and editor for the South Bend Tribune for 31 years before his retirement in 2010. He began his newspaper career with an article about a banana leaf for LaSalle High School's school newspaper, The Explorer, in 1971.
