Brasler

LEGENDARY 52-YEAR CAREER BEGINS AT THE 1965 CONVENTION AS A YOUNG ADVISER

The Early Days

Wayne Brasler visits with NSPA conference coordinator Jeanne Buckeye at the 1974 Fifth Annual Spring Publications Conference in San Francisco where Brasler led the Newspaper Short Course. Buckeye would go on to serve as executive director from 1975-1978.

WAYNE

BRASLER’S CAREER with high school journalism spanned 52 years. It’s a career integral to NSPA/ACP history.

It started in 1964 at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, where he led students to produce a mimeographed weekly newspaper. He moved to Normandy High School (Missouri), his alma mater, when the adviser there died on graduation day.

From there to the NSPA offices and back to Normandy, his career circled back to the University of Chicago Laboratory High School until his retirement in 2014.

Along the way, he met scores of students, interacted with five generations of student media leaders and became instrumental in writing NSPA’s Nearbook Scorebook in 1967. He served on the NSPA board of directors, spent summer 1968 judging publications at headquarters and wrote NSPA’s history for its 75th anniversary.

Brasler attended his first convention in 1965 at the Palmer House, in Chicago. He said it was there he found mentors and life-long friends.

“I knew no one when I went to the convention, but I embraced every opportunity,” he said. “Ben Alnutt and Col. Charles E. Savedge helped change that. We dined together, laughed together, and I became part of the NSPA family.”

A Tribute To A Legend

Celebrating the organization’s 75th anniversary at the 1996 Chicago convention, Tom Rolnicki, executive director, recognizes Wayne Brasler for his decades of service. In 1967, Brasler was instrumental in writing the NSPA Newspaper Scorebook with several updates in future years. He also wrote profiles of the Pacemaker-winner newspapers for Scholastic Editor magazine.

That NSPA family provided an opportunity for him to observe and learn.

“I met all the leaders my first year,” Brasler said. “Each of the leading people in the field had their own talents and their own viewpoints. There was no cookie cutter going on. You would learn from everybody you met.”

Lessons learned included understanding how to make student journalism real and how to become an effective publications adviser.

Inspiring Brasler were the stories of

Rowena Harvey, adviser in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Harvey was instrumental in the development of the National Association of Journalism Directors, now JEA.

“Rowena built the Southside Times to mirror The New York Times, and they built an entire newsroom modeled after The New York Times. I have never seen a high school paper like that before or since,” Brasler said. “I’ll never know how she got that out of these kids.”

Brasler said Harvey’s publications were reflective of the times for student newspapers.

“By the 1920s, papers had exploded,” Brasler said. “There were few dumb papers — it was what Col. Murphy (Columbia Scholastic Press Association founder) called the ‘magic mirror.’ You could read the story in print, and if you were smart, you could read between the lines. It’s telling a completely other story of what we could be doing in the school.”

Pioneers of scholastic journalism understood how to create the magic mirror, and Brasler said they had another characteristic in common.

“Rowena was very tough and very smart and clicked with kids, which I think is the key to this. Advisers and students who click result in Pacemakers.”

Brasler’s list of friends reads like a Who’s Who of scholastic journalism. At the top are the directors of NSPA.

“I’ve known all the directors. Every one of them was great and had his or her own style, which I thought was very important.

“They have all had their own style — no peas in a pod, no copycats, and they weren’t afraid to change things,” Brasler said. “They had a great talent for knowing who to pick because they weren’t looking for a survivor, but for a personality. In this business you have to have a personality. They were looking for crazy.”

Fred and Lucille Kildow, who led NSPA for 40 years, were mentors to Brasler.

He said summer 1968 was a highlight. “I was adopted by the Kildows,” Brasler said. “We saw eye to eye on everything. I spent the summer in Minneapolis while I judged publications.”

He said the Kildows lived well. “Just being there and being part of it — working on the scorebook and judging was wonderful,” he said. The Kildows later surprised Brasler with an award named in his honor.

“The first applications were so good,” Brasler said. “They were deep, fearless, innovative, mavericks. Picking the winners was hard.“

Today, the first-place winners from each NSPA Story of the Year category (news, feature story, editorial/opinion story and sports story), as well as the social-justice reporting category, compete for the $1,000 Brasler Prize.

In 2001, the same year he underwent a five-valve bypass surgery, Brasler started an alumni newspaper for Normandy High, his alma mater. With 1,500 subscribers and proceeds going to scholarships, Normandy alumni distributed papers to legislators then preserved the district.

“I knew it was time to quit when I heard the alumni paper had saved the district,” Brasler said.

“Normandy changed my life, and the Courier was the heart and soul of the school.”

In 2014, Brasler retired from University of Chicago Laboratory High School but not from journalism. Former NSPA director Logan Aimone now advises at the University of Chicago Lab School, and Brasler focuses on the Normandy High School alumni paper.

As reporter and editor, he produces 60-80 pages per issue to inform the school’s graduates and inspire students.

“I told them that after 52 years I wanted to go back to being a journalist,” Brasler said. n

An Oral History

In May, 2019, Gary Lundgren and Linda Puntney traveled to Chicago to interview Wayne Brasler. Over a three-hour lunch at the Atwood, located in the iconic Staypineapple hotel, Brasler shared insights and stories about scholastic journalism and NSPA. “Since I am 78, I knew virtually all the founding mothers and fathers of scholastic journalism — when I came into the field at the age of 23, they took me under their wings.”