Seven years ago, it was safe to say I was a little lost.
I had moved back to Nebraska from San Diego in the fall of 2002 to quickly get my master’s degree. The plan was that I’d finish it in three semesters and then move back to San Diego to reunite with my girlfriend of several years, whom I had left behind. But then things kind of got messed up. We broke up that spring, so I had nothing to move back to. And then budget cuts loomed at the University, and I kept hearing a (never-substantiated) rumor that if the Journalism college faced cuts, my assistantship would be one of the first things eliminated.
So when the summer rolled around, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what I was working toward anymore. I didn’t know what awaited me after graduation, much less what awaited me in August. So I did what anyone else would do. I channeled my despair and lack of direction by packing up my car, driving around the United States, trying to have adventures and trying even harder to grow a beard. And if I learned anything or grew as a person or figured out my place in the world or whatever, that would be great too. The best part was that my friend Derek Lippincott was the editor of the summer Daily Nebraskan, and he gave my life a little bit of purpose by letting me write about these adventures for the paper.
Over the course of this summer, as a tribute to 2003, I’m going to re-run the original Bearded Odyssey columns in director’s-cut format — including stories that had to be trimmed, an adventure that never saw print and photos that never ran. They’ll run in the same weeks they ran originally, with the official intro debuting on June 8. Here is Editor Lippincott himself to kick it off:
When one assumes the role of editor of the summer edition of his college newspaper, he is confronted with three main options for how he wants his publication to serve readers.
Option #1 is a weekly tabloid version of the school year product. Hard news. Beat writers. Sports features. Opinion page with a couple columnists.
Option #2 is an alternative weekly art house rag. Just enough news to call it a newspaper. The rest is music and movie reviews and columns. This is the easier option. During the summer all your good journos are off at summer internships, leaving you a few youngsters, a couple homebodies and a whole bunch of hipsters. Hipsters love to review music and write columns.
Option #3 is running it with no real style or substance whatsoever. It’s showing up on Sunday afternoon to put the paper out on Monday. It’s having 32 column inches of space to fill and running a 30 inch “Sex and the City” column with a pulled quote. It’s a cover story about a 311 coming home for a concert – never mind that 311 hasn’t been popular since 1997 and the concert was in Council Bluffs and your paper is in Lincoln. It’s telling your artist to “just draw something cool and we’ll run it big.”
It’s telling one of your buddies, who is preparing to load up his Saturn and embark on a solo cross country journey, to write about his experiences and e-mail them back to you. And goading him to grow a beard along the way. And to write about that, too.
Option #3 was my tenure as editor in the summer of 2002. And so the “Bearded Odyssey” was born under the faithful correspondence of Neal Obermeyer. It took readers of The Daily Nebraskan – Summer Edition from the peaks of the Rockies to the beaches of San Diego to a conference for believers in the paranormal in the hills of Appalachia. Readers met a bum named Chester, a tracker of bigfoot, a man claiming to be an archangel of the Lord, and many others. The Bearded Odyssey spanned approximately 5,000 miles and about 120 column inches. It involved zero razors.
If memory serves me correctly, the growth of hair on Neal’s jowls and upper lip was far less remarkable than the journey during which he grew it. The son of a thick-bearded farmer, Neal often fought the harsh torment of follicular underachievement. He simply couldn’t summon the testosterone to grow a beard of appropriate substance.
Yet, in a way that only a paranormal devotee or archangel of the Lord could truly know, I believe that the substance absent from Neal’s beard was poured into my summer newspaper. The Bearded Odyssey made the Daily Nebraskan – Summer Edition plush and vibrant.
What you are about to read are Neal’s first-hand accounts of the Bearded Odyssey, as published that fateful summer. These are the words that gave life to Option #3.
- Derek Lippincott
That’s a solid intro from Mr. Lippincott.