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(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) This month, Yale junior Garry Trudeau began to draw a comics series about the football team, called 'bull tales'; they would run in the Yale Daily News , starring BD and Mike Doonesbury. On the cover of GQ , September 1968: Omar Sharif, wearing a plaid wool jacket. On September 7 at the Miss America pageant, Atlantic City: Despite the legend, no bra burning took place. several dozen women's liberation protesters from New York City joined with women from around the country to stage a show on the boardwalk. From Jo Freeman , who was there: Women’s liberation took advantage of this to stage several guerilla theater actions. A live sheep was crowned Miss America. Objects of female oppression – high heeled shoes, girdles, bras, curlers, tweezers – were tossed into a Freedom Trash Can. A proposal to burn the can’s contents was scuttled when the police said that a fire would pose a risk to the wooden boardwalk. Women sang song...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Since Dr. Martin Luther King's murder in April, investigators had been following a trail of a man who seemed to have been following King, and went by the name of Eric Stavro Galt. Although information linked him to King's murder in Memphis, it was three months before he was finally caught. Police in London arrested him June 8 at Heathrow Airport, where he was trying to leave the UK with a Canadian passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd. James Earl Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's assassination. He would confess in 1969 and be sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted the confession and was supported in his effort for a retrial by King's family. 40 years later questions about James Earl Ray linger , Atlanta Journal Constitution. On June 10, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as military commander in Vietnam. At Walter Reed Army Hospital, former president Dwight...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) In May, the turmoil continued: On May 2, in France, the university at Nanterre was shut down by its administration after several weeks of student protests. The next day, students at the Sorbonne held a protest of the events in Nanterre, and police responded by surrounding the campus and shutting it down. The National Union of French Students and the Lecturers' Union called a strike, and on May 6 they marched to the Sorbonne. Police charged the crowd and the students created barricades. Rioting and conflicts with police would continue, including an all-night riot on the rive gauche on May 10. The Communist Party responded by calling for a national one-day strike on May 13. That day, a million people marched in Paris. Workers continued the protests, shutting down factories, around the country. The situation would continue through the month. On May 7, the Indiana primary gave Robert F. Kennedy his first big win, with 42 percent of t...

Following up on yesterday's post on Washington Post researcher Julie Tate, there's a profile of her in City Paper: The Unsung Hero of the Washington Post . Nice takeout on what a great researcher provides to investigative stories. Note the story says she was involved in 4 of the 6 Post Pulitizer-winning stories, and has contributed to at least one previous Pulitzer winner. Is the Post's research staff going to take hits from the latest buyout plan? Downie says the unit is critical to the paper’s investigative work and is keeping a close eye on how it fares in the buyout. “The research staff is one that we wouldn’t want to short on resources,” says Downie. “What exact number that means, I don’t know. We wouldn’t allow it to be imperiled.” (Thanks to contributors to the NewsLib listserv.)

Buried in the column by the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, praising the contributions of editors and other staff to some of the Post's six Pulitzers this year, is this: And one researcher, Julie Tate, was credited for important contributions to three Pulitzer-winning entries. This means researchers have been cited in at least a dozen, maybe two, Pulitzer awards in the last few years. Congratulations. Oh, and then there's this: Twenty-five Pulitzers have been awarded since Len Downie became executive editor in 1991, the most for any editor in history.

Nice to see that the Miami Herald's editor Anders Gyllenhaal had a hand in the awarding of a special Pulitzer Prize to Bob Dylan , as a former Minnesota editor..... And, of course, great huge congratulations to the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten , who once was the editor of the Herald's long-gone Tropic magazine....although I never read the story that won the Pulitzer because the concept bothered me a bit.....but I had a dream about Gene last night: I called him 'Uncle Gene' and congratulated him. Hmm.

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Monday, April 1, started out as a normal work week. It may have been my first day in the Washington Post's library, although I might have started the week before. Whichever, I was in a strange new job working with people I was just getting to know, in a city I didn't yet know well. This week would be a defining time. In Vietnam, troops in Operation Pegasus began the fight to open the road to Khe Sanh. On Tuesday, April 2, the film 2001 Space Odyssey , based on writings by Arthur C. Clark (who died last week) had its world premiere at the Uptown Theater in Washington. General release --with 19 minutes deleted -- would be April 6. That day, Sen. McCarthy got 56 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin primary. On Wednesday, Martin Luther King returned to Memphis and that evening gave his 'I have been to the mountaintop' speech . Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world....the world is all messe...