Jake Highton: 1931–2017
For someone so devoted to full and granular accuracy, Jake Highton didn’t allow too many people to know his real name: Robert Donald. When he was a kid, he followed around a bigger kid in his neighborhood: Jake. He was omnipresent at Big Jake’s side. And so he became first “Little Jake.” And then just “Jake.”
Anyone who knew the man knows Jake never stopped being Jake.
He told me that story after I saw his real name on a check. I was home in Portland and I’d missed a flight back to Reno and the University of Nevada’s Reynolds School of Journalism — which meant I was going to miss an exam.
Jake’s exam.
I couldn’t afford another ticket right away and to eat. I called Jake to apologize.
He told me to make whatever arrangements I needed and to come and see him in his office when I got in. He’d cut me a check for the airfare.
He barely let me thank him.
“You going to do it again?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You learn something from all this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good.”
And that was that.
As coolly lethal with words as he could be, Jake could pound and Jake could roar. He knew more than one way to kill. I still hear his voice, ramming into us the rules of clean, clear writing. One foot up on the conference table in the second-floor classroom, he thundered again and again, his punctuating fist banging on the lectern with every word, determined that we learn deeply, intuitively when to hyphenate: “Compound adjective modifying a noun!”
It’s been 19 years since I was in that class.
He intentionally worked to destroy you as a writer so he could build you back up, clause by clause, sentence by sentence, breathlessly short paragraph by short paragraph.
But that’s the thing. It wasn’t all about him. It was about the students.
He’s one of the few instructors I’ve ever had who encouraged me to skip class. When I was in his advanced class as a senior, I also did some freelance work, mostly for the Sacramento Bee. Paid journalism. The major point of that class was to build up a portfolio. So he decided I didn’t always need to be there.
“If you have an assignment for a paper, just give me a call or send me an email and then bring me the clip afterward,” he said.
If you wanted that kind of attention from him, it was there. You just had to make it worth his time.
He needed to know you were learning. He needed to know you were trying to improve. He needed to know you weren’t ever skimping on something that might benefit your readers.
If it was in your power to make something better and you didn’t — he was never going to understand you.
He was old-school since before old-school. In the late 1990s he still used his textbook from 1976. All President Ford and cathode-ray terminals. And advances in newsroom technology surprised him.
During one class, he talked about his love for the raucous clatter of Teletype machines streaming in wire copy and how it was important to learn how to ignore them to focus on deadline.
I’d done an internship the summer before where, wonder of wonders, the AP wires came in silently on computers.
He thought I was kidding. And then he stopped a minute simply to marvel.
He was relentlessly curious. Always reading, always exploring.
Always teaching.
He was good like that.
