HIGH LIFE : Student Press Association Lives On : ‘Old School’ Journalist Passed on Skills to New Generation of Reporters

It was October, 1981, and while Ralph Alexander lay in the Long Beach Veterans Hospital dying of cancer, his mind was concerned with something else--as usual. Alexander had never been very big on thinking about himself. He hadn’t done it for the past 72 years, and he didn’t figure to start on his death bed.

After all, he hadn’t dressed five-and-dime to pull the California Scholastic Press Assn. out of the red for nothing. He had coddled the workshop for 31 years, molding it into an esteemed organization that churned out media talent with more regularity than most journalism schools. He had to find a way to make sure it wouldn’t slam to a stop when he was no longer at the wheel.

It had almost happened twice before when he was “the chief,” as such colleagues as Syd Kronenthal, director of human services in Culver City, called him.

“Ralph had this dream, when he wrote sports for the (Los Angeles) Examiner, of getting kids motivated in the media,” Kronenthal said.

Alexander was an “old school” journalist who believed young talent should learn by hands-on experience. So, in 1950, he approached his publisher, William Randolph Hearst. He pitched Hearst the idea of having a sports page written entirely by high school reporters. Hearst bought it, and the Scholastic Sports Assn. was created.

A network of young sports stringers could suddenly live out their Red Smith fantasies. In 1952, the “Traditional 30” boys were recruited to apply for the SSA’s first-ever two-week workshop at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “I don’t think there’s a high school in California that Ralph didn’t visit at one time or another,” Kronenthal said of Alexander’s recruiting trips.

In 1962, however, the Examiner merged with the Los Angeles Herald, and suddenly there was no need for the SSA. Professionals were hired in greater numbers and the prep writers were released. But Alexander managed to salvage the workshop, now under the title of the Interscholastic Press Assn.

“The day we got on the Greyhound bus at Cal Poly (in 1962),” recalled Steve Harvey, now a writer for The Times, “was the day Marilyn Monroe died. I remember seeing the headlines in the news racks.”

It was also the start of journalism boot camp with an average of 10 one-hour classes a day and on-the-spot deadlines for each one.

“I had heard from people that it was a tough, long, hard grind,” said Larry Welborn, court reporter for the Orange County Register and currently CSPA chairman. “It was my first time away from home, and I was going to room with someone I didn’t know. But I always knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. When you go to an intense, high-pressure program and battle intense deadlines every day, it helps that dream to fit so much better.”

Completing the sizing was the reach of the workshop, which extended to thousands of dollars in scholarship money that Alexander had raised.

“Ralph and the CSPA helped me to get a scholarship to Pepperdine,” Welborn said.

In 1967, employees at the Herald Examiner went on strike.

“Ralph had only 90 days left to reach his tenure,” Kronenthal remembered, “but he said, ‘All my friends are on strike. I can’t be a scab.’ So he went too.”

Alexander lost all his benefits, and came close to losing his workshop, now called the CSPA, as well.

“It was a real bitter strike,” said Welborn, who was then a workshop counselor. “All the files were locked, the mailing lists, the programs. . . . “

But CSPA, financed in part by donations and by Alexander and his wife, Millie, scraped together enough to survive.

“The strike had just started,” recalled Art Aguilar, a 1967 graduate the CSPA workshop and now editor of Southern California Publishing Company. “It was a topic of discussion when we left (the workshop). Ralph was out of a job and trying to run the workshop.”

Aguilar almost didn’t attend that summer. “I didn’t think I’d make it,” the graduate of Pico Rivera El Rancho High School said. “But then Ralph called me right before the (application) deadline and said, ‘You’d better apply.’ ”

What he found amid the intensity of the camp was practically a second home. “If Ralph was the captain, Millie was the drill sergeant, and wouldn’t let you forget you still had a responsibility to behave like a human being,” Aguilar said. “I felt like Millie was my mother at the workshop. When she spoke, I listened, let me tell you.”

The workshop was in critical condition.

“Ralph begged and borrowed to keep the program afloat,” Kronenthal remembered. The files were moved to Ralph’s garage in Long Beach, alumni sent donations, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo President Bob Kennedy allowed the program to be held at the college at no cost except for food. But now, Ralph needed to charge a workshop fee--something he’d never done and something he was adamantly against--for CSPA to survive.

“The toughest thing,” Aguilar said, “was convincing Ralph that we needed to charge the kids.”

By the summer of 1972, when Tim Ferguson attended the workshop, a fee was the only thing about the CSPA workshop that had changed--except that girls had been admitted since 1965.

“I met a terrific girl there, in fact she ‘made my life complete’ for the whole 12 days. But alas, she got away,” said Ferguson, a graduate of Santa Ana High School and currently features editor of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page. “But I loved the competition. I figured I had it wired--sweet innocence of youth!”

The same naivete affected all the students. As Dave Hall, formerly a court reporter for the Daily Breeze and now a law student at the University of San Diego, recalled, “After a hideous bus ride we had to write something. It was like, ‘Deadline in a half hour. Go!’ I was pretty blown away.”

If the pressure didn’t produce the desired effect then the roster of instructors would. Aguilar, Welborn and Harvey had all returned to teach, as well as other alumni like KABC reporter Henry Alfaro and Los Angeles Times sports columnist Scott Ostler.

“It’s a nostalgia thing,” Harvey explained. “It reminds me of when I was a kid up there. And, I always get some unusual comments, like when we do the pro/con death penalty editorials. Comments like, ‘There are over 600 people on Death Role.’ And once, we had a kid who couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a photographer or editorial writer. I kind of liked that one.”

The idea that journalism went beyond the front page came from the workshop’s variety of writing experiences, as students alternately were junior versions of Jim Murray and Dan Rather. But some had already patterned themselves after other famous celebrities. “One guy swore he was Eric Clapton’s nephew,” Hall said. “There were a lot of weird personalities up there.”

The benefits went well beyond personal satisfaction. At the workshop’s close the instructors would pass out a contact list for the students to use in the future, and many have.

“A year after I left the (CSPA) workshop, Jay Berman (currently a journalism professor at Cal State Fullerton) got me into a journalism class at USC before I was eligible,” Hall said. “And later, I ended up playing on his softball team. You make contacts up there that last the rest of your life.”

In October, 1981, Alexander lay in his hospital bed. He had buried Millie just six months before, and he didn’t want to bury another thing that meant so much to him.

“A week before he died,” Berman said, “he gathered (the CSPA board of directors) at the hospital. And as we stood around the hospital bed, Ralph told us to keep the workshop going. The only problem was none of us thought to ask him how long .”

The board, made up mostly of CSPA graduates who were in the middle of establishing their own careers, wondered if it could. “Not having Ralph was like finishing the ark without Noah,” Welborn said. “So all of us animals just had to do the best we could.”

Without the captain at the helm, there was some confusion as to who was going to steer. “There are times when we each feel we do more work than anyone else,” Berman said. “And, I get frustrated when I see people not as involved as they once were, and I think, ‘Who’s going to keep the damn thing going?’ ”

But memories are a powerful emotion.

“It was obvious that the workshop was a labor of love, from Ralph and Millie on down,” said Ferguson, who returned to instruct. “The tradition is the tie that binds.”

Last summer, six years after Alexander’s death, the workshop was rolling so strong it gave some students nightmares before they arrived at San Luis Obispo.

“Every time my (journalism) adviser would mention it, she would add, ‘You’ll be all right,’ ” said Wendy McCallum, a recent graduate from Upland High School.

The reputation of the grind was upheld by Alexander’s former students.

“The first few days were like hell,” said Angie Atkinson, a recent graduate from Troy High School. “I thought, ‘Why am I here? I could be home doing other things.’ It was like, OK, this is going to be a fun two weeks.

“The pace didn’t let up, but it started getting fun. I got to know people and made friends. I mean, you were all in the same boat.”

The voyage, according to McCallum, was an arduous one.

“I had to be so keyed up for two weeks that I was afraid if I slept and I really enjoyed it, I wouldn’t wake up. I dreamed of typing stories and of deadlines, and of my manual typewriter chasing me.”

But manual typewriter aside, McCallum found that she had a knack for broadcast journalism and later received an internship offer from Cable News Network.

“I like to see myself up on the screen,” said McCallum, who will attend UC Santa Barbara in the fall. “I’m a very vain person. I’ve always thought I was better in person than on paper. I think I’m a terrible writer.”

Her CSPA sentiments echo so many students before her. “I’m even going to come back to Cal Poly and instruct,” she said. “My roommate and I--we’re a package deal. We want 13 hours of lecture time. Just one day. That’s all we ask for.”

Added Aguilar: “We’re instructors because we know what it (the CSPA workshop) did for us. We’re paying Ralph back. I think he’s instilled in us that the business needs to develop kids into journalists and do it right.

“And then in class, you see the eyes open wide and a light goes on, like, ‘Hey! I’m a writer!’

“I think we’ve all got a little of Ralph and Millie in us.”