It’s been a while, but I’ll tell you what I can remember.

I met the (eventual) news editor of Pipe Dream, Marc Springer, in 1972. We became friends my freshman year, first floor Chenango (now defunct — the dorm, not our friendship). Junior year, he told me about an opening at the paper. This was after I bailed on my extracurricular gig of the first two years — Harpur’s Ferry. The saving lives/EMT/pre-med track, it turned out, was not for me. I had joined Harpur’s Ferry in 1972 along with another freshman, Rick Markello; we studied, trained, and became EMTs together, and were going to run the organization by our senior year. I quit in 1974; Rick was executive director by 1975.

So: Pipe Dream. Marc said I would be working the headline machine and helping edit and write headlines. My unofficial title would be Headline Guy — there was no official title. I’d also have gofer responsibilities. But I would get paid by the hour (no pay at Harpur’s Ferry).

I loved it. Not only did I get to read articles and massage and create headlines, but it was about 20 or 30 steps to the pub, so I was getting paid and had a bar nearby!

Before working there, I appeared in the paper along with several of my dorm mates in a photo taken after we as freshmen, had quietly snowed in the door of a couple of sleeping, whiny sophomores and forced them to “wake up” to an impromptu performance of a nastily reworded Everly Brothers’ song. They opened their door to a solid, packed wall of snow, right to the top. Hilarity ensued, and a commemorative photo was taken and published in Pipe Dream, as I recall.

Another photo was of me and several friends — all wearing identical masks depicting a weird, smiling, old bald man. We had spent the afternoon, the masks as our only costumes, approaching people in various groups and pairings, gesturing and dancing around, no speaking, and then walking away. We got a group shot at the end of the day. Just before graduation, I grabbed the originals of both photos from the files, as someone in the newsroom told me they were “gonna get tossed eventually.”

As unofficial Headline Guy, I wrote a very clever headline about Larry Coryell playing on campus, when the concert was delayed due to Binghamton weather. His band of recent years had been called Foreplay, and the shortened concert was reviewed as problematic. The headline (I think) I came up with was something like “Not Enough Foreplay as Coryell Comes Late.” The author may claim the title was his or hers, but I enjoy giving Headline Guy the credit. After searching through multiple issues of Pipe Dream on the NYS Historic Newspapers website today for clarity, I’ve got bupkis.

There were plenty of late nights working on Pipe Dream. In fact, I just found another photo of me and the team taken around 2:40 in the morning. We took the photo as we were putting the issue to bed. It’s a picture of those members of the management and staff still around at the end of a long night. As we were finishing our April Fools issue that year, everybody was required to look pissed off.

The guy wearing the Nazz shirt in the photo was the main music guy on the newsroom team. Memorably, he showed up one evening in fall 1975 and started playing Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” and kept playing it (flipping the LP, side A to B to A to…) the whole night. I didn’t know much about Bruce before then, but by the end of the night I was sold. I returned to Binghamton with a car full of friends for a one-night visit when Bruce played Broome County Arena in March 1977 during the “Lawsuit” tour.

I only had one piece of writing published in Pipe Dream. It was an extraordinarily difficult and esoteric rock music quiz. One of the questions was based on knowledge of an imaginary band that only five other people knew about. It’s highly unlikely anyone on campus got 100%.

After graduation, I didn’t pursue journalism. I went on to scientific research on antihypertensive drugs, got a PhD in Pharmacology in Westchester NY, did electrophysiology research in Houston, Texas on marine gastropod mollusks, worked on G protein-coupled receptors at Mount Sinai in New York City while getting my Juris Doctor at night, and spent several years as a patent attorney in law firms in NYC, at a drug company in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and lastly for a distributed, wholly online law firm during COVID.

I am now happily retired in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, scanning the web for invitations to write think pieces for alumni newspapers.