Class visit

With the visit of Hank Klibanoff, the class of Journalism 5300 got a history lesson as he addressed his youth in Alabama, his college years at Washington University in St. Louis and then some of his experiences as a man in his 20s.

The Pulitzer prize-winning author grew up in Alabama in the 1950s and 60s, the child of the northern mother and southern father.  Although his high school did not integrate until his junior year, Klibanoff lived in a more progressive area of Alabama.  Industry, attracted to the region by the TVA, brought in outsiders, and the presence of NASA in Huntsville, less than two hours away, attracted several famous scientists, including Werner Von Braun.  People like that brought culture, like a symphony and opera.

“Why there is a correlation between things like that and a progressive attitude, towards things like race, I don’t know,” Klibanoff said.  His own mother was responsible for founding two theater companies.

Even surrounded by racial tension, as a high school student, he did not understand much of what was going on in the larger world.

“College awakened me,” he said, when he went to Washington University in St. Louis during the time of student activism, especially involving the Vietnam War. Although Klibanoff was never drafted, he did receive a draft number, which made him think about what he would do if he were chosen by lottery.

“You can’t help thinking—what would it be like to leave the country, to go to Canada,” he told the class.  His father’s position of head of the Draft Board complicated his views, and Klibanoff often begged his father to resign that position.

It was not until many years later, he said, when he realized what good his father had done as head of the Draft Board when people came up and told him how they had been able to avoid the draft due to their conscientious objections and his father’s work.

After he had graduated college and worked as a reporter for several years, Klibanoff took eleven months off to travel the world.

            “I had never seen anything of the world, and I thought I should,” he said.  He jokingly advised the students never to ride a camel from the pyramids at Giza to the one at Djoser.  You won’t be able to get up for weeks, he said.

With his talk, the students learned about his background before he became a well known editor and later Pulitzer Prize winner.