LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Instructor remembers former Journalism Department professor Howie Snider

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Editor’s Note: The Daily News publishes Letters to the Editor with minimal copy edits and provides a headline only if the author does not provide one. We reserve the right to withhold submitted letters depending on the content. Letters should be approximately 500 words and sent to editor@bsudailynews.com.

Dear Editor,

More than 20 years ago when I first began teaching at Ball State in the journalism department, I met Howie Snider, who had been teaching in the department for 10 years, mostly advertising and mass media.

Highly popular among students, the Muncie native had already been named university "Instructor of the year" and would be again before he retired in 2004. Howie died last week, age 84.

He had earned his own undergraduate degree at Ball State — most of a master’s, too — after a 20-year military career, the final 16 in the U.S. Marine Corps as a pilot and flying instructor.

Though I had myself already taught for 10 years in higher education, every new faculty needed a mentor, and Howie was assigned to be mine.

One way we bonded was through music. Howie was a musician, a singer and banjo player and songwriter, though more like a humorist in lyrics. He and a fellow Marine at Naval Air State Pensacola in Florida cut a record album sometime in the ‘70s titled “Two Captains from Castille.”

Since I was a pianist, Howie asked me to accompany him on a variety of occasions when he’d be asked to perform.

He had honed his craft over decades, including at his family-run pizza joint in Muncie, Shakey’s, which he founded in 1975 on Kilgore, later known as Howie’s Place.

There, he and family members performed and conducted sing-alongs which were popular, but not enough that he thrived. The business was financially troubled.

His most enthusiastic performances with me were at annual journalism department holiday parties, where he would write up amazingly funny songs to entertain the 40 or so faculty and grad assistants.

One year he wrote a verse for every teacher to a limerick-themed tune and he sang each one as I banged on the keyboard. When done he looked around the room to confirm he touched everyone, then asked me, “I got them all, right?”

I knew he’d omit himself and me, and I was prepared, and replied, “You forgot one, but I’ll get it.”

I then warbled (“singing” doesn’t describe my voice):

“A former Marine flyboy turned pizza chef,

Now writing clever verse and singing in the treble clef.

Should be happy our skins are thick,

To put up with this kind of schtick,

And it also doesn’t hurt to be tone deaf.”

For lunch occasionally he and I would stroll to the Village, and I recall one particular time at Scotty’s Brewhouse. Howie was a marvelous storyteller and didn’t need much to get going.

In the late 1960s, he had been promoted to captain and assigned to the Pentagon as a press liaison. He had public relations experience. His commander was glad to have a combat veteran during the Vietnam War to deal with media.

Except Howie didn’t have combat exposure. On learning this, the commander was aghast, and rectified the omission post haste. In short order, Howie deployed to combat missions in Southeast Asia.

One of his first was taking out a Surface-to-Air Missile facility in North Vietnam.

A radar specialist remotely directed him to the precise spot. A SAM outpost is designed to shoot down exactly what Howie was flying. The radar man radioed to ask how many passes Howie wanted to take on the installation.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” Howie replied sarcastically. “One.”

He attacked and per protocol, did a wide swing over the target to visually confirm taking the SAM site out, which he had done.

For his service, Howie is a hero to me, but neither heartless nor cold-blooded.

“When I got back to base, I went to the Officer’s Club and ordered a beer,” he said somberly, “and thought to myself, ‘I’ve just killed a human.’”

Very dedicated, both in class and extracurriculars, Howie once supervised a student group into early morning hours building an elaborate float for Homecoming. By 8 a.m., rain poured and the parade cancelled. An hour later, the department chair went to Howie’s house to console him, and found Howie sitting alone at his kitchen table with a large pitcher of Bloody Marys.

For one year’s student media banquet, in vintage fashion Howie wrote and sang a song dedicated to the campus newspaper, sung to the U.S. Navy tune of The Song of the Seabees.

“We’re the eyeballs of the campus,

We cover the news and we write,

We always get our story,

But we stay up half the night.

We do the jobs we’re taught to,

Because we know we ought to,

We’re the eyeballs of the campus,

The balls of old B.S.U.”

Vintage Howie. Rest in peace and Semper Fi.

Larry Riley

lriley@bsu.edu

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