Did you ever prove yourself to someone older?

Yes. It took me several hours of having this screen open, with the topic before me, to think of the right time…and I just thought of it.

This takes us back to 1992, when I was just a little freshman at Northwestern. My favorite class was my radio class. I loved the radio station. Just thinking about it makes me feel happy. When I go back to the college now, the radio station is in the Jesse Dunn Annex, but back in the day, we and the TV station were the only souls in Vinson Hall. It was delightful then. Just our own little gang of oddballs, hanging out in an empty former dormitory, playing music or recording TV pieces.

I liked my first radio class, taught by Bob M., a lot. He always seemed like a really nice guy, and a friend, to me. Everything he told me was amazing, and the gospel truth. I pity today’s radio students who don’t know how to back up records one-quarter turn or to turn cassette tapes back with a pencil before playing them.

The college students who made up the staff were great too. Nicole, Paula, Stuart…these were seriously cool people. I loved it when I could hang out with them and they included me, even though I hadn’t known them before. I remember helping to write a commercial for Sunset Road and we recorded it. I was the only freshman there at the time, and it was pretty neat for a starry-eyed kid like yours truly.

I wished I could work there, and there was actually a job open. I hadn’t been able to find any E&G work, which was part of my financial aid package. All the jobs across campus were filled. But Mr. M. had five hours of work study for a music secretary. That meant the person who typed all the new music titles in the computer, then printed out the giant spreadsheets (on big green and white paper with holes on the sides) for the DJs to use. Mr. M. didn’t want to hire a freshman; he wanted someone with experience at the station. I begged…I wheedled…I whined to be hired, but oddly enough, he didn’t hire me.

All this time, new music is coming in, and no one is typing it in. If you wanted to find a certain song, you had to look in the books, hoping and praying it was there, and when it wasn’t, you had to look at all of the backs of the CDs to find the right one. And these weren’t regular CDs…these were collections with all kinds of different artists on them. It took a while to scan all of them trying to find the right one, and the natives were getting restless.

Finally, I decided to do something. The radio station was closed on the weekends, and with Stuart’s permission, I took the papers out of all of the CD jewel cases. I took them home, put paper in my electric typewriter (it was lavender colored paper, of all things) and got ready to type. Before I started, I went through all of the CDs (and there were like 20 of them, with probably 25-30 songs per CD) and alphabetized each song by artist on a piece of paper. Then I typed them all, in alphabetical order, using the typewriter.

On Monday, I got to the radio station first thing. The morning show was going…I think they called themselves the breakfast flakes(?)…were on the air. I handed over the purple log and put all the papers back in the CD cases. Everyone was happy to get it!

I went to class, which was just down the hall in VH100. That afternoon I was back at the radio station for another class, and Mr. M. caught up with me.

“Regina,” said he, holding the purple pages, “Did you do this?”

I told him I did. He asked how, and I told him what I’d done.

Mr. M. was impressed. Very impressed. He told me that the music secretary’s job was hard – very hard – and I would have to go to Shockley Hall, where the big computer mainframe thing was, and get the passwords from Bob and figure out the program all by myself…but if I was willing to do it, the job was mine.

I did it. I had proven myself to Mr. Robert L. “Rockin'” M. (our term, not his) and I had landed the position that I had been striving for all that time.

I was so excited that I just about danced all the way to Shockley Hall.

It was hard. And it was scary going in and talking to Bob, and asking for help, and getting it done. But I did it. I liked it so much, I kept doing it. The next year, my title was Music Director. Nothing really changed about it, but it did sound better. I did other stuff at the station in later years, like Program Director and co-Station Manager, but I always kept that music job. Even now, I still kind of miss doing it.

Before I graduated from college, the big fat continuous folded green and white paper spreadsheet metamorphosed into two books with white spiral binding on the sides and red laminated covers with Northwestern emblems on them. I went to the print shop and would get the edges (where you’d normally have to tear the paper on the dotted line) cut off, and the dotted edges too. Then I’d manually turn every page so they would all be facing the same way. I’d punch new holes and attach a spiral binder. I’d re-use the laminated covers until they got ratty, and then I’d do new ones.

I typed the titles and artists of CDs, cassettes, 45 and 33 1/3 records and carts. I still remember the names and artists of so many songs – some that I don’t know the tune to. Sometimes I dreaded getting it done – especially at the beginning of the year when the passwords had to be reset and a summer of music accumulation had taken place, but I still loved typing in the cluttered little room in Shockley Hall, watching the giant blade of the paper cutter chop the edges off, smelling the ink as I turned the pages to face in one direction, holding the finished product in my hands, and handing it over each month to the hands of the DJ on shift at the time.

When I went back for homecoming a couple years ago, I saw the green and white pages of the log sitting on a lower shelf by the radio board. It wasn’t one of mine, so obviously they found someone to replace me, as unbelievable as that is, ha ha. It had gone back to its original form as one long sheet of folded up paper with holes on the sides. It was ratty; I don’t think they updated it anymore, since everything is all coolio and on the computer now – a computer right there in the control room, can you believe that business? But they still had it for when someone wanted to play a moldy oldie, I guess. It made me feel happy, and nostalgic, to see it there. It reminded me of the good times, and the days spent at the radio station and all the great memories I’d made there. Seeing those pages brought all back.

And…I also felt secretly ecstatic that it didn’t look as good as it did back in my day.

Success!