The word CRISIS does well on a newspaper placard, but describes Lundagård badly during the second half of the seventies.
We had certainly (almost) no money, but many readers who cared, and demanded every five minutes the editor’s resignation. The economists had not yet taken over the media and as long as we reached some real editorial parties everyone seemed to be happy.
And the student politicians were proud to have the oldest student newspaper with many renowned editors. The cultural pages and editorials of the Stockholm magazines were regularly attentive to what we wrote.
The comments were admittedly most of the kind – “it was better in the old days,” but our ambitions were not to compete with Hjalmar Gullberg, Allan Fagerström and Nordal Åkerman …
Instead, we mixed high and low, trying to provoke (though it was not easy at that time), while we saw ourselves as a struggling mouthpiece for the union. We did what we could to stop U 68 and attract public opinion for better study allowances.
A little crisis appeared perhaps when we gave the art-gallery owner Jean Sellem a whole issue and he filled it with a single long text in Latin. It would have become a crisis for the irresponsible publisher who had a text printed with a content he had no idea about.
The crisis was probably not too far away when the deputies suddenly had opinions about that we had moved the editorial from Lund to Bangkok. Only temporarily for a few weeks, but still. The Vietnam war was over, but war was still raving in Laos and Cambodia and we bet everything on one card that there would be a revolution in Thailand and it would start on the Thammasat University … And to show that we were not completely joined in union leading-strings and highlighting the opposing side as well, we half a year later moved the editorial staff to the USA and UCLA, but made sure to be back before the deputies could threaten with a new vote of censure.
That we “survived” was probably because we showed that we liked Lund. We hooked on student evenings, student’s farces and not least the carnival in 1978 and let the student politicians bash each other in our columns, while we took the student life issues very seriously and devoted a special issue to loneliness, exam anxiety and suicide. We invested in “Poems by the thousands” and arranged poetry evenings and Pun Watchers made us realize that bad puns are not the worst.
The only crisis I associate with Lundagård is the one I experienced when I after four and a half year as editor realized that it was time to leave Sweden’s funniest and maybe most important newspaper job.
Text: Per Lindström, Professor of Photography, Editor 1976-1980
Translation: Lars Jansson
