An ad in The State Hornet changed her life, then she changed lives at The State Hornet for nearly 33 years.

When Dee Schulz closes her office door for the last time tomorrow, she will leave a job with the newspaper that she has held since Richard Nixon was president and The Beatles? break-up was just a rumor.

“I?ve always done it because of the students,” she said.Besides her official duties as business manager, Schulz has been the Hornet?s unofficial academic advisor, psychological counselor, computer network troubleshooter and motor pool mechanic.

In one day Schulz might fix a fax machine, handle an ant infestation in the news room, counsel a worried student, jumpstart the Hornet Jeep, move office furniture, design a last-minute advertisement and meet with her boss, the Sacramento State Vice President of Finance.

“Over the years, she?s saved the Hornet so many times,” said Professor Michael Fitzgerald, a former State Hornet faculty adviser.

He remembers coming to the Hornet in the mid-Eighties when staffers–fed up with the dilapidated manual typewriters they had been using to pound out copy–one evening tossed them all out the back door of the newspaper into a heap.

The next morning the police arrived at the Hornet, ready to charge the students with vandalism. Schulz walked outside with the police, looked at the pile of 25 or 30 machines and told the cops to be happy. The students had said they wanted to take the typewriters to the top of the library and throw them down into the quad.

“The police dropped the ?investigation? and the typewriters were hauled off to the dump where they belonged,” Fitzgerald said.Vince Mastracco, part of the 1973 staff, remembered Schulz as the heartbeat of the newspaper.

“She was far more than a secretary. When any of the machinery went awry, she was the first person called. Even if she was at home ill, we phoned for advice,” he said.

“Mom was always getting calls late at night and leaving home to go fix a problem at the Hornet,” Schulz?s daughter, Kim McKeag, recalled.

And Schulz leavened those problems with doses of self-deprecating humor that endeared her to students and colleagues.

At a meeting with a group of high level administrators about the State Hornet budget, in her presentation Schulz several times referred to the State Hornet as the State Horny, administrators pointed out her misstatement.

“You should try working with 20-year-olds all the time,” she said. “Then let’s see what you say.”

In an environment where students and advisers turn over every few semesters, Schulz is the institutional memory of the paper.

“I remember when (Hornet news editor) Scott Burns published a picture of himself in the nude on the front page,” she said. Another time, the Hornet staff protested a move to cut the paper?s funding.

“They put out a blank paper that week with just ads,” Schulz said. Schulz came to the Sacramento State campus in 1969 after her husband, who was a student, brought home a copy of the The State Hornet and she saw a classified ad for a clerical job with the paper.

She is retiring to move to Seattle and be near her daughters, Kim, and Ericka Schulz, and 3-year-old granddaughter Emma McKeag. Shultz will continue to work as managing editor for the California Chiropractic Association Journal.