Section 1:
Q: We were talking earlier about the
relationship you developed with your sources,
like in the cases with the sports reporters
with the coaches and ADs and such. Then, the
problem these days with the fact that these
reporters really aren't getting close,
perhaps for fear that it might look like
there is some conflict of interest or
something. Maybe you could talk about
concept of objectivity. What is objectivity
to your specific mind?
A: I think objectivity is one of the main
things that a good reporter ought to have. I
mean, not to be prejudice to the point that
you can't really tell a story without being
objective. I think that you should always be
wanting to tell both sides of the story if
you can get both sides of the story. You
ought to be accurate to the point that you
can get the facts. You should be fair. Fair
and objective. Sometimes I think sports
writers, maybe, tend to become homers just
because they get close to the players and
close to the situation, so I think it's kind
of natural for you to want the home team to
win, your team. I always felt one reason I
wanted them to win because it was easier to
deal with the players when they win, in happy
situations. If I'm covering Drake or Iowa or
Iowa State, I always wanted them to win,
because it made my job easier. I've been in
some pretty tough situations where teams have
lost or tied games.
I'll never forget the game at
Oklahoma in about 1980. Iowa state
had not beaten Oklahoma for a countless
number of years. And it was '80, '81, '82,
one of those years in there. Henry Duncan
was the Iowa State football coach. They took
the ball late in the game. The score was
7-7. Duncan had used to coach at Oklahoma so
the game meant an awful lot to him, if they
could beat them. And they marched down to,
let's say, the five-yard line, the eight-yard
line, and got the clock down to where they
had five or ten seconds to go. I mean, just
setting up the field goal, just being content
to run the clock down because they had a real
good kicker. And the kicker went in and
missed the gyp shot field goal and the game
wound up in a tie. And that poor kid! I
mean, he felt as though he had the world on
his shoulders and he let them down. I guess
that makes for a dramatic story, just telling
about that kid being slumped in the corner
and all that stuff, but it was also kind of a
touching scene, too. Henry Duncan grabbed
him right after the game and gave him his
support and so on and so forth, which I
always thought was pretty classy because I
knew how much it hurt him not to be able to
win that game. So there are a number of
situations where it's a lot better when the
home team wins. Like Iowa beat Michigan,
12-10 on a field goal in the last play of
that game in '85. I remember that was one of
the really thrilling games you'd ever want to
see, Number 1 against Number 2 and Iowa
winning the way they did. --
Section 2:
Q: Okay, to wrap up, we'd talked a little
bit about the difference in the ownership
between what Cowles was and what Gannett
offers. What do you think about the look of
the paper these days when you look at it and
read it?
A: Well, I don't think they do the job
that we used to, but I suppose that's normal.
I don't want to sound like a frustrated old
malcontent, but I think that we don't have as
much space as we used to have, for one thing.
I think that they don't have the resources
to really cover things the way we used to
cover them. In a lot of cases, they don't
really care because they are so bottom line
oriented that they basically are a central
Iowa shopper and it's not journalism as we
knew it, where the newsroom and everything
else reigned supreme and you'd go after this
story and that story and you put out a
product that not only informs your readers
but does a service in a lot of ways.
[background interruption]
A: I could go into cover stuff, except
that you might be about done.
Q: You were talking about the fact of what
journalism has become. The bottom line.
A: The Register is not the only one. I
mean, it's kind of the dangers, I guess of
change of ownership and even to the point of
being absentee ownership. I mean, certainly
the honchos in the company are mindful of
what is going on, but they also want a bottom
line of profit that sometimes is too much.
It seems to me that the profit margin when
the Cowles family had the Register was
somewhere around 8-10 percent a year, and 12
percent would be an extraordinarily good
year. Well, Gannett wants 25 percent at
least, and maybe more than that. When you
start talking about a profit margin of that
magnitude, then you look for ways that you
cut, whether it's the staff or the
circulation. They purposely cut back the
circulation, out in the state, so that the
main circulation of the Register is a 75-mile
radius, or 75 miles around Des Moines. And
that's basically for the advertising. So the
cost of delivering the paper beyond that 75
miles, the profit is not there. They don't
really care. To somebody that read the
Register years ago - now the news is 24 hours
old, especially with the sports. You can
pick up a paper and almost tell, to the
minute, what time that paper went to press by
what sports scores are in there. It's kind
of too bad that Iowa might play Indiana in
basketball on a Wednesday or Thursday night
and there will be nothing in the Register the
next morning because the game didn't get over
until 9:30 or a quarter to ten and the
Register went to press at nine o'clock.
Somehow, I think they made a horrible mistake
in what they've done that way because the
technology is so much faster anymore and the
interstate highway system, to me, there is no
excuse for not delivering a good paper into
eastern Iowa, Iowa City, and Cedar Rapids,
than what we are doing. But they don't look
at it that way. They don't particularly care
about that circulation.
Q: Local papers pick up the slack. I
mean, you got your Press Citizen and the
Gazette and all that. But why is this
important that the Register serve those
functions?
A: It just seems to me that - of course,
the Register and the Press Citizen are both
owned by Gannett now, so they do have a
combination Sunday paper and the only reason
that's being done is because the Press
Citizen can be wrapped in with the Register
and they can have the late-breaking sports
news on a Saturday night for the Sunday
morning paper. Apparently, that's been
reasonably successful. The Gazette, of
course, would be a direct competitor. You
always want to do better than your
competitors. I have felt all along that
somewhere along the line, they missed the
boat. I mean, circulation has dropped - I
couldn't even tell you what it is now,
160,000 maybe? It used to be 225,000. They
probably dropped 75,000 daily, but most of
that has been planned. As I say, they don't
want the circulation - they'll take it if
they can send the paper out there, but it's
not a paper that a lot of people want to buy.
Q: Although what you are talking about is
profit journalism, it seems to be prevalent
throughout the country. Is there any good
journalism left?
A: But it's just not journalism. It's the
big mergers. We're going to wind up with
three big airlines and two or three big
telephone companies. The insurance company
mergers and all that kind of stuff, that
sometimes I think bigger is not better. In
my field of newspapering, it's not just the
Register. It's all over. It's, in a way,
too bad. You kind of wonder with the
internet and so on, coming in. I mean,
newspapers are fighting for - I won't say
fighting for survival, because I think there
is always going to be a place for the printed
word, but just the competition for readership
and the young people who maybe don't even
read the paper anymore. That certainly
doesn't bode well for the future. I know a
lot of young people that get all the news
they want off of television and I don't
really think that that's much of a broad
based news to get it that way. But they
don't read papers. --
Section 3:
Q: Do we have time to talk about Roy
Carver? Is there a story that you wanted to
tell about him?
A: One story that is in my book, but it's
not exactly explained in any detail that I
think I could go into it, but Ray Carver was
an industrialist. He had the Carver Pump
Company. Back in the 1950s, he was having
severe financial problems. He might have
been on the verge of bankruptcy or even in
bankruptcy, at the time he had a chance to
buy the German patents for the cold water
process of re-treading tires, truck tires.
And he could see the value of that with
interstate systems coming, truck travel, a
cheap way to retread tires. But he couldn't
get the money. Nobody would loan him the
money. He was in such financial difficulty
that nobody would loan him the money.
Finally, he went to a young banker friend in
Rock Island who agreed to loan him the money.
And that's how Band-Aide got started and
Roy, out of that, became a multi, multi,
multi-millionaire. The University hospital
has greatly benefited by the money that he
has given to Iowa. He was always interested
in the hospitals, partly because he got them
to give him special diets because he was
concerned about his lifestyle and he wanted
to eat properly because he enjoyed life and
wanted to live to a ripe old age. And
unfortunately, he died of a heart attack
during an uproar in a restaurant in Spain
when he was only 71. That was in 1981. In
the meantime, he had donated money to Iowa to
build Carver Hawkeye Arena which he never got
to see because he died two years before that
opened. He donated money that could build
the first artificial fields they had in
Kinnick Stadium, which has now been recovered
back to grass. Roy's other big interest was
the Iowa wrestling team. His money donated
to that program had an awful lot to do with
Iowa's later success with Jerry Curdlemeyer
and then under Dan Gable.
The one story I wanted to tell was this Van
Sheriff, the Northern Iowa Athletic Director,
actually knew of Roy's contributions and so
on and Stan had the idea to build a dome
facility at northern Iowa, which now is the
Unidome. But he couldn't come up with the
money. It was about $7 million dollars and
he could come up with, over a year or two's
time, not nearly enough and he finally was at
the end of the rope as far as trying to get
anybody to give him money to build the
facility - and a lot of people thought it was
a crackpot idea anyway - so finally, he tried
to get a hold of Carver - and Roy, for all
the money that he gave away, was close with
his money. I mean, he gave money to the
University hospitals and he gave it to Iowa
wrestling, but there were very few others.
Illinois, where he graduated - he was an
engineer graduate - Illinois tried for years
to get Roy to donate money there and he
wouldn't do it. There is a Carver Field
House at Augustana College in Rock Island,
which goes back to the banker friend who
called Roy one day, many years after he had
approved the loan for starting the Band-Aide.
And the banker friend said that he was in
charge of the committee that was seeking
finances for the building of an arena at
Augustana College and Roy said, "How much do
you need?" And the guy said, "A million, two
million," whatever it was. Roy said, "You'll
have my check tomorrow." Obviously paying
off a debt that was longstanding to this guy.
A: Roy gave money to Iowa wrestling or to
the Iowa football field. He might not
necessarily be a soft touch but he certainly
was a force of some money. But Stan said he
couldn't even get past Marcella, who was
Roy's secretary. She was very protective of
him. Roy lived almost an idyllic lifestyle.
He had a villa in the south of France, a
condo in Miami, a motor yacht. I remember one
time he gave me his business card with all
his things on there. Motor yacht with a
phone number and a forward to a Falcon jet
and how to get a hold of him there. I mean,
he traveled extensively and he enjoyed
spending his money, but he was not free and
easy giving it away. Sheriff found that out.
Stan said he went to the Midlands Open
wrestling tournament one December and
Evanston just tried to get next to Carver, to
see if he couldn't convince him to - but that
didn't work out. I mean, they did bump into
each other in the hallway, but that was no
place to make his pitch for the million
dollars that he needed. So he was bemoaning
this fact one day, up in Cedar Falls and
there was a young graduate assistant on the
staff who had - John Briggs was his name -
wrestled with Iowa, was very friendly with
Carver. He'd gone down and he wrestled - Roy
liked to wrestle in his later years, too. He
was a wrestling nut!
Q: In his later years?
A: Yes. So, Briggs knew him real well.
He knew Marcella McKilip, the secretary. In
fact, Bob Brooks told me one time that
Unidome never would have been built without
Carver's money. And I said, "I never heard
that before." "Yes, check into it with
Sheriff, he'll tell you." Well, I kind of
filed that away. Stan, by that time, had
gone on to the athletic directorship at
University of Hawaii. But I ran into him at
the NCAA convention in Dallas in 1993 and
Stan saw me walking across the back of the
room and called me over and we were talking
for a little time or so and I said, "By the
way, I heard about how much help Carver was
in building the Unidome." He said, "You
mean, Bob Briggs and so on?" And I said, "I
didn't hear the part about Briggs. I just
heard that his money was important in you
doing that." "Well," he said, and then he
goes on to tell me story that Briggs had come
into his office just when he was bemoaning
the fact that he couldn't even get past
Marcella, and Briggs said, "You mean Marcella
McKilip, Carver's secretary?" Sure as I
looked at him, I didn't even know this young
guy, and he said, "I can get a hold of her,
if you want to talk to Roy." So he picked up
the phone and he called Marcella, who he knew
real well and got Roy on the phone, and sure
enough, the next day, the president of
Northern Iowa and Sheriff and Don Briggs were
on their way to Muscatine to meet with Carver
and he said Roy did not agree to give him the
money but he agreed to sign a bank loan to
guarantee the bank loan for however much
money they needed to finish the Unidome. And
he said, "That was music to my ears." He
said, "That's all we needed." And that's how
they got the money to build to the Unidome.
That was one of those stories that really -
it was an old story, basically. I didn't
really have a news peg to write that story
except when I got home on Saturday from
Dallas and I had been with Stan on Thursday,
when he told me the story, and the story came
out on the wires in the Sunday paper that
Stan Sheriff had died of a heart attack while
walking through the Honolulu airport on the
way home from that convention. Then on
Monday, I called Don Briggs and got his part
of the story and so on. I wrote the story as
a semi-obituary on the fact, the legacy of
Stan Sheriff. It was really a shock that he
died within days of telling me that story.
But Carver was quite a character. You've got
the Carver Pavilion at the University
Hospital now. His money has been - he never
really lived long enough to see all the
fruits of his generosity.
Q: [Inaudible] at the University? Were
you close with him?
A: I got to know him because of the
wrestling tournaments. He was a wrestling
nut. I remember the first time that Iowa won
the NCAA in 1975 at Princeton. Roy had a lot
to do with getting Krudelmeier to build up
the program and getting Iowa to hire Gable.
Things just took off once that happened.
Gable was hired in the fall of '72, I think
it was, or '73. Anyway, Krudelmeier coached
the next two years and Dan took over, but
Iowa won the NCAA in '75 for the first time
at Princeton. Roy took over the Princeton
County Club and threw a big party for
everybody. I remember one time, I don't know
if it was that year or not, but Roy was down
in the front leading the cheers. He had a
Hawkeye baseball cap on, leading the cheers.
And somebody said, "Who is that old guy down
there leading the cheers for Iowa?" And I
said, "Well, that's their biggest benefactor.
The guy is a millionaire." But, actually
probably closer to a billionaire. He was,
Band-Aide was a huge success and it's kind of
unfortunate that he died at rather an early
age. I talked to one of the sports
illustrator writers into doing a story on
Carver as only they could really do it. And
before they got around to doing it, Roy died
and nothing ever came of it. But he was a
fascinating person. He would have made a
fascinating book. --
Section 4:
Q: Buck, those are my questions about your
time at the paper and your time as a
journalist. Do you have anything else that
you would like to add, things that you can
recall about people, places, events?
A: Well, I think we pretty much covered
the territory. I covered quite a few of the
- I covered Lou Olston's game at Purdue when
he got into that big hoop-la with Jim Bane,
the referee. I don't know if you remember
that?
Q: I don't, no.
A: Olson was furious after that game, and
rightfully so, because the foul that Bane
called on Kevin Voyo was - it might have been
a foul somewhere, but Kevin Voyo was over
here. I mean, he was not near the - they
were going for a rebound in the last five or
three or two seconds of that game and Bane
called the foul. It was one of those fouls
or one of those scrambles that really, at
that point in the game, you can't really call
anything, much less to call on a guy who is
not involved. The score was tied at the
time, I believe, and the Purdue guy went to
the other end of the floor and they had one
free throw that won the game. That's the one
time that I was glad that I had a little tape
recorder with me, because Olson blew up after
that game and he said stuff like, "Those
guys, they're blind! They should be walking
around with canes. It's criminal! They
should be thrown in jail!" I mean, all the
stuff that really, if you're going to quote a
guy, you want to make sure you get those
accurate. It was an afternoon game and I had
time to go back to the tape recorder and just
take off the forbidden quotes so that I was
going to get them right. The only other time
I really wished I'd had a tape recorder was
when Howard Cosell gave a talk in Des Moines
and he talked so fast and with so many
different words that it was hard, in your
notes, to keep up with what he was saying.
Well, in this situation, I wanted to make
sure that I quoted him accurately. And of
course, it led to all kinds of things - Olson
got reprimanded and the t-shirt people here
in Iowa City made a t-shirt with the noose
around Bane's neck and so on, and Bane sued
them and I think they ended up paying about
$10,000 for defamation of character or
something like that. But Bane also was in
line to become the supervisor at Big Town
Official and he claimed later, that that
ruined that job for him. So anyway, that was
one of the highlight stories, I guess, of my
career that comes to mind right away. There
have been quite a few dramatic situations.
Over a period of time you're going to have
quite a few of those. I can't really think
of too much else that we haven't covered.
Q: Well, good. Thanks very much for your
time.
A: Yes.
