More than 70 years have passed since her time on The Renegade Rip, Bakersfield College’s student newspaper, and 92-year-old Josephine Audap still reads and edits newspaper publications.

“There’s a columnist that makes the same mistakes over and over and nobody apparently notices them except me,” she said regarding a columnist in a local publication where she now resides in Delano. “He doesn’t know the difference between i-t-s and i-t-’-s.”

Audap, then Fanucchi, who graduated from BC in 1941 after two years of being on The Rip, including one year as editor in chief, said her time on the paper still impacts the way she views publications.

“It makes you very aware of which words you want to use because homonyms, you know they use the wrong ones at the wrong times,” she said. “So maybe that’s why I pick the paper apart sometimes.”

In celebration of its 85 years of existence and in light of BC’s centennial year, the journalism program will hold an alumni reunion banquet May 10. The idea for the banquet came from former BC journalism professor Bona Dillon, who will be attending with her husband Larry Press, a former Bakersfield Californian editor.

Although Audap will not be able to make it to the reunion due to a wedding in the family, she did contact BC journalism adviser Danny Edwards to suggest holding another reunion some time so she could attend.

Despite so much time having passed, Audap still recalls her experience on The Rip.

“I think that being in a newspaper makes you a little more liberal,” she said. “Having done it makes you a little freer thinker or something.”

Along with her experiences writing the editorials and gossip column, the process of having the newspaper printed and doing the proofreading was a memory that stood out for her.

“We had to go downtown to proofread everything because it was printed downtown,” she said, explaining that she had friends and even her would-be husband help out. “If I trusted their spelling and grammar, it would just be sort of like a party going down there.”

She recalled that even the man who owned the print shop would get involved with the proofing process and tell them things that he liked and didn’t like.

“It was very informal, but I’m sure the school paper has to be a little bit informal.”

Although she wanted to be a journalism major, Audap had to change her major to English after she went on to Berkeley.

After graduating, Audap got married and her husband joined the service.

She said because her husband was stationed in Oklahoma the summer after graduation, she did not work that summer, but did later go on to have a large family with nine children.

Although she obtained her degree in English, she said that having been a representative for many clubs, she has written many newsletters and other forms of publicity.

She said writing and newspapers has been and will always be something she is passionate about and although she doesn’t write anymore, she does read the newspaper every day.