A Brief History Of The Union Weekly
The Union Weekly has been a staple of the Cal State Long Beach campus since its inception in 1977, when it was formed as a response to the students’ increasing contempt for the school’s official mutant of a newspaper, The Daily 49er. The students, fed up with the Daily 49er’s ineptitude and corruption, demanded a paper that was run solely by students, for students, without the slimy influence of the Journalism department. Out of this eruption of displeasure and cynicism, The Union was born.
In the beginning, all Union staffers were renegades, forced to edit and write under pseudonyms so that their evil, Big Brother-agent professors wouldn’t fail them simply for writing for the student paper. Relegated to the darkest, dankest corners of CSULB, editors were forced at times to operate in the depths of the school’s unused bomb shelters, at others in a shanty made of empty pizza boxes and chewing gum. For a while, the paper was good, great even, until one fateful day…
As the legend goes, the staffers were celebrating their 2nd sober day in a row by getting drunk, and accidentally (read: trespassed illegally) entered into a Puvunga Indian Burial Casino, where they discovered the famed Puvunga Grunion Curse (in actuality nothing more than a poem that Hunter S. Thompson had carved into a poker table while in the depths of an ether binge). Chanting the curse out loud, the writers found themselves inhabited by strange, horrible demons, which forced them to write witty, acerbic satire that ripped apart the pretenses of society.
The Grunion has attempted to take over The Union numerous times, but has always been ultimately too lazy to get the job done. In the Treaty of Paris, 1978, the Grunion was relegated to the back page of the paper, doomed to be upside down and therefore completely unreadable, since in those days, the “paper” was chiseled into sheetrock and was only one page long. However, since the advent of newsprint, the Grunion has been free to grow, causing wanton cruelty, disrespect, and general unpleasantness wherever it has drunkenly staggered.
So come on in, won’t you? Sit down by the fire, play some Mario Kart, ignore the gnats and fruit flies, and watch us at The Union do what we do best: Reach out and touch people. People like you. We’re touching you right now, you lucky devil. And when you’re done with that, enjoy the many and varied sections laid out before you. Whether you’re into Music or Literature, Entertainment or Satire, we’ll have something for you. Unless you’re into Polo. Then you’re shit out of luck.
