Then I wondered what she looked like back then and if there’s any chance we may have crossed paths. She probably wrote for the Alligator under her maiden name, right? I seem to recall an editor named Andrea but that was a lotta years and a lotta bourbon ago.
Alex.
I've got a helluva story about the Alligator, if you will indulge me.
When I was at UF a fellow student named Koretzky ran the Alligator. I didn't know him, but I must've met him. I went to dozens of their parties, each more notorious than the next. They had parties in the newsroom sometimes, sometimes off-campus, but I always found my way to them, even though I had no affiliation other than knowing a couple of writers and a "stripper," (the guy who sets the film images up to create printing plates). It was a real cowboy culture there. Pretty much anything went in the newsroom. Koretzky was a hardass about everything related to the publication. But he allowed pretty much anything to go on in the newsroom. People frequently did drugs, drank all day, and had sex there.
One day a 19-year-old kid named Sam Hirsh walked into the newsroom with a copy of an internally distributed fraternity publication called "The Four O'Clock Weekly." Hirsh had recently been a brother at Beta Theta Pi, but had quit when he could no longer bear the abuse and ridicule he received from his brothers. Hirsh was a Jewish kid, the brothers picked on him, hammered him with slurs constantly, and generally treated him like shyt. The publication he handed over to Koretzky contained some of the vilest, filthiest, profoundly misogynistic stories you've ever seen. It had a beer graph that instructed brothers on how many beers it would require to bed each little sister in the house. Each little sister had a derogatory nickname, "Basketball Head," "Anvil Head," etc. It had detailed accounts of what they called "RM Missions" where they would prop a ladder on the side of the house and watch their brothers engage in sex acts with girlfriends. It gave a graphic account of one brother who smeared his girlfriend's menses on his roommate's pillow. And it had lots and lots and lots of racial slurs.
Koretzky took the zine from the kid, who did not see the humor in the stories and was seeking to expose these guys for being the misogynistic, fun-loving racists that they were. So Koretzky interviewed the kid and filed the story in what he promised would be a series of many more to come. He quoted from the text and promised to reveal more in the coming days. He set to work following up on the story leads, tracking down brothers, talking to others who had quit the frat and interviewing faculty to get their take on what punishment should be expected, etc.
The story was so inflammatory that it broke nationally almost immediately. Hirsh was interviewed on Good Morning America, the AP wire picked it up and every major daily in the country ran a story on it.
When I read the story that morning in the Alligator, my first thought was, "I have got to get ahold of a copy of that thing!"
The "stripper" I mentioned earlier was a guitarist I played with. I gave him the use of my Fostex recording machine, which he was dying to lay tracks on, and asked him to get me a copy of the "Four O'Clock Weekly" in exchange. That night when I got home from class, he'd left a sub, a joint, (which I gave to my roommate), and the "Four O'Clock Weekly." I dove into it and the sub immediately. The first thing I noticed, was that it had editor's marks on it in heavy pencil with handwritten notes. I thought that was a little weird but I plowed on, sometimes amused by what I was reading, sometimes sickened, but in the end feeling like I had done something really dirty.
I took the publication home during the break and left it on my desk. My mom found it, read it cover to cover, threw it right into the garbage in disgust and I never saw it again. End of story. Literally.
About 12 years later a guy who had become famous for publishing a successful alternatively weekly in South Florida calls me. He knew my name because I started an unsuccessful one in Palm Beach County that ran weekly for three years. "This is Koretzky," he said. "Wanna start a paper with me?" "Meet me at Denny's and we'll talk about it."
And thus began my love/hate relationship with this brilliant man. We ran a weekly called the Free Press out of an office on Clematis Street for three years before we sold it. We laughed and fought and put out a bunch of good and bad stories. In the end, we were pretty proud of it.
In all that time, I'd never known Koretzky's background. I knew he'd gone to Florida, didn't really know much else about him. One day we met for lunch a few years after we sold the paper. I'd remembered he was in the J school at Florida and I asked him if he knew a buddy of mine. He said, yes, the cat had worked as a writer for him when he was the editor of the Alligator. I told him I remembered the parties, he laughed. I mentioned my buddy and the Four O'Clock Weekly and he froze. "Are you serious?" he asked, "You're the guy? All these years I thought it was one of those scumbags in Sports who stole it. Do you know you killed my story? I had the best story ever, landed right in my lap, and you killed it! That was the only copy we had."