50 Year Reflections

Reflecting on the brief 50-year-old saga of the Committee for Reunion with England, I have realized that it came at a time of transitions: for me personally and professionally, for the United States, and for technology and culture.

Just a few months before my friend David Gambill and I ran the advertisement in the March 26, 1975, edition of the Richmond Mercury, I had changed quite significantly my life plans. In the summer of 1974, after completing my M.A. at the University of Virginia, I had planned on moving back to Philadelphia, to share an apartment with a trio of close friends I had made during my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. I had no specific job in mind in Philly but had saved enough money to get me through several months and was sure I could find something. In August 1974, my plans changed and I decided to stay in Richmond. For a brief period, I continued in my summer job as a keypunch operator at Thalhimer’s Department Store, but thanks to the help of the head of that department, I interviewed for a position as a copywriter in the advertising department. I believe I began working there in September and by the end of the year had moved into my first apartment in Richmond’s Fan District. When I went to City Hall one day on my lunch hour to pay the water/gas utility bill for my apartment, I saw an advertisement on a bulletin board seeking adjunct instructors at the Downtown Campus of J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. I soon had a part-time position at Reynolds starting in January 1975, and by September 1975 got a full-time position, where I continued teaching until I retired in 2013.

In the middle of those first months as a copywriter and an adjunct professor came the idea for the Committee for Reunion with England. Drawing on my newly developed skills in writing copy, I designed and wrote the ad for the Richmond Mercury. During another lunch hour, I walked to their offices at 7 E. Main St. with a mock-up of the ad. A week after the ad ran, the Mercury‘s managing editor called me and said how impressed he was with the satirical humor. After chatting awhile, he offered me the opportunity to be the Mercury’s freelance movie critic. I leapt at the chance, because for years I had dreamed of working in some way with film, ever since I had a fantastic film history class at the University of Pennsylvania. Starting in April 1975 for the next three months, I wrote reviews and articles for the Mercury. (I have found copies of my old reviews, which can be found here.) Unfortunately, the Mercury went out of business by August 1975, and that chapter in my life ended. (A story about the Richmond Mercury‘s mercurial history can be found here.) More than a decade later, I would start working part-time at the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a copy editor and later as the restaurant critic, so my association with newspapers did not end in 1975.

Reflecting on the CRE saga, I also realize how important personal connections are to the paths I followed. It was through my faculty advisor in the English Department at Penn, who had become an editor at the Pennsylvania Gazette, that our ad was published on the back cover of the alumni magazine. It was that placement that led to the articles in the New York Times and eventually newspapers across the country (when it was picked up by the Associated Press) and ultimately The Times in London. It was through a friendship with a fellow student at Penn, whose father was the producer of To Tell the Truth, that I was invited to appear on that TV show. That led to several transitional firsts for me: first airplane ride, first overnight stay in Manhattan, and a continued love for New York. (I had visited Manhattan several times while at Penn, but they were always day trips via the train.)

While the media coverage of the Committee for Reunion with England had all but fully ended by November 1975, we continued to publish The Tory Torch through the spring of 1976. Looking back at the four issues of the newsletter, I remember the technical challenges we had in producing it that would be so much less with today’s computer technology. We were working on a tight budget (we had only $83 in subscriptions), so we couldn’t get any professional typesetting and layouts done. We produced the body copy (the text in the body of the articles) on an IBM Selectric typewriter. To achieve the fully justified columns (even margins both left and right), I had to add spaces between words manually. Needless to say, typing the articles was tedious and time-consuming.

To produce the headlines in different typefaces and font sizes, we used Letraset dry-transfer type. I would purchase sheets from the now-defunct Richmond Art Company with different typesets and sizes and then position the desired letter over the space on the page where we wanted each letter in the headline to be and then with a blunt wood stylus rub until the vinyl letter was affixed to the paper. Then on to the next letter. Laying out a four-page issue of The Tory Torch could take several days, and then we would take the precious pages to Kopy Kat or some other copying service to run the copies of the pages, assemble and staple them by hand in preparation for mailing to our subscribers.

Today, of course, all of this could have been done in minutes with Microsoft Word, where you can pick typefaces, fonts, and justification with just a few clicks, layout the whole page with text boxes, and print it all with an inkjet or laser printer, or even easier transfer the document to a USB drive to take to Fedex Kinko’s. Or easier yet, not produce it on paper for mailing via the increasingly unreliable USPS but put it on the web.

That leads me to another reflection: how significantly the media landscape has changed. In Richmond in 1975, there were two daily newspapers (the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Richmond News Leader) both severely conservative in politics and style (but both excellently produced papers) and one weekly, the Richmond Mercury, which tended to be liberal and somewhat iconoclastic (which is what enabled us to run the Committee for Reunion with England ad there). Fifty years later, there is no Mercury. What later replaced it was Style Weekly, but that is no longer a print publication. The Time-Dispatch and the News Leader merged in the 1990s, so Richmond now has only one daily newspaper, and it is now an ultra-progressive and ultra-thin paper, more frequently read on the Internet than in print. (And in my opinion, poorly written and poorly edited.)

Of course, this change in the newspaper business is not peculiar to Richmond, but it does make me reflect on how different the saga of the Committee for Reunion with England would be if we tried to do it today. There would be no low-priced way to publish an advertisement in a newspaper that would get into thousands of hands and then lead to coverage in the big local paper and the local TV stations and eventually be picked up by the national news media. Granted it would be much easier to produce the advertisement and the newsletter … we could post it on X and Facebook and TikTok and other social media … but having it “go viral” in the way it did in 1975 would be quite different and I suspect quite difficult. The Tory Torch could be published on SubStack or on a web page (such as this), but again the combination of serendipitous and focused coverage would be hard to achieve. (Not that we “achieved” that, in some ways it seems to have simply happened, once we ran the initial advertisement.)

Finally, that leads me to reflect on the changing culture and politics of 2025 versus 1975. In 1975, we had just come through the political trauma of the Watergate scandal, the near impeachment and resignation of Richard Nixon, a period of ultra-high inflation, the final ending of the decade long Vietnam War, and the continuing Cold War with Russia — all events that had shaped my generation in so many varied ways. Despite all that (or because of it?) the country seemed in the mood to celebrate its history patriotically with elaborate Bicentennial plans. In 2025, we have had similar scandals, impeachments, political division, and renewed conflicts, yet it feels as if patriotism and the celebration of America’s founding is far less pervasive as we near the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than it was for the 200th. It also feels as if the country has lost much of its sense of humor. Jokes are now either crude or rude, rather than the ironic satire that David Gambill and I tried to put forth 50 years ago. Still, the Republic survives, communities thrive, and faith sustains.

God Save the King! God Bless the U.S.A.!