Happy Birthday NOMOCO

Sunday will mark the birthday for Havre’s college newspaper, which began in 1933.

The Northern Montana College and Montana State University-Northern newspaper had a run in some incarnation or another for 77 years. Many students went through the newspaper as it evolved and morphed, until it faded away.

Valerie Hickman, the MSU-Northern library archivist, said she worked at the NOMOCO, which is an abbreviation for Northern Montana College, from the fall of 1975 to the spring of 1978. She said the first year she worked for the paper, she wrote stories. The last two years she was there, she worked for the advertising section.

“Usually, there were around a dozen people,” Hickman said, listing the editor, assistant editor, reporters and so forth.

NOMOCO covered anything that was on campus, Hickman said: clubs, student committees, college sports. To lay out the paper, they used rubber cement to arrange printed columns on a sheet before sending it off to the printers. Hickman said the paper was mostly a weekly publication, but at one point, it was biweekly.

The paper had a faculty adviser to oversee its production, but every other position was filled with a student.

Steve Hesske, a communications professor at MSU-Northern now, was once a faculty adviser for the publication, but said he cannot remember exactly when. He said that one of the reasons the paper is not being printed today is because no one would take it up.

“NOMOCO just sort of died from neglect,” Hesske said. “ … I think a lot of college campuses are giving up their papers.”

Trygve “Spike” Magelssen, a technical science professor at MSU-Northern now, said he was once the managing editor of the paper and a reporter before that. He said that, at first, he had no desire to work the paper, but agreed to after many people urged him to do so. He said that working for the paper brought on great experience and memories.

During the two to three years he was working the paper, he and others who worked it decided to change the name of the publication from NOMOCO to Northern Light. That was 1999.

“We’d get the paper done,” Magelssen said. “We’d start Tuesday afternoon and we were working until early Wednesday morning around 3 a.m.”

He said he and the Northern Light staff would go out onto the lawn after they had finished building the paper and yell to the dormitories that the paper was finished.

He said the paper fell through because they could not find people who were interested in it. Toward the end of its life, news on campus surged with the advent of the Filthy Lucre, an alternative news publication, but eventually, all physical news publications died out.

“It was an important part of my college experience,” Magelssen said.

He said that the university could use such a news source these days, for the students to know what the administration is doing, what student senate is doing and so forth.

“The information doesn’t get out to the students,” he said. “They don’t have a forum to complain about things on campus. The NOMOCO or Northern Light provided a forum.”

He said that though the newspaper covers hard university news, there were also fun things in it like a question of the week and games. They did provide information to the students and the newspaper was a part of making changes to better the university, he said.

“We were actively involved in politics,” Magelssen said. “We participated in the process. … We did it legitimately, like real journalists should.”

While Magelssen was at the paper as a reporter, Rob Everingham was the editor.

“Without Rob, we never would have had the paper,” Magelssen said.

Everingham had previously worked at a college newspaper in Bozeman and was working as a sports reporter part-time at the Havre Daily News while he was in college in Havre.

Everingham, today an employee of North 40 Outfiter, said that he was the one who changed the name of the paper.

“I went to the senate and let them know that we would be changing the name,” he said. “To Northern Light.”

He said he understood that NOMOCO was nostalgic for some people, but the college had been MSU-Northern for six years at that point and students were no longer recognizing Northern Montana College.

“We had a staff of around five people,” Everingham said. “Putting out a paper every week was stressful. It was definitely a challenge, but we got it done.”

He said that the last issue he put out was in May 2000. He said he thinks the university should still have a news publication.

“I think every university could use one,” he said. “It gives students a chance to learn those skills.”

He said the most difficult part of running a paper like Northern Light is finding students who were willing to put in the time to get it done.

“We worked hard to try and make sure the students had a paper,” he said. “It gave the students something to look forward to every week.”

Hickman said, after looking through the almost-exhaustive archives of the NOMOCO and Northern Light in the lower lever of the library, that the last issue of Northern Light she could find was from October 10, 2010. It was only being sporadically published at the end of its life, but a couple of years before that, she said, it was fairly regular.