Found in newsstands across campus, Sinclair’s The Clarion has provided students at the college with a variety of news articles, opinion pieces, editorials (such as this!), cartoons, and community activities since its establishment in March 1977 to the present 2022. This collection has been retained, largely intact, thanks to the efforts of both The Clarion staff and the College Archives, and its 45 years of articles can be perused to this day. Did you know, however, that it was not the first student-organized publication to find syndication here at Sinclair? Two other newspapers, ranging from the 1930s to the 1960s, have kept the YMCA College and later Sinclair Community College students apprised of what their respective staffs felt to be most relevant. The Y’s Owl and the YMCA/Sinclair College Clipper in the Archives offer a glimpse into the journalistic history at the college, warts and all. This article highlights the student newspapers of Sinclair and efforts made by the College Archives this spring to preserve the information they contain and ensure future access.
The first of these two publications, the Y’s Owl, ran from December 1932 until December 1936. Despite its short-lived tenure as the student newspaper of the YMCA College, the Owl published over 70 editions during this tiny window. At the time, due to the school’s ties to the Dayton YMCA, many of the events reported by the Owl focused on the “Y”, such as the annual open house held in January. However, other organizations, such as the fraternity Sigma Kappa Phi and the sorority Iota Tau Lambda also frequently featured in articles written during this period. Also included were profiles of prominent teachers at the YMCA College and multitudes of social events and dances sponsored by the YMCA. Despite the focus on school and local events, the Y’s Owl did make note of both national and international news, with the ongoing Great Depression, repealing of Prohibition, and rise of Nazi Germany all receiving some attention.
What sets the Y’s Owl apart from its sister publications is largely the quality of its printing. While the College Clipper and the newspaper version of The Clarion hew to a modern newspaper layout with columns dedicated to each respective story, the formatting of the Owl appear simplistic at times, with a mere two columns per page. Furthermore, some editions of the Owl are clearly typewritten instead of being mass-produced via the printing press. The ink lettering for issues bearing this format has faded to the extent that reading some of the words is a difficult prospect. Ironically, the Y’s Owl standard letter paper format has rendered it far easier to rehouse, scan, and preserve in the archives going forward compared to issues of the Clipper or The Clarion. The entirety of the Owl’s collection can be condensed into one standard archival box. The same cannot be said for either of its successors.
The second major student paper at Sinclair prior to The Clarion underwent several name iterations before settling on the Sinclair College Clipper. The first version of the paper, which ran from 1937 to 1938, belonged to the YMCA College’s School of Business and Finance and was titled the Dayton YMCA Commerce Clipper. Thanks in part to its publication success, the start of the Spring Term of 1939 saw the scope of the paper expand to encompass the goings-on of the entire college. Thus, the YMCA College Clipper was born. With its publication run of January 1939 to January 1948, most of the newspapers from this period were naturally influenced by the events of World War II. The impact that this had upon the paper was varied, with some differences more apparent than others.
Perhaps most visible was the quality of the paper itself. Once America entered the war, the wartime rationing led to a change in the type of paper utilized by the students. While newspapers published before and after the conflict have aged largely intact, papers printed during the war have grown discolored and fragile due to the higher acidity of the replacement material. The second influence that the war had upon the publication of the YMCA College Clipper pertained to the staffing of the paper itself. Unsurprisingly, due to the demands of the US military, fewer men attended classes and activities at the YMCA College between December 1941 and December 1945. Consequently, women took on a far greater role in the management of the student newspaper. Finally, the influx of Second World War propaganda and media was an impossible inclusion to avoid. Every editorial page printed during this era was accompanied by a political cartoon that either extolled the virtues of the American government, demonized its foes, or made a demand for war bond sales.
After the YMCA College formally changed its name in early 1948 to the Sinclair College of the YMCA, the Clipper followed suit, becoming the Sinclair College Clipper; a name that would remain with the publication for the remainder of the collection maintained at the Sinclair Archives. What also became a fixture of the Clipper during this time was its fixation with the Spring Prom. Any issue printed in April and May would hype up the social function and its attendant Spring Queen and Man-of-the-year competitions. Although interest in global affairs, and articles pertaining to them, were far more pronounced after World War II, school and class news largely dominated this period of the collection.
One problem that remained endemic throughout the publication of both the Y’s Owl and the iterations of the Clipper was the lack of author information. When entering metadata in Sinclair’s database, the title of the article, its date of publication, the volume and edition number of the publication, subjects, departmental affiliation, and newspaper publication are entries that would ideally be filled out to ensure an easier search for any would-be researcher. All told, the index covering the newspaper articles from the Sinclair collection totaled over 3700 separate entries. Leaving out the author for many of these articles from the 1930s to the 1960s renders it difficult for would-be researchers to cite them properly. Unless every entry in Sinclair’s database for these articles contains an in-depth description or synopsis, locating authorless or articles without a title within the database becomes far more difficult, though not impossible.
A second issue The Clarion collection faced during this preservation project concerned the sheer mass of the newspapers themselves. Compared to the standard letter format (8.5” x 11”) of the Y’s Owl, The Clarion resembles a more traditional newspaper format. However, that larger format combined with over 40 years of content renders it far heavier and more expansive than either of its predecessors. Consequently, while the other collections could be condensed into a mere three small archival boxes, The Clarion collection spans 15 boxes, the majority of which are substantially larger than the rest of the collection. The increased mass of this section of the collection also extends to the size of the files within the boxes themselves. Since each file ideally contains the entire volume or print year of The Clarion, the sheer size of those folders prevents more than 4 or 5 files per box from the 1990s editions of the newspaper onwards. Handling these boxes in the future should be done with care if only to prevent a stress injury caused by handling the weight.
However, there was one final problem that was inherent to all these newspapers, but particularly The Clarion: ink. As anyone who has ever read a newspaper will understand, ink is easy to smudge and hard to avoid handling when using a newspaper. Compounding the situation was the presence of skin oil, which also had the potential to contribute smudges to the paper itself. The solution? Use nitrile gloves to handle the material (unlike latex gloves, nitrile gloves are hypoallergenic and have a lower risk of leaving residue). While it proved to be difficult to eliminate the problem of ink smudging, gloves were handy in preventing the transfer of oil from hands to paper. Going forward, any readers who may wish to read past issues of Sinclair’s newspapers should probably be wearing gloves to turn those pages.
But what was the point of all this, the reader may ask? Why couldn’t we simply have scanned all these newspapers and published them digitally for us to read instead of going to this trouble? The twofold answer is the same refrain that many archives will state on similar projects: a lack of time and resources. The Records Center and Archives at Sinclair are presently run solely by Shelby Beatty. This article is merely the culmination of 100 hours of effort undertaken by an intern over the span of a month. While it might appear that this venture was akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, creating metadata entries, even incomplete ones, still assists in the location of articles for future researchers. Additionally, moving all the newspapers to more modern housing will mitigate some of the worst effects that erode newspapers such as light and moisture. Taking these measures is simply the first step in the long process of preserving Sinclair’s newspapers.
Digitizing the entire Sinclair newspaper collection would take a significantly longer period to accomplish, given the care that must be taken with scanning newspapers. Instead of simply flipping through a paper harvesting the metadata, as was done with this project, digitizing requires a patient approach since the prospect of having to rescan materials is omnipresent. The sheer bulk of the collection once again acts against an expedient digitization process, with over 80 years of newspapers to scan. Simply scanning one year’s worth of the Y’s Owl took over 3 hours, and the Y’s Owl is by far the smallest portion of this collection. In addition, a portion of these newspapers was bound into book format, which requires a different style of scanner from the traditional flatbed; a book scanner that Sinclair currently does not have access to. Indeed, the project was fortunate to even have the requisite number of archival boxes that were required to rehouse the newspapers.
Preserving an inherently temporary medium, one destined to be mass-printed and then disposed of is a tricky prospect. If anything, working on the Sinclair newspaper collection was a valuable experience in appreciating how an archive manages to work within its means. All the boxes used to rehouse the collection were already available. The acid-free paper used to separate acidic newspaper pages had been ordered previously. Even the metadata index used was preexisting, though over 2000 new entries were added over the span of the project. All of this is done in the hopes that some journalism students in the years to come will feel the itch to look back and see what their predecessors felt was pertinent news. And if some of the articles written by students in the very same newspaper mocking their respective forebears are any indication… at least future students will be walking a well-trod path.
Andrew Sullivan
Contributing Writer