Mike on the Central Star:
“The Central Star was something of a disaster,
quite literally from day one. The idea was
great, but we were just kids and we messed up.
“The first story was a news piece about a
burglary that had occurred near our school.
We thought it would be a great idea to write
this up in the first edition, so three of us,
including the editor, went to the guy’s house in
nearby Hill Street on our lunch hour.
“He was a little suspicious of us, and who
can blame him? Three, grubby school kids
pretending to be “reporters” wanting
to quiz him about the burglary at his house the
day before.
“For some reason - God knows why - he
decided to inform us that he was a
Freemason. Now I have absolutely nothing
against Freemasonry - each to his own, I say
- but we were just kids. I remembered my
dad telling me that the Freemasons
were “a secret society” so I repeated this to
the guy and he flipped.
“The Central Star was something of a disaster,
quite literally from day one. The idea was
great, but we were just kids and we messed up.
“The first story was a news piece about a
burglary that had occurred near our school.
We thought it would be a great idea to write
this up in the first edition, so three of us,
including the editor, went to the guy’s house in
nearby Hill Street on our lunch hour.
“He was a little suspicious of us, and who
can blame him? Three, grubby school kids
pretending to be “reporters” wanting
to quiz him about the burglary at his house the
day before.
“For some reason -
Freemason. Now I have absolutely nothing
against Freemasonry -
were “a secret society” so I repeated this to
the guy and he flipped.
“’We are NOT a secret society, young man!” he bawled. “We are a society with secrets!’
“What the difference was we didn’t know, but we thought we’d better get back to school. By the time we arrived the police were
there waiting for us. The guy had obviously thought we knew something about who had done his house over, and its hard to fault
him. We decided not to run the story in the first edition, or any subsequent one come to that.
“The editor, Alistair Coulson, wrote a horror story that ran into three parts. He called it ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. We thought this
was a pretty cool title, and didn’t realise that he’d nicked it from an Edgar Allan Poe short story first published in November 1846.
Not that it would have bothered us if we had known - we had absolutely no concept of the legal or moral issues surrounding
copyright and plagiarism back then.
“The magazine was printed by a teacher in the school who normally taught sewing and ‘Home Economics’. She would turn out
fifty copies or so on one of those old-fashioned duplicating machines when she had the time. My recollection is that she took ill,
and eventually went permanently sick. I later heard she died, but I can’t be sure it’s true. Anyway, after she left no one else had
the time to do it, so The Central Star folded after just three issues, and that was my last dabble with the media during the 70s.”
“What the difference was we didn’t know, but we thought we’d better get back to school. By the time we arrived the police were
there waiting for us. The guy had obviously thought we knew something about who had done his house over, and its hard to fault
him. We decided not to run the story in the first edition, or any subsequent one come to that.
“The editor, Alistair Coulson, wrote a horror story that ran into three parts. He called it ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. We thought this
was a pretty cool title, and didn’t realise that he’d nicked it from an Edgar Allan Poe short story first published in November 1846.
Not that it would have bothered us if we had known -
“The magazine was printed by a teacher in the school who normally taught sewing and ‘Home Economics’. She would turn out
fifty copies or so on one of those old-
the time to do it, so The Central Star folded after just three issues, and that was my last dabble with the media during the 70s.”
