Soon after I returned to Loyola as an instructor rather than a student, I was asked to write something about the history of The Maroon. I wrote about the man who made me fall in love with journalism.
Unlike our other professors, he did not have a Ph.D. after his name, and no “Rev.” before it. He’d earned a bachelor’s degree at Loyola on the GI plan after he’d had his thumb shot off in World War II. We called him “Chief.”
“In the early 1960s, there were maybe two dozen of us majoring in journalism at Loyola. The department chairman and its only full-time faculty member was Edwin Pierre Fricke. He was gone a lot during the racing season, since he was also Ted Turfman, Times- Picayune handicapping columnist. But many of us remember him as the best teacher we ever had. He was by far the most colorful. His personality was precisely in tune with the Damon Runyonesque image we had of reporters. The Maroon was his passion.
“When we did a good job, he let us know. When we didn’t, he let us know that too. Any Maroon staff-member who wasn’t producing was ‘dead wood.’ A poor page layout wasn’t just poor; it was ‘bilious.’ A bad issue of The Maroon was an ‘abortion.’ Every year, when a new staff and editor took over The Maroon, the first issue was an abortion, each page bilious in its own way. That issue, and all that followed were posted on office walls, with red circles around stories and exclamation points and comments in the margins. There were a fair number of abortions, but most years the paper took an All-American rating – the highest awarded by the Associated College Press.
“Fricke made us write all the time. But he despised overwriting. ‘You’ve got diarrhea of the typewriter,’ he’d say if you turned in a long-winded story. Then he’d scrawl ‘Rewrite’ across the top.
“But he was there when you needed him. If you were short on money, he’d find you a job phoning in election returns, or reviewing a Loyola theatrical production for one of the city papers, or even filling in at a desk job when they were short-handed.
“He sent us all over town on stories – to City Hall, to night court, to WWL-TV, and, of course to the Fairgrounds, where we interviewed various interesting friends of his -grooms, jockeys, the race track bugler.
“He acquired a horseshoe desk from the New Orleans Item when it merged with the other afternoon daily, the States. The Maroon editor sat in the middle, copy editors along the edges, and reporters put their stories on the spikes to be read and edited. Just like on the dailies.
“Most of the instructors were working reporters he’d talked into giving a course or two. Fricke taught the other courses himself – layout, editing, advanced reporting and so on. He had two major dictums. One was to spell names right. ‘Sometimes all a man has is his name. If you spell it wrong, you take that away from him,’ he’d rasp.
“The other was to never start a story with ‘the.’ ‘That’s too easy. Get rid of ‘the.’ Then you’re forced to be creative.’
“He was more Damon Runyon than Woodward and Bernstein. We cut our journalistic teeth writing about racetrack characters like Black Cat Lacombe as well as doing conventional college journalism about visiting bigwigs and campus politics…”
Eventually he left Loyola for new adventures, and in time, his one-man department became the School of Mass Communication, with a full complement of full-time talented professionals.
Fricke passed away in November at age 84.
His newspaper obituary was brief and to thepoint, but if you go to www.Legacy.com, you can read the growing number of testimonials from his students posted as each hears the news that he is gone.
One after the other remembers him as “the best teacher I ever had.”
His learned colleagues would have envied that.
Liz Scott Monaghan is a professor in the School of Mass Communication. She is also the former adviser of The Maroon.
