Section 1: Q: We're talking with Jack Hovelson of Cedar
Falls, Iowa, on July 24, 1999, at his home at
824 Hudson Road in Cedar Falls. Jack, could
you go ahead and just give me a test,
10-9-8..
A: 10-9-8.
Q: Jack, I wonder if we could just begin with
the time where you'd been at Courier for
eight years before opening the Waterloo
Bureau for the Register. How did that come
about? Who pursued who, was it you going to
them or they came to you?
A: First of all, I was at the Courier for
seven and a half years, if we want to be
exact about that. When I was in the army, I
worked as a journalist for the First Cavalry
division in Japan. I was essentially a
bureau reporter then because I was at one of
four bases that the division operated out of.
I was the correspondent, bureau person, from
one of the bases for the division newspaper
which was called the Cavalier. Anyway, the
editor of that paper was a guy by the name of
Ed Heins. He was my editor. He got out of
the service and I got out of the service soon
after he did. Sometime later he ended up at
the Des Moines Register and I was at the
Waterloo Courier and he became the assistant
managing editor at the Des Moines Register
and it was right at the time they decided to
open a Waterloo bureau. He knew me from the
army and we'd kept in contact, so he
approached me about being the person to open
and operate the Waterloo bureau. It was a
hard decision for me to make because I was
kind of on the way up at the Courier and I
didn't know whether to just walk away from
that and take a chance on something
completely new. But after a week of
agonizing over this, I took the job and
ultimately it was probably the best decision
I have ever made. It was knowing somebody,
of course.
Q: How was that the best decision you think
you have ever made?
A: Obviously, the Courier is a paper of one
size and the Register is a larger paper and,
one would imagine with a reputation and the
papers were just on different levels. It was
an opportunity that, had I not taken it, I
would have been sorry.
Q: When you were at the Waterloo Courier, had
you realized what the Des Moines Register was
and did you know how well respected it was?
A: Yes, I had read the Des Moines Register
since I was five years old. We always had it
in our home and I just grew up with it like a
lot of native Iowans had. I just thought it
was the greatest paper, at least in the
Midwest. I don't know whether it was my
lifelong dream to work at the Register. I
can't say that. But when the opportunity
came, it was good that I took it.
Q: More money involved? Can you say how
much?
A: Yes, there was more money, of course. I
think it was $190 a week. It was somewhere
in that vicinity which was about $30 more
than I was making at the Courier.
Q: What was the Register doing for news for
the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area before the
bureau opened?
A: They had a bureau in Davenport. That was
their first bureau. They opened it in 1961,
I think, and Gene Raffensperger was running
it. Raff, as we always called him, went all
over eastern Iowa. So, if a big story
happened in Waterloo, you could figure that
Gene Raffensperger would be there from
Davenport to cover it. Waterloo, in those
days and maybe still, is a good, active news
town. It seems like there was always
something going on in Waterloo, not always
good, but something was going on. The
Register opened the Davenport bureau, and
then the Cedar Rapids and Dubuque bureaus in
1967, and it began to realize that a lot was
happening in Waterloo. After they opened
Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, those two guys
would occasionally slip up to Waterloo.
There was enough going on in Waterloo that it
warranted a news bureau. Plus, I think this
is correct, for years and years, Black Hawk
County had the largest circulation of Des
Moines Registers out of Polk County. Of the
counties. So it was a good Register area,
more than Cedar Falls. And it still is
basically because the Waterloo Courier is an
afternoon paper and the Des Moines Register
is the only morning paper we can get
delivered in Black Hawk County.
Q: I don't know if you said this, but you
mentioned a Cedar Rapids bureau. Who was
running that at the time?
A: Bill Simbro. And in Dubuque, it was Jim
Ney. They had been hired a year before I was
hired to open those bureaus.
Q: At the time, was there an Iowa City
bureau?
A: No.
Q: When did that come along?
A: In the seventies. I can't tell you the
exact year, but I think sometime in the
mid-seventies.
Q: Not knowing the businesses as well as I
should, how many stories were you expected to
send in on a weekly basis, or was there a
quota?
A: When I started, the rule of thumb was a
story a day, and it was to be something that
the Waterloo Courier didn't have. They came
out in the afternoon, so I had to come up
with at least one story for the next
morning's Register that hadn't been in the
Courier the afternoon before. Plus, we were
expected to do stories for the Sunday paper.
Somedays that was pretty tough to come up
with a new story. Well, somedays it just
didn't happen. But that was the rule of
thumb. As time went by, that changed and
they decided that really wasn't the best way
to do it. It depended on which editor you
were working for. They all had different
views. When I went to work for the Register,
the first thing I did was they brought me
down to Des Moines to work three or four
weeks to be indoctrinated, so to speak.
Every editor I met down there had different
advice for me. "Well, when you get out do
this, and do that." And I was getting
confused because this guy would say, "do
this" and this guy would say, "do that."
Gene Raffensperger, who had been the original
bureau guy, gave me the best piece of advice
I ever got from anybody and I always followed
it. He said simply, "Hit them where they
ain't." The old baseball saying. I always
kept that in mind and I looked at what the
Courier was not covering or not covering
well, that's what I concentrated on.
Q: How did you dig up those stories? Were
they looking for hard news, or would a
feature or human interest story do?
A: I think in those days, about anything
would do. Usually, it was some kind of a
spot news story. One thing I would do, the
Courier would come out in the early afternoon
and I would go through it and look for some
things. Once in a while, they would have
some story that they had buried or something
out of the police log and they would have a
little twist to it. I would make some
telephone calls and expand on it and build it
up into a story. Every once in a while, it
was amazing because it would get on page one.
Something that they had kind of treated
routinely and I saw a possibility of a twist
to it and so it would develop.
Q: What would you attribute that to? The
lack of follow-through on the part of the
Waterloo Courier?
A: Probably more than anything, they were
just rushed for time. I know because I used
to do this. You would go and pick up all
these items and you would have to bat them
out for that day's paper. Even if you did
realize you might have had a nugget of a
story, you wouldn't have time to do it that
day. I suppose sometimes they just plain
overlooked the possibility of a story. I'm
sure I've done that. We all have. --
Section 2: Q: Talk a little bit about the competition.
Was there an intensity of competition between
the Courier and the Register where you would
get the story or they would get the story?
A: I think they felt it. In talking with
people I knew from the Courier, they said the
editors over there were upset if I scooped
them. But the Courier could scoop me and I
would say, "There are fifty people over there
and I'm one against fifty. Sure they're
going to scoop me." But if I did it against
their forces, that was something for them to
wring their hands about. So they felt that
more than I did.
Q: And I imagine you still had friends at the
Courier after you started at the Register.
Was there any type of cooperation?
A: No, after I moved over, I am told that
they were told that there was a staff meeting
where they were told by the editor, then Gene
Thorne, who's now deceased, he said, "Now I
know that a lot of you are friends with Jack
and we all like him, but you are not to tell
him anything." That's the way it should have
been. I didn't tell them anything. We were
friendly competitors.
Q: Did you socialize out of work with them?
A: Sometimes. One thing about being a
one-person bureau, you get a little lonesome.
You don't have that newsroom atmosphere.
You don't have that after work comraderie
where you would go and get a beer or
something. I would seek that once in a while
with friends from the Courier and we would
talk in general and careful not to tell each
other anything that they shouldn't know. But
I had a generally good relationship with
them.
Q: Name a few people who you socialized with?
A: Sure, there was George Saucer, who is the
now-retired editor of the Courier. He and I
were good, close friends. He came to the
Courier a couple years after I started there
and we did a lot of work together. I would
see him. The others names don't come to mind
right away. Verl Sanderson, who later ended
up at the Register, was another one. I can
recall David Brown, now deceased, who later
ended up at the Register also but worked
several years at the Courier. Stewart Haas
was a state editor at the Courier. Patty
Johnson, who died just within the past year.
She was a longtime feature writer. I sat
next to her and valued her friendship and was
able to maintain that. Phyllis Singer,
retired, we used to call it the Women's
Section. Of course, it's Lifestyles now, I
guess. Longtime editor of that section and I
still run into her occasionally. There were
some really good people over there. --
Section 3: Q: Both were daily papers. Talk about the
difference between the two. Clearly, the
Register was read by people in Washington
D.C.
A: Well, the Register, of course, was known
nationally as one of the ten best in the
country and had this tremendous reputation.
It was based on its coverage of the entire
state. It was pretty unique that one paper
would blanket a state like the Register did,
not only in circulation, but in coverage.
It's not true now, but back then if something
would happen in Inwood, Iowa, which was the
smallest town in the most westerly quarter of
the state, some major thing, catastrophic or
whatever, chances are there would be a
reporter and a photographer on a plane out of
Des Moines to Inwood or the closest airstrip
to go do the story. That was an amazing
thing. To me it was the greatest example of
newspapering that I had ever known. I just
admired that. When I started for the
Register, that's what we were doing, things
like that, and I just thought that was the
ultimate.
Q: Why was that so unique, I wonder. The
geography of Iowa or the commitment by the
owners?
A: I think it was a combination of those
things. The geography of Iowa was good
because Des Moines is pretty much in the
center and you could just go out from there.
And certainly the commitment of the
management. I know that the paper could have
made more money, net profit, had they not
spent money on some of the things they did in
the news. They spent a lot of money. Of
course, we now know that's changed. There's
more profit coming out of the Register and a
whole lot less of enterprising, good
newspapering.
Q: What do you think about that?
A: Frankly, I'm distressed about it and I've
expressed that several times. I know the
necessity of making money. The Register has
always made money. I don't agree with the
necessity of making a lot of money. The
Register was making a good profit doing the
newspapering job that it did and
unfortunately for us who live out in the
state, outside what they call the Golden
Circle, we just don't get the kind of
newspaper that we did before. The commitment
is not there to the really good enterprising
newspapering that used to go on at that
paper.
Q: What would have been lost? You
concentrate on central Iowa more, Des Moines,
and you have got your other papers out there.
A casual reader might say, "so what?"
A: There are a lot of people who would say,
"So what? I don't need to know in great
detail about a disaster in Inwood." For
those who do say that, I say fine. We're
getting a paper now that is so concentrated
on central Iowa and Des Moines that's there's
a good share of the news hole is devoted to
things that are really of no interest. We
get stories about city council happenings in
Urbandale. And it's very important to
Urbandale and maybe to all of Polk County,
but it's not very important in Cedar Falls.
Too much of the paper that we get out here is
devoted to that. I would rather read a wire
story out of Georgia about something that is
really interesting than a story about the
Clive city council dealing with a sidewalk
program, which incidentally, was a story that
was in one of our Sunday papers.
Q: So the Des Moines Register is no longer
the paper that Iowa depends on?
A: I really don't think it is. It really
isn't because I don't think the Register can
honestly say that it covers Iowa. It will
cover major things. For example, they are
currently covering floods along the Cedar
River and doing a pretty decent job of it.
But that's a major story that's going on out
here that certainly should be covered. But
there are a lot of other stories going on
that they give what I call superficial
coverage. They do it by phone out of Des
Moines. They don't staff it, and you can't
staff everything. We never did staff
everything, but we used to staff a lot more
things. When I say staff I mean physically
be on the scene and report from there. We
used to do a whole lot more of that out in
the state than we do now. There was another
thing. They had a correspondents network
that was pretty good and pretty extensive.
That has disintegrated and there are not too
many good correspondents left.
Q: That was unique, I think, because I've
talked to some other people at the Register
and they said you had at least one
correspondent in each county, at least in the
county seat. And that's no longer the case?
A: I think it's pretty obvious that it's not.
Q: And these were paid correspondents?
A: They were paid. They weren't paid a whole
lot, but they were paid and they were
dedicated people. I used to work with some
of them on occasion. Some of them were
little old ladies, literally, and I could
tell stories about some of them. I tell you,
those people, whatever they might have lacked
in journalistic training, they certainly made
up for in effort and enthusiasm and
dedication.
Q: I'd like to hear a story about a little
old lady.
A: Two of them stand out. There was one in
Dubuque. She was the queen of
correspondents, Arlene Eberhart. And then
the one in Waterloo, Annette Linglebach.
Little old lady, a kind of interesting
character. Short, never married, lived with
her mother and a bunch of cats. Always wore a
funny hat. She was a correspondent for the
Register for years and years and years.
After I opened the bureau, she continued to
do that. She did some routine things that I
couldn't get to or if I would be working out
of town, she would take care of it for a
while. Anyway, Annette made these routine
calls. Everyday about three times a day, she
would call the police department, the
sheriff's office, and the highway patrol,
maybe even the hospitals in this area, and
ask what was going on. She was known by all
of these law enforcement and rescue people.
She was kind of a joke, but they all loved
her and they all knew that she had all these
cats and loved cats. One night she called
the fire department and said, "Hello, this is
Annette, what's going on?" The dispatcher
said not much was going on and that it had
been a quiet night. Annette asked if they
had any calls today and the dispatcher said,
"Oh, a couple, not much." Annette asked what
the calls were and the dispatcher said, "We
had one up on Logan Avenue." He was just
leading her on. "We had to send the aerial
truck out there because somebody's cat got
way up in a tree and couldn't come back down.
So we sent the big truck out." There was a
cat involved so she was very concerned. The
dispatcher said, "Well, we put the ladder up
about as far as it would go, about a hundred
feet, and the cat was up about ten feet
higher and we just couldn't do it, the cat
wouldn't move." "Well, what did you do?"
"There was nothing we could do, we just had
to shoot it down." She just went ballistic,
but finally she realized she'd been had. I
think they had it on tape. I never heard it,
but they talked about that for years. But
she was a beloved person.
Q: Would that be part of your system to call
the police department and the fire
department?
A: I didn't make routine calls like that. I
felt I wasn't expected to. When I knew
something was happening and I was working on
a story, I would call. I didn't tie myself
down to every morning calling the police
department. I listened to the radio newscast
and the television and I depended on them to
let me know what was going on. --
Section 4: Q: You say you were a one-man bureau, did you
have any help? A secretary?
A: No. I was by myself.
Q: What did you have for references? A
telephone?
A: A telephone. Of course, there were a lot
of changes over the time I was at the bureau.
That is one thing we wanted to talk about. I
started out with the telephone, and that was
about it. I would send my copy via Western
Union and what I would do was work during the
day and come four or five o'clock, I would
start working on writing my stuff. I would
try to get it done by about six o'clock. At
that time, there was a Western Union office
in downtown Waterloo about a block away, so I
would make carbon copies, which I would keep,
and then I would run the originals over to
the Western Union office and then somebody
there would type it out in a telegram. I was
told that it actually went to Minneapolis and
then it was relayed through Minneapolis to
Des Moines, instead of going directly to Des
Moines. I would take these carbons home with
me because so often, about seven thirty, I
would get a call from my editor in Des
Moines, at this time that was a fellow by the
name of Jack Gillard, a colorful, great
newspaperman. He would call and say stuff
didn't come in. I would have to get out my
carbon copies and dictate it to him over the
phone. That would happen with too much
regularity. At some point, they came out
with the first facsimile transmitting
machine. What it was was a big machine about
three feet wide and had a big cylinder on it
and we would type out a page of copy, put it
on the cylinder, get hooked up with Des
Moines by phone and this cylinder would
rotate and a light would scan it. It would
take six minutes per page. And then it would
transmit it to Des Moines. Then you would
put on another page until you were done. At
the time, that was quite an advancement.
That would have been in the early seventies,
I'm guessing around '72. It was a big heavy
machine. I remember a couple times we moved
it. We moved it out to a golf course one
time so that Buck Turnbull, who was a
longtime sportswriter, he covered golf and
was covering the Waterloo Open and he used it
to transmit back to Des Moines. It was not
really what you would call a portable. But
it was an advancement. Then a smaller model
came out that was faster. At some point in
the eighties we got into computers and we
went through three or four different models
of computers. Like the little Radio Shack
ones.
Q: These are computers that you could hook up
to the phone?
A: Yes, laptop-type computers that were
portable and you could take out on
assignment. I can remember sitting at a park
bench at a park in Oelwein They had
electricity out there and I was hooked into
it and I wrote a story there. I had written
stories on those things in a lot of different
places like that that were kind of unusual
and out in the open.
Q: I remember, in my own experience, there
was a time when we tried to get hooked up to
a payphone. Did you ever have any
experiences like that?
A: Oh yes, sometimes successful and sometimes
not. Well, we had these cups that you could
put the phone into the cup, but you had to
work fast because if you didn't get it done
real quick you lost the connection or
something. I had moderate success with them,
only moderate.
Q: But the last resort was dictating the
story over the phone?
A: Oh yes. At some point in there, I guess I
missed this, in between the Western Union and
the oncoming new high-tech stuff, that's what
we did. We did it for about three years or
so, that's the way we did it all the time.
We just decided this was better than what we
had been doing. I can remember Lucia
Herndon, who's now a columnist for the
Philadelphia Enquirer. She was a Drake
student, an African-American young woman from
Des Moines and she went to Drake journalism
school. They hired her and one of the main
things that she did was to take dictation. I
used to dictate to her every day almost and
we developed a close friendship through
dictation.
Q: At that point, between fax machines and
Western Union, all the bureaus were calling
in their stories to the Register in Des
Moines.
A: She was the primary one to take our
dictation and if she was tied up with me and
the Iowa City bureau called in, they would
drag somebody else over to take theirs or put
him off until Lucia was done with me.
Q: Labor intensive. Maybe, as long as you're
on the subject, you could talk more about the
changing in technology since you became a
journalist.
A: There had to be more changes in my career
span than all the times before. We went from
the clackity old typewriters to laptop
computers and various stages in between.
There is just no comparison between those two
methods. I know a lot of new technology
happened in the office. The whole computer
thing came in during my time and that just
revolutionized the whole industry. Really,
what it did was knock out a whole department
of the newspaper, the composing room. It
just eliminated the composing room. Ninety
percent of what used to be done in the
composing room is done in the newsroom now.
The page make-up and all that is done in the
newsroom now.
Q: Is there a downside to that?
A: Yes, it has put an added burden on the
newsroom, which has resulted in earlier
deadlines. We all thought with the advent of
the computer, gee whiz, this new fast stuff,
instead of an eight o'clock deadline we can
go up to a ten o'clock deadline. Well, it
didn't work that way. It worked the other
way. The only thing I can figure out is
because the newsroom had to do these tasks
that the composing room used to do. It's
probably not as simple as that, but that's
one of the reasons. I think that's certainly
a downside. There are a lot of upsides, of
course. As these things are perfected, it
gets better and better. We now use
pagination. Not working in the main office,
I kind of missed out on some of this because
I'm out here with my laptop and I know that
end of it and I know how to operate that.
What happened after it got into the main
office is still kind of a mystery to me.
Q: Somebody had mentioned that another
disadvantage to that change had been the
elimination of these people who were checking
copy and now they were relying on spell check
or editors.
A: You really do see more mistakes. A lot of
it you know is because of spell check or
somebody. I did considerable editing when I
was at the Waterloo Courier and I did it
looking at typewritten pages and also, in
editing my stuff that I wrote myself on a
computer screen, it's a lot easier, I think,
to edit typewritten pages. There's something
about the screen that makes it easier to miss
stuff than on the typewritten page. I don't
think it's just me. I've heard other people
say the same thing.
Q: Given the configuration of the newsroom
now, we're not seeing typewritten pages at
all. It's all on the computer screen.
A: Yes, well, I don't know. Maybe they do
some printing out of some long-range stuff.
Maybe they do that. I don't know. --
Section 5: Q: You took photos, too. Was that something
you learned on the job or something you'd
been trained for?
A: I always say I'm a picture taker, I'm not
a photographer. I think there's a real
difference. I like taking pictures and I
started news pictures, in earnest, when I
went to work for the Fort Dodge Messenger in
1959. A small, daily paper where everybody
had about fourteen different jobs. One of
the jobs that everybody had was you took
pictures. That's what I did. You would get
a camera and somebody would show you how to
use it, and you'd go out and take pictures.
I enjoyed taking pictures and I really
enjoyed it when I got a good picture. I can
show you one that I really prize. I've got
it in a frame. I don't know if you'd like
that.
Q: Is it close? We could stop the tape. Why
don't we do it at the end? I would imagine
that after you've been taking photos for a
while, you would get an eye for what is
newsworthy and what isn't. The
photojournalist side.
A: Yes, I felt that I had a pretty decent eye
for a news photo. I remember a couple of
times when I was working with our own
professional photographers, who incidentally
I thought were great, really some talented
photographers at the Register, and I spotted
something and tipped them off to it. I got a
kick out of doing stuff like that. If I
could get a picture in the paper, or
particularly get one on page one, which I did
occasionally, I thought that was a bonus. I
didn't get more pay, but it was just great.
Q: Did you have any photography training?
A: For composition and stuff? No, I never
took any courses or anything.
Q: Did any of the photographers at the
Register give you any tips?
A: I had some really close friends,
particularly Larry Neibergall, who is now
deceased and his son is a photographer for
the Register now and has been for quite a
while. He and I worked together, I once
estimated, for more than 250 stories over the
years. I learned a lot from him, as I did
from other photographers. Just watching
them. A current photographer I worked with
is Harry Baumert out of Cedar Rapids. He,
too, was one that I learned a lot just being
around.
Q: When you say you worked with them, as in
Larry Neibergall, you would send a story and
they would see that it needed a photo. Is
that how it worked?
A: A lot of times we would work together.
We would go out on a story together and he
would do the pictures and I would do the
interview. Sometimes he would go first and I
would follow. Usually, the photographers
would like to have the reporter do the
interview and they would sit in on the
interview and then that would give them ideas
about picture possibilities. More often than
not, I would lead off with the interview.
And then sometimes we would be on spot
situations, crime stories or something like
that, where he'd be taking pictures and I
would be interviewing.
Q: He was based in Des Moines?
A: Larry Neibergall was based in Des Moines.
Q: Did you ever cover sports stories?
A: Yes, on occasion. When I started out in
Fort Dodge, one of the things I did was be
the assistant sports editor on top of
everything else. So I did a lot of sports
there. But when I was at the Register, they
would ask me if I could. If I couldn't or
didn't want to, I usually didn't have to, but
I liked sports. I would cover some UNI
football games and some basketball, on
occasion. If a sports figure would come to
town, one of the nice, most enjoyable
interviews I ever did was Bart Starr, when he
came to town. Rod Carew came to town and I
got his autograph on his picture on Time
magazine. I loved that. I'm a big sports fan
and I loved doing that.
Q: Talk about the story you wrote about Bart
Starr. How did that come about, what was the
story?
A: It wasn't a particularly great story. He
was in town to make a speech and so I grabbed
him for five minutes and talked to him.
There was something going on at the time in
the NFL, some controversy and I can't
remember what it was at all, but it was
something I could ask him his opinion on. He
gave me some comments, a very gracious man.
It was enough to build a story.
Q: Was he still a player at the time?
A: No, he was retired. --
Section 6: Q: How was it you came about talking with
Barbara Walters over the farm fence?
A: In 1976, the NBC Today Show, because it
was the bicentennial year, each week they
were going to a different state and doing
their program from someplace in that state.
When they came to Iowa, they did it from a
farm a few miles south of Hudson. We all
knew in advance when they were going to do
it. I went out and spent the day covering
them doing the Today Show from this farm near
Hudson. Barbara Walters was the one who did
it. One of the two anchor people would go
out and do these things and they traded off.
Barbara Walters was there for the Iowa piece.
I just stayed as close as I could to Barbara
Walters whenever I could. At one point, she
and I and Paul Engel were sitting at the
kitchen table in this farm, just the three of
us.
Q: Paul Engel from the University of Iowa?
A: The late Paul Engel. They had him up
because they did an interview with him. The
three of us ended up at this kitchen table
just chatting for five, six, seven minutes,
which I'll always remember. Then later on,
we were out in the farmyard there and they
were shooting the obligatory Iowa pigs. They
had to get those. Barbara was there, she was
not out with the pigs, but she was leaning on
the fence and doing her thing with the pigs
in the background and then afterwards, for
just a couple minutes, she and I were leaning
on this fence and she was asking me what pigs
do. So we talked about pigs. I was so
impressed with her, she was a consummate
interviewer and every time I talked to her,
three different times during the day, she was
actually interviewing me. She was pumping my
brain just about Iowa. That impressed me.
Q: What was she getting out of you?
A: Just little bits and pieces. One thing
she asked me at the kitchen table was about
Clark Mollenhoff, who was the Washington
bureau of the Register. Mollenhoff had
gotten up at a press conference and gotten
into an argument.
Tape One, Side Two
A: She was referring to a press conference, I
think it was President Nixon, and there was
an exchange between the two that was unusual
and Mollenhoff shot a remark back to Nixon
that some people thought was uncalled for,
impolite, something that you don't do with
the president no matter what you think of
him. But that was Mollenhoff. He was a guy
who would bowl through. There were stories
about him when he was a reporter in Des
Moines going out on the ledge on the outside
of the Polk County courthouse and getting
around to a window where the supervisors were
trying to hold a closed meeting. They saw
him at the window and they said, "All right,
let him in." There are just some really
amazing stories about that guy.
Q: Is that legend?
A: It was told to me as a factual story.
Q: When you told Barbara Walters what you
knew about Clark Mollenhoff, did she have any
comments about him? As you said, some of the
journalists weren't happy with what he had
done at the press conference.
A: As I recall, she expressed that. She
thought he was out of line.
Q: What are some of the other stories, too?
You said, Jerry Rubin, the member of the
Chicago Seven, one of the most obnoxious
people you ever interviewed. How was it you
came to interview him?
A: I really didn't interview him. He had a
press conference here in Cedar Falls before
he made a speech and it was during some
turbulent times. The community was upset
that he was here and they were fearful that
he was going to set off a riot. Anyway, he
held this press conference and there were
several other reporters there from all the
media. Every question that we asked, we got
a smart-aleck answer from him. He was just
an obnoxious person. I asked him one
question. Before my question, somebody had
called him Mr. Rubin and he had dressed them
down for that. So, I didn't say Mr. Rubin. I
said, "You used to be a newspaper reporter.
Why did you get out of it?" He looked at me
and sneered and said, "Because of people like
you." OK. That was the kind of response you
would get from him. I thought he was one of
the most objectionable people I had ever
dealt with. --
Section 7: Q: Can we talk about how news stories are
selected and reported today as compared to
how they used to be when you were practicing
journalism in the fifties and sixties? Not
necessarily the technology but the way hard
news is written. How stories are selected
and reported on.
A: I don't know if this is exactly what
you're asking but one thing that I have seen
a real distinctive move is the selection of
the stories, the way they were covered, that
used to be pretty much decided by the
reporters, at least for the Register. Back
then reporters were given a beat or an
assignment or whatever. Let's say you were
covering education. You were responsible for
being the expert on education. You went out
and you got to know people in that field and
you got to know what was going on. At any
given time, an editor could call you over to
his desk and say, "What's going on with the
board of regents?" And you were expected to
know. People did, reporters did. Reporters,
more or less, decided what was news from the
education. The education reporter would
follow stories and he would keep the editors
informed. Back then, the Register was what
we would call a good reporter's paper.
Because reporters did, more or less, decide
or dictate what was going to be in the paper.
I, being a reporter, thought that was great.
Today, papers are editors' papers. They
have meeting after meeting to decide what is
the news. I think it's a bad system. Not
always, not every time, but I often wonder
how can six people sitting in an office
building in Des Moines on the fourth floor
decide what is news in Waterloo or Inwood or
wherever. The reporter who was there was
covering Waterloo or the reporter who was
covering the regents meeting in Iowa City,
they are the ones who, if they don't know,
they're not doing their job. When they are
doing their job, they're doing it better than
editors can do. That's been the big change
and I think it's editor driven papers. They
decide now what's going to be news next
Tuesday. Maybe some of it's going to be news
next Tuesday, but you sure can't decide today
what's happening next Tuesday. To me, it's a
backward way of going about it. But that's
the way it is these days, mostly.
Q: What do you think the editors are thinking
with that? Are they going for some sort of
theme to the newspaper or what's their
motivation?
A: Newspapers today, and I'll use the
Register as an example, are being run more as
a magazine. All this preplanning, all these
meetings. They are going to do this kind of
coverage. Sometimes this is great. Take the
coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Tournament a
couple of weeks ago. Super, fantastic. You
couldn't have asked for better coverage of
anything. That was all preplanned. That was
something you could plan for and lay out what
angles you're going to go for and that's
great. But, on the general run of news, I
don't think you can do that. That's what
they try to do. They try to predict and
dictate how they're going to cover something
next Tuesday or what next Tuesday's news is
going to be. I think there's got to be more
spur of the moment, seat of the pants,
gut-feeling newspapering going on than what
there is.
Q: You have a limited amount of space in the
newspaper and some stories might get lost.
A: The paper is looking more and more like
television. More graphics and fewer words.
More pictures.
Q: We were talking a little earlier about a
reporter who is very well recognized and well
renowned at the Register who editors say
couldn't write. Did you come across any of
those people?
A: I think some of the best reporters in the
world were not good writers. Great
reporters, great for getting the news and
mediocre at putting it into prose or
free-flowing writing. That's where the
editors come in. Good editors can take raw
material like that and form it into really
readable stuff. We were talking about Clark
Mollenhoff, who is a good example. As I was
told, I never edited any of his copy, but I
heard people talk who have and they said his
stuff was really tough and he would jump
around, but it was all there. He was a great
reporter and not a great writer. There were
a lot of people like that.
Q: What makes a great reporter?
A: The one who can get the information. It's
as simple as that. However you have to get
it without being illegal. Of course, some
did go illegal on occasion. I don't recall
that I ever did. People with a great
personality, number one. Someone who could
talk with people and get people to talk to
them. That was the main thing. And then
people who had a good instinct about where to
go and who to go to for the information.
There were times when just being tough and
not taking no for an answer and when you knew
that something was a public record and
somebody was trying to tell you it wasn't,
and you just stuck to it and finally got it.
A lot of elements.
Q: And a plus could be that you could
actually write.
A: And if you could write on top of that, you
were a pretty damn good newspaper person. --
Section 8: Q: Can you think of any mentors at the
Register or the Courier or the Messenger?
A: People I tried to pattern after or looked
up to. I know I have mentioned Gene
Raffensperger at the Register. He was one
that I always admired and I learned from him
because he had been a bureau person. I
sought advice from him. And then he became
an editor, my city editor, for a while. He
was great. There were a lot of people at the
Register that I just admired. I think there
was great talent there. Jim Flansburg is one
and there were many others. Otto Knauth who
wrote about science and things like that was
an excellent writer. I would read something
that they wrote and I would just marvel. A
current one is Ken Fuson, a great feature
writer who is now back with the Register
after being with the Baltimore Sun. Larry
Fruhling, who left the Register a few years
ago, had a great touch. There are just so
many that I would read their stuff and hope
that I could write somewhere close to that.
Q: What made you want to be a reporter when
you first started out and what did you like
about it when you became one?
A: My desire for it began in high school. I
went to a real small high school, so it
wasn't that I was getting any great
experience from it there. It wasn't one of
those things that I woke up one morning and
said, "I want to be a newspaper reporter."
It just kind of developed.
Q: What did you like about it once you became
one?
A: The variety, not being the same thing day
after day. Although some days were pretty
routine, of course, and some days weren't the
best. I think just getting up in the morning
and not really knowing what the day was going
to hold for you. You could end up having a
very dull day, a slow news day, or I know one
day I was sitting in my office and by eleven
o'clock I got a phone call that said to go to
Houston. That night I was in Houston, Texas.
Something like that, there's just something
about it. The unexpected, the variety and
excitement. Meeting people, important
people, of course. Bart Starr. That was a
great experience. Just interesting people,
maybe somebody you have never heard of before
turned out to be a real interesting person.
That was one of the greatest things about it.
Some of the people I dealt with I didn't
particularly care for. I mentioned Jerry
Rubin, and there were some others.
