Adios, Frank

I'm headed to Corvallis this afternoon to join the Oregon State University community in saying goodbye and fare-thee-well to Frank Ragulsky, who's toiled selflessly but effectively as director of OSU Student Media for 28 years.

Frank is one of those guys who's too good to be true -- versatile, dedicated, resourceful and relentlessly cheerful. Over the years, I've seen every one of those qualities on display as Frank moved seamlessly from advising the OSU student newspaper to staging an annual summer workshop for high school yearbook editors to coming up with money for a summer journalism camp for minority high school students.

He served as director of Northwest Scholastic Press, an association for high school publications advisers, and organized the annual Fall Press Day, which brought together professionals, teachers and students for a day of workshops and critiques. And he was always there, if not in person then certainly behind the scenes, in steering OSU students to regional writing conferences and skills development workshops.

During my years as The Oregonian's newsroom recruiter and internship coordinator, I grew to admire Frank's bottomless well of enthusiasm and support for students who gravitated to journalism at Corvallis, despite a decided lack of institutional support.

Oregon State eliminated technical journalism in the early 1990s following state budget cuts. Yet a talented stream of students -- including several who interned at The Oregonian -- threw themselves into the learning laboratory that is The Daily Barometer and now work across the country as professional journalists. Their collective success peaked in 2002, when the Society of Professional Journalists named the Barometer the best collegiate daily in the country.

Prior to the cuts, The Daily Barometer was often a regional winner in the SPJ competition but was never named among the national finalists. Since the early '90s, the newspaper has operated without the benefit of an academic major; more recently, it has joined its peers around the country in making the transition to new media.

This afternoon Frank will be the center of attention at the OSU Memorial Union, as colleagues, current and former students all gather to wish him well in retirement in Alaska. Even those whose lives he touched only briefly know what kind of an impact he made at OSU and beyond.

Consider the tribute from Saba Saleem, a student at Portland's Madison High School, following last year's minority journalism camp at OSU:

"[T]he biggest props go to Frank Ragulsky, the guy who held the piñata together like the paste, and all of us were the paper mache strips. He planned everything for us, got up early to get every thing ready, and went to bed late, cleaning up after our mess each and every day. He was this camp's back bone and we really appreciate what he did to get us all here for free."