04/04/2025
“I first came here in 1973, after I graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota. My journalism career had started because I always loved sports. My sophomore year, there was a woman I wanted to date, and she was going to become the editor of the paper at Carleton. She said, “Would you be my sports editor?” I said, “Sure.”
Well, she never comes back to school, and now I’m the sports editor... After this experience, I applied to journalism schools and ended up coming here. I wanted to be in California.
After my first term, I go to Dean Edwin Bayley, whose portrait still hangs in North Gate, and I tell him that I’m leaving… He says, “Why don’t you take a leave of absence?” But I never came back.
I’ve had many careers since, I suppose. I started out as a sportswriter, but I’ve had every type of job… I worked in TV a bit, not as a reporter, but as a producer. I also had a restaurant in Philly.
My career changed when I started writing books in 2011… In my view, I’m a historian. Now I’m back here trying to integrate history with my studies as a returning student. I wasn’t going to take the narrative journalism track, because that was my professional life before. I take the audio concentration, and I’m taking photography classes.
I’m in my quasi-retirement. I play tennis and travel, and I do a number of other things that you would expect somebody my age to do.
But nobody has a retirement like a 25-year-old, which is what I have. When I talk to somebody here, they don’t they don’t talk to me like I’m their grandfather. They talk to me like I’m their contemporary.” — Robert Strauss
“Nobody has a retirement like a 25-year-old, which is what I have,” said Strauss, a 73-year-old master’s student.
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