Letter to the Editor: Congratulations!

Forty years! Hard to believe that much time has passed – and that much newsprint has rolled through the presses – since the first thin issue of the Tufts Daily landed in the dining halls and dorm lobbies of Tufts University. Having been there at the paper’s birth midway through my sophomore year (and having worked at its precursor, Today Tufts, as well), it’s a thrill to see the Daily has not just survived, but thrived.

It was a far-from-perfect product we put out in those first semesters, but I don’t think we ever missed an issue, and we had a great time being the upstarts who churned out a scrappy and snappy Daily with “All the News That Fits.” In short order, the Daily page count grew from a single folded sheet (four pages) to as many as 24 with a special entertainment section. Working with just an Olivetti electronic typewriter (State of the art! You could see almost a whole sentence on the little screen before hitting “print”!), a Polaroid camera, a Kroy Type machine for headlines, lots of sheets of Letraset (look it up, kids) with all sorts of fonts and images and a heated wax roller to make it all stick to the page, the creative denizens of the Curtis Hall basement compiled the first rough draft of Jumbo history. Or at least something that could entertain and inform students and staff while they drank the dining hall coffee that — if memory serves — was rated the worst java in all of Greater Boston.

So happy 40th anniversary, Tufts Daily! Congrats to all the current and past staff, and best wishes to those who no doubt will keep the paper going for many years to come.

Art Charlton (LA'82), editor in chief fall 1981