Thin and scruffy-looking, dressed in brown cords and T-shirt, 17 years old, I entered Room 212 of Kerckhoff Hall for the first time. It was 1949. A boy named Chuck Sutton was sitting in the arch of a horseshoe-shaped desk and I told him I had seen an article in the paper saying that the UCLA Daily Bruin needed help on the staff.

"Any writing experience?"

"I took journalism in high school."

He handed me a sheaf of papers.

"See what you can do with this. Give me about six inches. That's four lines to an inch. Use one of the typewriters against the wall and be sure the margins are set at 10 and 75."

It took me about 40 minutes and two or three rewrites to get the story done. My lead went something like this:

"Various events are planned around the campus this week on behalf of the University chapter of the United Nations Association."

I handed it over and he looked pained, then told me to come back tomorrow if I wanted to help out any more.

I looked in the next morning's paper and found that somebody had rewritten my story, but I decided to go back to The Bruin anyway. I joined the staff and rose to be city editor, was nominated for managing editor but was rejected by the Student Executive Council through guilt by association with a parent. Twenty years after I first set foot in Kerckhoff Hall, I returned to UCLA as a graduate student in journalism and decided to write my master's thesis on the history of The Bruin—to find out for myself how it was that a mere college newspaper had left its mark so deeply on me and on so many other people. My research into the history of The Bruin became a way of laying old ghosts to rest, after two decades.

The Daily Bruin was formed along with UCLA itself in 1919, and, like the University, it has evolved and gotten bigger and perhaps it has also gotten better in that time. It has had its moments of foolishness and of greatness, it has printed thousands of poorly written stories, about the same number of creditable ones and once in a while its writing has touched the stars. It has had on its staff a man who would become a Nobel Prize winner and one who would win a Pulitzer, one who became a beloved newspaper columnist and one who became a bishop. Former editors have stressed this: The Bruin cannot be separated from its staff. Al Greenstein wrote in 1954:

In writing my thesis, I stopped at January 1955, because that is the month when the "old" Bruin ended and a "new" one began. Perhaps the new one became better than the old one was; but someone else will have to tell that story. And it deserves to be told, just as the story of the old Bruin deserves to be told.

The UCLA campus newspaper has had five names in the past 77 years—the Cub Californian (1919-24), the California Grizzly (1924-26), the California Daily Bruin (1926-43 and 1944-48), the California Bruin (1943-44) and, finally, the UCLA Daily Bruin (1948-present).

Its history, though, is linked not to its name, but to the changes in the University and in the world outside. You can divide that history into The Bruin's founding and growth from 1919 to 1924 and its coming of age from 1924 to 1929. Then, the Depression years and the War. Finally, the Bruin under its most severe stress, during the anti-Communist crusades and the McCarthyist atmosphere of the ten years after V-J Day. But before we look at that story, let's delve into a bit of prehistory—what journalism was like at UCLA's predecessor, the State Normal School at Los Angeles.