Section 1: Q: We're talking with Otto Knauth on
Saturday, April 17 at about 11:10 in Seashore
Hall on the University of Iowa campus. We're
going to be talking about his time with the
Des Moines Register dating all the way back
to 1948. Mr. Knauth, I'm wondering if you
could just talk about how you came to be with
the Register in regard to the Register's
reputation at that time, obviously it was a
highly regarded newspaper. What did you know
about the Register before you were hired
there? Were you in the know about how well
renowned a paper it was?
A: No, all that much. I was working on the
city desk of the Saint Joseph Gazette in
Saint Joseph, Missouri, after World War II.
A friend of mine from before the war who had
worked on the Gazette, Jerry Thrailkil, had
moved up to the Register during war. He
suggested that I try for a job on the
Register. So I wrote a letter to Frank
Eyerly and Frank had me come up for an
interview in the summer of 1948. My wife and
I drove up to Des Moines. Frank kept me
waiting in the newsroom for, it must have
been four or five hours on a really hot
summer day before he had me in for an
interview. I wasn't all that enthusiastic
after that, but subsequently he sent me a
letter offering me a job. I was making
around forty dollars working on the Gazette
and he offered me seventy-five, so I thought
that was pretty good. I moved up to Des
Moines in December of 1948. My wife stayed
in St. Joe for the time being and I worked on
the copy desk on the rim under Ray Wright and
Herb Kelly. Herb was the telegraph editor at
the time. And Chuck Reynolds was there. And
John Schmidt was there on the rim.
Q: What's the rim again?
A: It _was a horseshoe-shaped desk with the
telegraph editor in the center and the copy
editors all around the rim of it. The
telegraph editor would have a spike and he
would put the stories on the spike for us to
work. That's the way the thing operated. It
was a cut-and-paste operation. We each had a
paste pot and we had rulers that we could
tear the paper against. That's basically
what it was. We had reams of copy like that
all pasted together. Then it would go down
to the composing room. They had a pneumatic
tube that went down to the composing room and
down there the foreman would then cut the
copy apart and hand it out to the linotype
operators and then, of course, it would be
assembled in hot type in the forms. They
would press an asbestos sheet against which
the plate would be cast for the press. It
was a half-round plate that would be fastened
to the press. That was the operation. --
Section 2: Q: You were talking about Frank Eyerly. He
kind of put you off from the beginning. What
was he like to work with?
A: Well, a lot of times it was not all that
pleasant. There seems to be a general
feeling in the newspaper operation that good
editors would be promoted to administrators
and they had no facility for administering
personnel. Frank was like that. He was a
marvelous editor, there is no question about
it, but his relations with the people
underneath him were not that good. He held
the threat of losing one's job over one, and
so he was more feared than liked in the
newsroom. Ken MacDonald, who was editor at
the time I was there, Frank was the managing
editor--Ken rarely came into the newsroom.
We didn't see him very much. He was a much
nicer personality than Frank was. But, we
never had much to do with Ken. We had much
less to do with Mike Cowles. I guess I saw
Mike in the newsroom maybe two or three times
the whole time I was there.
Q: How so was Frank a person that didn't get
along with people?
A: He was very quick to yell at you if you
made a mistake and just dress you down in
front of the whole newsroom. He liked to
snap out orders without thinking about it
ahead of time. Generally, was not all that
good an operation.
Q: Aside from that, how was the job in terms
of the workload, the pay, and the company
policy in general?
A: I had no complaints about the job itself.
The people on the copy desk were easy to get
along with and we had a good camaraderie
going. We knew each other outside of the
newsroom and we would go and have a beer or
coffee together. We would see each other
over the weekend and stuff like that. We
became friends on the copy desk, which, of
course, we never were with Frank. The
workload was not that bad. There were a lot
of things that were easy about it and a lot
of things that did take a lot of work and a
lot of thought. For example, I think it was
on June 25, 1950, and the North Koreans
invaded South Korea. I got the job of
editing that story. It was a Saturday night
and it was for the Sunday Register. That
was, by far, the biggest story that I had
ever handled. I worked on it all night long
because we kept getting updates all the way
through. So, from edition to edition, it
meant changing the story, maybe putting a new
lead on it, expanding the text down below,
and writing new headlines for it. It was a
big story at that time, of course.
Q: And you were working long hours to get it
together.
A: I came to work at six o'clock in the
evening and the first edition deadline was
nine o'clock and then the first edition came
up at 9:30 from the press and we would scan
that for errors and misspellings and stuff
like that. The second edition deadline was
about eleven o'clock, I believe. The final,
the third one was at one A.M., if I remember
right. It came up about 1:30 or so. Of
course we edited things from edition to
edition. Sometimes there was almost no work
to do and other times there was a complete
makeover.
Q: With regards to the Korean War story,
where were you getting your information? The
wire service?
A: It was all wire service. AP was, of
course, the main one we relied on. I think
we had UP then also. I am not sure. I think
we did. I don't think we had the New York
Times service at that time. We did get it
later, but it was almost entirely AP.
Q: So this was work as a copy editor? --
Section 3: Q: Talk a
little bit about the positions that you held
there as a copy editor and the assistant city
editor and beyond that.
A: I stayed on the copy desk. In 1950, I was
called up as an Army reservist, so I had to
leave the Register for a year. I went over
to Tokyo and spent a wasted year there in
Tokyo. Then I came back and worked as night
editor on the city desk. That was a big
change, of course. That meant assigning
stories to reporters and I handled all the
weather information for the Almanac page.
That was always updated from edition to
edition, too. There wasn't a whole lot that
went in there, but it had to be kept
accurate. It also involved the births and
deaths and all the almanac stuff. On the
city desk, of course, we handled the
reporters' copy before it went to the copy
desk. We would go through that for accuracy
and general information as to what the
reporter was writing about. Then that would
go to the copy desk and from there on down to
the composing room. One thing that was
impressed upon me on the copy desk and that
later stood me in good stead on the city desk
was that we simply had to learn (nobody said
we had to do this, but it was just part of
the job), we had to learn all the 99 counties
in the state and all the county seats, and
the main highways and the main railroads that
covered the state. As part of the job, we
had to be conversant with the whole state of
Iowa and with all the officials. We knew the
sheriffs, we knew the state representatives,
the state senators, the governor, the various
other officials in the administration. We
all had to know how to spell their names.
There was a lot involved in putting out that
paper. It wasn't just a matter of cutting
and pasting; there was a lot of your own
knowledge that went into the various local
stories.
Q: That was important because this was the
paper that Iowa depended on.
A: We liked to think that it was. We
certainly liked to get it as accurate as
possible. This was the time before we would
run a column correcting mistakes the way they
do now. That corrections column grew out of
the inevitable mistakes that anybody would
make in putting out a daily paper seven days
a week. It was impossible to avoid them. We
certainly tried to keep them at a minimum.
Q: You said you didn't realize how well
respected this paper was when you were hired.
At what point did you find out that you
really working for such a good paper?
A: One Saturday night, I was walking past the
pressroom, which you could see from the
street. There were plate glass windows that
looked down into the presses. To see those
thousands and thousands of papers come
screaming out of there, it was then that I
realized that what I was doing was actually
going out to the whole damn state. Not just
to the Des Moines area, but to the
far-reaches of the state. That was pretty
impressive and it was something that you kept
in the back of your mind when you were
working on it.
Q: Lately, the paper has become more
localized and covering central Iowa more than
they did before. What do you think about
that?
A: It's a tragedy, I think, that the paper
has pulled back from its statewide coverage.
It just seems that the more they become
computerized, the worse the paper gets. Our
first edition deadline was nine o'clock in
the evening. Now, I think it's something
like six or so. I don't understand it. The
computers were supposed to make everything
quicker and easier and it's had the opposite
effect. I think it really is a tragedy for
the people in the state that the Register
does not go out to Decorah and Akron and
places like. Hamburg, Keokuk. They are just
all missing.
Q: Why is that important? Because Decorah
has their own paper. Keokuk has their own
paper. A: Except those are local newspapers,
and I think the people relied on the Register
to give them much, much broader coverage, a
world-wide coverage, which they are now
missing. It has opened the door to the
Chicago Tribune coming into the Davenport,
the Quad Cities, Dubuque, places like that.
The Omaha World-Herald coming into western
Iowa that used to be exclusive coverage of
the Register.
Q: What is it that the Register could offer
that the Chicago Tribune or Omaha
World-Herald could not?
A: We would simply color our stories to fit
the outlook in Iowa. We always looked for an
Iowa angle. A lot of times it became almost
an obsession to find an Iowa angle in any
story that came through. As a general
policy, I think the people of this state
appreciated that. Of course, that was
something that none of these out-of-state
papers would do. --
Section 4: Q: Let's talk about your experience writing
stories. I saw in your autobiography that
they sent you to Antarctica and to the South
Pole. It was not too often that a Des Moines
Register-sized newspaper would send a
reporter out to these places.
A: That grew out of a journalism forum here
in Iowa City back in the early 70s. A guy
there named Jack Renerie from the National
Science Foundation came out and gave a talk.
I talked to him some and he was telling me
about his experiences in the Antarctic,
because he was the co-coordinator of the
annual journalism trips to the Antarctic.
When Congress funded the National Science
Foundation, they stipulated that a certain
amount of money had to be set aside each year
for a trip of journalists to the South Pole
because there was no other access to the work
being done down there in the Antarctic. It
was all being controlled by the National
Science Foundation. All the scientists who
went down there, all went on grants from the
National Science Foundation. There wasn't
any room for any reporters or photographers
to get down there except through the NSF. I
had been fascinated by the Antarctic ever
since I was a boy of ten. My father got
Captain Scott's diary, which came out in the
1920s. I read them as a boy and just had it
in the back of my mind that this must be a
wonderful place. I wrote to Jack Renerie
about getting a spot on the annual journalism
trip to the Antarctic and, son-of-a-gun, he
wrote back and offered me a place. I had to
get a medical clearance and I was somewhat
older than most of the reporters who would go
down there, so they were a little stickier
with me than some of the others. I passed
everything. This was in the summer of 1979.
They had a big meeting of all the scientists
and everybody else who was going down to the
Antarctic that fall. Well, actually, it was
the spring in the Antarctic. They had a big
meeting in Washington, a three-day meeting to
tell us about what to expect down there. I
think it was in early November, I was to meet
a bus at the International Airport in Los
Angeles and that bus took a bunch of us to
the Navy station at Point Mugu. There we got
on board a big cargo plane for the flight to
Christ Church, New Zealand. It was just a
very dreary flight. They didn't go in for
passenger comfort. Everybody sat in these
seats facing to the rear and they handed out
meals. We had supper and we had breakfast on
board the plane. We landed in Christ Church
and they had a very nice enclave there for
the Antarctic teams. Put us up in a motel.
We had several days to explore Christ Church.
I think there were about five of us in that
journalism crew. There was a woman from the
New Yorker magazine, Charles Pettit from the
San Francisco Examiner, there was a radio
reporter from INS, Ira Flatow was there for
the National Public Radio, and then there was
a CBS crew. They had a stand-up TV guy, a
director, and two men on the camera. They
made up the CBS crew. They were there just
getting background pictures that they could
use whenever they needed to.
Q: What was the angle of your story?
A: I felt I should just simply try to
acquaint Iowans with what was down there and
what was being done. There was a lot of
interesting research going on, and there was
the landscape. The landscape itself was
worth writing a book about. All the
activities that went on there. When I came
back, I wrote a series of articles, one a
week for a whole week. They have a news
bulletin that comes out everyday down at the
big station, McMurdo, and I asked them to put
in a call for anybody from Iowa. I got some
response from that. No matter where you go
in the world, you always encounter somebody
who has some connection to Iowa. So I did a
couple of articles on Iowans at the South
Pole. That was it. I was there for a week
or ten days and it was just ceaseless
activity. We were just on the go all the
time. You wondered when you were going down
to sleep, whether it was night or day,
because the sun never set at that time of the
year. We had to darken the rooms so we could
get to sleep.
Q: Did you get any feedback from readers
about that series?
A: I did, quite a bit. Actually, several
other stories grew out of that series. There
was a man out in Western Iowa, I don't
remember exactly who, he had been down at the
Antarctic with the Navy some years back. He
wrote me and I went out and interviewed him.
He actually had a mountain named after him.
If I remember right, he was down there with
Admiral Byrd when Byrd was heading his
expedition. So I wrote a story about him.
And then there was a doctor from Perry who
was going down as a physician for the
National Science Foundation. There were a
couple others who don't come to mind. --
Section 5: Q: I want to go back to this other issue
about the paper rights. We talked about the
fact that readers throughout the state might
be missing something now that we have
centralized. The fact is, there were
politicians and people in Washington D.C. and
New York City reading the Des Moines
Register. I wonder what it was about the
Register that made it such a well-respected
paper.
A: I think it was just simply the Cowles
brothers who organized it and Harvey Ingham
who was the editor at the time of its
greatest reputation. The fact was that they
went through surprises occasionally and they
enjoyed a good reputation among newspaper
people and that translated into a general
respect in the public. You could buy the
Register on Times Square in one of those
newspaper offices. I'm sure you could buy it
on the street in Washington D.C..
Q: So these other journalists were seeing
wonderful reporting, wonderful writing. What
was it?
A: I'm not sure it was so much wonderful
reporting. We did have our own war
correspondent in Gordon Gammack, and, of
course, that meant a whole lot. We had a
Washington bureau with Richard Wilson who set
that up and filed the daily story out of
Washington D.C.. Those things just become
impressed upon the consciousness. The
Columbia Journalism Review would run a story
on the paper, or something like that. I
think it was simply the worldwide outlook of
the Cowles family that did it, really.
Q: In your writing and reporting, did you
ever come across any ethical dilemmas in
story selection or how you would cover it.
Was there ever a time when you thought twice
about how you would cover a story?
A: No, I can't say that I really had much of
a problem with that, but that had mostly to
do with my beat. It was a non-controversial
beat that I had. I would go out and write a
story about a prairie or something like that.
It was pretty non-controversial. The only
times when I had something approaching a
problem were in covering the Iowa
Conservation Commission or the Natural
Resources Council. Occasionally some issue
would come up there, but it was always clear
to me as to how I should approach a story
like that. I don't remember that I had any
particular ethical dilemmas about it. There
was a time in covering the conservation
commission, there was a farmer in southern
Iowa who was carrying on a vendetta against
the staff members in the conservation
commission. Bob Leonard was his name. I
guess he had had a run-in with a game warden.
There had been some kind of controversy.
Leonard simply went crazy over trying to get
back at these people. At first, I took him
more-or-less at face value, but as this went
on it became more and more obvious that it
was much too personal a vendetta on his part
and I just stopped writing about him. These
were kind of rare occasions, really.
Q: In this case, you had filed a story about
him?
A: Oh yes, I wrote several stories about him.
Q: What convinced you that he wasn't a
reliable source?
A: He would be on the agenda of a meeting of
the conservation commission, and he would
come and use vile language. He was just
simply, completely intemperate. It was just
obvious that this was not something that the
whole state of Iowa would be interested in. --
Section 6: Q: How about the idea of objectivity? Was
that ever a word used in the newsroom or was
that a given?
A: A lot of people had different ideas about
being objective in your news stories. I
started writing with the idea that I was
going to as objective as I possibly could.
As I matured and became more experienced, it
became obvious to me that complete
objectivity is impossible. You simply cannot
keep your own feelings out of the story. It
becomes a question of how objective you want
to be on it. There may be times when you
lose all objectivity. If a story becomes so
obviously an injustice for some person or
some group, it is simply part of your job to
point that out and you lose the objectivity
in that case. We always tried our best to
get both sides into a story. We would go to
great lengths sometimes to reach somebody by
telephone to get their two cents worth in.
Many times, it was obvious where the right
coverage lay and how the story should be
slanted.
Q: Was there ever a disagreement between you
and your editors about whether or not this
was an injustice that should be written
about?
A: I had a long argument on the telephone
with Frank Eyerly once about covering a
situation in the Polk County jail. I'm not
sure exactly what the issue was, but I think
it had to do with the almost intolerable heat
in the summertime in the Polk County jail
cells. I was city editor at the time and we
ran a story about it on the line. It started
when a guy who had just been released on bail
or on parole or something came up to the
newsroom and told us how bad that situation
was. These were days when the temperature
was going up above 100 and there was, of
course, no air conditioning and very little
ventilation in the jail, so we played it big.
Frank subsequently wanted to downplay it,
and, of course, I had no choice. We just did.
Q: Why did he want to downplay it?
A: I don't know why. The sheriff's
department, actually, was not all that
responsible for it. It was a matter of the
county supervisors doing something about it.
They were the ones who were ultimately
responsible for it. I think Frank didn't
want the sheriff's department to be unduly
tarnished with this, and that's the way it
was.
Q: Were there other examples of that, where
he didn't want city officials to be
tarnished?
A: I had very little contact with issues like
that. It occurred far more in the area of
politics. I just never had anything to do
with politics. He ruled the political
coverage with a very heavy hand. I remember
back in the 1950s where we had a big issue of
going from the commission form of government
for the city of Des Moines to a city manager,
and Frank was absolutely in favor of the city
manager. Anything that was derogatory to the
city manager was not printed. He ruled that
with a heavy hand. There was an election
coming up and they gave it massive coverage.
The city manager issue was approved. --
Section 7: Q: Can you think of any close friends or
people who were writers?
A: I suppose for a long time the best friend
I had was John Karras. I started riding my
bicycle to work back in the 1950s. I lived
about two and a half miles from downtown and
I would go to work at six o'clock and there
wasn't much traffic. We just had one car,
and I thought why not ride a bicycle to work.
So I did. I would take it up in the
elevator and park it in the newsroom. Karras
was working on the copy desk at the time and
he lived out not too far from our place, so
he and I would ride our bikes together to
work. Subsequently, we did a lot of other
things together too. As I became more of a
nature writer in the 1960s, I would find
these interesting places out in the state and
I would think, "Gee whiz, this would be nice
place for some of the people on the staff to
go to." So we organized weekend picnics and
trips and things like that for various staff
members. I have always been interested in
canoeing. My wife and I had bought a Grumman
canoe back in 1959 and we started canoeing
the rivers around Des Moines, the Raccoon,
the Des Moines, and the Skunk, and others.
People on the staff started asking me about
this, so we organized overnight canoe trips
for staff members. I think at one time we had
a canoe trip going down the Des Moines where
we had something like ten canoes. All staff
members and families from the Register. We
would camp overnight on a sandbar. You could
really get isolated on a river in Iowa. You
would be completely cut off from the rest of
the state. It was a really nice experience.
The sand was always clean and it was more or
less an uplifting experience. Except every
once in a while. There was one trip that we
took down the Cedar from Otranto down through
St. Ansgar and then on down to Osage. We got
up to Otranto on a Saturday about midmorning
and it started raining and it rained that
whole afternoon without letup. We were just
all soaked. We camped in the campground
there at St. Ansgar. One poor guy dropped
his steak in the mud and another one locked
his car keys in the car. It was just a
series of disasters. The next day wasn't too
bad and so we just continued on down to our
takeout point.
Q: This must have been great fodder for
stories.
A: I did write quite a bit about those
things. About the blessings of the rivers in
Iowa. That eventually led to a whole series
in Picture magazine where I did a story on
every major river in the state. The
photographer and I would go and try to find
its source, the source of the Iowa River
and...the source of the Cedar River was up in
Minnesota. We would trace the river down to
its eventual ending in the Mississippi or the
Missouri and I would research some of the
history along the way, the various towns and
things. This led to this series in Picture
magazine that ran for several years.
Q: Did you ever have problems getting support
from editors about funding and supporting
these ideas that you had?
A: Actually, no I didn't. Carl Gartner was
the editor of Picture magazine then and he
was always receptive to anything like that.
Any stories having to do with the nature of
the state, he always leapt on those. I
remember once I did a story on Interstate 80,
when the last link was finally paved on
Interstate 80. I went into Frank Eyerly to
propose the story; this was also for Picture
magazine. He seemed a little dubious about
it at first. I mean I told him that I was
going to write up the history of all the
little towns along the highway and eventually
the only thing that he was concerned about
was that we start in the east and go west and
not the other way around. [laugh]
Q: He wanted you to move west?
A: Yes, that's the way the state was
populated. --
Section 8: Q: You talked a little bit about the Cowles
company, but could you expand a little more
on that? From other people we have
interviewed, we hear they were sticklers for
accuracy and demanded a lot from the
employees. What was your experience with
them? Talk about Mike Cowles. You had a
feeling what the policy was.
A: At least in my case, it just simply became
my own personal goal to be as accurate as
possible. I would look up things in the
Webster's Second Edition Dictionary and we
had the Iowa Red Book always on hand. I
gradually developed on the city desk a whole
series of references that we could go back to
to research any particular question that
would come up. That just became a personal
thing with me to make sure that we had those
things right. One impetus for that was the
flood of 1954 on the Des Moines River that
came through Des Moines. This was before the
Saylorville Dam was built, of course, and it
was the main reason why the dam finally got
built. We had this huge flood coming through
Des Moines and we had almost no information
about flood levels and about what would be
flooded at a certain elevation and things
like that. Even back in Des Moines, there
was just almost no information about floods
in the state until I gradually, with the help
of the various conservation game wardens and
other people in the conservation commission,
built up a table of listings of the various
rivers in the state and their flood levels.
And also historic flood levels and how high
they have gone and stuff like that. That was
a big thing. I just undertook it on my own
and it went into the files and we could refer
to it in subsequent years.
Q: With regard to the paper itself, Frank
Eyerly in specific. Can you remember any
instances where a reporter or an editor or a
photographer may have left because he or she
was dissatisfied with the way the paper was
being run or because of the personality of
Frank Eyerly?
A: I know that occurred, but I can't put my
finger on any particular person. I know that
various staff members would have a clash with
Frank and just decide to go on. I can't say
I remember any particular one who left
because of that.
Q: Any philosophical differences with the
paper?
A: I don't think that occurred that much
because the paper's philosophy was something
that was easy to agree with. You had to
really be obtuse to oppose it in most
instances.
