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Joyce Kiefer |
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DR. BENTEL!  Columnists Joyce Kiefer and Gerald Nachman pose with their former teacher between them--Dr. Dwight Bentel, founder of the journalism school at San Jose State University, who just celebrated his 100th birthday with friends and former students. |
A Great American Educator
Celebrates 100 Years
of TheColumnists.com
When I was an 18-year old freshman at San Jose State, I attended the celebrations of the 100th birthday of the college. I was impressed by speeches describing its beginning days as a “normal school” for training teachers. I tried to imagine how different the campus was at that time, populated by proper young ladies in long dresses. A century was a light year. The college was a different planet then.
Last week I attended the 100th birthday celebration of Professor Dwight Bentel, chairman of my Journalism Department when I was a student and he was then around 50 years old. Newspapers were his specialty. His centenary was a bit of a mindblower: My professor is as old as our college was when I was a freshman. And newspapers–of course they would last forever--are going the way of normal schools.
As I dressed for the party, I saw a personal challenge in the event: If Dr. Bentel has changed into a doddering, timid old man, I will also feel antique. If he remains as formidable as I remember, then little time had passed because little has changed. My college (now a University) will still be the same planet.
I attended the celebration with Jerry Nachman, my journalism classmate and fellow columnist on this site. We asked a student who was studying on a bench near the parking garage where we could find the Dwight Bentel Journalism Building. She said others had asked the same thing and she had no idea. We shook our heads. How tunnel-focused can today’s coeds be? Everyone should know where the student paper, the Spartan Daily, comes from! When we were students our J-Building was a barn-like structure with attack birds lurking in the palm trees next to the entrance. We produced the Spartan Daily in the loft.
Thanks to Dr. Bentel, journalism took over the stucco building behind us and the department grew into to the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
We made our way past the Women's Gym, the Home Ec Building, the Music Building. These landmarks may not go by those names any more, but the current labels are only as deep as the last coat of paint. It’s the foundations that count--what the buildings originally were meant to be.....
Jerry and I found a party, but was it the right one? Our answer was the prof himself, standing in the sun, unpropped, his head protected by a shock of white hair. We introduced ourselves. Bentel remembered Jerry. Like others we met later, he recalled “The Portable Nachman,” a published collection of Jerry’s witty columns from the Spartan Daily. Rumor goes that copies still exist in piles that survived the move from the barn to the new place.
The crowd of some 200 guests milled about, squinting at each other’s nametags, telling each other they’ve read their stories over the years. Most of the guests seemed to work for the San Jose Mercury News some time in their lives. My son Dave, a Merc but not an SJS alum, received a message about the party. He e-mailed me: “Do you know this guy?”
Yes I do. Although Dr. Bentel was graduated from Stanford and received a doctorate from Columbia, he came across as a hard bitten newsman straight from “The Front Page.” He had also worked as a reporter for the Mercury. In class I watched him pace back and forth as he lectured, putting his glasses on and taking them off. It’s a miracle he lived past 50. In staccato tones he told us the best sentences were short, simple ones that start with a subject and go directly to a verb. “If you fall in love with a phrase you’ve written, throw it out!” He also advised dumping adverbs and adjectives. He thought it was a bad idea to take the lower division honors Western Civ humanities program, which I did. And he was rumored to think women in journalism was another bad idea unless the girls stuck to feature writing. Any coed who chose the major as a means to an “MRS degree” should get out immediately. But he respected the women who proved him wrong.
Dr. Bentel and I were not on the same page. I had just changed my major from English to journalism and considered him a bit of a Philistine. After a while he told me I didn’t have the right stuff to be a reporter. Not enough drive and determination. I agreed. But I did manage to graduate with departmental honors.
I came to respect his no-nonsense, direct manner in dealing with all of us, the way he showed us how to cut to the chase. Power in writing, he said, comes from simplicity and truth. He continued to take interest in the careers of his students who did have the right stuff and never forgot them. Ten years ago my classmates had a reunion and he came. He told us, “Death wouldn’t keep me away.”
When Dr. Bentel finally sat down, his big brother sat next to him. Carr Bentel is 102. Cameras closed in, including one from a local TV station. Then we moved to the auditorium to watch a film several students created about his life. They interviewed three Pulitzer Prize winners he mentored as students. Finally the prof addressed his class. With everyone standing in his honor, he looked smaller than life, a bit stooped. Someone handed him a microphone and asked for a statement. Satirizing the news style we once used so earnestly, he said, “I’ve been attributed with being 100 years old,” and snapped, “You can’t get old by attribution. You have to earn it.”
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chats with Dr. Dwight Bentel, his teacher half a century ago. |
On the way out Jerry and I met up with classmate and fellow columnist Elias Castillo when a student reporter stopped us at the door. Pulling out a recorder, she asked what lessons we learned from Bentel that helped our careers. Jerry and Elias clearly impressed her with the response of their respective lives as entertainment and investigative writers.
But their stories were rooted in newspaper journalism. What of the imminent demise of newspapers? Has Bentel become more artifact than inspiration? What future does this bright young woman see for herself?
I e-mailed her later and she wrote, “One of the few things I heard repeated at the Bentel celebration was that journalism students have been warned to stay out of the field for decades, but that many have found successful jobs and lived out exciting careers. Hearing reassuring words from people like you reminds me how much I love to write and that somewhere there’s a job waiting for me.”
Clearly this woman has the right stuff. Bentel is still passing the torch. Now that I’m far from 18 years old, I see the continuity that threads its way through change.
©2009 by Joyce Kiefer. The illustrations are the property of the author. All rights reserved. This column first posted May 4, 2009.
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