Will started at Northeastern as a political science major (later, philosophy). He wrote for the Northeastern News and eventually became News Editor. His main co-op job was as a copyboy (later, clerk) in the newsroom of The New York Times (1965–1967). His locker was right next to Harrison Salisbury’s, and he often worked across from the last guy in America who still chewed tobacco in an office.
After graduation he wrote for the Old Mole, the alternative fortnightly in Cambridge, until its demise in 1970. He did a piece there on the Hayakawa cop-riot at NU which the Boston Globe praised in its Mole obit as an “extensive photographic refutation of Boston Police accounts.”
After the Mole, he knocked around odd journalism jobs, including four years freelancing for the Real Paper in Cambridge. At one of said odd jobs, he asked the typesetter if he could teach himself how on her spare machine; she said yes. So, he supported his freelance journalism addiction with typesetting. He wrote for national magazines with some success but not enough to live on. Feeling it essential to make bigger money per unit of writing, he moved to L.A. to try scriptwriting (while typesetting to live.) There were some brushes with the bigtime, but he ultimately failed. Then the Mac desktop revolution came in, and he segued from typesetting into freelance graphic arts. This semi-creative outlet saved his sanity, and the money was fairly good.
Now retired, he is writing a history book entitled “Greytown Is No More!!!” describing how two U.S. companies “inveigled” Washington into destroying a tiny Central American port in 1854. The incident is still used to justify U.S. military interventions sans the Congressional approval the Constitution requires. He wrote a scholarly journal piece on the subject in 2017 and an op-ed on it in 2018 called Can an Amateur Historian Rewrite History? https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170070. He believes his book will win a Pulitzer Prize.
Will Soper graduated from Northeastern University in 1969 with a degree in Liberal Arts.