I’ve referred from time to time in these columns, to the Missouri Nine, make it Ten, when you include John Whale. The Nine, were eight other fledgling journalists, plus me, all from the Missouri Graduate School of Journalism. The other eight were: Pinki Virani, Calvin Lawrence (my immediate room-mate), Dan Higgins, Marynelle Hardee, Louis Trager, Andrew Cavanagh (from Wales), and our Chinese colleagues, whose names I don’t have here, except I believe their English names were Grace and Simon. Grace was from Taiwan and Simon was from the People’s Republic of China.

     After we’d all arrived in London around September 1, 1981, Mr. Whale called us in for our first group meeting. I don’t recall much about it, but then, or at one of our group meetings, he said, ‘It’s beginning to look like we’ve got a real pig on our hands.’ Interesting language to inspire fledgling journalists with, but we were all 30 years old, or close, and we’d been around the block, I’d guess. Still, all I knew was, no matter whom or what Mr. Whale was referring to, when all was said and done, I didn’t want to be described as a pig, and the same went for my work.

     To be sure, I danced around many story-ideas that semester, without writing about them even close to enough times to make 12 stories, and I’d guess Mr. Whale tore out most of any hair he had left, driven by my writer’s block of sorts. Of course, it wasn’t really writer’s block that drove me away from the typewriter; it was my interest in walking about and taking pictures.

     I’ve already mentioned the stories I photographed (at least potentially for publication) with Dan Higgins, Louis Trager, and Marynelle Hardee. I haven’t mentioned that I photographed Calvin himself, working at my Olivetti manual typewriter, which we both typed our stories on. He was wearing his patented Army t-shirt then, and I wish I still had the photos.

      Calvin was my immediate room-mate in the big flat six of us lived in. He was African-American, from Baltimore, about six-feet tall, athlete-lean, wore his hair very, very short, and had a B.A. degree, I believe, from an East Coast school. Although I didn’t photograph any stories for him, we attempted to cover one story together: skinheads in London.