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didn’t cover much hard news; it was all opinions and rants. I certainly didn’t teach him anything, but Gary was a good critic. We got a lot of free vinyl, and a lot people hung out at the newspaper for the free records.”
    Davenport recalls that Webb mostly wrote about his favorite bands, Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music, but just as in high school, he also wrote scathing satires about campus events. When a liberal history professor sponsored an antiwar film series at the school, Webb helped pen several reviews of the series, each freighted with self-parodying pacifist clichés.
    â€œWe got irked because there was all this money being spent on a film series that was essentially just antiwarpropaganda,” Davenport says. “Not that any of us were against that necessarily, but it was horribly one-sided. The professor called the series ‘Battle Cry of Peace,’ and we just mocked it horribly. We kept running headlines like ‘Battle Cry of Peace,’ ‘More Battle Cry of Peace,’ and ‘Still More Battle Cry.’ Gary was on board for that. It was pretty funny considering that Gary was a military brat.”
    The lack of editorial supervision at The Sagamore meant that campus reporters had to police each other. “Some kid had written a film review and convinced us to run it, and I got called on the carpet because the kid had stolen it from Playboy,” Davenport says. “Gary found him a day later and dragged him into a restaurant and threatened to beat him up, but didn’t. He explained that we didn’t want our reputation messed with that way. He had a sort of honest streak in him back then and always did. He just didn’t suffer fools at all. If you weren’t honest and straight-forward, he had no use for you at all.”
    In the summer of 1975, Webb got a job with City Lights of Indianapolis , a fledgling alternative weekly. His IUPI friend, Rex Davenport, was the paper’s managing editor. “We were mostly focused on arts and entertainment,” Davenport says. “Gary did some big interviews for us that summer: Billy Joel and maybe Paul McCartney.” David Letterman, then a local celebrity weatherman, wrote a piece for the paper as well. Davenport can’t recall what it was about, but wasn’t impressed. “It made no sense,” he says. “It was crap, actually.”
    Webb spent most of his free time hanging around with Greg Wolf, who often borrowed Gary’s rebuilt MG, a blueroadster that he and his dad had picked up at a local junkyard. With his father, Webb rebuilt the engine and repainted the car. His father fashioned a personalized brass plaque for the dashboard, which read, “This car built especially for Gary Webb.”
    Wolf was a year behind Webb in high school. Through a girlfriend, he met a beautiful brunette named Sue Bell. “I asked Sue out,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a big deal or anything. We were just friends, but Gary had the hots for her.” On that first date, Wolf borrowed Webb’s car.
    Sue laughs when she recalls what went through her mind when she noticed the plaque. “I was sixteen,” she says. “I thought ‘My, he must have a lot of money.’ Greg asked if I wanted to go back to his parent’s house. Gary was there watching TV. He used to hang out there and watch old Godzilla movies and stuff and make fun of them and laugh. He was just sitting there. He talked to me a little, but he was really shy. But two weeks after that, he asked me out and we started dating. And two weeks after that he told me he was moving to Kentucky.”
    Bill Webb had found a new job in Cincinnati. Gary and Kurt gave up their scholarships and transferred to Northern Kentucky University. Webb spent the next four years there studying journalism, working for the school paper, The Northerner , and traveling back to Indianapolis to see Sue. “I figured we’d never see