Section 1: [beginning of transcript not available] A: When he visited Des Moines in 1959,
John
F. Kennedy said, "I cheered for Iowa and I
prayed for Notre Dame." Jimmy Carter, for
instance, when he came here in '77 when we
had the fuel shortage and we had gas lines,
and one of the things he said, I covered it
for WHO-TV at the time, he was president, he
said, "Why, you people out here shouldn't
have any trouble with gasoline shortages.
Fifty years ago, you made alcohol out of your
corn and burned the alcohol in your cars."
Well, I put myself in a position where he had
to pass me when he went out and I said, "Mr.
President, you said they burned that alcohol.
They didn't do any such thing. They drank it.
Those were the bootleg days." Well, he smiled
and went on and then he came back and said,
"I gave you the Baptist version."
Another time when Lyndon Johnson was down in
Warren County, he liked to show off his farm
knowledge and farm aptitudes. He was out in
the hog lot and so he tried his pig call to
call the pigs to come and eat. They went the
other way. They apparently didn't like his
Texas brogue.
Herbert Hoover, when he came in 1932 to
announce his candidacy for re-election, in an
election when he knew he was going to get
clobbered, he sat on backstage at the
Coliseum with his head in his hand, very
dejected. Mrs. Hoover went over and grabbed
him by the shoulders and said, "Herbert,
straighten up and be a man." The guy went out
and made a terrific speech, a wonderful
speech. He was plenty good. But, of course,
nothing would have saved him.
Another time when Eisenhower and Adlai
[Stevenson] were battling for the presidency
in '52, I got a lucky break in that I was up
in Minnesota at the national plowing contest
where they both spoke at separate times.
Well, they both had lunch separately in the
host farmhouse. And, one of the things, of
course, was that everybody in the crowd, five
hundred cameramen, all wanted a shot of both
of them eating lunch at different times. They
finally said, "OK, we will let six of you in
at a time. You go in the back door. You take
your shots for two minutes. Then you go out
the front and six more will come in." I
always carried a camera, so I became a
cameraman. I got in the line and went in and
shot several shots. I saw Ancher Nelson, a
congressman from Minnesota over by the
kitchen door. So, I went over to shake hands
with him and I looked in. And here is the
big, fat farm woman washing dishes. On an
impulse, I walked in and pushed her away from
the sink and said, "You shouldn't have to do
this on this day. Let me do it." Lo and
behold, it worked. I was in the kitchen the
whole time that Eisenhower and Adlai were
eating lunch and I got all kinds of great
stuff eavesdropping on them.
Q: Did you use that in the story?
A: Yeah. --
Section 2: Q: Why don't we start out with how you got
into journalism. Where you were born, where
you went to school.
A: I was born in Chicago. A below-poverty
level family, but a family that was a book
family. We had a collection of books going
back to my grandfather Mills. We never had
much money. My father used to do a lot of
reading. He worked at Marshall Fields
downtown and he used to go around to second
hand book joints at noontime buying books for
a nickel or a dime. Stuff like that. So that,
it was my privilege to grow up with a bunch
of books. He had a bunch of Conan Doyle,
Sherlock Holmes, books, about this many. When
I was nine, he said, "Don't read those. You
are not old enough." So, I read them. Then
also, one of the things that I remember that
affected me, when I was about nine, I think
it probably affected me more than any book I
have ever read, and that is Les Miserables by
Victor Hugo. I am sure I didn't get much of
it, but nothing affected me like that book
did. I read with my feet up on the stove. You
see, we had a house with no furnace. No
electric lights. No telephone. But I never
will forget that book as long as I live.
I was born June 15, 1906. I will be
ninety-two in June. I wanted to be a writer
because I was surrounded by books, so to
speak. The other thing I wanted to be in, and
this was paramount, I wanted to pitch for the
Chicago Cubs. But, I never made it. I was a
skinny little kid. I never did have enough
heft to be a top-flight pitcher, although I
got by in the Big Ten all right. I played
against Iowa maybe four or five times. Once
in a while, they knocked me loose from my
back teeth and some of the other time, I did
all right. I did pitch a four-hitter against
Iowa one time. Then, it was my hope that I
could, on graduating, get a job as a sports
writer and pitch at the same time. So, that
was the reason...well, it wasn't the reason,
because I was happy to get a job anyplace. I
was out hitchhiking and I stopped in
Marshalltown because one of my fraternity
brothers, Northwestern fraternity brothers,
lived there. I stayed with him overnight. His
father took me down to the Times Republican
and I got a job at the Times Republican. The
thing was that organized ball in
Marshalltown, it was a Class D league, went
to the devil. There wasn't any organized ball
in Iowa at all because the depression was
coming on and baseball was having a tough
time. So, I ended up with the sports writers
job all right, but I didn't end up with the
Cubs. Which I wasn't going to end up with
anyway.
That is sort of the outline of my beginnings.
I was enthusiastic about the Cubs beginning
in 1916 when I was ten years old. My father
would give me a dollar on my birthday. It
cost me twenty-five cents to get in in those
days. Three cents each way on the streetcar.
That made it thirty-one cents. Ten cents for
peanuts. That's forty-one cents took care of
a baseball game for me. So, my father's
dollar gave me two baseball games and
eighteen cents profit. --
Section 3: Q: Take us from the Marshalltown paper to the
[Des Moines] Register.
A: I was on the Marshalltown paper for five
years. I have bound volumes here to show
you...how different - you are talking about
history. You ought to know about how
different the Marshalltown paper was. There
never was any local news in our paper on the
front page. There never was anything but Iowa
news on the second and third pages. All local
news was in the back part of the paper. The
last page was market, but the last half-dozen
pages were the local news. Something that you
never see anymore. And some very interesting
things on the heads, for instance. They are
very complex things that you wonder why the
newspaper had such long heads. And then, what
was interesting about it, Paul Norris and I,
up there, we were reporters together. We were
the reporters on the paper, the two of us.
And I was the sports editor as well. I was
sports editor for the first two hours every
morning. Then I was the courthouse reporter.
I was city council reporter Monday night. And
I covered baseball games at night. Football
games and stuff like that. But the two of us
were the reporters. Plus the fact that the
city editor, Joe Whitacre, was a very
prolific writer, too. So, really, three guys
turned out the paper. The local part of it.
The interesting thing about those heads - we
frequently wrote the head before we wrote the
story. As Paul said, it enabled us to sum up
our thoughts.
Q: What do you think about that idea of
having national news on the front page and
local news inside?
A: I think there is something to be said for
departmentalizing. I think maybe one of the
mistakes the Register made in about the '40s
or 1950 in which they dropped what we used to
call the "Local News Section" of the Sunday
paper, which was Iowa news. The whole
section. They changed that and diffused it
and I think they lost ground to the Omaha
World-Herald thereby, because the Omaha
World-Herald did a tremendous job of
concentrating the Iowa news in the Iowa part
of its edition in that one section.
Q: You think that is better than what we have
now?
A: Now you don't have that type of thing at
all. But I think there is something to be
said for it. And, as far as that goes, we
used to say that if you ran the local news on
the front page in Marshalltown in my time,
three-quarters of the people would miss the
story. It sounds screwy, but that's the way
it was. But, as I said, I was the sports
editor for two hours every day. That included
writing a column. Of course, as far as that
goes, we didn't pay any attention to hours.
We worked six days a week in the first place.
Q: What was your salary?
A: To begin with, I got twenty-five dollars a
week when I first started. Then I got a
hundred a month. They cut me down to a
hundred a month. Then I got up to a hundred
and forty-five a month. They boosted me that
much. And one hundred and forty-five a month
was darn good pay because I ate on a dollar a
day. Twenty-five cents for a small steak
dinner in Henry Wachter's place up on Main
Street in Marshalltown. I paid two dollars
and a half a week for a very nice room. My
landlady did my washing and laundry for fifty
cents a week. So, I saved money. Then, when I
went to Des Moines...
Q: Why did you leave Marshalltown to go to
Des Moines?
A: I wasn't feeling very well and I just took
a few months off. Then we ended up in Des
Moines. I stopped in at the Register. John
Silence from Marshalltown was working as
assistant state editor. He told me that they
needed a copy reader. I went in and I got the
job. The first week, eighteen dollars. The
second week, twenty-five. In six months, I
was up to thirty-seven fifty, which was going
pretty good. I quit for the reason that I am
too much of a bum. I do not want to be in the
office. I want to be out on the street as a
reporter. So, I quit in '34 and I was told by
Ken MacDonald, the news editor, "You are
never going to get a job on this paper again.
Quitting like you did."
Well, anyway, then I quit and I took a job
with the Iowa Daily Press Association. Do you
know what that was? It was an organization of
about forty daily afternoon papers in Iowa
whose sole purpose was to squelch the
Register. Because the Register's circulation
was coming up so fast, you know, and it was
really a superior paper. So, the Iowa Daily
Press hired me to be a one-man bureau in Des
Moines to steer as much news as I could
toward the afternoon papers. They were all
afternoon, really, daily except for Sioux
City. So I was out to not have the Register
carry exclusive news in the morning paper,
state news that is, mostly out of the
statehouse, rather than have the Register get
some of it. I was engaged in a battle to
steer all the news I could to the afternoon
papers. But, I decided that wasn't a whole
lot of fun just doing that. So, I went out to
see how much I could scoop the Register. In
other words, get exclusive stories in the
papers out in the state. As you guys know,
you can't keep a reporter from getting the
news. I don't care who you are. If a guy
works, he is going to get news. Well, I
worked and worked hard, and I got some pretty
good scoops. I got a scoop on one that I
remember the Cedar Rapids Gazette put the
Sunday line on and that was the fact that
Iowa law forbade the sale of liquor, liquor
by the drink, in those days. Here, the
federal government had issued retail liquor
dealer licenses to some seventeen or eighteen
hundred bootleg joints in Iowa. I got the
list and, boy, the Cedar Rapids Gazette
really went to town with that. They used to
love scooping the Register and, of course, we
weren't very popular with the Register
reporters either. But that was the Iowa Daily
Press Association.
Vern Marshall of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and
Earl Hall of the Mason City paper. Dubuque,
Davenport, Muscatine, Sioux City,
Marshalltown, Ames, Centerville, Mt.
Pleasant, Bollington, and so forth. They all
just loved it. I don't think it had any real
affect on the Register, because the Register
circulation just kept soaring. But it gave
them all, out in the state, a feeling that
they were giving the Register some
come-uppance from the little guys. Kicking
the big guy in the teeth.
Q: After the Register, you worked for them.
Then did you go to Cedar Rapids?
A: I quit the Register and went to the Iowa
Daily Press for forty dollars a week. Really
good. I was with the Iowa Daily Press from
'34 until '37 and then began the series in
which I never applied for a job. I was
invited into the rest of the jobs I had for
the rest of my life. In 1937, the Associated
Press offered me fifty bucks a week. Well, I
jumped at that. I got along pretty well with
the Associated Press until '42 when the Cedar
Rapids Gazette, what did I get - eighty, I
think. They offered me a job as City Editor
of the Gazette. I took it and then I
regretted it, even though I had a perfect
set-up and I probably would have ended up as
editor of the paper. But I just don't want
to be in the office. So, I quit and came back
to Des Moines with the AP and then when Ken
MacDonald heard I was back, he invited me out
to lunch and offered me a job. Even though he
had told me some years before that I never
could have a job again with him. So, I went
with the Register and I spent the next
thirty-some years with the Register.
Legislative. Politics. Just whatever I wanted
to do with the Register. I thought I had the
best reporting job in the United States. No
fooling. Because they would let me do
anything. In other words, most of the news
that I wrote, I originated. That is the way
the Register functioned. Just turned guys
loose. The paper was our religion. We really
were out, by God, to show the world that we
were turning out a good newspaper. So, I was
in that job until I retired in '73.
Then, after that, in '76...I continued to
write. I wrote a book for the Register in
that period. Then, in '76, I was retired and
WHO-TV called me up. This was in the Jimmy
Carter/ Jerry Ford campaign of '76. I said,
"We have got a bunch of kids. They are good
kids and all that, but they don't know
anything about politics. How about coming to
work for us for three or four months to cover
the Carter campaign?" I said, "OK." And I
did. And it lasted eight years. In other
words, in December when the period was over,
they wanted me to stay on. I stayed on from
'76 until '84. --
Section 4: In between, one of the things that I think is
very interesting, it was to me, it was
wonderful to me, from 1943 till 1954 the
Register let me be the Iowa correspondent for
Time, Life and Fortune magazines. It ended up
with way too much work for me and if it
hadn't been for my good wife, my late wife, I
couldn't have done it because she sort of
managed the telegrams and so forth. Time and
Life and Fortune were just unbelievably
wonderful to work for then. Actually, I made
enough money out of them in that eleven years
to buy my house twice over. I made about...in
those days, you know, seventy-five dollars a
week was good pay. Well, I was making
seventy-five bucks a week on the side. And
not only that, but whatever I originated or
whatever they asked for, they didn't care if
we ran it in the Register first. I had some
pretty good stuff over the years. Certainly
had a wonderful opportunity to see those big
shots in action because they took us into New
York for a week every year while we watched
the Time and Life editors especially, put
their magazines together every week. It was a
class operation. Don't think it wasn't. So,
that was a real advantage.
I told you one about the American County
deal. This was a Life picture story about
Adair County, Iowa. I did the preliminary
gathering of the facts. One of the
interesting projects was that in '46, at the
end of the war, the globe was in a bad food
shortage as a result of so much
war-time...the absorption of production into
the war effort so that there just wasn't
enough food in the world to go around. Well,
Time asked for some suggestion that I might
have as to some individual who would
epitomize the productivity of the American
farmer, who was going to rescue the world
from this big famine. Which, probably, they
did because the American farm production was
just absolutely fabulous for the time. So,
they said, "You pick out some guy who is of
some other prominence than being a farmer." I
said, "Sure. Gus Kuester of Griswold, Iowa.
He is a big, raw-boned farmer who was also
the Speaker of the Iowa House." They said,
"OK." They sent a guy out from New York. I
bird dogged it for him, told him all about
him. They sent out a writer to write the
story of Gus Kuester. Who did they send out?
Whittaker Chambers. Now, I don't know how
many of you know who Whittaker Chambers was.
Well, man, you should know. He was one of the
great Americans of his time. He was a former
Communist who backed up on Communism and was
the guy who really exposed Alger Hiss who was
sitting as Roosevelt's [President Franklin D.
Roosevelt] right hand as a Communist spy.
That high up in the government. Roosevelt's
trusted assistant. There is a book written by
a guy from Grinnell, Sam Tannenhaus, called
Whittaker Chambers. It came out last year. It
is one of the great books of our time. And
you if want to know about America's wrestling
with the Communists, and it was a real
proposition, and don't ever think there
weren't all kinds of Communists that had
infiltrated the American government, you
ought to read that book. --
Section 5: Another story one that was kind of fun. A guy
out in Urbandale who was a hatchery salesman
traveled around the country selling grain and
stuff like that to hatcheries. He collected,
from hatchery operators, all the chicks that
he could who had malformations of one kind or
another. One wing or something like that. In
other words, chicks that weren't normal
physically. He interbred them and he bred a
breed of wingless chickens. Don't ever think
that wasn't a sensation. I had control of
that darn story. We ended up with a great big
beautiful picture story in Life, a good text
story in Time and we had it all over the
paper in Des Moines before anybody did. That
is the kind of stuff that I did for them. --
Section 6: People usually ask, "What are your best
stories?" You probably bump into that and you
have a heck of a time figuring it out, don't
you? I think maybe the most important story
that I covered, I did cover thirteen national
conventions and, of course, there was a lot
of good stuff in those. But I think the most
important story that I covered was Winston
Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech. I don't
know how many of you know who Winston
Churchill was or what the "Iron Curtain"
speech was. [The Iron Curtain was the term
given to the self-imposed isolation of
communist countries in Eastern Europe and
Asia during the Cold War. The term was
popularized in a speech given by Sir Winston
Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5,
1946.] But that was the first...that was down
at Fulton, Missouri and President Truman was
there. I covered that for the Register.
Then, forty-six years later, the Register dug
me out of the mothballs and sent me down
there to cover Gorbachev's speech in '92. I
was the only reporter who was at both of
them. In fact, three different television
stations interviewed me down there, a St.
Louis station and what not, because I had
been at both of those historic meetings. --
Section 7: Another story...most of us don't take the
trouble to collect our clippings. One of the
others that was pretty sensational, I went
out to Glenwood, the state institution for
the mentally retarded, one time in '56
because they had a new superintendent out
there. And I got a story from him on...he had
just arrived and they had found all kinds of
interesting stuff dating back into the 1870s
up in their attic. It was a good story. Good
visuals and so forth. Before leaving, I said
to him, Al Sasser his name was, "Al, I saw a
story in the paper the other day about
somebody in Chicago by the name of Bernadine
Olson who had taken twenty mentally retarded
people and given them very intensive
education and training and succeeded in
raising their IQ. You have got eighteen
hundred mentally retarded people here. Are
you doing anything to raise any of them up to
normal?" He said, "Hell, we have got them
normal here now." I said, "In this
institution?" "Yeah." "You mean to tell me
you have got people who are normal in this
institution as mentally retarded?" "Yes."
"Did you just get them?" "We got one guy who
has been here for fifty-eight years." Well,
you can imagine what I did with that. I said,
"Lead me to that guy." They brought him over.
He was a nice little fellow. He had been
there since he was ten years old. He was
sixty-eight years old. He played nine musical
instruments. He subscribed to Time magazine
and the Omaha World-Herald. He was foreman of
the print shop. He gave piano lessons to kids
in downtown Glenwood. Well, we went to town
on that and Life magazine did, too. Can you
imagine the wasted lives, just by
carelessness, so to speak. We got some forty
people freed from Glenwood. When I say, we, I
mean we didn't do it. The authorities did.
That was a pretty good one. And, as I say,
Life magazine went to town with it.
Q: Do you remember that guy's name?
A: Mayo Buckner. --
Section 8: Then, another story that
attracted a lot of attention, some teenagers
were playing chicken up in northern Iowa.
Back in about 1949. Chicken was a game by
which the kids drove head on toward each
other and then would swerve at the last
minute. See who had the guts to stay on the
course and who would wilt. That type of
thing. Well, they smashed into each other and
four of them got killed. It was west of
Hampton. And four of them were badly injured.
It came up with a story about that one in the
paper. [The teenage crash story first
appeared as a routine report about six inches
long in the paper. What I did was build it
into a story five columns long.] You know
what it would be. Commonplace, so to speak. I
said to the boss, "How about letting me go up
there and just letting me do a real take-out
on that thing?" He said, "You think you can
get a pretty good story out of it?" I said,
"Yes." So I went up there and I talked to
fifty different people. I was up there
seventeen or eighteen hours. I came back and
I wrote a story in which I sort of built the
lives of all eight of those kids for their
last three hours. The Register ran a
five-column story on it. Can you imagine
running a five-column story on an auto
accident today. It was a line story. I wrote
it a couple or three times and the telegraph
editor, he didn't say anything to me. I
thought, "My God, am I going to have to write
it again?" Then the next thing I heard was
from MacDonald. He said, "This story is going
to be re-printed all over the United States."
You know how that is. You sometimes write
something that you think is darn good and
nobody pays any attention to it and another
time somebody writes something and, wow, it
is great stuff. You never can predict. It ran
in Reader's Digest and it ran in Look. I got
a thousand dollars out of it from Reader's
Digest which, a thousand bucks in 1949 was an
extraordinary amount of money. Of course, I
regretted the fact that I had to cash in on
the stupidity and the loss of life of all
those kids. --
Section 9: I don't know. I worked for a year trying to
nail down the fact that the governor of Iowa
had cheated on his income tax. And I guess I
broke the law in getting verification of it.
But I didn't run it, or we didn't run it -
when I say "I," I am just part of a
newspaper, you can't say "I" too much - what
we finally did is we went over to the
governor and we said, "The report is
everywhere that you have cheated on your
income tax. If you did, if you are having
trouble, you would be much better off to
disclose it yourself rather than somebody
else come out and dig it up and make it an
expose' story." He was pretty well shocked by
that time mentally and he agreed. So we ran
it as an exclusive story. He had cheated to
the extent of $16,000 on his income tax in
1949, which would be the equivalent to
something over a hundred thousand now. It was
a substantial amount at the time. [That was
an exclusive story that shocked the state.] --
Section 10: I wrote a story that two mothers of retarded
children came up to me to see me about. Back
in the '50s, I think it was. They said, "We
aren't getting enough publicity on our
efforts to handle the retardation problem in
this state. Why can't you do something for
us?" I said, "OK. You do what I say and we
will go to town. I know you both have
retarded children." One was from Forest City.
I said, "Let me come up to your home." This
is in the days when retarded kids were kept
in the closet, you know. It wasn't out in the
open at all. Families were ashamed of them. I
said, "Let me come up there and write the
story and let's put it out just exactly what
the experience is of a family with a retarded
child." They fell for it. They went for it.
And that is what I did and I won a prize on
that story, for whatever that was worth. --
Section 11: Another thing I used to try to do. Everybody
in the reporting business has his own
procedures. I used to try to get into
meetings where I wasn't supposed to be.
Especially if it was some big shot. In 1954,
Richard Nixon was vice president. He came and
had a closed door conference down in the
Kirkwood Hotel with the leaders of the Iowa
Farm Bureau. Before he got there, I went down
there and looked in the room from the sides
so people couldn't see me necessarily and
thought, "Nuts. Why don't I become a member
of the Farm Bureau?" So I went in and sat
very unobtrusively in a back seat. Nixon came
in pretty soon and he sat on the edge of the
table. He had a nice, formal, folksy
conference with the Farm Bureau guys. Good
story. Well, when it was over, my opposition
- and we had opposition in those days, really
honest-to-God opposition reporters in Des
Moines. They saw me leaving the room. They
were enraged and they jumped all over the
Nixon people. "What do you let that guy in
for?" Well, the Nixon people were just
furious and they jumped all over me. I didn't
give them the satisfaction. MacDonald was the
executive editor then and he was in New York
at an American Newspaper Association meeting.
They called him and he called me back and
said, "What's going on? Man, did I ever get a
reaction." I told him and he laughed. We ran
it, of course. But, before that, Nixon found
out. He said, "What is going on?" Then he
said, "Did I say anything on foreign policy?
I don't want to embarrass the Eisenhower
administration with some off-the-cuff comment
on foreign policy." I said, "No, you didn't.
You didn't say anything on it." So he said to
his guys, and this is one reason why I have
been pro-Nixon somewhat ever since, he said,
"Let that guy alone. He showed enterprise."
Another time, Tom Dewey was candidate for
president. He was in Des Moines in 1948 and
he had a closed-door conference with Iowa
labor leaders. Well, I succeeded in becoming
a temporary Iowa labor leader. I got in the
room and I was in good shape until that darn
[Bourke] Hickenlooper, he was then a United
States Senator from Iowa, he decided he would
take Dewey around and introduce him to all
the labor leaders. Well, there wasn't any
escape for me because we were on the twelfth
floor of the Fort Des Moines Hotel. They
reached me and Hickenlooper said, "You son of
a bitch. What are doing in here?" He jumped
all over me. Between the two of them, they
made me promise that I wouldn't write
anything that I had heard. And I didn't, but
I told Dick Wilson, our Washington bureau
chief and he wrote it. --
Section 12: Q: Let me ask you something. You said, "The
paper was our religion. We were out to show
the world the Register was a great paper."
What is it about the Register? Was it a
combination of people? Was it the ownership?
What happened in that era when the Register
was a great paper and then take us to where
the Register is now.
A: Well, I don't want to go too far in taking
you to where it is now, because I want to
leave that up to somebody else. Let me go
back to why I think we had that esprit de
corps. And it was tremendous. There is no
fooling about it. Does the name Gardner
Cowles mean anything to you? Gardner Cowles
was a country banker up in Algona. He was
also a legislator for two terms. And,
incidentally, for your archives, let me tell
you this to take you up to date. One of the
things I have done recently, and I am in the
process of doing right now, I have about
finished a twenty-thousand word article on
the Cowles family as a power in the newspaper
business. Gardner Cowles bought into the
Register in 1903. Even though he wasn't
originally a newspaperman, I think he is as
close to a genius in newspapering as I have
ever bumped into. They guy had the ability to
charge people up. In the first place, he was
willing to spend almost unlimited sums of
money. As he put it, let me see if I can word
it exactly as he put it - I can't seem to
word it, but what it amounts to is what he
wanted to do was sell enough advertising to
make a lot of money to make a better
newspaper to sell more advertising to make
more money to make a better newspaper to sell
more advertising and so forth, indefinitely.
The guy's mentality wouldn't let him ever let
up. The result was that that paper just had
sensational circulation gains. It went from
eight to ten to fourteen thousand when he
first got it in 1903 up to, our biggest
edition, which is the Sunday paper,
centennial, five hundred and fifty thousand
papers in a town of under two hundred
thousand in 1949. There is nothing ever close
to it. The guy just knew how to motivate
people and, at the same time, he was just a
tremendous businessman. He didn't let up on
anything and nobody around him was able to
ever let up because he wouldn't let them.
But, at the same time, he had that motivation
power.
A: One of the things about the Register, the
first half of the century was the Golden Era.
There is no question about it. The second
half, it changed because the situation
changed. Look magazine, which had been a big
success, failed. The Des Moines Tribune had
to discontinue because television was soaking
up so much national advertising. Also, the
Register was not able to maintain circulation
in all ninety-nine counties the way that it
had. But, at the end of the century, what
happens? The Register had, with a great
struggle - the Register people - had taken
over the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. It
sold for one billion, four hundred million
dollars. That was the Register's biggest
story, I think, of the last half of the
century. But I am also of the opinion that
when you get one billion, four hundred
million dollars, mostly into a family, my
God, I am entitled to know how much everybody
got individually. And I am fighting with them
right now, trying to get at the figures. I
have got some figures. I know some people got
one hundred and fifty million dollars and
that ain't chicken feed. I am maintaining
that when you are in the newspaper business,
you are not in the position to hold out
anything. In other words, I want those
figures. I have got some allies on my side in
the family. So, I am engaged in a ninety-two
year old battle to jar loose some figures
that haven't been out even though the sale
was completed several months ago.
You have touched it, though. There is
something different about this guy. One of
the things that he insisted upon, at all
times, anything involving the family had to
be in the paper. [Gardner] "Mike" Cowles, one
of the sons, had three divorces. Every one of
them was reported on the front page. And, so
far as advertising pressure and so forth,
back at the end of World War II, all our
prices and our economy were subject to price
ceilings. Well, I covered the OPA. That was
one of my jobs. One day, I flushed a story of
a deal that had been cooked up secretly
between the OPA and the Iowa Laundry
Association so that the laundry companies
were going to be able to boost their price
ceilings and get more money for their
services and the labor union, the laundry
workers, were going to get higher ceilings on
their wages. I had it and flushed it. I was
sitting and typing it at my desk and here
comes a call with a favorite epithet that I
have had all my life. Some guy said, "You son
of a bitch. I don't want that story in the
paper. Our association spends fifty thousand
dollars a year with your company and we don't
want that story in the paper." Well, you
know, you pass it off. So, he slams the phone
and pretty soon I get a call from the
advertising manager. He said, "I was told a
long time ago, 'Don't fool around with the
news.' Just tell me what is happening." I
told him. We ran it as a top head on page
one. Maybe a week later, I discovered that
this laundry guy had called Mike Cowles in
New York where Mike was running Look
magazine. Mike said, "Mister, I don't have
any control over those reporters in Des
Moines." That shows the attitude of them. The
realization that you had to be square with
the public in running your paper. --
Section 13: Q: Were you sad when they sold the paper to
Gannett?
A: Yes, I was sad. But, on the other hand, I
wasn't what you call "happy" with it without
the management that it had. Just imagine the
management. You would go to MacDonald or one
of those guys and say, "Hey. The battleship
Iowa is going to sail into mothballs in
Norfolk, Virginia on Thursday. We ought to be
on it." "Sure. Go ahead. Arrange your
transportation." Which I did and I was on it.
I dictated by radio-telephone from out in the
Atlantic back to the paper. That kind of
stuff happened all the time.
Another time, you know, Iowa was in the Rose
Bowl for the first time in 1957. That was
[Eveshevski] Evy's first Rose Bowl. I said to
Frank Eyerly, "There are going to be fifteen
thousand Iowans out there and they are going
to get in all kinds of trouble and there will
be a lot of fun. There will be lots of good
news." "Sure. Go ahead." So, I was out there
for a week. That is the kind of paper it was.
They had no worries, shall we say, about the
budget or anything like that.
I went to Vietnam with Governor Hughes that
way in '65. I was gone for three weeks. In
fact, nobody knew where I was because I
couldn't get anything out of Vietnam. The
military had all the communications blocked.
You couldn't even telephone. You couldn't
wire. You couldn't do anything. My family
didn't know where I was. It was not what you
would call a tea party anyway, with the type
of fighting that was going on. But I went to
Vietnam and got a lot of Iowa stuff that
nobody else had.
They just took a tremendous amount of pride
in turning out a good Iowa newspaper. In
newspapers, there are all kinds of
cross-currents all the time. About half the
reporters think the editors are stupid the
way they choose news or what they eliminate.
You know what reporters are up against. But
the general thought on the thing was that, as
I have said since and as I have said now, I
think I had the best job in the United States
because they let me do everything I wanted
to. --
Section 14: Q: Changing directions a little bit, you have
worked in newspapers, magazines and in TV.
Would you talk a little about the differences
in those and what your preferences are?
A: TV, let's take that first. Its advantages
are indisputable. This big picture that I
showed you of the wire photo picture. When
wire photo first came in, that was a
absolutely sensational. When the Hindenburg
exploded, here is how the Register played it.
And there are twenty-six pictures of that
explosion in that newspaper. It is the
damnedest thing you ever saw. But just
imagine the impact that had. Nobody else in
Iowa had it. There were only twenty-six
cities in the United States that had wire
photo. It cost the Register, the fee to the
Associated Press, was sixty thousand dollars
a year, which is about three quarters of a
million dollars now.
Now, you couldn't come close to getting that
much of a picture in the paper, because
unless you had something that was completely
exclusive that was of that sensational
nature, but all of it, play by play, live, on
the tube. One of the casualties of the modern
age is that the pictures are of relatively
much less importance in newspapers as they
were in those days.
Q: What do newspapers do that TV can never
do?
A: Well, let's put it this way. When I was on
TV one time, a couple of instances, I said,
"I have got a pretty good story from out in
Dallas County." They said, "We can't use
that. We don't have any pictures." I said,
"You are in the business of transmitting
news. I don't give a damn if you have got any
pictures or not. You have got to run this
story." That is one. Another thing I told
them one time, I had a good story and I
couldn't come close to covering it. I said,
"The trouble with this media is that you
write your story, then you start eliminating
essentials." And that is true.
TV has got the advantage, from a lazy
person's standpoint, you can watch TV and
think you have got the news covered when you
know darn well you haven't. In fact, you
haven't got it covered in the press either,
but you have come much closer to it. And then
you have got the advantage of reading a
newspaper at your leisure, whereas you have
got to be on the spot unless you are with CNN
where they are popping it at you all the
time.
