The old way of communication...

Ever wonder how rocketeers exchanged news, tips, launch information, plans and so forth before the rise of the Internet?

We did it through newsletters sent through the U.S. mail. It was slow by today's standard, but  effective. This was how NAR - and later, Tripoli - leadership communicated to their members, and it worked reasonably well for decades. Well, NAR started out sending a newsletter, but it later blossomed into magazines: the Model Rocketeer, American Space Modeling, and the one we enjoy today, Sport Rocketry. Estes and Centuri also jumped on newsletters, mainly to spread word of new products and to offer discounts to get the attention of rocketeers on limited budgets (most of us bought stuff using our allowances). Model Rocket News, the American Rocketeer, and the newsletter of the Estes Aerospace Club, the EAC Spectra, were very welcome sights in ye olde mailbox. I especially enjoyed the design of the month plans, as those gave me reasons to buy parts at the hobby shop (A&M Toys).

An issues of Estes' Model Rocket News
(Click to enlarge).

An issue of Centuri's American Rocketeer
(Click to enlarge).

It did not take long for NAR sections to start producing newsletters. Clubs like the M.I.T. Rocket Society and NARHAMS began their literary forays in the 60's and 70's; others, like that produced by SNOAR, came later. The earliest newsletters were typed on typewriters; plans, artwork and other illustrations were drawn by hand and pasted into the appropriate places on the pages. Check out these front pages from the early newsletters of NARHAMS and the M.I.T. section:

An issue of ZOG (Zap of Grief), the
newsletter of the NARHAMS section
(Click to enlarge).

Table of contents from an issue of the
Journal of the M.I.T. Rocket Society
(Click to enlarge).

You will notice that the ZOG issue has purple text - that's because the master was transferred to a stencil, then the copies were produced by a mimeograph machine. Very popular in schools, and us old geezers took many tests that came off those devices. I came to hate the color purple...

Anyway, time passes, and the mimeographed newsletters soon gave way to those mass produced (if you call 40-50 copies "mass produced") on photocopiers ("Xerox machines"). This was in the mid to late 70's. The next big advance came in the 80's with desktop publishing software, which ran on the first of Apple's Macintosh line of computers. Photos still had to be pasted on the masters, but the artwork and illustrations could be generated on the computer and incorporated into the layout with little fuss. You also had a wide choice of fonts, making the newsletter look much more spiffy. An example of this would be the first issue of my section's newsletter, the Max-Q, which came out in 1987:

First edition of HARA's newsletter, the Max-Q
(Click to enlarge).

In addition to pasting the photos on the master, you still had make the copies of the newsletters by running down to the Xerox store and using the photocopiers. Those things went away when cheap scanners and laser printers hit the market, enabling the editor to produce everything on the computer and then print the copies on the home printer. But then the PDF document format hit in the mid-90's and newsletters went straight to PDF and the section website, saving trees and stamps. A good example of a modern newsletter is Total Impulse (see below) - we've come a long way!

Total Impulse - the newsletter of JMRC/HUVARS
(Click to enlarge).

Total Impulse is a rarity nowadays - sections generally use email, club websites and social media to convey club info and happenings. It takes a lot of work and time to produce a quality newsletter (My hat's off to Buzz Nau, the Total Impulse editor). That's why most section newsletters start out strong and then die away - Max-Q started out with 5 issues per year in the beginning, dropped to 4 in the early 90's, then 2, then 1, finally ceasing to be after 2005. No one in my club wants to bring it back - it's just too much work. Everyone knows that it will rapidly devolve into just one person doing everything - writing the articles, obtaining the images, producing the pages, etc. That's enough to make anyone think twice.

So why am I doing a blog post about newsletters? Because I am in the process of scanning all of the issues of Max-Q and placing them on the HARA website. There's a lot of interesting stuff in those issues, and I figured I ought to give a nod to those stalwarts of the past who produced the newsletters. Much of the history of our hobby is written therein, and we ought to thank those guys for recording it.