Spring 2002

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Exchange: To and from the editors

SO LONG TO ALL THIS

by Patricia Wright

OUR ROOM: Contact editor Rachel Morton, center front, in 1986. Seated at left, Elizabeth Pols; standing, from left, Patricia Wright, Chuck Smith, Carol Demaradzki, and Steve Long. I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT "SO LONG" was a westernism, a verbal idiosyncracy distinguishing me as an emigrant from Oregon. No sense of distinction warranted, Audrey Duckert told me briskly, when I telephoned the professor emerita of English to check. “It’s everywhere,” said Duckert, whose opinion may be trusted not only because of the confidence with which it’s declared but because she’s an acknowledged authority on American speech. I was able to tap that authority in a local call to Hadley because I had the merest slip of a memory of a story about the Dictionary of American Regional English, which Duckert helped edit, from Contact magazine in 1986. “America Says a Mouthful,” the story was called. The author, Charles C. Smith ’97, was my nearest sibling in the office family I joined in 1984 as one of two half-time writers for Contact, one of the predecessors of UMass. Story titles in Contact were almost always group efforts, but “Mouthful” sounds like Chuck, whose proclivity for puns was matched only by his gift for limericks. The photo we ran with the story – a closeup of a man stretching his mouth around an overstuffed grinder – has the signature brio of our irrepressible then-editor, Rachel Morton. LOOKING AT THE FACES of Rachel, Chuck, and the rest of that staff in a picture taken in 1986 to celebrate a cluster of awards we won that year, I’m touched by the fact that it shows the office I’m now clearing out as I prepare to retire from UMass; and by how great a role this place and these people have played in my adult life. Not that all are still physically here. Carol Demaradzki, our typesetter in those pre-digital days, left UMass in 1989 with that wave of retirees. Rachel and Chuck have moved on to other places and things. But photographer Steve Long is still on campus, now absorbed in creating a digital archive of images for UMass. Elizabeth Pols is now art director and associate editor of the magazine. We’ve been joined by Linda Cahillane as classnotes editor and by writer-photographer Ben Barnhart – now our torchbearer in the awards department, having won national honors for three straight years – and by many others, including our freelance contributors and an advisory board who help us make the magazine as good and useful as we can. NOW, HAVING SPENT as many years in Munson Hall as in my family home before leaving for college, I’m about to be out of here. At such a moment, the writer and the editor in me reach an impasse. The writer is bursting with words; the editor is saying sotto voce, “Don’t get her started.” So I will just say how conscious I am of what UMass has done for me, and what it’s allowed me to do. And that is to spend nearly two decades not only in congenial company, but in a house of learning. What a privilege to have as part of one’s mental equipment an awareness of Audrey Duckert’s scholarship, and that of the hundreds of other scholars and teachers, students and seekers, with whom this magazine has brought me in contact in this good and useful place. It’s been so good to know them.

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ALL THE LETTERS, ALL THE TIME

LETTERS IN PRINT, SPRING 2002

SO LONG TO ALL THIS

SO LONG: larger image