The following are excerpts from essays written by CD alumni reflecting on their tenure at the student paper. The essays, and directions on how to submit your own recollections, can be found on the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association’s web site, www.cdalumni.org.

1958 by Tom Hawley
The paper was printed by the University Press with the letterpress process, which required more skills than the present computer-generated copy. It was my job several nights a week to watch over the production and proof read before printing. If there was open space, I usually threw in a free ad for Ballentine beer or a bit of support for Rock Weir and the annual Alumni Game at the end of Spring football practice. It must be remembered that beer was an essential nutrient for aging alumni and was rolled on the field at time outs to refresh the returning alumni.

1967 by Dick Dyas
For the Openings Weekend edition that year, we selected a front-page photo of a painted mural in Memorial Gym, showing a nude reclining. It did not appear in the Friday edition—there was only a blank spot with a meaningless cutline. The manager of the University Press had removed it without advising us. The editorials the next week were withering, and Dean Runk advised us on Friday that the University Press would no longer print The Cavalier Daily. After several calls to former staffers, we learned of a newspaper in Culpeper, the Star-Exponent, that might be amenable to printing us. The editorial board traveled to Culpeper, met with the editor, who was an alumnus, and told him of our plight. He was incensed by Dean Runk’s action and agreed to print our paper and drop it in Charlottesville each day, at a price that was one half what we had been paying the University Press.

1970 Bob Cullen
... The paper was blissfully unenlightened about feminism in general. I recall that one of the staples of our national advertising budget was something called the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute. It regularly placed big ads that featured a photo of a fetching, recumbent girl in a very short skirt. She was smiling and she had a book somewhere in front of her, but it didn’t look as if she was smiling because she could read 800 words a minute. These ads irritated some of the pioneering feminists at the University, who were enrolled in the graduate school or the education school. They protested by ripping the offending page out of the paper and scrawling across it in red marker, “The CD is sexist.” Sometime in the early morning hours, they taped the marked-up pages to the doors of our offices. They even taped one to the door of my office that said, “Bob Cullen is sexist.” It took me a while to realize they did not mean I was handsome and attractive.

1973 Steve Wells
... While editor-in-chief, I received a note from a third-year law student challenging me to a duel on the Lawn as part of a raging battle over whether the third-party candidate he supported in the 1972 presidential election should get treatment from the CD equal to that afforded Nixon and McGovern. Finally, after a rancorous extended battle over it, the managing board voted and overruled me, 3-1 (for the only time that year), and we gave him the equal coverage he demanded. The following day, I received a note from him saying he’d arrive in my office that afternoon for a “spleen-venting” session during which I could spend as much time as I wanted telling him exactly what I thought of him. At first I thought it was a joke, but when I realized it wasn’t, I had someone call him off.

1980 Rick Neel
… It was the end of transition week at the paper, and I was looking forward to taking over the reins the next day as editor-in-chief of a proud and venerable student newspaper. My reverie ended abruptly; I would have no honeymoon; I found myself in the middle of a crisis even before my first day on the job. [Then-University President Frank] Hereford had picked the most vulnerable time for The Cavalier Daily in which to launch his strike.
Hereford did not summon our managing board to his office to be officially informed until Monday, April 2 (my second day as editor-in-chief). Twenty-four years later, I can still see Hereford leaning back in his chair and trying to get his pipe started with his hands visibly shaking. Of course, he wasn’t the only nervous guy in the room that day. (For more of this story, see Page 4.)

1992 Kim Ramsey
… The newsroom was an exciting, frustrating, alive space. Four daily editorial departments—news, opinion, lifestyles, and sports—each had a single desk and shared the bank of six computer terminals against the wall. Phones rang, interviews were conducted, stories written, pages composed—all within that one green-carpeted room. Nothing was quiet or secret.
While the University’s news was being spread on the front pages of the CD, the news of the CD was spread—and often created—in the newsroom. Put nearly 100 college-age men and women together in a small space for as many as 50 to 60 hours a week, and plenty of grist for the gossip mill develops. Relationships were born and died on a regular basis all within the newsroom’s walls. At one point, there was a sort of Kevin Baconesque chart linking a large number of CD staffers together, with “hooked-up with” replacing “co-starred with.” Opinion editor Rob McWilliams referred to it as “the CD soap opera.”

1993 Lisa Guernsey
…What else do I remember about my CD days? The drug raids top the list. When I was a Life Editor, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency launched a sting operation at several U.Va. fraternities. Even though I wasn’t on the news desk, I still remember rushing out to Rugby Road, seeing the flashing red lights from the cop cars and watching agents in black T-shirts and jackets start to wrap yellow tape around the perimeter of the properties.
A few days later, Trey Hanbury (the other Life editor) and I visited the courthouse to get the documents surrounding the raid. I remember standing at the counter leafing through the docs and trying to write down what I could, since we were not allowed to take them with us and we had not yet persuaded the receptionist that we had a right to copies. I remember writing down details about hallucinogenic mushroom incubators and marijuana-growing paraphernalia, things that sounded utterly exotic to me, a workaholic goodie-two-shoes.