Ray Huard ’70
Ray Huard has covered shuttle launches, city politics, and environmental pollution. But right now, he says, his specialty is "murder and mayhem."

An English major and former managing editor of theSaint Anselm Crier, Huard covers the courts for the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Mostly that amounts to murder trials. We get a lot of them, including some cold cases that go back 15 years or so that have been solved with DNA testing," he says of his beat for the past two years.

Huard joined the Crier in his sophomore year after the paper printed his letter to the editor. "I got a thrill seeing something I wrote in print," he recalls. "I still do."

He worked with editor Paul Kasianchuk ’70 in the newspaper office, which was then on the top floor of Alumni Hall. His most memorable assignments were Vietnam War marches and protests.

"Journalism became an immediate goal and passion once I started writing for the Crier," Huard says. "I hate to admit it, but I would skip classes to work on the paper. I remember driving in the middle of the night in a borrowed car to a printing plant near Keene to pick up the latest edition hot off the press and return to campus to distribute it."

He credits English professor Fanny Delisle with encouraging him to write, teaching him "some mean lessons in logic," and writing a recommendation for his first job at the Lawrence, Mass., Eagle-Tribune. The experience led to work with the Florida Times-Union, Miami Herald, and Palm Beach Post. Huard’s "most memorable" and "silliest" assignments were the 1981 launch of the Columbia space shuttle and "a kazoo parade on a slow news weekend in West Palm Beach."

"For good or bad," he says, "the Crier was the start of my brilliant career."