James Houston '40

James Houston, Jr., ’40, a professor emeritus of psychology, and an alumnus who founded The Beacon, the University’s newspaper as a freshman in 1936, died on December 14, 2007. He served on the University’s faculty and in several administrative positions from 1952 to 1981.

Houston served as the first editor of The Beacon for the two years after its founding, so there would be “unified communication on campus. We did not anticipate solving problems or setting the world straight when we started,” he said in an interview for The Beacon’s fiftieth anniversary issue. “We just wanted a college newspaper for the fun of it and to tell what was happening. We did not get into very many heavy issues except perhaps fighting to allow students to have a smoking area on campus.”

Operating on a tiny budget of only $100 from the SGA, Houston and his staff of four, in the absence of a permanent newsroom, met in an unused classroom in School #24, then the University’s home in Paterson. “We would meet in the classroom or in the student lounge and piece out the assignments and put it together,” he said.  He would do the layout and editing and was responsible for getting the finished product to the printer, often walking the paper to the printer himself, a mile-and-a-half trek. The first issues consisted of four pages printed once a month.

Unable to attend college directly after high school, he worked as a file clerk for a company that manufactured airplane engines in Paterson, and later joined the Merchant Marines. While on campus, he was also president of the SGA, master of the Skull and Poniard fraternity, and the first manager of the college bookstore. To support himself, he worked in the campus library for thirty-five cents an hour.

At the outbreak of World War II he joined the Coast Guard serving in the North Atlantic, and later in the South Pacific. He earned a doctorate from Columbia University and found his way back to campus as a professor in 1952, fulfilling a lifelong dream to become a teacher.