Tribute to Robert C. Maynard

Delivered at Mills College convocation, Sept. 10, 1993

By Sarah Pollock

I was lucky enough to have known Bob Maynard not only as a journalist, but also as my teacher and friend.  I first met him in 1977, when I was 19 years old and a junior at UC Berkeley.  He had come here from the Washington Post to launch a summer program to train minority journalists.  As it happened, I was then managing editor of the Daily Californian and Bob hired me to manage the design and production of the program's newspaper.

I didn't know it at the time, but that first experience of working with Bob Maynard -- which eventually extended into two summers -- was to change my life.  I had planned to become an English professor, but Bob's incredible, charismatic vision about the way the world could be -- and the power of the reported story to help make it so -- drew me instead into daily newspapering.