Even before he embarked on his 40-year career as a professional journalist, Ed Kohn had already covered enough drama to fill many a reporter’s lifetime. If police were brandishing batons, protesters were rioting or shots were firing at Stanford in the heaving early ’70s, chances were decent the details would be in the next day’s Stanford Daily under Kohn’s byline.
But for Kohn, every Daily story—not just the ones that swirled in chaos—is a vital record of campus life, which is why he was back at Stanford on his own dime in the spring of 2013. Kohn, ’73, was helping another former Daily staffer, Charlie Hoffman, ’73, MBA ’76, with perhaps the ultimate acknowledgment of the paper’s importance—the creation of an online archive digitally preserving every Daily since Volume 1, Edition 1, rolled off the presses on September 19, 1892.
It was a project that had begun gathering steam four years earlier, after the opening of the Daily’s sleek new offices on Panama Mall culminated a decade-long effort to secure the paper a modern home. With that accomplished, staffers and alumni backers in the Friends of the Stanford Daily turned their attention to how else to position for the future. The vast archive beckoned.
But dragging 120 years of daily journalism into the Internet age is more easily said than done—as Kohn’s two weeks of volunteering would show. By then, contractors had already scanned rolls upon rolls of microfilm, but the results were replete with gremlins—unreadable scans, duplicate pages, missing stories, mislabeled editions and the like.
And so Hoffman, the project’s main architect, with Kohn, spent weeks diving through the Daily’s hardbound volumes, searching for missing stories and trying to resolve the confusion from mislabeling. (Throughout the paper’s history, staffers have often forgotten to change edition numbers.) By the time they finished stacking volumes to take to FedEx for further scanning, even the 6-foot-7 Hoffman was stretching to reach the top of the towers.
But fortune apparently favors the dedicated. When Hoffman and Kohn found holes in the record, a fix proved close at hand. Inexplicably, issues from the fall of 1974 were neither in the library’s microfilm nor in the paper’s bound collection, but a call to their old associate Dave Robinson, ’75, the editor in chief during the missing time, soon filled the void. Robinson went down to his basement, rummaged under some old Little League scores, and added his personal bound volume, the traditional prize of each editor in chief, to the effort.
More daunting was realizing that none of the special Saturday sports editions from the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have been preserved. “I was horrified,” Kohn says. “I couldn’t imagine who would have them.” But then a current Daily staffer referred them to Jim Rutter, ’86, Stanford’s volunteer sports archivist, who had virtually the full run in his files, many of them as pristine as the day he had picked them up as a child. “I have been waiting for years for someone to make a request like that,” Rutter says. “It was my Rose Bowl.”
And, so, by luck and diligence the Daily’s online archive pushed closer to its comprehensive goal. You can never fully know what else may be out there, says Hoffman—perhaps the paper put out special issues in 1910 or 1920 or 1930 that he didn’t even know to look for. And as of the writing of this article, a lost exchange of data meant no stories yet from fall 1961 to spring 1963. But they hope they’ve captured most everything else: 998,500 articles and counting.
It’s not perfect. Some words were rendered nonsensical by the automated software. (Readers may register to correct typos.) And it’s certainly not all scintillating (Exhibit A: “Last Tuesday’s Lecture,” a front-page headline on the very first Daily). But for anyone with more than a passing interest in Stanford history, the result is a feast at the fingertips—and a long way from squinting at microfilm in the basement of Green Library.
Want to see freshman tennis sensation John McEnroe, ’81, demonstrating his swing in shorts and a sports coat in his Wilbur dorm room? Or the two editions the paper somehow put out the day of the 1906 earthquake? Or the front-page photo of GSB student John F. Kennedy registering for the draft? Or the banner headline announcing the end of a cap on female enrollment? They’re just a search away.
For some, the pleasures are more personal. Sarah Maisel, ’14, the latest in a string of Daily COOs to shepherd the project, gets a smile from the strangeness of seeing the byline of her father, Ivan, ’81, senior writer for ESPN, above stories about sports other than college football. For others, they come from the thrill of new insight. Barbara Wilcox, a master’s student researching Stanford life during World War I, found an unexpected window into harsh restrictions on women during and after the war, including the Motor Rule, which as late as 1921 prohibited female students from “motoring after seven-thirty unchaperoned.”
Such restrictions, including curfews, put the screws to the Daily’s first female editor in chief, Ruth Taylor, Class of 1919, whose responsibilities to the paper obviously required late nights, Wilcox says.
“I don’t know if I would have bothered to page through years’ worth of microfilm to get the whole story,” she says.
Part of the fun for others is in discovering that the archive exists at all. Launched without fanfare last summer, it has delighted users who stumbled upon the resource during Internet searches. Won Gi Jung, a freshman taking a class on the death of Jane Stanford, had been frustrated by his inability to find press accounts of the Gilbert Affair, a scandal that exacerbated tensions between Mrs. Stanford and David Starr Jordan, the university’s president, and which continues to stoke conspiracy theories about Jordan’s involvement in her death.
Jung could find no mention of the tryst—which involved a professor close to Jordan and a woman who worked in the library—in three San Francisco papers. And so he tried a last-ditch attempt at entering keywords into Google and suddenly found himself with an anonymous reference to the matter from a Daily published in 1901. “It really was a magnificent discovery for me,” he says.
Of course, the trove comes with the unspoken caveat that you can’t believe everything you read, especially in a student paper. Amateur journalists balancing deadlines and the rest of college life aren’t necessarily reliable sources for gospel truth or deep analysis. And even the best of them operate under the unique pressure of trying to cover their peers fairly. That’s no easy task, especially during times of strife, says Philip Taubman, who, like Kohn, chronicled campus trouble. (Headline over a double byline from the two: “Police Arrest 23; Break Up Sit-In With Swift Early Morning Sweep.”)
Taubman, ’70, who went on to a long career with the New York Times and is now a consulting professor at Stanford, makes for a telling example of the angles on major history captured by campus journalists. As a freshman, he was sent to meet Martin Luther King Jr. at San Francisco International Airport, writing a front-page account from their 45-minute drive back to the university. Less than a year later, he was reporting the campus reaction to King’s assassination.
Regardless of the reservations, the Daily was typically the only resource covering much of campus life, and that alone makes its new accessibility invaluable for someone like Miriam Palm, who is researching the biographies of people who lived in campus homes for the Stanford Historical Society. One recent uncovered treasure: an obituary for Gordon Davis, chief of Stanford police from 1941 to 1968 and a longtime campus resident who, unlike many professors, left few obvious traces.
“It’s not the last word, but it’s a pretty good first word,” says Stanford history professor emeritus David Kennedy, ’63, who is interested in the Daily’s coverage of his fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega, which had its national charter lifted in 1961 for refusing to back down from pledging four Jewish students.
Indeed, the biggest frustration for modern readers might just be that the Daily staffers couldn’t see the future. Those hoping for vivid accounts of John Steinbeck, ’23, during his six years on campus have to content themselves with little more than the irony of a page 2 brief announcing the future Nobel laureate as one of six “neophytes” elected to the English Club.
But even glancing mentions can make for small gems. The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ’48, JD ’52, is one of two bylines on a humor column that belies the stern visage that was often his public face: “I know a woman who was abroad once—of course now she’s married and perfectly respectable.” Bad joke, fascinating tidbit.
In a later edition, a young Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52, appears with another female prelaw student in a photo with a visiting candidate for California attorney general that gives a whiff of the sexism that made it so hard for the future first female justice to start her legal career. “Meeting the Gals...,” it begins.
Her 1952 engagement notice to John O’Connor, ’51, JD ’53, is another nugget, though one that’s arguably upstaged by a different kind of insight into times past. Just to the corner of the announcement, a large ad boasts “Nose, Throat and Accessory Organs Not Affected by Smoking Chesterfields: First Such Report Ever Published About Any Cigarette.”
“You can very much get your finger on the pulse of a time,” says Hoffman, whose long history with the Daily includes founding the Friends booster group in 1991. “It is the most complete record of Stanford life.”
But the project, which cost roughly $250,000, is about more than satisfying people’s curiosity, Hoffman says. Ultimately, students at the paper will determine its use. Still, in a tight time for all print publications, the Daily included, the archive opens possibilities for monetizing the paper’s near monopoly on coverage of more than a century of day-to-day happenings on campus—perhaps by allowing patrons to sponsor certain volumes, perhaps by charging for access.
For Kohn, preserving the past is an investment in the future well worth his weeks of volunteering. “I spent a lot of time at the Daily, I worked hard at the Daily. I learned a lot at the Daily,” he says. “I want to make sure the experience is available to future generations.”
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.
