Letter to Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Lasher Barnette

NOTE: A condensed version of the following letter was read on April 30, 2008, before a Journalism Day audience celebrating the U.S. Postal Service issuance of a set of stamps honoring journalists who had risked their lives to cover internationally important conflicts: Martha Gelhorn, John Hersey, George Polk, Ruben Salazar, and Eric Sevareid. This American Journalist Stamp Series was in celebration of the 2008 National Press Club Centennial.

Dear Mary Lib,

The faculty, staff, and students of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism are assembled in the Baker University Center today with our United States Postal Service guests, Columbus District Manager Joshua D. Colin and his colleagues. As I read this letter to the group, we are honoring you as our most beloved graduate and the alumnus or alumna with, by far, the longest association with this school of journalism -- and, at 84 years, possibly the longest such association in world history. This letter bears the special postmark of E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University, Journalism Day, April 30, 2008.

You were just 2 years old (although probably already able to read) in 1924 when your father, George Starr Lasher, was recruited by Ohio University President Elmer Burritt Bryan to establish a Department of Journalism in the College of Liberal Arts. Journalism was then housed in Ellis Hall and offered two sequences.

Press play button to view pictures.

You were a year older when Mr. Lasher and Frederick W. Bush, publisher of The Athens Messenger, set up practice courses, so Journalism seniors would be required to work part-time for one or two semesters for a daily newspaper. This was the first such program in the country.

As a young child, you cheered for the first journalism graduate in 1926 and the first woman journalism graduate in 1927. These people earned B.A. degrees because the program was still in the College of Liberal Arts.

Before anyone ever dreamed that Carnegie Hall would become Scripps Hall, your mother was taken from the family and your father was badly injured in a 1934 car accident in Florida, where he and you stayed during his long convalescence. As colleagues and other friends rallied around to help in Athens, they removed your family's possessions from the house you had lived in and stored them in Carnegie Hall, which had been mothballed after the library moved out of there and into the then-new Chubb Hall. Your bike, your 7th-grade notebooks, whatever toys a precocious 12-year-old has, and 6-year-old Dorothy's things were in Carnegie for more than six months all those years before any effects of the Scripps faculty came there.

The School of Journalism was formally established in 1936, when it also moved to the ground floor of Ewing Hall and became part of the College of Commerce. Its first BSJ degrees were granted in 1937 with great celebration. You entered college in 1938 at the age of 16 and followed your father's first love -- journalism. As was the custom then, you began your sophomore year by suffering through your father's famous language arts course, Introduction to Newswriting, where he was tougher on you than on any other student (if that was possible). This course was known everywhere, even in newsrooms far beyond this campus. It made incoming freshmen quake at the thought of the one academic year they had to live before coming under its axe, and it made the sophomores wish for merciful haste in their own deaths. But you survived, despite never having fully mastered the art of spelling.

But you did master journalism. In your senior year, beginning in the fall of 1941, you became the first woman editor of The Post. After less than three months on the job, you had to present to the campus coverage of the Pearl Harbor attack of Sunday, Dec. 7. What a challenge for a 19-year-old!

After college came a competitive scholarship to the Tobe-Coburn School for Fashion Careers because of your strong interest in fashion journalism. The year was spent pleasurably and profitably in New York City, and to what fashion magazine did it lead for your first professional job? -- Editor & Publisher! Again, you were the first woman to make a journalistic stride -- first one to become a reporter-columnist of E&P in this case. There had been women in secretarial and service roles there, but never before had there been one on the editorial side. From there you went to the American Newspaper Association as its first woman PR director.

After the war, you married Ken Barnette, whom you had met in Athens when you had been a student and he had been an Athens Messenger reporter before Uncle Sam had called him to the service in World War II. I enrolled in the School of Journalism and became Mr. Lasher's grader for three years. I hadn't known you during my college days, of course, since you had gone on to New York, but I knew your sister Dorothy well. She majored in your father's second passion, theater, but she was in the Journalism area of Ewing Hall often. All of us journalism students who graded or worked around your father's office knew Dorothy.

Then came your years of bearing and rearing children -- three daughters. Only upon the death of your husband in 1969 did you go back to work, this time as the editor of the Amherst Bee, the suburban Buffalo paper Ken had edited. Again, you were the first woman editor there. Then you became copy editor of the Buffalo Courier News and simultaneously a feature writer for the Tonawanda News. Then a return to public relations directorships made you the link between the public and the Audubon Society, followed by the Buffalo Philharmonic, and, finally, Buffalo State College, where you remained until you returned to Athens to enjoy your own retirement.

While you were away from Athens, the School of Journalism had moved to Copeland Hall in 1955 as part of the College of Commerce, to the Radio-TV Building in 1969 as part of the new College of Communication, to Lasher Hall (the former Athens Messenger building) in 1974, and finally to Scripps Hall in 1986. The school also had grown greatly in enrollment, faculty size, sequences (seven at the highest count) and degrees (a master's added in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1969) over that same period.

Not that you had been entirely absent from Ohio University during your professional years. You and your family established the Lasher Living Legacy Award in 1965 for the purpose of sending one or two students each year on a cultural trip. You also returned for the dedications of both Lasher and Scripps halls, thus playing major roles in each of the School of Journalism's most recent moves. In 1992, you were called back by your own college graduating class as a special guest speaker for its Golden Anniversary. You were not only the first woman president, but the first president of any description of the School of Journalism Society of Alumni and Friends. You also served on one of the search committees for a new director. During one of your last years in Athens before moving closer to your daughters, you announced the Lasher-Evarts Quality of Writing Award in 2005 to annually recognize a student who has distinguished himself or herself in the study of journalism's key ingredient -- precise writing. This award became fully endowed this year, thanks mainly to your family.

Throughout your association with the School of Journalism as one of its most active alums, your attention has consistently been to the students. You have invited a report from those winning the Lasher Living Legacy Award, and regularly invited those students to dinner at the Country Club when you lived in Athens. These courtesies are but a sample of those you have extended to students over the years. The school's responsive regard was shown last year when a special ceremony was held in your honor and you were also honored at the Journalism Banquet with the same Ohio University captain's chair that is given retiring faculty members. We were glad to give it to you and hope you are enjoying it.

Best wishes to you go with this letter recognizing your 84 years of association with your school of journalism.

Dru Riley Evarts,
writing for faculty, staff, and students,
E.W. Scripps School of Journalism