Otto Knauth interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, April 17, 1999

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