Photo by Matt Cochran

UM School of Journalism professors: left to right: Sheri Venema, feature writing; Keith Graham, design; Teresa Tamura, photojournalism.

Near the end of the Fall 2005 semester, Journalism Dean Jerry Brown suggested that students might put together a retrospective of the Unabomber’s arrest in Montana. I thought about his idea over the winter break. Who better to start the project than my feature writing class, I thought.

On the first day of the Spring 2006 semester, I told my features class that we’d spend a big chunk of time reporting and writing about the time a decade earlier when Ted Kaczynski was arrested. Some students eyed me warily. Some were excited. A few didn’t seem to know who the Unabomber was.

But by the end of the semester they knew the most intimate details of Ted Kaczynski’s life in a tiny cabin near Lincoln — how he grew carrots, lived without a bathroom, helped the librarian’s son with math homework, bought groceries and mailed bombs around the country. They found out what happened to his cabin, who owns the land where the cabin once stood, how the FBI hunted him down and what his life is like in prison. They wrote Kaczynski two letters and got two back. They read his journals and his 35,000-word Manifesto. They traveled to Lincoln, to Helena and even to San Francisco. They interviewed former neighbors and acquaintances, journalists who covered the story, former UM photo students who got the first pictures of the captured Kaczynski, FBI agents and the U.S. Forest Service agent who pulled Kaczynski out of his cabin and into the world spotlight. They wrote their stories, workshopped them, rewrote them and then rewrote them again.

On the photo side, professor Teresa Tamura worked with her advanced photo students to determine the best pictures to go with each story. Photo students trekked to Lincoln and Helena and traveled as far as Oregon and Colorado. Some made photo illustrations or locator maps. Then they picked the best of their work to include in this project.

When the stories were polished and the photos tweaked, professor Keith Graham turned the project over to his design class. Each student completed a layout of the entire 56-page magazine. From those designs, Graham selected the work of Eleena
Fikhman, with input from the designs of five other students, whose combined efforts appear in the magazine, which will be published in summer 2006.

This project gave UM journalism students not only a glimpse into a fascinating time in Montana history, but also the real-life experience of working as a newsroom team and seeing their work published. For their hard work and their excitement, I thank all the students who labored on the Unabomber project. And special thanks go to professors Tamura and Graham for their enthusiasm and willingness to add this mission to their syllabi.

Summer 2006