By Joe Pinter, News Editor, @JPinter93
November 19, 1926
St. Bonaventure University’s first campus newspaper, The Bona Venture, started on this day in 1926. At first, the paper cost five cents to purchase.
Now, it has become a weekly Friday tradition for many students, faculty and alumni to read a copy of The BV while they are eating breakfast.
The BV—still going strong after 86 years.
By Joe Pinter, News Editor, @JPinter93
November 14, 1947
The St. Bona Venture was St. Bonaventure University’s first student-run campus newspaper. It was founded by Irving Bacon, a professor of English and Latin at Bonaventure.
Before its establishment, The Laurel was Bonaventure’s official student publication. However, The Laurel has always focused more on creative writing and poetry than news.
During World War II, The St. Bona Venture published less copies of its newspaper, and also cut back the amount of pages for each edition.
After the war, the editors of the paper decided a shorter name would work better. It was on this day that the name was changed to what many Bonaventure students and faculty recognize—The Bona Venture.
By Joe Pinter, News Editor, @JPinter93
ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. (Oct. 19) — During its weekly meeting, the St. Bonaventure University Student Government Association discussed five topics, including Brown and White Night and the March of Dimes.
Afterward, SGA gave the floor to students presenting their campus club.
Abby Harrington, SGA vice president, led a discussion on the course evaluation system and whether it should be kept as is or changed.
“I sit in on the faculty senate, and they addressed to me that there is a problem that we don’t have enough participation in the course evaluations,” Harrington said.
Cody Clifford, SGA president, said that the participation has dropped from 68 percent to 42 percent within the past year. This trend coincides with all evaluations switching from in-class forms to online forms.
Some changes to the evaluation system were considered, including giving out evaluations the last day of class, making the evaluations shorter, giving students even more time to take them and the professors designating a time at the end of the last class of the semester when the students use their laptops to complete the evaluations.
When it was put to a vote, the SGA officers were even-split. But the two most favorable options were keeping the current system and having students do the evaluations on their laptops in class.
In other business, the officers concluded the March of Dimes had been a success.
“We had about 20-25 teams participating,” said Robbie Chulick, SGA executive secretary. “About 15 of them were SGA clubs or student-oriented teams.”
Chulick also added that $45,000 had been raised. However, that number is likely to go up since the online fundraising will not end until next Friday, Oct. 26.
The four groups that raised the most money:
*The Buzz
*The Bona Venture
*SBU Resident Assistants
*SGA/Townhouse 25
Heather Pfeil, March of Dimes community director, said 300-400 walkers participated in the event.
The next item on the agenda was the introduction of the new Class of 2016 SGA officers.
They are as follows: Kelsey Koos, president; Megan Cutia, vice president; Kendra Worley, secretary; Diane Adegoke, treasurer.
SGA recently altered the duties of the freshmen officersto mainly watch and learn how SGA is run while still planning a few community events.
After the floor was opened for club presentations, five clubs presented while two clubs did not have a representative at the meeting.
Asian Students in Action (ASIA), Latin American Student Organization (LASO), Black Student Union (BSU), Voices, Step Team, Spectrum, SBU Hip Hop, and Bonacoustics all presented. Each club is chartered by SGA.
ASIA, LASO, BSU, Voices, the Step Team and the Hip Hop Team all spoke to the SGA officers and used PowerPoints to explain the goals and ideas their clubs have.
The highlights of this segment of the meeting:
Voices helped pay for the speaker from Burma that was on campus on Wednesday. The officers were approached by SGA and decided to help bring the speaker to Bonaventure.
Voices will also be selling club t-shirts for $12 a piece starting next week.
The Step Team will host its seventh annual talent show on Nov. 7. This is just one of many fundraisers the club has planned.
The Hip Hop team announced that it performed to a sold-out Quick Arts Center crowd on Monday night, making $1,750.
According to team captain Caitlin Welch, the money goes to a special place.
“We are donating to a family originally from Jamestown, now living in South Carolina,” Welch said. “It is for a couple married one year ago who are hoping to adopt a child with special needs from Uganda. The child they are hoping to adopt is 3 years old and is struggling with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. The grand total they need to raise in order to adopt is $25,000 and prior to our show they had raised $15,000 already.”
The team now has 43 members and the number is rising. The club is growing and will perform at halftime at almost every home basketball game. The team has been working with the Olean School of Dance to help the younger kids. Additionally, it will host a Christmas show from Nov. 27-28.
Spectrum and Bonacoustics were not present at the meeting.
By Joe Pinter, News Editor, @JPinter93
October 12, 1978
It has long been assumed that there is a ghost on campus—Willie Cooper. His name is even engraved on the WWII memorial on campus.
Some people say Willie is the ghost of De La Roche Hall. However, Willie was said to have visited another place on campus—the fifth floor of Devereux Hall.
In September 1978, the residents of Dev had to evacuate the building after an “explosion.” There is still no cause to the explosion; however, students believe it fits right in with the tales of black masses, murders and exorcisms.
It was on this day that The Bona Venture wrote a famous story about the history of Dev and its ghost.
Students have been living in Dev since 1928, but it has been more than 50 years since students have lived on the fifth floor.
A fire destroyed parts of the building in 1930, causing the fifth floor to temporarily house students while the building was being redone.
During this time, the freshmen football team lived on the fifth floor. But once the building was finished, students were moved off to another floor. This coincides with legend.
After this, the west wing of the fifth floor was used for fraternity meetings in 1963 and 1964. The east wing was locked up.
After the east wing became locked, rumors floated around about strange things that happened there.
According to Rev. Alphonse Trabold, O.F.M., an exorcism did not take place. However, he did say that a “kind of desecration” did. The friars have had books on the subject, and in the past, students have stolen them and read about it.
However, no evidence of these events was found on the floor after it was opened for recreation.
Not too long after the floor was opened, it was suddenly closed. The reasons are still, to this day, not clear. The entire floor then became a storage area.
In October of 1978 the Devereux Dorm Council wanted to renovate the floor and make it into a lounge again. All the furniture was still in it. This would never happen.
Many reasons attributed to the floor not being reopened, mainly the fact that there are no sprinklers or fire alarms. The floor has been locked for years.
But Bonaventure students are sure that one person will always be on the floor—Willie Cooper.
By Joe Pinter, News Editor, @JPinter93
October 10, 1969
The Vietnam War has been referred to as one of the darkest periods in our country’s history.
There were violent protests at schools across the country.
All across the nation, college students that had been drafted were burning their draft cards in protest to the war and the mandatory draft itself. This happened often at St. Bonaventure University although it is unknown exactly how many Bonaventure students participated.
The Oct. 10, 1969 issue of The Bona Venture featured a story about David James Edward Aud. Aud graduated the previous year and had been student president. He believed that war and killing were immoral. Because of this, he did not wish to fulfill his military duty.
Aud was denied an appeal, and he decided to “wait it out” in Boston until he received a draft notice and faced arrest. The BV focused mainly on Aud’s story instead of the students burning draft cards. This was a display of Bonaventure’s emphasis on peace.
By Joe Pinter, News Editor, @JPinter93
September 14, 2001
It was on this day that The Bona Venture, our student-run print newspaper, would publish a front-page story about the life and death of Fr. Mychal Judge.
Fr. Mychal Judge grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. at the height of the Great Depression. He witnessed true poverty and suffering while he was young. He even realized at a pretty young age that material things had no meaning in his life.
When he was 15, Fr. Mychal started the process to enter the Franciscan community. He received a BA degree from SBU and then was ordained a priest at Holy Name College in Washington, D.C. Fr. Mychal then served at many chapels and monasteries in the New York-New Jersey area. But in 1971, he became an alcoholic—which he would eventually overcome in 1978.
By 1992, Fr. Mychal was appointed chaplain of the fire department of New York. He used this position to encourage and pray at hospitals, fire stations and even rescue missions.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Fr. Mychal heard of the attacks on the World Trade Center and rushed to the site. Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked him to go into the lobby of the North Tower and hold a prayer service. This would be the last time he spoke to the mayor.
The South Tower collapsed and sent debris flying through the North Tower. Fr. Mychal was struck in the head with a piece of debris. According to New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly, Fr. Mychal was praying out loud, saying, “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!”
Fortunately, firefighters carried Fr. Mychal’s body out of the lobby and into a church nearby. This scene was in the documentary film, 9/11. It would become one of the most famous images from the tragedy.
Fr. Mychal has a memorial at the 9/11 site. He also has had countless awards named after him and even a documentary about him on that tragic day.
pinterjo11@bonaventure.edu
By Tony Lee, Editor in Chief, @sHecKii
Have you noticed the way The Bona Venture has changed its social media usage? Have you noticed an exponential increase in its web exclusive frequency?
It might be pretentious to think The Intrepid alone sparked The Bona Venture’s increase in social media usage and updating frequency, but the timing of the change seems like it did.
Regardless, as a student journalist all about progressive thinking and adapting to the 21st century, watching fellow classmates rise up to the competition makes me smile.
And I love it, and so should the St. Bonaventure University community.
The Intrepid started because I strongly believed American newspapers can still be a formidable communication medium.
Newspapers needed new ideas, and journalists needed to be more creative to adapt to the 21st century.
But The New York Times cannot risk experimentation. Neither can most community newspapers.
Student journalists can and may be the only ones. Most St. Bonaventure journalism professors believe the answer to “How can newspapers be profitable again?” lied within a student’s mind, too.
As a result, the Bona’s community has recently experienced a richer, fresher content only spurred by competition between two student-run organizations.
And now, I hope everyone realizes The Intrepid’s vision since the beginning.
Both news organizations not only can coexist but can work synergetically to provide better coverage for the St. Bonaventure community.
The Bona Venture currently has more staff, and because the organization did a great job adjusting to the market, it’ll force The Intrepid to recruit better and find different story angles.
The Intrepid praises the new changes at The Bona Venture, and so should everyone else.
As long as the fire within St. Bonaventure student journalists keep getting stronger, the future for journalism looks bright.
And so does St. Bonaventure’s.
EDIT – March 16, 10:41 a.m.
A former editor-in-chief of The Bona Venture asked me this on Facebook.
“…They may be posting more regularly, but we jumped on Twitter back in 2009 when I was EIC and got a Facebook page around the same time. So, I guess I’m confused about the aspect of having changed anything?”
In my opinion, I was not talking about merely having a Facebook or Twitter account.
The Bona Venture traditionally had an online editor burden this task, and I would know being one last semester. But now, the entire staff helps out — retweeting each others’ articles, promoting The Bona Venture’s work and fully taking advantage of social media.
Not only that, The Bona Venture has started its own sports Twitter account, too — something The Intrepid had made but didn’t debut since we do not have many staff writers.
Once again, I said it’s pretentious to think all this happened just after The Intrepid launched, but that wasn’t the main point anyways.
The point was (or supposed to be) the importance of student journalists and what happens when competition strikes.
Two, competing organization have made the university better because it provides more content while inspiring student journalists to not only be more creative but strive for excellence.
I am sorry for any confusion.
– Tony Lee
intrepidsbu.com 