The Education of a Journalist Thomas M Parsons

7. The Education of a Journalist

I didn’t have much use for or interest in horses. I had something else on my mind. In September of 1959 I began the next phase of my education. I had completed elementary, junior high and high school. Now I needed a college degree. I would like to say that I was accepted at Harvard and Yale but turned them both down, but the truth is I was accepted by the only university I applied to: Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

WSU is not an ivy league school. Its football team seldom gets covered by any newspaper other than WSU’s. Oh, maybe occasionally the Free Press or the News will mention them. The university is located in an area of Detroit that even then was not a desirable area in which to live. So why did I go there?

Because I could afford it. My parents had said that as long as I was in college I could have free room and board at home. Thus I would have none of those expensive room and board charges to pay that my friends who went off to other schools would pay. WSU didn’t even own any dorms!

Also, being a resident of Michigan, I could get the tuition rates that would apply to residents. That would save me even more than my friends who went to schools in other states and had to pay the non-resident rates.

There was also the fact that I could work to help pay my way. Detroit’s business community offered many opportunities for part-time employment.

Now, I do not mean to imply by this that WSU was a cheap source for education. WSU was and is a fine university. It has much going for it. It operates one of the mid-west’s finest medical training facilities. Its campus sprawls over a several-block area west of downtown Detroit. It has a significant number of PhD’s on its faculty. It is a major research university. It would have been silly for me to look elsewhere for an education that I could get so close to home at a price I could afford. It would not cost my parents anything but, as I said, room and board. And I didn’t eat that much!

It was a long way from my “Helpfulness” article in the Keppen Chronicle just four years earlier. I was listed as “Managing Editor” with another young man named John as the editor. This was not the same John who was my best friend. This John was sort of an “egghead.” He liked to discuss philosophical and political issues. He was a good editor, though, and he and I got along quite well. So, there I was, a new freshman at WSU in the fall of 1959, eager to get started on earning a degree in journalism. Of course, the first two years of any college education are filled with the basics. Majors are not usually declared until the beginning of the third year, so I had some time before I would begin the classes that would lead me to a degree in the field I wished to enter.

I did need a job, however, to pay for tuition, books, food and transportation. Tuition was not as major as it is now; my whole four years of education at WSU cost much less than the one year my daughter had at Cornerstone University in 1995. Books were expensive, but not as much as they are now, and most were resalable to the book store after the class was completed. Food consisted mostly of snacks and pop to drink with my brown bagged lunches Auntie made for me at home each day. And transportation was mostly parking fees at WSU’s various parking lots around campus.

Dad worked in downtown Detroit at a shoe store. He had worked there since prior to our move from Windsor to Lincoln Park. It was this store that he had taken Lynne and me to when we were kids and he had some inventory work to do, and from which our trip home made me carsick. Parking near his downtown store was more expensive than it was at WSU, so he drove the family car to Tall-Eez Shoe Company on John R. Street downtown, and then I drove it the few remaining miles to WSU. In the evening I drove back downtown. He usually had me drive home, since Dad was almost sixty years old when I was attending WSU, and he was usually tired after a day of waiting on customers.

So it worked out well for both of us. The only thing was, I had to stay on campus until Dad got off work. The store closed at 6:00 pm most days, but on Monday and Wednesday, it stayed open until 9:00. Dad worked those long twelve hour days twice a week, and I stayed on campus late those nights to pick him up after work. He also worked Saturdays, but I did not have classes on Saturday, so he either took the car, or I got up early and drove him to work and then went back to pick him up after work so we could have the car home on Saturday. That usually meant, though, that Mom had somewhere she wanted me to take her, since she did not drive.

I needed a job, and preferably it should be a job on or near the campus. I had tried my hand at following in my dad’s footsteps that summer between high school and college. My friend John worked for a shoe store in Lincoln Park, and he told me his manager was looking for another part-time salesman. During that summer I worked a few Saturdays for ninety cents an hour and a one percent commission. Needless to say, even in those simpler times, I was not making much money. And I didn’t really care for selling shoes. My boss figured that out right away.

I was supposed to call each Saturday morning to see whether I was needed or not. When his answer was “no” three Saturdays in a row, I took the hint. I never called again.

That meant when school started, I had little money. I needed a job fast.

I don’t know how I found out about the job, but I suppose it was through the school newspaper, or on a bulletin board. But the Pharmacy Stockroom was looking for a student assistant. The College of Pharmacy preferred hiring non-pharmacy students to work in its stockroom because pharmacy students were more likely to help themselves to expensive supplies.

Photo: Old Main at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. From Wikipedia. Wayne State University now has campus dorms and is poised with a new president to meet the challenges of an urban university in a city that continues to struggle.

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The stockroom was located in Old Main, a building which was old; it had served as the forerunner of WSU in the late 1800's. I was told to report to the basement of the old building and see the manager of the stockroom, a lady I will call Mrs. Norris.

To make a long story short, Mrs. Norris hired me, and soon I was learning how to clean and organize the materials on the shelves and to distribute them to the students as needed. They purchased cards from the College of Pharmacy, and we punched numbers on their cards as they received supplies. It was easy work, and the pay was decent. Since the stockroom was open until 5:00 pm each day, I could work up until the time I had to leave for downtown to pick up Dad. My routine was classes in the morning, stockroom in the afternoon. There were many times during my work time that I was free to do assignments for my classes as well. And since Mrs. Norris was also taking classes herself, in education, she was not there some of the time, leaving me in charge.

I was the only white employee of the stockroom. Mrs. Norris was black, as were her two other student assistants. But she and I hit it off. She enjoyed talking to me, it seems, and so the College of Pharmacy often paid her and me to carry on conversations. Sometimes I helped her with her assignments for her classes. She was in her forties at the time, married with two grown children, and taking advantage of the university’s willingness to educate its employees at a special rate.

We had all kinds of drugs and other supplies in the stockroom. Most of them were harmless chemicals, but we had some that were caustic that we had to be careful with, and there were some that were volatile. We also had some controlled drugs, such as morphine, that were under lock and key and only the head of the college could have access to these.

We had a three-room area to work in. Mrs. Norris’ desk was right up front by the Dutch door which served as our counter when we were waiting on students, as well as our means of entering and exiting. In this first room we stored the most common substances on metal shelves so they would be easily accessible to us when students were waiting for their supplies.

The next area, I will call the in-between room because it served as a buffer between the main room and the back room. It contained drawers on the walls which stored equipment and non-chemical supplies. The back room, which also had an exit out into a lounge area with food machines and benches which came in handy when I needed a quick break, stored less common and more volatile chemicals, as well as other supplies. This area also had access to the small room in which animals — rats and mice, and occasionally a cat or two — were kept in small cages in less than clean conditions. I was not responsible to care for the animals; a pharmacy student had that nasty job. But I used to feel sorry for the creatures that were being kept for experiments and demonstrations. All of them would die in that little room cramped in little cages.

In spite of the animal room, I enjoyed working at the pharmacy stockroom. It was much easier than trying to sell shoes to a female customer who had no idea what she wanted, or, if she did, we didn’t have what she wanted. The pharmacy students always knew what they needed; in fact, so did I, since we received lists of what supplies were needed for the labs that met each day.

I also had opportunities to talk to Mrs. Norris about my faith in Christ. She indicated she was also a Christian, but I was never really certain about that. She went to church, and she talked about the Lord, but I did not really see evidence of saving faith in her life. I may have been too judgmental in this, for only the Lord knows what is in a person’s heart. I hope she was saved. If she is still living, she is an old lady in her eighties. If she is not still living, I hope she is in Heaven. I would like to see her again when I get there.

Speaking of my faith in Christ, something else happened in the summer of 1959, the summer between high school and college, the summer after I put my faith in Jesus Christ for salvation. I began to be discouraged with the church I was attending. I began to feel that the church was not really preaching the message of the Bible with clarity and conviction. I liked the pastor, and as I mentioned before, his son was in my graduating class from LPHS. You remember, Sarah also attended this church, at least she had. She was no longer attending, and I did not know where she was going to church. Nor did it matter to me, since I had decided she was not the girl the Lord would give to me for my wife.

There are many churches in this world that do not preach the simple message of the Bible. In these churches, encouragements and opportunities for good works abound, but little is heard about what Christ did on the cross to pay for our sins. He is the Great Teacher, or the Great Example, or the Great Humanitarian. But seldom is He the Only Savior.

The church my dad had brought us to was like this. There were many good things about the church, to be sure. But there was little evidence that the people really had a saving relationship by faith in Jesus Christ. Their lives didn’t seem much different than anyone else’s. They were good people, there was no question in my mind about that. But that wasn’t enough. There were many good people who didn’t go to that church, some who didn’t go to any church. So, how did going to this church make any of us different? It didn’t. I began to realize I wanted more from a church.

I wanted to know that being part of a church did make a difference in my life and in the lives of others. WSU was helping me learn how to think and to apply knowledge of the world around me in a career. But I also needed someone to help me learn how to share Jesus Christ with a dying world.