Larry Fruhling interview about journalism career, Bellevue, Iowa, June 15, 2000

Section 1: Q: We are talking with Larry Fruhling at his home in Bellevue, Iowa, on Saturday, July 15, 2000. Larry, let's just start with how and why the Register hired you in 1959? You asked me to ask you about that when I visited you before. And who wanted who, and why? A: I had been working for UPI in Des Moines for two years and I don't know - I had sort of a run of good luck for a few weeks. I got some pretty good stories. The Register did not buy UPI new service. It was about three or four days in a row when something I had written showed up as the banner headline in the Iowa edition of the Omaha World- Herald and I was really just on kind of a roll for a while. So, a little time passed and I got a call from Ed Hines, who was the managing editor of the Register and he wondered if I was interested in a ob. At the same time, I had become bureau chief in Iowa for United Press International, a job that I truly, truly hated. I had really liked being a reporter for UPI, but you know, you get these calls every day from people complaining that the ag markets were three minutes late on the radio wire and the Davenport Plains-Democrat had a peculiar deal. They had the AP news and the UPI picture wire. So AP would come across with a big story about a plane crash in the Congo and the picture editor in Davenport would start calling me, asking for a picture. And I'd say, "Well," [laughter]. There was a lot of things that would be beyond my control that I was getting nailed on and I hated it. So I was real glad to have Hines call me. I went over there one day and I had never been in the Register newsroom before, because, as I say, they didn't take the UPI wire and I didn't know much about the place. I walked in there and saw this block-long newsroom with all these people in it, scurrying about. I think everyone who ever walks in there the first time has the same impression. It's kind of a big deal. So, Hines interviewed me for about twenty minutes. He had worked for UPI for a while and he, for about nineteen minutes, recounted his days at UPI. And he asked me if I wanted a job, and I said, "Yeah, I did." So that was it. I think about the process now, where these people go in there and they're interviewed for like, two or three days, by all kinds of levels of editors and human resources managers. I always think that must be pure hell and torture for them. I'm sure I would have never gotten a job there if I'd of had to go through that. Q: Why not? A: Oh, just because I don't like stuff like that. I like being a reporter and writing up stuff. I like asking questions, but I hate answering them. Just a little bit more about this, about the informality of the process. Hines and I settled on a salary figure of $218.00 a week, which was pretty good darn money in 1969. He told me to come to work Monday - I don't know, 1:00 in the afternoon or something like that. So I came in and Hines wasn't around. I didn't really know anybody else there and I finally asked who the city editor was. They said, "Well, it's Gene Raffensperger. He's sitting over there at the city desk." So, Gene was sitting there, grumpily editing some copy, with a big, black pencil, just marking out all kinds of stuff and he was growling and grumbling as he did it. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, "I'm Larry Fruhling. I'm the new reporter just hired here." And he looked up and went back to his work. As it turned out, Hines had not bothered to tell the city editor that he hired me. The whole day went by like that. I just stood there. I didn't have anything to do and nobody to talk to. Finally, somebody mentioned to me that Jimmy Larson, the news editor, was from a small town in Nebraska and I was, too, and I thought maybe that would give me something to talk about to somebody anyway. So I found Jimmy in the wire room, all these wire service machines were spewing out these endless reams of news. But none of it excited Jimmy very much that day. He was just standing there scowling at the machines, so I walked up and said, "Hey, Jimmy! My name is Larry Fruhling. I just went to work here. I'm from a little town in Nebraska." I said, "I hear you are, too." And Jimmy looked up, and said, "Yeah, I wish I was still there," and went back to work. So that was how I got started there. There was no chair for me to sit on and no telephone and nothing to do. After about three days, I just finally started to trying stories and write them up. I always thought I probably could have stayed for three years and gotten a check without ever doing anything. It was just a very informal place. There was almost no structure to it. Reporters ran the newspaper and the editors, which is something we could talk about later, maybe. The editors sort of took what they got from the reporters and stuck it in the paper and that was about it. Q: Now, you were general assignment at the time you were hired? A: Yes, I was. I got to do that for ten months before I was kind of forced to go to work as assistant city editor. We can talk about that a little bit more, too. Q: You mentioned your first impression when you walked into the paper, I mean, it was pretty impressive? A: Extremely impressive. Q: You had worked at a paper before. It wasn't anything like that? A: I had worked for UPI for a year when I got out of college in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then, I went to a little daily in western Nebraska, in McCook, which is near my home town. I had worked there part-time in junior college and I guess I was kind of the managing editor there. But you know, when you have a staff of maybe six people and we all sat around in a room about this size with our typewriters. I had never seen anything like the Register newsroom. It was very impressive. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: And you also mentioned in the bio sketch - I'm trying to get a physical, to what the room looked like. The desks were lined up in a row. They were metal desks and I heard there were six reporters. A: Right. There were big, ugly metal desks that were three abreast, back to front, so there was room for six people at each set of desks. I don't know how many of those there were. It seemed endless. There were two telephones on each desk, so three reporters had to share a telephone. If somebody got on there and talked to his girlfriend or his wife or carried on with a news source for three hours, there would be all kinds of people scowling at him and butting their heads on the desk, because they just couldn't get anything done. The desks had these trap doors in them and the typewriters folded down in them. There was a great story about some guy, whose name I can't remember. This had happened a long time ago, about him falling asleep at his desk and putting his head down on it and getting his head trapped in the typewriter trap door there and being unable to extricate himself until he got some help. Q: Is that local lore? A: I think its - well, you know, there is probably some little grain of truth to it, anyway. Q: Then, of course, the offices, I guess, were surrounding the room, is that right? A: I think that there were only the managing editor had an office and the editor had an office - the editor was Ken MacDonald and I think he almost never used it. I know Hines, the managing editor, had an office. I don't know if anybody else did. The rest of the room was entirely open. There was a library and we had a couple of artists then, who mostly drew, maybe these little half-column maps of you know, Lenox and Des Moines or Des Moines and Sioux City. That was about the extent of the graphics in the Register. The sports department and the features department, kind of the Register and Tribune reporters, then the copy desk had a rim. The main news editor sat in the middle and all the other copy editors sat around in a semi-circle and he pitched them stories and they pitched them back and a copy kid came and got them and so on and so forth. Q: Where was the cartoonist? You had a staff cartoonist, didn't you? A: Yes, Frank Miller was kind of back in a corner by himself, but he didn't have an office room. The one amenity that he had that the others didn't was a little sink to wash out his paint brushes. It was all pretty egalitarian. Everybody was out there and everybody knew everybody's business and all of that kind of stuff. You asked me about the technology at the time. [recorder off briefly] A: The technology at the time was a bunch of old, beat-up Royal typewriters and the news came in on wire service printers, which operated off of a big roll of paper, an endless roll and that went through the wire service printer and when it got down to a little nub, the copy kid would take it off and put a fresh roll on. The little nubs were what reporters wrote stories on. The Royals had an old piece of coat-hanger rigged up behind them and the rolls sat on that. reporters also wrote stories on these endless sheets of paper. I think one of the funniest things I ever saw there, was George Mills, who was writing a big, long Sunday story about truck reciprocity late one Saturday afternoon. And Dick Klein was the news editor and it was getting late and George was writing and writing and the story was getting longer and longer, and close to deadline time, Dick Klein went over there and kind of ripped this big, long sheet out of George's typewriter and looked at it for a moment and held it up and very neatly folded the top to the bottom and went down and made a crease half way. He took his pica pole and ripped off the bottom part and made a wad of paper and threw it away and walked off. I thought George was - he was totally apoplectic. [laughter]. Q: He made it fit? A: Well, yes and certainly the only way it would have fit in the paper, because it was a real long story. [laughter continues]. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: That's funny! And also, let's see. There were not many women there at the time, either, as reporters, were there? A: No, there weren't very many. There were several - they were probably sixty, which is what I am now, but they seemed pretty darn old to me, because I was 28 or whatever. Generally, they had been hired during World War II, which took a lot of men out of the newsroom. And I think that they did a good job and had good jobs during the war. I mean, they got to go out and cover real news. But after the guys got back, they were sort of demoted again, to writing recipes and taking re-writes. The most notable one to me was Lil McGlaughlin, who was one of the best writers I've been around in my life. She wrote feature stories and always kind of grumbled about it, but she was a beautiful woman who had a beautiful southern accent and she was just a tremendous writer and reporter. She was the one who really stood out. I think the Register, by that time, was kind of starting to think about hiring more young women and some were hired, but not a whole hell of a lot of them, certainly. Q: How about minorities? A: Hardly any. The guy I remember best was a guy from - well, the country then was Biafra, which had broken off from Nigeria, I think. And Ike Nobita was a Biafran, who was an Iowa State graduate student who worked part-time at the Register. He was a delightful guy and he was real smart about economics, but not too good about journalism. It always seemed to me kind of perverse, but the Register would always send him out to these white suburbs, West Des Moines and Urbandale, to cover these city council meetings. I'm sure a lot of people out there had never seen anybody as black as Ike, who was truly a coal-black guy. And nobody could ever get his name right. The common - when somebody called and wanted to talk to Ike, some city councilman from Urbandale, they usually called him "Ike Nupoopadu" which he thought was hilarious! [laughter] Q: He didn't like that? A: He was just a terrific guy. Everybody loved him. Q: And how were people in the newsroom to the women who worked there and also to Ike? A: I don't think that was any problem. Of course, my perspective would certainly be different than theirs was. We would get into the feminist insurrection in the newsroom, but at some later point, we'd talk about the Sioux City plane crash, which was one of the darndest things I ever saw, what happened afterwards. I don't know how much you want to bounce around and how much you want to stay chronological. Q: I want to hear your stories, yes, but that kind of peaked my interest. What are you talking about? A: Well, this was something that just polarized the newsroom, the men and the women, for months and months. The Sioux City plane crash was in summer of 1989 - is that right? Yeah. This giant DC-10 crashed in Sioux City at 4:30 in the afternoon, which was no more than four, four and a half hours before the Register's first edition deadline. And Sioux City is 200 miles away. I mean, it could hardly have been farther from Des Moines and it was obviously an incredible story. Randy Evans was the city editor and Randy was like a general whose was being attacked from all sides and making these decisions, just like this - I mean, "you go do this, you go do that." [gesturing]. He deployed 15 or 20 people, just like that. And as far as I know, nobody could have possibly done it better. We got up there fast and we did a couple days of really good stories and then we produced this huge focus on Saturday for the Sunday paper. It was one of the best stories I have ever been involved in. It was a minute by minute account of what these people went through while this plane was en route to crashing. Everybody that worked on it just thought it was great. There was this party Saturday night after we'd finished this story for the Sunday paper, there was a Saturday night party. And I'm skipping something here. Later Saturday, a bunch of women accosted Geneva Overholser, the women editor of the paper, who hadn't been there very long. Q: Women in the newsroom? A: Right. Their complaint was that Randy hadn't sent enough women to cover this crash, that the women had been frozen out of the action. They had their point of view and they're entitled to it and all that, but in fact, Cynthia Hubert stayed in Des Moines, that wrote one of certainly the most critical stories that were involved and a female photographer went up there. But those are kind of details, but these women went up and started making this big scene about being frozen out of this big story and the guys in the newsroom, I mean, they were just furious about it. Because, I mean, we just thought we'd done a good job and Randy was taking the heat for it. He was just in a controlled panic when he was sending all these people here and there. He wasn't thinking about their sex when he did it. And this just caused hard feelings between men and women in the newsroom that went on and on. The guys started going to lunch all by themselves. I don't know what the women talked about, but I know the men - that's all. We couldn't get it out of our craw for two months. It would have been a great story for Columbia Journalism Review, because Geneva was a woman and she was new at the job and one of her first crisis at the newspaper was this feminist uprising, which was unfounded in my mind for a lot of reasons. It would have been a great story. And Geneva, after listening to this stuff for a while, finally just put out a memo saying, "We probably have some problems here, but in this case, Randy did better than anybody else in the world probably could have in assigning people to go cover this terrible thing." Q: How many women was it that were criticizing? A: I don't know - there were probably six or eight of them anyway. One of them was Julie Gammick, who wrote a column and never covered news stories. One of them was Melanie Lewis, who I had liked and respected quite a bit, but she had a little cold that day, so she didn't come to work even. One of them was Melinda Voss, who wrote features or health or something. She didn't cover hard news. They were kind of the ringleaders, really outsiders from the actual news staff that was covering the thing. Q: So that really was never resolved, until people left - A: [laughter] Yeah, I guess it resolved itself. But the incredible thing to me, was just how people couldn't get it out of their craw. I mean, it just went on and on. You'd get sick of talking about it and resolve not to talk about it, but then half way through lunch, somebody would start gritting his teeth and it would all come up again. Q: As to the story itself, you know, it sounds like an ideal model of how a story is going to be covered, especially the hard news, spot news story like that. How many people were sent up? A: Geez, I don't know. I suppose that there were - I stayed in the office that evening and night and wrote the story based on what information we were getting from the people who were up there. There must have been six or eight. Because the next day I went up there. You know, everybody had just flown out of the office and some of them didn't have any money or any underwear, toothbrushes. I remember that Vern Brown, who was the office administrator, gave me a thousand bucks to take with me. And I thought, "Whoo! This is a big story!" So I was up there working and I was also kind of the payroll master, I guess, for a while. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: Can you talk about those wacky days of working at the Register? What do you mean by that? I guess it was the wacky seventies. Then you went into talking about the coverage of the Wadena Rock Festival. A: Yes, just the atmosphere. I mean, I wasn't prepared for this, I guess. Because I had worked for the small daily and for UPI for three years. Those were really nose-to-the-grindstone jobs. There was always more work to do than you could ever get done. And you sat there and worked all day. I came to the Register and maybe the most notable example of this was John Van, who covered City Hall. John was real energetic and kind of hyper. And he'd come back from a City Hall meeting and before he could sit down and settle down and write the story, he just had to let off some steam. So he had a big cape and a German World War I Picklehaube - you know, a spike helmet. So he would put on his cape and his spiked helmet and ride his bicycle up and down the rows in the newsroom until he could settle down enough to sit there and write the story. There was the Office Lounge, which was a real integral part of the Register's history, as far as I'm concerned, my time there anyway. It was just across the alley from the Register building. It's where the Marriott Hotel is now. If a reporter or an editor wanted to sneak out, he could pretend to go the men's room down the hall, and go down this stairway and through the composing room and by various routes, he could come out right at the door of the Office Lounge. The back door of it was just right across the alley. And there was a lot of that that went on. Q: Was this a bar or restaurant? A: This was a bar, just a bar. There were a lot of sane, sober people there who went home to their wives and children every night after work and led normal lives. But there was a pretty big bunch, also, that really liked to drink and carouse and raise hell. The Register tolerated it, I guess. Everybody still got to work the next day and did their jobs. Maybe I'm talking out of school a little here, but this is the way it was. There was a wire editor whose name was George Hanrahan. Whenever George wore his red blazer to work, you knew that George was going to get hammered that night. I don't know what the connection was, but everybody knew it was going to happen. And there were a couple of occasions when George would get the paper out and close the Office Lounge and go back up to his desk and call David Kruidenier, who was the publisher of the newspaper and start singing "Delta Dawn" to him at 2:30 in the morning. [laughter]. David Kruidenier was like the nicest man in the world and I don't know if he ever said or did a thing about it. [laughter]. Q: That's wacky! A: Booze was an important aspect of the Register and Tribune. For better or worse, I don't know which it was, because I mean, a lot of times when we were sitting there, drinking beer with your friends, you do get some good story ideas, if you can have the presence of mind to write them down before you forget them. It was a work thing and a social thing and it all went together, maybe more than it should have. But that's the way it was. I was a reporter for ten months and then I was on the city desk for two years. Then I went to work for the Des Moines Tribune in, I think, '73, covering the legislature with another guy whose name was Norm Brewer. The legislature, the last day had occurred, and Norm and I had to produce a big long story. I suppose it happened on a Friday night, probably late. Norm and I had to write a big long wrap-up story for the Saturday Tribune. So we were up in the newsroom, like at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. And we'd had the foresight to get a six-pack of beer. We weren't sitting there getting drunk, but we were sipping our beer and writing this stuff up and having a good time, and Michael Gartner walked in. He had just been hired as the editor and neither of us had met him because we had been at the statehouse all day, every day. I don't know what he was doing in the newsroom at three in the morning, but he walked in and we introduced ourselves. He said, "You guys have done a really good job, I think, over there." And he walked out and he never said a word about us sitting in the newsroom, drinking beer. Not a word about it. There was another - I hope I don't seem preoccupied with drinking, but like I say, it was an important part of the way the place worked. Q: Part of the culture. A: Yeah, it was part of the culture, for some of us, anyway. Like I say, certainly not all. But there was another time when Gartner had become an executive at the paper, which was a terrible mistake, but [cough, cough] for the paper. He and - well, he was kind of behind this. They tried to put together a poison pill to keep anyone from taking over the corporation - this was before Gartner tried to take it over, of course. But they formed this committee and he had recruited some high-powered law professor, I think from Harvard or maybe from Yale and the guy flew into town and called Gartner and Gartner was going to go get him, but he didn't have his own car. He had to drive one of these old crummy Fords the reporters and photographers drove. So Gartner took this old thing out to get this guy and they got in the car and they were coming back to downtown and a light turned red, quickly, in front of them. And Gartner slammed on the breaks and there was this whole avalanche of beer cans that came up from under the front seat. Gartner came back and sat down at his typewriter. You would guess that he would say, "Well, we can't do this anymore. You can't drink in these company cars." But instead, he put out this little memo, "Please clean the beer cans out of the company cars." [laughter]. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: So, what was the story about Mike? Why do you think it was not a good decision that the paper took him on in an executive position? A: I don't know. First of all, I thought he was an absolutely brilliant newspaper editor. And he came down in the newsroom and set up his desk there and helped people make stories better and saw stories that they didn't see, which most editors don't do. I mean, most editors make stories worse. Most editors are cautious and careful and Gartner was always trying to needle a little bit more out of a story if that was justified anyway, and make it better than it was. But then he became an executive and well - I suppose the story of the ultimate sale to Gannett is well-known by now. I don't have to go through that. Gartner put the newspaper in play. He tried together with the Wall Street Journal to buy it from the Cowles family. He did it surreptitiously, without letting David Kruidenier know what was going on, as I understand it anyway. That was kind of a great trick. Because he did that, the Register was put into play. It was known that it was for sale. And Gannett ended up buying it, which I think was unfortunate. I really felt hostile toward Gartner for while, about what he had done. But upon reflection, I mean, this forced Kruidenier to check the status of the newspaper with the family members. Most of them were long-removed from Des Moines and all they wanted was more money and they told him to sell it. I suppose it would have come to that in a year or two anyway. I think that what Gartner did accelerated the process, but la de da. Q: Just for the record, Kruidenier was married into the Cowles family? A: Yes, that's right. Kruidenier's father had been a Cadillac dealer in Pella, Iowa, and he married into the family. Anyway, things weren't good financially, for the newspaper. I think there was a year when it actually lost money, as opposed to making a little bit. It was no fun working for Gannett, but I don't suppose it would have been a lot of fun working for a paper that was losing money, either. Q: Talking about Gartner, it might be a good transition to your distinction between what an editor-driven paper is and what a reporter-driven paper is. What is that? What do you mean by those terms? A: When I went to work for the Register, the reporters just came in and did what they wanted to do. Certainly, if a plane crashed, somebody had to go cover it or if the city council was meeting in Clive and there were some big deals were going on, somebody had to go cover it and an editor would say, "Go cover the plane crash," or "Go cover the city council meeting." But to a large extent, reports just covered what they wanted to do. They ferreted out stories and covered them. They told somebody what they were doing and did it. Q: They had their beats? A: Yea, they had their beats and they knew what was going on and they were in touch with sources. All of that drastically changed over time, for the worse in my mind. That evolved into editors having endless meetings every day and sitting in the office and deciding what was going on and what should be covered and how it should be covered. Of course, they didn't know anything. [laughter]. Well, they didn't. They weren't out talking to people all day. That wasn't their job. And it kind of went from bad to worse, I think, because it evolved to more of an editor-driven paper, certainly not totally driven that way. I mean, these are all matters of degree. But in my mind, then, it became sort of a graphics-driven paper. You decided what to cover and how to lay the page out because you had some stupid graphic of something or some pretty picture of something. They decided the newspaper should look like a television set instead of a newspaper. And those things became - they're still over writing importance some days. They have the dumbest stories on the front page of the Register, because they have a pretty picture to go with it or some mindless graphic. I hate that stuff. I wish that all newspapers were like the Wall Street Journal and they had some little, tiny half-column photo of somebody, would be plenty for me. But I like to read stuff. I think that newspapers are for people who like to read and I think there are a lot of people who still like to read. Q: What do you think the rationale was, taking their side, or trying to figure out why they would have done this to make it more of a editor-driven paper. Were they not getting the stories that they wanted from the reporters or was it a management cluster there, to make the final decision? A: My own thinking, and I certainly tend to over-simplify and over-dramatize these things, but I sincerely believe that somewhere around the late seventies, I guess, that all these publishers went to some meeting and they had some consultant, probably from Belgium because if he's from a long way away, he must really be smart, get up and tell them that they should not just let these newspaper guys in the newsroom decide what's in the newspaper. They ought to get out and ask their readers what they want. So, the Register started doing that and I think that you could probably draw a straight line on the Register's circulation. The first time they had one of these readership surveys, they were up here, and then they started having these, plus focus groups and community meetings and the circulation went like phttt, like that! [gestures downward]. No mechanic has ever asked me how I thought he should change my transmission oil and I never saw any point in asking newspaper readers what ought to be in the newspaper, because first of all, they don't know. We went through this for years and there would be one of these surveys every two or three years and there would be this big newsroom meeting. The results always were that the readers want more local news. So, over time, we had all these meetings, spaced out a few years, and we always came up with the same thing, that the readers wanted more local news. Finally, it occurred to me to ask whoever was in charge of the survey, what local news was. And she said, "You know, that's something we really don't know." And that was an important question in Iowa. I remember one of these things, the only one I ever chose to believe the results of, was done in the late seventies, when the Register had a huge circulation. I mean, they had 500,000 readers, which, in a state of three million people, means that everybody saw the Sunday Register. And it created a tremendous cohesiveness in the state, I think. Everybody sort of felt like t hey were an Iowan. The result of this survey that I chose to believe asked people whether they were more interested in a story that happened in their block or their town or their county, or within a hundred miles, or anywhere in Iowa. And the answer was, it was a local story to them if it was anywhere in Iowa. But anyway, we went through all that stuff and nobody ever defined what local news was, that all of these readers wanted. It was just absurd. Q: It was a waste of time? A: It was a big waste of time. The whole idea of this was to be more reader-friendly and we want everybody to love us and we don't want anybody to be made at us for anything. We're going to have these focus groups where these hod carriers and day care providers and mathematics professors can tell us how to put out the newspaper. And we're going to listen to them. It goes on and becomes more deeply entrenched all the time. But I got to tell you, that I'm pretty down on the way things are now, because I'm old and crotchety and all of that stuff. But I also think that there is kind of an ebb and flow to these things and that someday, all of these publishers will go to a meeting in Deminie and they'll have a new consultant from Hungary and he'll say, "Well, what we've got to do is put more news in the newspaper." And everything will be fine. George Anthon, who is the chief of the Washington Bureau, is contemplating retiring someday. What he's doing to do is become a newspaper consultant. He's going to get one of these sticks with the laser light on the end and he's going to charge fifteen thousand dollars a day and he's going to get a 1922 New York Times and blow it up great big. Then he's going to say, "Well, guys, this is what we have to do from now on. See this page here? It's got twenty-three stories on the front page and they all jump. And if you look at the jump, they're all sixty inches long. This is what we got to do now." And then everybody will say, "Yeah! That's a great idea!" You know, things will change, we'll start having more room for news in the newspaper and that kind of thing. Q: Great! I hope it happens. A: So do I! [laughter]. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: Talk a little bit about the competition between the Register and the Tribune when you were there, too. The Tribune didn't close until '83. A: '82, I believe. Q: I've talked to a lot of people about this, about this competition within the same company, you know. A: Yeah, the guy sitting across the desk from you was your main competitor in covering the news in Iowa. It was pretty peculiar. Q: There was competition? A: Yeah, and people outside of that little closed society could never really believe it. But it was really true. I mean, the Register and the Tribune, as far as covering state government, at least in politics, had the best reporters in the state. And there was nothing in particular the Tribune would rather do than beat the Register on a good state government story, because the Tribune was the smaller paper and the Register always won all the Pulitzer Prizes and had this big national reputation. The Tribune was just kind of this little underdog outfit. I still identify, to a great extent, with the Tribune because I loved working there. We beat the pants off the Register regularly and there was nothing that we'd rather do. We didn't care if we beat the Cedar Rapids Gazette on a story or the World-Herald or whoever. You wanted to shove it down the throat of that guy sitting across the table from you. There were always accusations of people coming in late at night and reading somebody's carbon of their story. Or picking up carbon paper and trying to see from the imprint on the carbon what this guy had written, that he was so proud of, that was going to be in the paper the next day. It was very competitive. I think the Register sure lost a big edge when the Tribune closed down in '82. There was other competition out there but it wasn't competition that you'd spent some number of years fighting against. Q: Was there ever any cooperation on stories? Since you would have two reporters there covering the same beat, within the same company? A: Not that I know of. I mean, the managing editor who was in charge of both papers must have been in a lot of difficult situations. But I don't recall the managing editor interfering either. I'm sure that he knew it was to his best interests to foster the competition because everybody worked harder and tried harder. You know, you see the Register now, it's striking to me. We're sitting out here two hundred miles from Des Moines and at least once a week, what strikes me is that there is a really good story someplace - you know, in Iowa, a big international or national story. And it happens often that that story is on the inside of the Register, maybe six paragraphs or three paragraphs. But the next day, the same thing is on the front page. They seem to have no kind of visceral reaction to stories. When the Tribune was there, if the Register booted it, that night, the Tribune was sure not going to boot the next day, and they were going to revel in the fact that they saw the story and the Register didn't. Q: [inaudible] about the Iowa reader. A: [laughter]. Well, there are those that will assert that, but I think the fact remains that after twenty-four hours or thirty-six hours, when it goes like that and it is on the front page the day after its already been in the paper once. That happens all the time. The woman driving her pickup and three children into the Missouri River in Council Bluffs. There was some little sketchy thing in the Register the next morning and apparently somebody had heard something and called a cop and the cop didn't say anything and they let it go at that. But there was obviously something pretty good going on there and I think that, in a bygone day, somebody would have said, "Gee, let's get three people beating the living hell of that story." It would have been in the Register the day after it happened. But that's just a white motif of the Register anymore, whether it's a local deal or not. The illegal Chinese immigrants who suffocated in the truck trailer in England. There were 53 of them or something? That was another story that was buried on the inside of the paper the day it happened and the next day, of course, it would be front page story and it was virtually the same story. That's one of the reasons, I think, is the Tribune and Register competed and I think that the readers truly benefited from the competition. Q: I wonder if things would have been different if the Tribune had still existed when Gannett bought the paper, would there be a different configuration set up, where there would be more cooperation than competition. Because like you say, it was good for the readers to have that very competition. A: I'm sure that Gannett would have knocked the Tribune in the head the same way the Cowles family did, because Gannett has done that in quite a few places. They took over the Louisville Courier-Journal and immediately killed the afternoon paper there. I think its happened elsewhere, too. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: And also in your bio, you mentioned a series of stories you did on inflation with Arnie Garson. Can you talk about that, just as a veteran news reporter. What were the steps that you went through to bring that story to the paper? A: We set out to do this early in 1979 and inflation had gotten to be a terrible problem in this country. There was one year that things cost 12% more at the end of the year than they did at the start of the year. Jim Gannon, I think, was the editor then, and this was his idea that we try to figure out how this was affecting people and they way they lived. And we tried to think of the best way to do it. Tape One Side Two Q: I was sitting and talking with people in the neighborhood. A: Yes. I mean, the idea was that if the town were big enough, it kind of reflect what everybody in the state was going through for better or worse. So we went up there and spent an entire summer reporting on this. That was a tremendous commitment of time for the Register, for two guys who made a decent salary at least, to spend four months working on one story. We stayed at the Holiday Inn in Fort Dodge and when we checked in the first time, the corn was about like that [holds up finger], it was springtime. By the time we finished reporting, great big old corn was there. We talked to everybody we could think of: bankers and farmers and welfare recipients and social workers and teachers. We came up with what I think was a very good series of stories which really told about what had happened and how people were adjusting. The ones who had benefited from it, the farmers, were getting rich. They were in debt. All farmers are in debt and all farmers have land. They were paying off their debt with dollars that every year were becoming increasingly numerous and worthless. Meanwhile, the value of their land was just going through the ceiling. And Fort Dodge, itself, was basically prospering from all of this. I guess we kind of went up there looking for - thinking we would find people eating dog food because they couldn't buy macaroni and cheese anymore and then the story was just the opposite. This sort of typical Iowa community was doing very well. So we wrote this big long series that truly did go on and on. Arnie was very meticulous. Arnie and I were classmates at the University of Nebraska and Arnie had started out in engineering and switched to journalism, but he still carried his slide rule in his holster as a student. He was very precise and meticulous and loved to figure out things mathematically. We had all that kind of stuff, a lot of human interest stuff and it was a good series. That was going to start running on a Sunday, I think, in October. The day before that, the federal reserve board decided they were going to get rid of inflation so they tightened down on currency, which didn't really have any impact for several months - really, a couple of years. But the story was kind of shot out of the water the day before this big series ran, not that it harmed the series any, I don't think. It was kind of unlucky timing on our part. We should have finished it up a week earlier than we did so we could have gotten it into the paper. Q: With something that big, how often would you be sending the stories back? A: We didn't have anything in the paper for three months. Q: Oh, is that right? A: Like I say, it was a big commitment of resources for the paper but they thought it was important, so they did it. I can't remember how we did it. I think we simply saved everything up and after we checked out of the Holiday Inn in Fort Dodge for the last time, we got a little room upstairs in the Register and laid out what we had and figured out what to do with it and did it. It was another instance where Jim Gannon had the idea, the editor, and he set us loose and we just did what we wanted to. We covered it the way we wanted to and wrote it up the way we wanted it and the Register stuck it in the paper and that was it. Q: How was it that you were chosen to do an inflation story? Did you have some expertise or was it just your interest in it? A: I knew about as much about inflation as I do everything else, which is about that much [shows with hand]. I was a business writer for a year in '79 at the Register and I guess that's why I became involved in it. Q: Was it something you wanted to do? A: Yes. I always loved to get into stuff like that, that you could really get into. That would strike a lot of people as adult subject and maybe it struck the readers that way, too, when we published it. But I just have always loved to - that was a great thing about the Register. No matter what else was going on there, I still was kind of privileged, I guess. I mean, I got to spend lots of times doing kind of deep, long things and I loved doing it. I really did. Q: Very labor intensive. Not only the interviews and all, but the research that goes with it. A: Yes, but it's sort of rewarding to think that you've been able to figure something out and figure it out pretty well if you spend enough time and effort at it. It's simply fun to do. I like knowing more about things than most other people do. Besides that, somebody gave me a salary to find it out. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: We talked already about Jimmy Larson. Anything else you want to add about him, because you brought him up in your biography. A: Jimmy Larson was a brilliant news editor at the Register for a long time. I'm not sure exactly when he finally got displaced, but he was the news editor when I went to work there. And Jimmy always looked like a bum. He'd come to work with razor cuts all over his face and he would have these little tufts of toilet paper stuck on his cuts. His neck tie was usually under one collar but not the other one and kind of flying over his shoulder and he had cigarette burns all over his white shirt. He looked like a bum. He looked like some homeless guy who wandered in there. In fact, a reporter, Dan Filler, was walking up the street in Des Moines one night with - I think it was Cal Holtman. He was kind of a big shot guy in the Iowa legislature. And Jimmy - it was a cold winter night and Jimmy had on his big overshoes that were all unbuckled and his tie was all askew and he had on this kind of raggedy old trench coat slung over his shoulder. And Jimmy was walking around with his head down. Dan said, "Hi, Jimmy, how you doing?" And Jimmy kind of "Umf," and kept walking. They walked a little further, Filler and Holtman and Holtman says, "Who in the hell is that bum?" [laughter]. Hiller said, "That's the most powerful man in Iowa. That's the guy who decides what's going to be on the front page of the Des Moines Register every day!" And Holtman was just astounded! But Jimmy was brilliant. He could take this terrible mix of stuff every day and come up with the best stories and put them on the front page. Even when I went to work there, there was a little news meeting at 4:30 every afternoon that Ed Hines, the managing editor, ran and everybody would say what was going on, to the extent they knew what was going on at 4:30 in the afternoon. And Hines would sort of pick out all these stories and then Hines always caught a bus at 5:00 to go home. And of course, all kinds of things would happen after that and Jimmy would forget everything except what was going on and what seemed like the news to him. And he'd do whatever he wanted to. There were nights, there were a lot of nights when there were breaking stories between editions. Jimmy would just totally tear up the whole newspaper, two or three times a night. He'd run down to the composing room and yell at the top of his lungs, "Checkers!" And checkers meant that everything was going to get moved from one place to another. And he was just brilliant at it. He loved doing it. He, too, probably drank more than he should of. But it never seemed to impair his ability to put out a great front page every day. Of course, when we got into all this committee meetings and focus groups and stuff like that, Jimmy wasn't really the kind of a guy for that sort of newspapering, so he got bucked out of his job. He still works there as a part-time and still is a marvelous guy. I mean, I never knew anybody who worked there who just didn't have the highest regard in the world for his ability, really. Everybody not only loved him as a character, but just thought the world of his ability, however he did it, to put out a good newspaper every day. -- <br><br> Section 9: Q: Were you there at the time Frank Eyerly was there? A: No. Eyerly had just gone and Hines had just been hired when I went to work there. I only heard about Eyerly. Q: I heard plenty about Eyerly. [laughter]. A: He apparently was an irascible hard guy to get along with, who also was a pretty good newspaper editor, I think most people thought. Q: How about working for Ed Hines? How was he? A: Well, the paper had been a pretty wild place and Ed - he had been a business writer and he was a very serious, sober guy. He wasn't very personable, really. But he was just more serious about everything. After I was a reporter for ten months, he wanted me to go to work on the city desk. I was having the time of my life for ten months, because I had escaped the drudgery of UPI and was getting to find out how much fun it could really be to work for a newspaper. I really didn't want to do it, but he told I should and his charge to me was to keep the newspaper out of trouble, which was the last thing I was interested in. I mean, I was having fun getting into trouble. [laughter]. But he was a lot more sober and serious. I don't think he's a bad newspaper editor, probably, but he - a lot of people didn't like him and finally, I think, the pressure from the staff is what got him dethroned and Gartner hired. Q: What kind of trouble are you talking about? What kind of trouble did the paper get into? A: Just writing up stories that got people upset. There was one - and I still don't understand this and I never will. But there has been some kind of a situation in Johnson County, Iowa City, in which some county officials were indicted, secretly, for something. They were indicted and that was announced but the indictments were sealed and nobody could find out what they had been indicted for. That was going on and it had been going on for a couple of days. One night about six o'clock, a reporter named Mike Sorkin found out what the indictments were for. It was some real low-level bribery of some kind. These guys had taken calendars with birds on them from the Caterpillar Company or something like that. It was kind of rinky-dink stuff. But Sorkin wrote up the story and we made it a one-head, which is a major story. It wasn't a big banner, but it was a big, one-column headline at the top of the page and Hines had the first edition sent to his house by cab every night as soon as it came off the press. And he saw that story and called and demanded that we kill it. I was stunned! Why? He said, "Because nobody told me it was coming and I don't like to be surprised." That was the only explanation I ever got out of him. I mean, it was humiliating to the paper, because here's this story in the first edition. All the TV stations grab the paper of the newsstands so they can read the newspaper at ten o'clock. The wire services grab the paper and swipe everything out of it. So everybody in Iowa had this story the next morning, except the Des Moines Register, unless you got the first edition. I went in the next day. I was ready to quit except I had a wife and two babies or I would have. I was just - I thought it was really humiliating for the paper. But Hines, he said, "I don't like to be surprised," and that was all he ever said about it.