When the Rocky Mountain Association of Rocketry / Skywatchers rocket club made its debut as a section of the NAR in 1974, one of the first orders of business was to establish a news letter.
I was a senior in high school at the time, and was taking advanced English and creative writing classes. In addition, I was taking a mechanical drafting class. Naturally, I was elected as the first editor of the club newsletter, The Cosmic SteppingStone.
In subsequent years, the editor was elected along with the other club officers for a one year term. Besides myself, editorial duties were handled by club members Marc Kramer, Lester Coburn, Glade Gordon, and Brian Fox.
The masthead of the premier issuecarried a drawing of a circular space station, very crudely drawn as there was a huge rush to get the publication worked up and printed.
By the time issue #2 came around, I had more time to sit down and draw up a much better rendition of the station.
Like most club newsletters of the time, the CSS carried the usual things such as event calendars, editorials, meet reports, general club news, cartoons, rocketry tips and techniques, and the occasional rocket plan submitted by a club member.
The club's printing process wasn't exactly the greatest, so any attempt to include photographs was a dismal failure.
These were also the days before the advent of personal computers and word processing software. For many years the newsletter was laboriously pounded out on a mechanical typewriter, usually by a late-night, bleary-eyed, caffeine-laden editor.
At one point in the mid 1970's, printing was done on one of those old hand cranked, purple-inked mimeograph machines that one of the club members had obtained on the cheap.
No newsletters at all were published from late 1978 through all of 1981. This three year hiatus was the period when the club was down to five members and activity was at an all-time low.
Things changed big time in 1980.
The NAR presence in the Mountain States region enjoyed a huge resurgence. The HOTROC regional contests were in full swing, and ROMAR re-chartered as a section.
The Cosmic Steppingstone was re-born in a much slicker format. As the premier editor of the new order of things, I re-designed a new mast-head and began including full front page illustrations.
Huge improvements were made in newsletter layout, regular features and articles were graced with graphics and clip art. For the first time, the club's printing process was adequate enough to reproduce photographs with a bit better quality. Submitted rocket plans were also very professionally drafted. In those days, there was a lot of real paper cut and paste work done, as well as hand drawing column separation lines. It was way more work than what we can do today with modern computer publishing apps.!
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| A Sample page of the CSS 'New Look' |
In the last years of the Cosmic Steppinstone's publication, we enjoyed a healthy newsletter exchange with many of the well-known NAR sections around the country.
I still have all of my original copies of the newsletter, which I enjoy taking out once in awhile to spend an evening re-reading and reminiscing about the 'goodle days' of ROMAR / Skywatchers.
Even more importantly, these old documents have proven a very valuable resource for digging up information for this blog series on the history of ROMAR!
Cheers!
