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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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enough in the subject so that I remember starting a school newspaper in my first year of high school with the rather grandiloquent title of “The S-1 Criterion” [“S-1” being the designation of the class]. Some of my classmates, one of whom had a hand-printing set, and I organized this paper and put it out for, as nearly as I can remember, the better part of the year, perhaps even longer, on a bi-weekly basis. Anyway we got out a little paper which dealt with school news, school affairs, some fiction, and so forth. The school, I should mention, was the Collegiate School in New York, on West 77th Street, where I went from first grade right through to the last.

Q:

Did you do any summer work on your father's magazine?

Oakes:

No, I never did that. The only thing I ever did for his magazine, I remember was once designing a cover for it, which rather pleased him. But I never did any work for it. I did immediately, though, of course, as soon as there was an opportunity, go out for the school annual, called the Dutchman-- this was a school originally founded by the Dutch, by the way--and I worked on that and was editor of that in my senior year. And when I went to Lawrenceville for a year, I was on the Lawrenceville paper. I was only at Lawrenceville one year, really to fill in before going to college. I was on the Lawrenceville paper and on the yearbook also for that one year, and then as soon as I got to Princeton, I went out for the Princetonian, for the daily paper at Princeton. I didn't make it the first time; I did make it the second time I tried. We had competitions lasting several weeks at a time. And I was on the Princetonian during the rest of my college career, which was certainly my





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