Please hang on to this issue of The Post.
To put it together, we sifted through archival photos with white gloves, began researching stories months ago, and generally did our best to distill 200 rich years of history into eight pages and a supplement. It'll be worth something someday.
Don't expect this bicentennial Post to fetch more than a few dollars (if that) on eBay or its future equivalents, but don't be surprised if many years down the line, you find yourself paging through some old college effects and find it among your papers. I hope its value then will have increased; if you get two copies today and do the crossword in only one, you'll have something to look forward to in the golden years down the line. (Save tomorrow's Post if you do that, so you'll have the answers.)
It's impossible to be involved at any level with Ohio University and not be struck by its pervasive sense of history. The simple act of walking to class often takes you past College Green, which in one form or another has anchored the OU campus since before Abraham Lincoln's time. If you have trouble finding a place to park on a crowded weeknight on Court Street, chances are that a hundred years earlier, your collegiate forebears were tooling around the block looking for a post to hitch their horses. The evidence is everywhere that thousands of people knew and enjoyed OU and Athens long before we got here.
Nowhere do we feel the encroachment of history more than here at the campus newspaper. At The Post we have about a dozen or so framed copies of old front pages from not only this paper, but its various predecessors, dating back to the old OU Green & White, the Echo and the Panorama. We even have the old Daily News from 1891, when the top story was about an Athens judicial race and a local hatter bought an enormous ad on the front page for shirts
underwear gents' jewelry etc. & etc. You can't buy an ad on the front page of The Post these days.
I am privileged and excited to have had a hand in bringing you this bicentennial Post, which has cast a new light on my brief time with the newspaper and as an OU student. All the long hours I've spent chasing sources, sweating under deadlines and flailing to grind out stories don't seem so bad when you think that my predecessors have been doing it for the better part of two centuries.
Associate Editor
philip.ewing@ohiou.edu.
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Phil Ewing
