Ex-Editor Bailey Would Do It All Over Without Regrets

(Secretary to the Corporation and of the Board of Overseers, Harvard; Publication agent, Harvard, 1928-1945.)

What does the CRIMSON men to me? I suppose every old CRIMSON man who tries to face this question will have a different answer. What we get out of life depends so much on what we put into it. Coming to Harvard from a small school, naturally shy, and quite without-friends, and going out for the paper in my freshman year, I found that the Crime, for me, opened doors in Cambridge which otherwise I might never have discovered. I worked harder for the CRIMSON than I had ever worked before. It was not my first paper, for I had written news stories and editorials, solicited advertising, set type, printed and sold a one-man neighborhood weekly when I was twelve. Nor was it the last, for I spent my first ten years out of College as a metropolitan newspaperman. But the CRIMSON was my introduction to the world of legwork and rewrites, headlines, deadlines, and cutlines, proofsheets and makeup--a world which still seems to me fantastically absorbing and rewarding.

Like every institution, the CRIMSON has had its ups and downs. The paper in my day was up. The Board which I was lucky enough to join doubled and trebled the size of the CRIMSON it inherited. We bought a new press--with our own earnings. We added a pictorial supplement, literary and dramatic columns, a photographic darkroom. Though today's CRIMSON editors would doubtless think us a pretty conservative lot (we even supported Harding for President!), we were, I think, to be credited with more innovations than any other board in these seventy-five years.

I'd do a lot of things differently if I were to come to Cambridge as a Freshman next September. But I'd still go out for the first Crime competition.