When Herbert Parker, an African-American assistant director of financial aid, was fired during my junior year, students responded with a series of protests: Herb Parker, Just like him/Dare to struggle, Dare to win. Minority students occupied Day Hall and the Office of Admissions on Thurston Ave., leaving when the University got a temporary restraining order from a judge.
For those of us working at The Cornell Daily Sun, those goings-on were only part of the drama, however. Downtown at the paper, two reporters assigned to write an article about the firing got into a fist-fight during which the story was yanked from a typewriter and torn into tiny pieces. Editors separated the brawlers and quickly produced a new article before deadline. But one staffer spent hours collecting all 100 or so pieces of the original story and taping them back together. He then proclaimed that the original lead written by one of the reporters had been a whopping 73 words, or about 50 words too long.
The staffer was David Rosenberg '78, who went on to an illustrious career at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The story of the fist-fight and the 73-word lead became part of Sun lore. It was retold, by one of the reporters involved, at David’s memorial service. David died of brain cancer in 2002.
I was thinking of David recently, when I was in Ithaca for a Sun gathering and took a long walk around campus. He was my classmate at Cornell, my colleague at The Sun and The Journal, and a close friend. And he’s still the person I want to talk to about so many things: The Sun has a sex columnist! The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch! Joe Torre is the manager of The Los Angeles Dodgers! (Though David grew up in Ithaca, he was a life-long Dodgers’ fan.)
David matured beyond the days of newsroom fist-fights — most of us did — though he never learned to suffer fools gladly or tolerate journalistic incompetence. I can’t remember whether the internal Wall Street Journal email sent out when David died called him obsessively brilliant or brilliantly obsessive; either one applies.
One of David’s first assignments at The Sun was to cover a meeting of minority students planning a protest. Someone spotted him sitting in the back and taking notes. He was confronted by several very large, very angry would-be protesters, who asked what he was doing and demanded his notebook. Asserting the rights of the press, he refused to hand it over. A scuffle ensued, and he ultimately made his escape, still clutching the notebook, in a triumph for press freedom.
David also was an eager combatant in the ongoing strife between two factions on the 1976-1977 staff. We’re pretty sure he was joking when he said he had a fantasy of two massive dogs walking through the newsroom to attack someone in the other camp. The culmination of the in-fighting, and some relief, came in the form of a pie fight. After the paper was finished one night, Sun staffers began hurling cream pies at one another until the newsroom and everyone in it was covered with gooey, sticky filling.
David left Cornell and The Sun when The Wall Street Journal offered him a job in New York. He swiftly rose to top positions at that paper and The Asian Wall Street Journal, spending two tours in Hong Kong, and worked at The New York Times before returning to The Journal to oversee the paper’s partnership with CNBC-TV. He had an amazing memory, excellent news judgment and great intelligence, and it didn’t hurt that he was willing to work 16-hour days, at least six days a week.
It wasn’t that David had no life outside of work or necessarily loved his job. He was just intensely critical of any publication he worked on and thought there was work to be done. Shortly after becoming managing editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, he said in a letter: “We have yet to produce a copy of the AWSJ that hasn’t made me cringe for one reason or another.”
David loved music, and his tastes were wide-ranging. The selections at his memorial service included “Melissa” by The Allman Brothers and “O Terra, Addio!” from Verdi’s Aida. Another speaker at the service recalled the time David reached into an exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and touched Greg Allman’s guitar.
Along with a gift for sarcasm, David had a biting sense of humor that rarely missed its target. Pat Relf ’76, says, “I just remember him lurking, not saying much at all, until the perfect moment at which he said, very drily, something hilarious.” David was groggy after surgery when I visited him at a New York hospital, but lucid enough to tease me for not knowing which way was downtown as I looked out over Fifth Avenue.
When David got sick, he was living in a spacious Manhattan apartment filled with furniture and artifacts from Asia. He was dining regularly at trendy restaurants and attending opera at Lincoln Center. But when I think of him, what comes to mind is our cooking dinner together after a day of proofreading at The Wall Street Journal 30 years ago. David would make spaghetti — if he could find the same size jar of mushrooms his mother used. Or I’d make a casserole that he affectionately called Cooperative Extension Tuna.
It’s hard to let go of someone you knew and loved for so long. The truth is I still talk to David, all the time. And I still hold him to his promise to attend the Los Angeles Dodgers-Cleveland Indians World Series with me, at least in spirit, as soon as it happens.
Rose Gutfeld '78 is a former Sun Editor in Chief and a member of The Sun Alumni Association Board of Directors. She previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and Congressional Quartely and is now a freelance writer and editor.