For Thursday, March 11, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 730 words

Editors Supremo

This year Benicia High is honored to have one of the most outstanding student newspaper staffs to ever come together in one room. One could roast marshmallows on the heat of talent that emanates from our news laboratory.

If you haven't had the privilege of seeing a high school newspaper this year, you are missing out on a work of art and effort. The writing is so fluid, mature, thorough, hard, and the layout so balanced and appealing that I weep to see it. It sounds schmaltzy, perhaps, but I do.

I've been in that student press room for 14 years. I've seen a hundred outstanding journalists come through. I've had mostly all excellent years, with excellent staffs and papers to be proud of.

However, this year is remarkable. This year every journalist has some outstanding, unique talent and all the talents coincide and coordinate like planets in alignment. We have all the human elements it takes to produce a first-class, professional newspaper. I'm convinced we're experiencing some sort of primary cosmic junction.

Let me tell you how this all came to be:

Four years ago I was asleep, in my tent. It was pre-dawn. I was eight miles up a trail in Big Sur, camping with the Backpacking Club. I awoke and heard sawing. Sawing? It was barely light out. Being the foreman of the outfit, I crawled to my tent flap on my belly to take a look.

There, on a hillside, sawing a thick tree stump into firewood, was new, freshman member Heather Deal. The other 20 people were still all asleep. I remember pausing for a moment, my chin resting in the cup of my right fist, listening to her and thinking, "Wow, I sure have a trooper in the group this year."

Heather has gone on every trip since then. She has also gone on to become the president of the Backpacking Club. However, to me she will always be more than the president. She will be the Presedent Supremo. This is an exalted position held only twice before -- once by the famous woodsman Jason Cabrol and once by the famous woodcutter Brian Duquette.

Heather is now, along with Sara Flores, co-editor Supremo of the Paw.

As I mentioned in a September column, we spent our paper profits last year sending Heather and Sara to journalism summer school. When they returned they called me to a special summer meeting and said, basically, "Mr. Gibbs, we want to change everything, and you have to get us $4,000 because we want to do the Paw on newsprint. No more 8x11!"

I knew they meant business. I concurred, ran to my superiors and requested the extra funding. Bob and Sue and Gina saw it as a wise way to spend money, and helped us out. Today we look like a real newspaper, though we have always been one.

I don't know if the newsprint has helped bring out the best in our writers and artists. Though it has improved the look of the paper 100-fold, I'd like to think not. I knew these people long before the Paw went to newsprint, and they have always been talented. We're just lucky to be together.

To each and every member of the Paw staff: Huzzah!

For me as a teacher, this is the best time of year. Now is the time when my all my students are training me. In the fall I tell them what I know. In the spring we turn that around.

At this particular time, all of them are out doing research on topics I know little about. Their assignments are to go out, learn things, then come back and explain them to me. For this, I pay them in grades.

My journalists bring me news. My freshmen are bringing in historical research, and I've made a list of everything about computers I still don't understand and assigned each item on that list to one of my students in computer repair. Their job is to learn it and teach it to the rest of us.

The Spring Backpacking Trip is in three weeks. It just so happens that we will be hiking Big Sur again. Again I will have my tent pitched under that familiar pine at the base of the hill.

Wait. What's that noise? Do I hear sawing? Or is it lightning?