'Not the Red and Black'

Item Information

Title:
'Not the Red and Black'
Description:
'In 1979, my friends Chuck Merritt, Mark Costello, Feza Koprucu and I, who were all juniors at the time, founded a humor newspaper in the high school called 'Not the 'Red and Black'. We were inspired by 'Not the Boston Globe', a parody of Boston's daily that appeared around the same time which I still remember headlined a story about an atomic bomb destroying New York as 'Hub Man Dies in Nuclear Blast.' The first issue was 'underground,' in that we just published and distributed it without anyone's permission. It wasn't a secret (it included all our names), so while we weren't 'hauled' in front of the principal, he did call us in and asked that we become a club with faculty supervision. I seem to recall we became an autonomous sub-unit of an existing Creative Writing club with Judy Hession, who I think still teaches in the English Department, as our advisor. I remember she gave us a lot of room, and even laughed at some of our jokes, so we weren't constrained in any way and were able to write what we liked. Which we did, publishing three more issues our senior year, each issue longer and more complicated than the last. These were assembled during 'All-Nighters' in Feza's house, since his dad owned the Selectric typewriter we used to produce copy. We also used Letraset rub-off letters and whatever photos we could get our hands on to produce, edit, and lay out pages until the sun came up the next morning. We had a running competition with 'The Red and Black', the actual school newpaper, which we were parodying. Since most of our humor was pretty out in space, there wasn't much direct mocking of anything that actually appeared in 'The Red and Black', although we did play up our rivalry even though the editor of the paper at the time, Sally Weylman, was a friend with whom we all ran cross country. Sally is the person bent over in the photo being plastered with a poster about an upcoming 'Not the Red and Black' issue. Our most ambitious project was a yearbook parody called 'Not the Aberjona' that we published at the end of senior year. It was pretty ambitious, featuring lots of illustrations done by a friend of mine from Scouts, John Galligan, who lived in Arlington, and photos provided by a girl I was dating at the time who ran the yearbook. We actually asked the student government to give us money to have this one printed (previous to that, we would photocopy them at Chuck's dad's office and staple them together ourselves at a final 'stapling party,'). The four of us stayed in touch after high school, attending some of each other's weddings, and getting together when we were in each other's cities (Feza lives in DC after a career in the Navy, and Mark is in New York where he practices law and has written several terrific novels). And, despite serious lives with kids and careers, we're all still pretty funny. Pictured, from left to right: Mark Costello, myself Jonathan Haber, Feza Koprucu, Chuck Merritt, and Sally Weylman. Location: Winchester High School.'
Contributor:
Haber, Jonathan
Date:
1980
Format:
Photographs
Location:
University of Massachusetts Boston, Joseph P. Healey Library
Collection (local):
Mass. Memories Road Show
MMRS-0077
Series:
Winchester Mass. Memories Road Show
Subjects:
Costello, Mark
Haber, Jonathan
Koprucu, Feza
Merritt, Chuck
Weylman, Sally
Places:
Massachusetts > Middlesex (county) > Winchester
Link to Item:
http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15774coll6/id/12432
Terms of Use:
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Language:
English
Identifier:
UASC-0140-0077-0035-0001