(My alma mater. Now. Not then.)
What if something like this coronavirus thing had happened 50 years ago? I was graduating college then, just as several of the students in my Hofstra University sportswriting class hope to do—virtually, no doubt—next month. What if, during my senior year, shelter-in-place orders and social distancing had gone into effect?
I would have been cornered in my off-campus apartment with two other lads. We had no television and no reason to be there beyond getting a night’s sleep. We never cooked; there never was any food in the place. What if all on-campus dining had been shuttered as well as the townie restaurants. How often could I have stomached the old Ku-Ku Burger drive-through? (15-cent burgers.)
The Journalism School building—my real home at the time, where I spent most of my waking hours on the Columbia Missourian staff—would have been off limits. My daily routine of reporting and writing about local and regional sports would have been kaput because, as we now know, all sports are suspended during a pandemic. Besides, with the Internet and digital journalism still decades in the future, how likely was it that the Missourian could have pivoted to being produced remotely? We had typewriters and telephones (dial; not smart) but none of the fall-back technology so crucial to 21st Century communication.
Restrictions on travel and on the gathering of crowds would have cancelled the University’s annual Journalism Week conference, which would have meant that prominent guests such as the vice president of United Press International, who flew in from New York City, would not have participated in what resembled a jobs fair. Which meant he would not have stumbled onto some of my work in the Missourian. Which meant he would not have offered me immediate gainful employment in the real world. Which meant….
I’m of the belief that alternative history belongs in novels, unsettling what-ifs such as Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” Or poems—Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” In real time, our lives play out in a series of developments that, in retrospect, feel like simple twists of fate. And we carry on.
There was no communicable disease raging a half-century ago. The only minor interruptions in my senior year were a split lip sustained in an intramural softball game and a brief bout with mono. The UPI offer came through. I set off for the Big Town the day after graduation. Moved to Long Island’s Newsday a year later and stayed for 44 years. Met my wife at Newsday. Had a daughter. Traveled widely on assignments. Met fascinating people. Learned stuff. Had a lot of yukks.
Some people have all the luck. But suppose such a discombobulating event as COVID-19 had hit in 1969 or ’70, when I was looking no farther down the road than another day of newspapering, experiencing just what I had wanted to be when I grew up.
Now, part of my duty is to offer those Hofstra students some insight into the journalism business, but the world is shifting under all our feet. Maybe the best advice is the John Lennon lyric—“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I have no answer to “What if?”