"Please find attached a page from my Rhodes photograph album (1974-1977) – I am afraid it is the only reference to the Journalism Department in about 50 pages of photographs.

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The staff in the photos were Les Switzer and Peter Temple (whose wife Anita taught Press History, court courants et al). He later emigrated to Australia and became a popular author of crime novels.

 

John McCormick was editor of Rhodeo for a couple of years and I was the photographer and helped with the Letraset headlines.

 

Learning to type on a manual typewriter in Journalism I stood me in good stead for the computer age which only dawned in the 1980s. I never used the T-Line shorthand again after the final exam.

 

I remember monitoring the SABC news during the June/July 1976 vacation as a Journalism III project – it happened to coincide with the Soweto uprising. The SABC only mentioned the events in passing.

 

Instead of doing Journalism Honours in 1977, I did Economic History.

 

I was the Rifleman in charge of the Eastern Province office of the army magazine Paratus 1978-1979.

 

I briefly worked for the EP Herald 1980-1982 as a photographer before going back to Rhodes in 1983 to do an MA in Economic History.

 

I wrote my thesis on a Commodore Business Machine PC that had 32K of memory which meant it could only store 2 pages at once. To print thesis one had to string the 2-page chunks together in a print command. No spell checker let alone a graphics capability. I eventually upgraded the external tape drive to a floppy drive.

 

Halfway through 1983 I was offered a job at Wits as a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Economic History.

 

In July 1985 I moved to Unisa to teach Economic History in the Economics Department. I retire from Unisa next year and will have completed 34½ years. All my Journalism skills came in very useful when initially setting up my course study guides and tutorial letters.

 

Scary to think I started at Rhodes almost 45 years ago."