Ronald Maly interview about journalism career, West Des Moines, Iowa, February 3, 2001

Section 1: Q: This is tape one of the interview with Ron Maly. Ron, this is kind of a general statement. I'm going to ask you to think back a little bit. The fact that you were at the Des Moines Register from 1959 to 1999, I'd like you to let the time during your employment, whether it's one year or several years, when you were happiest professionally. What were those years and what was it that made you happy about what you were doing at the time? A: I would say the years 1965 to roughly 1980 to 85. In '65 I had been on the copy desk and I became a reporter in the fall of 1965. I began covering college football games and then in the winter, college basketball games and things that I really wanted to do. I knew I did not want to spend the rest of my journalist career editing other people's copy, so I decided I wanted to be a reporter and a writer and they afforded me that chance in '65. Then, things were going really well in those years for the newspaper. They were spending money to go to lots of games, lots of events. We would cover Nebraska football games, Notre Dame football games, big games in the Big 10 and then the Big 8, which is now the Big 12. Big national games, big bowl games. There was no end to the things we did in those years. I would say that until they started tightening the crunch, the money belts, those were great years. Q: Tightening the money belts at the Register? A: At the Register. Q: When did that start to happen? A: Oh, it happened, I think - let's see. Gannett bought the newspaper in 1985, I think, and in the mid-eighties, I would say, was when that began happening. The Register began to be a newspaper like other Gannett papers where the bottom line was the important thing. We ceased doing the things that I mentioned before. We ceased going to big football games, big basketball games, or football bowl games. Those things just stopped because they thought it cost too much money but the paper suffered because of it. Q: How did it suffer? A: First of all, the circulation was going downhill. In fact, I've got some numbers on that right here so I make sure I don't get these numbers confused. I think the up-to-date circulation figures right now are daily circulation is 155,698. That was as of a couple weeks ago. In the heyday, it was about 275,000 daily. And believe it or not, the Sunday circulation was about 540,000 and now it's 248,000. A lot of things had a bearing on that. The presence of television making inroads in news and sports coverage and things like that. But it also had a lot to do with, what I think, what the Register was doing, kind of pulling in its horns, not pursuing the big stories out there that were out there then. Q: Were there other ways that it suffered, perhaps, employee morale? A: Oh yes. Morale suffered then and my understanding - I'm retired now - but my understanding is that it is still suffering. There was a movement to bring in a guild at the Register in the 1970s because some newsroom employees thought the salaries were not high enough. In fact, it came down to two votes and the guild did not pass. But they were close votes. You can't really say that morale was that bad then, because things were stilling going pretty well for the newspaper. But later, getting towards the 1980s and certainly when Gannett took over, morale began suffering. They would bring in young people. They got them pretty cheap right out of journalism school or right out of college. Those kids I never felt had any plans to stay for the distance. I stayed there almost forty years, but the day of the 40-year employee is gone. I think not only at the Register but probably in all newspapers as such. Q: So you're saying that the kids didn't have any plans to stay at the Register but they did want to be journalists? A: Yes, the Register still had a good reputation in those days. And probably still does, among people who know journalism. But the young kids, many of them, did not plan to stay. They wanted to get two or three or four or five years under their belts and move on to a Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post, something like that, hopefully the New York Times. And they're aren't that many jobs around like that, but that was the idea. The young person never established a foothold here and wanted to stay, I don't think. Q: Do you think there were any good things that happened with that changeover from Cowles to Gannett? What were the positive aspects of that, as far as the reporters were concerned? A: I can't think of many. The veteran sportswriters at the paper felt that the Gannett company just turned out newspapers that all looked alike and wanted to save money. USA Today, of course, was the major newspaper in that in chain and the rest of us were down there someplace else. I think most of the resources went into USA Today and papers like the Register suffered because of it. But I don't think things improved any when Gannett bought the paper and I don't think it has improved since I retired either. Q: Of course, a newspaper is a business. A: Absolutely. Q: And the bottom line is important. How is it any different than the way Cowles operated it? A: I still think Cowles regarded the Register as a statewide paper. They wanted the state of Iowa covered, not only in news but also in sports. They poured a lot of money into the news operation and I just didn't think Gannett had that feeling. In fact, the movement started to even close the news bureaus in places like Davenport, Waterloo, and Dubuque. Those are gone. They are gone forever and those were real strongholds. But I guess the management of the paper felt that there was no use having those bureaus because the Register doesn't sell any papers there anyway. With the deadline situation being what it is, you can get a later edition of the Chicago Tribune and probably USA Today in a city like Iowa City, than you can with the Register. If University of Iowa plays a basketball game on a Thursday night, in Iowa City, the Register story is not in the paper the next morning. They have to wait another 24 hour cycle to get it. But the Chicago Tribune could have that story in a vending machine in Iowa City. Those are things that really hurt when you stop and think about the negative things that have happened. Q: Generally speaking, does the paper have a duty to do something other than make money? And if so, what is that duty? A: I always thought that - and I think we thought - the people who worked there for so long, we thought that we owed it to the state of Iowa and the readers to give them a good product. To act like you were a big-league paper and to go to these events and to go to Sioux City and to go to Davenport, to go to Keokuk if there was a big story and don't depend on somebody just calling it in from those cities, from those towns. Yes, money making is certainly important in any business but we always thought we owed it to the state of Iowa and to the readers to try to do a good job. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: I see, before you came to the Register in '59, you were at the Albert Lea, Minnesota Tribune. How was it that you came to the Register? What brought you? Were you out seeking a job or were you recruited? A: I went directly to Albert Lea, Minnesota, from school at the University of Iowa. I stayed there for a year and a half and it had been my goal for a number of years, to work for the Register because I had read it since the time I was a kid in Cedar Rapids. I remember riding my bicycle down to buy the newspaper for whatever it was, a nickel in those days or a dime, at a drug store. I couldn't wait to read the sports section, to see what was in there, to see what they were covering, see if anything from Cedar Rapids was in there. And it was my goal, I guess, from the day I decided to be sports writer to someday work for the Register. Once I was at Albert Lea - that was a great training ground for me. It served its purpose for me. I learned a lot of things there, got to know people well, knew how to deal with people. But after I had been there several months, I knew that I wanted to see if I could transfer this skill that I had to a larger paper, a paper like the Register. So I did apply at the Register in August of 1959. In early August I interviewed with Layton Haush, the late great sports editor. I got a job on the copy desk and stayed on that desk for six years. Q: You being from Cedar Rapids, were you also reading the Gazette? A: I worked at the Gazette. I worked there as a fifteen year old high school student. As you remember Jeff Schrader, who was a long-time sports editor at the Gazette and I think, in the back of my mind, from maybe 10, 11, 12 years old, I thought I wanted to be a sports writer. I took an English class at the old Wilson High School in Cedar Rapids, took this journalism course and enjoyed what I was doing and got some praise from the teacher, so that even made me want to write newspaper stories even more. So I applied at the Gazette when I was 15 and began covering high school baseball games and that developed into high school football games and basketball games. I never worked full time there but I worked there part time all the way through school at the University of Iowa. Q: When you were in Albert Lea, why was it that you chose the Register that you wanted to go to and not the Gazette? Because the Gazette was in your home town. A: At that time, I regarded the Register as a better paper. It was a bigger paper, bigger city. It covered the whole state of Iowa. I had worked at the Gazette, so I thought it would be good to try it at the Register and I never had regrets. I didn't have a chance to go back to the Gazette. Gus Schrader, the long-time retired sports editor did try to hire me back but I had just gotten my feet on the ground at the Register and didn't want to give that up at the time. I could have gone back, but that would have been like, they say, you can't ever go back home. I wasn't in the mood to go back home yet. So I fortunately or unfortunately never went back to the Gazette as a full time employee, but that's how it happened that I stayed at the Register. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: You know and a lot of people know that the Register has this reputation, not only state-wide but nationally, among journalists and readers, that it is one of the best in the country, at least at the time you were reading it when you were fifteen years old. What do you think made it so great back in those heydays? A: The things that we did in sports, the things that my predecessors did in sports. The Bert McGrains, the Bill Brysons, Tony Cadarro, Sec Taylor, who was the long time sports editor. They named a baseball stadium after him. And the Register was a paper that had a national scope. It had a Washington Bureau. It reported national news. It was well known to all people who worked in journalism and all qualified journalists that the Register always did a good job and it was an aggressive paper, pulled no punches, won a lot of Pulitzer Prizes and also did a great job in sports. Q: I'm just wondering. How do they attain something like that out here in the middle of the Midwest with Des Moines, relatively speaking, a small town? And I guess, its reach through the state, statewide, with correspondents all over the country? What was it, I wonder? I mean, there were plenty of little papers out there the size of the Register who were aggressive and had correspondents out there, but there must have been something unique about what the Register was doing. A: I think it was the Cowles Corporation and it was the people. The people who ran Cowles and who ran the operation in Des Moines decided that they wanted to make the Register a statewide paper and worked hard at doing that. They had good people back in the Ken MacDonald era, Gardner Cowles then Sec Taylor, who was at the Register almost forever. Les *** was still there and I got to work under him. And he still worked there up until the time he was about seventy-six years old. It was those kind of people who just poured their heart and soul into that newspaper and they were determined to make it a great product and they made it a great product. Q: You say you worked for Sec? A: Yes. Sec was the sports editor in name. Layton Haush was the executive sports editor. Layton ran the office and made the assignments but Sec was still called the sports editor and wrote the column, the main sports column. He was just a beautiful guy. He was someone who, at his age, 70-72, whatever he was and then up until the time he died at seventy-six, he was willing to talk to a young guy like me and tell me what he thought and what it was going to take to be a journalist at the Register. He was just a class act and I consider it a real privilege to work under him and for him. Q: Do you remember any advice that he ever gave you? A: He said, "Do everything with class. Don't do it any other way." In those days, he thought the old Register tradition would continue, that we would continue to cover big bowl games and world series, baseball all-star games and things like that, and that's what he wanted to continue. He always preached fairness, too. Be fair to the people you are writing about and the people you are dealing with and everything should turn out well. Sec - I don't know if you are aware of this, but in his earlier years, was also a football official. You know, they refereed the game and but then he wrote the story about the game. I don't know how anybody could do that. That would be quite an undertaking. I would hate to think of myself having to do that. Q: That's the ultimate objectivity, I guess, where you refereed the game and then you were going to write about it objectively. A: Well one thing, he wouldn't criticize the officials, I know that. He'd be very fair to the officials and say, well it was a nicely called game. Q: I think we've touched on this a little bit, but again, when did you envision yourself in a sports writing career, seriously - I mean, when you were young, you loved sports and such, but I mean, seeing yourself as actually writing about these events? A: I think once I got that job at the Gazette in Cedar Rapids and actually went out to cover high school baseball games, involving the old Wilson Roosevelt McKinley and Franklin, which later turned into Jefferson and Washington and also the Catholic schools over there. I knew then that that's probably what I wanted to do. I enjoyed it. It was just like most of the time when I worked full time, when I worked part time, it didn't seem like a job. It was fun. I wouldn't repeat this to too many people, and here I am saying it on TV, but I would have told people back in those days that I would have done that job for nothing. They wouldn't have had to pay me anything. And they didn't pay me much! I always told Gus Schrader that. I said, I'd work for nothing and that's what you paid me, nothing! Seventy-five cents an hour. That's what I got. Q: He took you seriously. A: He took me up on it. But it was a lot of fun. That's what got me very, very interested in it. I think by the time I was 15-16 and knew that I could do that, that I knew what was going on, in the business, because I worked on the desk at the Gazette after Iowa football games. I would go down and spot for photographers at the Hawkeye games, at Kinnick stadium. It got in my blood and I knew I was going to keep doing it. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: Did you ever have a thought about being another kind of reporter, as in a police reporter or being on the courts, writing about politic leaders? A: I never really wanted to do that. I did have to write some stories that would have qualified for police beat jobs, because I had my share of assignments that I had to do. I can think of a couple of them. I was just telling someone about this the other day. I seemed to be the guy that would get the telephone calls and the letters from people who were irate, irate parents who thought their kids who were athletes were being mistreated by some coach. And I'll never forget one situation where some parents had called from Ottumwa. They thought that the football coach there was being too aggressive with the players, maybe had grabbed them and gotten aggressive with them. Of course, that doesn't go over too good these days, so I got the task of going down there with the photographer to talk to that coach at Ottumwa, and coaches don't like to talk about those kinds of things, obviously. I introduced myself and introduced our photographer who was Larry Neibergall. We had to confront this coach with these charges that the mothers had made about that the kids were being grabbed by this coach. First thing he did was turn to the photographer and say, "I don't want any pictures taken of this." He was not a real happy camper but that story would have qualified more as a police type situation and not a sports story, certainly not like covering the Rose Bowl. Then, I had other situations like that, too, where back in the 1960s I was boycotted by some football players at the University of Iowa. That was in the era of the black power movement. Talk about Harry Edwards. There was a walk-out of the black football players at Iowa in spring practice when Ray Nagle was coaching. I wrote that story for the next morning after the boycott and it was a little bit different kind of football story and in those days, the newspaper referred to African Americans as Negroes. That shows you it wasn't that long ago that that was still the case. The black players did not want to be called Negroes anymore. They wanted to be called, in those days, African Americans and to a certain degree, black. But I got boycotted. I could handle that. I knew what the message was there. I had a long talk with my managing editor then, who was Ed Hines. I liked Ed. And Ed counseled me pretty well on that. He said that I handled the situation very well and that the whole thing would turn out well and it did. There were various things like that and I had to deal with school boards when high school coaches were fired and things like that, so it wasn't all just who scored the winning basket. I did have my share of those kinds of stories. Q: When you said that you were boycotted, what do you mean by that? That they weren't granting you interviews? A: Yeah, that was the idea. They said that they were boycotting me because I had referred to them by a term they didn't want used and that I was off limits. I couldn't interview the players. But that didn't last long. The same thing happened to me at Iowa State. I also had to write the black walk-out story at Iowa State. I guess they figured I had a lot of experience with that sort of thing. Same thing happened at Ames. I had to deal with the coaches and players up there on that. And they weren't real happy with me either. But yes, it was a boycott. It didn't last long, just a day or two. We just carried on as normal after that. Q: These kind of stories that you're talking about, perhaps the one in a tunnel where the coach was accused of manhandling the players, would you follow through in that story, as in talking to the police and the mothers and all that, and perhaps even make an additional [word on behalf of the next] or would that be passed on? A: With that situation, of course, in my original story, I not only had to deal with the coach and the mothers, but also with the school's administrators and I don't think the situation ever got to the police department. So no formal charges were filed. So I didn't have to deal with the police. And I followed that story all the way through and it was settled out of court. I guess the coach had to agree to never touch a player again and I think he got the mothers and the athletes convinced that things were all okay. The coach didn't stay down there very long, but yes, I would follow that story all the way through. Because I always felt that if I had my hands on a story, I didn't want anybody else to have it. I wanted to have it all the way through. I always got the feeling that there was a certain segment of so-called news-side people, like police beat reporters and city hall reporters and things like that, who kind of thought maybe that sports writers wouldn't touch stories like that. And I wanted to prove them wrong. I wanted to show them that I could write those kinds of things and I could be aggressive and I would pursue anything that needed pursuing. Sometimes it made for some long days and long nights, but I was always happy with how I handled those situations. Q: Do you think you convinced the news side that you were just as good as they were? A: I think I did, yes. I think I convinced them that I was willing to take on a tough story. I would never hide from it. If it was there, I would do the very best job I could. I was generally satisfied with how I produced and I am pretty well convinced that the people at the paper were happy with how I did, too. Q: In a case like that story, would it move from the sports section to perhaps a local section? A: Page 1A we used to call it. Yes, the cover of the news side. There were several stories that I wrote that wound up on the front page, because they were big, big stories. I'm pretty sure that the story I did in the old Ronnie Harmon days at the University of Iowa, when the Big 10 was investigating Iowa. There was a lot of controversy there. I think some of that wound up on page 1A, too. Those things started a trend. Big sports stories tended to wind up on page 1A because they were sometimes the best story of the day that happened. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Remind us of what the Ronnie Harmon story was. A: I've kind of refreshed my memory myself on that. Ronnie was not the world's greatest student. I think he was taking courses such as - I don't know what it was, actually - basket weaving, but the old basket weaving course you know, just getting enough coursework under his belt to survive. Because Ronnie was never going to be a Phi Beta Kappa. But he was a heck of a running back and a heck of a pass receiver and he later went on to a great NFL career. But I think that there was some things being done within the framework at Iowa City that kind of let Ronnie pass his courses and the Big 10 found out about it and Iowa was in a little bit of trouble for a time in that period. But they finally got it all straightened out. Q: Maybe it is a myth, but I thought it was rather common that those big star athletes were kind of ushered through the curriculum with fairly easy courses? A: Well, we used to hear that and I think a lot of that did take place. I don't know if there is so much of it going on now, although from what I read about what happened at the University of Minnesota in the Ken Askin situation, that was a big, big story for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the newspaper that exposed that, that Minnesota players were not taking coursework or maybe not even going to class. I think that universities are trying to a better job with that. We all used to laugh about those situations in the early fifties at Iowa, when they were really bringing in some outstanding football players and they went to two Rose Bowls, '56 and '58 teams. We wondered if any of those guys actually went to class and I don't think some of them did. Alex Kerris was in that group. And we don't know if Alex went to that many classes or not, but there is that prevailing thought out there, among people, that the athlete does not exactly sign up for biology and science and things like that, in his first couple years, because he is there to play football and they hopefully play in the NFL and maybe get a degree on the side. Q: As long as we're talking about the coverage of sports stories, one of the things that Buck Turnbull brought up when I talked to him was the big investigation into Forest Evashevski and Coach Ray Nagle when they were fired by the athletic department. Were you doing anything with that story? A: Buck did most of that, but I knew Ray Nagle and I knew a little bit about Evashevski, but I unfortunately didn't cover any of his games because he retired as football coach before I began writing for the Register. That was a mess at Iowa. The prevailing thought, in those days, was that Evashevski, who was a genius of a football coach - I mean, he's the guy that took them to those two Rose Bowl games and they won both games. He did not want to stay as football. He wanted to become athletic director and once he became athletic director, he decided he missed being a football coach. And he made it tough for Nagle. I think I'm remembering this right. The rules that Evy had to follow when he was a coach, he didn't want Nagle to have those same rights and it just made it a tough situation for Ray. I think Ray was a decent guy. There again, he had kind of a negative finish to his career too, because I was the guy who had to ask Ray if it looked like he was going to get fired as Iowa's coach. It was one of those Tuesday press conferences that they had over there. In those days, they held them at the Iowa Athletic Club up there, just west of the stadium. Q: On Melrose. A: Yes. And fewer people would attend those. Ray's team was not doing well and I wanted to make it as easy on him as possible. And I pulled him aside before the regular press conference got started and I said, "Ray, there is a rumor going around that you are maybe preparing to resign as coach. I didn't want to bring it up out there if there was nothing to it." Well, Ray didn't like that question so what he did was he didn't answer it. So we went in to where the other newspaper and TV people were and he said, "You know what this guy asked me? He just asked me if I was going to quit as Iowa's coach. Isn't that terrible?" So I didn't endear myself to Ray that day and I was trying to protect him a little bit. I was trying to get a good story, too, but I was trying to make it so he wouldn't have to tell everybody that he was spent, but a couple of weeks later he was out as Iowa's coach. It just didn't work out for him because of that whole situation with Evashevski. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: I was going to ask about antidotes and that's one of the antidotes you're talking about. Do you have any other ones that you remember about your sources and maybe encounters that you had with people that you were asking and trying to pursue a big story? A: There were so many of them. Let's see if I can think of a few of them here. I covered so many coaches at Iowa. It seemed like they changed every three or four years, because they were always fired. They went through twenty years of non-winning football. They had one year where they lost as many as they won. But otherwise, they just couldn't win. Frank Lauterbur was another guy who got fired as Iowa's coach. He came after Nagle. We all thought that Frank would be a pretty good coach at Iowa. He had been at Toledo, in the Mid-America conference and had been a big winner there. He was kind of a big, gruff guy and we thought, this is just the kind of guy that Iowa would need to restore its football brilliance. He talked about bringing a bunch of street riders in and playing for his football team. Well, I got to know Frank pretty well and I covered his opening game, as Iowa's coach. The game was played at Iowa State and he got clobbered there. He got clobbered a lot of other times after that, too. His last team at Iowa went to 0-11. That means you lost all eleven games. Toward the end of the season, it became pretty obvious that this was going to be his last year. There again, I went over to the Tuesday news conference at Iowa City and it happened that day that Bump(?) Elliott, who was then Iowa's athletic director, had informed people that Frank was going to be replaced as Iowa's coach. In fact, the way I heard it was that he had taken Frank out on a drive the night before, which would have been that Monday night. This may or may not be true, but it's a good story! Because Bump(?) didn't want anybody else to know what was taking place. So we wanted to get him away from the office so the phones weren't bugged or anything, so they are out there and he told Frank that they were going to have to make a coaching change. So I went to Iowa City on Tuesday and talked to Frank, and I said, Frank Lauterbur, "Frank, did you quit as coach?" He said, "No, Bump fired me. He fired me." Well, Frank wanted to be fired because that way he would get his pay for the next couple years. I'm sure he was under contract for another couple of years. So then, poor old Frank - it was raining that day, so he's holding an umbrella over my head while I write this stuff and hold the tape recorder to give me his statement about why he got fired and what went wrong at Iowa, and what a nice guy that was. Q: Making sure you got it right. A: Yes, making sure I got it right and so I wouldn't get water on my paper. I also covered Bob Cumming's final game at Iowa. He was another one of the coaches who was less than brilliant as Iowa's coach. He recruited pretty good players toward the end, though, because when Hayden Fry took over, he used some of Tommy's players and had a pretty good season that first year. Bob's last game was at Michigan State. I'll never forget the picture we had on the front page of the Register's sport section. Here's Cummings, coming off the field at his last game, just a few Iowa players coming off and I'm right behind Cummings in my overcoat. It was a cold day out there in November. I'm telling myself, here we go again. Here's another one of these terrible situations where we got to ask the coach why he got fired. But Cummings was a nice guy. He didn't take it out on anybody. But there were a lot of those kind of situations where we had coaches who were being fired or needed to be fired, not just at Iowa, but also at Iowa State where their winning record was less than Magic II. I remember when they had an athletic director there named Gordon Slim Chalmers. They really could not get it going in football or basketball up there in those days. And I interviewed Chalmers for a story which appeared on Christmas Day. I was trying to get him to compare Iowa State with other schools, like Iowa and the committee, then Big 8, which Iowa State was in, with the Big 10. Chalmers said, "Well, the Big 10 is always going to be the Big 10. I don't think Iowa State is going to be able to compete at that level." That was not something Iowa State's fans wanted to hear. So it wasn't long before Chalmers was fired as Iowa State's athletic director, but for just speaking his mind. I guess I had a role in him probably being showed the exit. But he just tried to tell the truth and that's what happened. Q: This was a quote that he gave you? A: Yes, gave me and then I used it in the story and Iowa State held it against him. He was just trying to tell things the way they really were. Then later on, Iowa State did get it going pretty good under the old Johnny Majors regime but in those days, maybe a little bit now even, the thought among football coaches was: try to win at Iowa State but once you do win, get out. It's regarded as a coaching graveyard. I asked Johnny Majors that one day, I said, "What do you think is going to happen if you really get it going?" And we thought he would get it going. We thought he'd have a successful program. I said, "You know, the word is that it is regarded as a coaching graveyard among you guys." And he said, "Yea, that's what they say." Well, Majors took them to two bowl games but he left right away. Iowa State still fights that to a certain degree. Fortunately, they finally had their first winning season in a long, long time, the 2000 season, went 9-3. So I was happy for Darin McCarney but it will be interesting to see how long Dan stays there until he seeks greener pastures. Because it's been less than a success overall era. Q: That doesn't have anything to do with journalism, but wouldn't you think coaching graveyard, [inaudible] meaning is that they teach and then they taper off and after that they get fired? A: It's where a lot of coaches go to get buried. If they can not succeed, then they have to get fired and then they have a hard time finding another job. Q: In other words, they can't continue coaching? A: They can't be a [inaudible]. They might have a couple of good years and then, boom! They'll have five losing seasons, something like that. You know, Iowa was known as kind of a coaching graveyard in those years when they had twenty-nine winning seasons. Iowa State does not have a monopoly on that. Iowa can do that, too. Because we just don't have the big population in this state to produce a lot of football players. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: Also, you were talking about the rumors of these coaches getting fired. Did you hear about it before hand? Q: . . . the way you get a story in and you would hear through the grape vine that somebody was going to get fired before a lot of people ever heard about it. How do you get those? Where do you find those sources and how do you get those rumors? A: You hear them from fans. Fans who maybe even - maybe more than fans, maybe boosters, the so-called financial boosters, people who give money to the program. They become fairly influential. Sometimes those financial boosters will say, "Look, if they don't make a change," or they might go to the school president and say, "Look if you don't make a change, if you don't fire this football coach, I'm not going to give you any money next year." College presidents tend to listen to people like that, especially if they are big boosters. Sports writers will talk with these boosters, they'll talk to influential fans to see what is on their mind, to see if they think that things are going okay or if there are changes that should be made. Then, after you've talked to enough of those kind of people, you start putting two and two together and think, well, hey maybe there is something going on here and we should pursue this a little bit. Q: So it takes several years of nurturing first, in finding who has the information and who doesn't. A: Sure. Q: And going back to them when you need a quote. A: Yes, that's right. And you find out who is reliable among those sources and who isn't. They are very valuable sources and you never reveal those sources either, because they help you a lot. Q: Which brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, when you get some of these young people in, people who aren't going to stay more than two or three years, how effective can they be when they don't have the chance to really develop their sources? You've got maybe a 27-28 year old kid sitting there as a sports reporter who knows that he or she is going to be moving on, and they really don't have what you have, sitting there for forty years. A: Unless they grew up in the state and knew a lot of people, unless they were from Des Moines or Cedar Rapids or Iowa City, some place like that, they would not be able to develop those sources so they would have to go at it a different way. They have to write the so-called big story. They have to do a big, investigative story that they can get their teeth into, but they can't get it through those sources that others of us have developed. Or they can get help from people within the newspaper who might tip them off with sources who will help them. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: Let's go back to your earlier days, too, when you were a copy editor, from '59 to '65. What was different about that kind of a job, than it was when you were actually doing the writing and reporting? A: It was a very structured job on the copy desk. When I first started, I started in late August of '59 and so the football season was about ready to start. I went to work on Saturday during the football season, at 1:30 p.m. and worked until 9:30 p.m. It kind of cut into the day. Then, during the week I would start at 2:30 p.m. and I'd be off at about 11:00 p.m. So it was a night job and I worked five nights a week. You went in at a certain time, you finished at a certain time. And you edited copy. It was a sit-down job. You very rarely ever left the desk. You got your half hour lunch period and that was it. You read all the wire service copy. You read copy produced by the Register reporters and that was it. It was a very structured thing. It was okay for a while but I knew I didn't want to continue it. Some people are happy doing that kind of job. Some people do not want to go out and cover games and deal with people and ask them questions. They are very content sitting there and editing these stories. I was content for a few years, but I also knew there was something beyond that and that's why I may have known that I did want to become a reporter when there was such an opening. Q: How many were there of you on the copy desk at the same time? A: There would have been, back in those days, probably seven or eight people and a couple of full time people, a couple of part-timers. We were there kind of by ourselves. We'd sit on a rim type area. I always got a kick out of - we'd be sitting there like at 10:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m., maybe not so much at 10:00, but 7:00 p.m., there might be a tour that came through there. The promotion department was running a tour and bring seven or eight people through there to show them the workings of a newspaper at night. So, one night one of these tours was coming through and we were all seated there, doing our work, and we'd see this tour coming. This guy leading the tour said, "This is the sports department. There is nobody here right now." By nobody here, they meant that there was no reporters there! There was just us copy editors there and we were actually putting out the paper, but they'd say, "There isn't anybody here right now." I used to tell that story to people who had to work on the desk, that you got no respect. Q: What he was saying is that there is nobody you'd recognize here. A: Yes, nobody here you know and nobody probably that you want to know. I guess I knew that night that I didn't want to stay in that job. Q: Would it be that you would have somebody out doing play by play and they'd be calling in a story over the phone? A: Could be. You always hoped you didn't have to take that story by phone, the dictation, because we did have - when I started, I went through the whole gamut of ways to send a story. When I first started sending them in, we used Western Union. We'd have a guy sitting there, a Western Union operator, and we'd type our story on a typewriter. Q: You'd be out in the field, right? A: Yes, I'm in the field. And that's the way the stories came in when I first was on the desk. Like when Bert McGrain was covering an Iowa football game, he would send it in with Western Union. And we'd get it on the Western Union machine and then we'd edit the story. Not until later did they improve that whole situation. But if everything fell down, if nothing worked, then McGrain or whoever - Sec Taylor, would have to dictate the story. I remember, I did take some dictation from Sec when whatever way he was trying to send didn't work. That was not much fun, trying to take that dictation from him because he was 75 years old and you had to take dictation on a manual typewriter. That wasn't much fun. Q: So how would that work? He would have the story already written and he'd be reading it to you over the phone? Or would he be just thinking out loud? A: That could be operated both ways. Hopefully, Sec would have typed his story on a sheet of paper and would then read it to me, if I was taking the dictation. But there were situations, and I got to give a guy named Bob Price credit for this - those seven or eight people I told you about, that worked on that rim, and edited those stories, well Bob Price was what they called a slot man or the news editor that night. Price worked like an Associated Press guy. He believed in getting the thing done and getting in the paper. I'll use myself as an example here. Like when I was out covering a game and they needed that story right now, I would call Price and tell him that I got this story and he had this nickname for me, he called King. He said, "Okay, King, read it to me." And I didn't have anything ready. I'd just have to try to write a story in my head and dictate to him so that they'd have some kind of story. And we used to do that. Now, I'm going to step back to when I was on the desk. We used to take these high school football stories off the phone from correspondents. We used to right little capsule articles of these games, whether the game was played at Primghar or Mason City or Davenport or Cedar Rapids or Marion or Soling, wherever they were, and I started doing it that way too. I'd say, "Okay, tell me what took place." And they would say, "Well, Joe Smith scored two touchdowns and ran for 150 yards and Soling won this game." I'd say "All right" and I'd construct this story as he told it to me so I wouldn't have to go back and write a story after that. So it was a raw way of doing it but it was a timesaving way of doing it. You learned how to do those timesaving ways when you're on the desk. Q: That's interesting. So how long would that story be? A: Those stories were just short, probably five or six sentences is what they amounted to. But they still had to make some kind of sense. It wasn't like you were trying to write an Iowa basketball story off the top of your head that would be in the second edition, the old second edition which is no longer, which used to go into Iowa City and that was - you had to really try to make sense out of those stories. You had to have your facts straight and you had to make sure you had the final score in there. And if you had the right night of the week, so there were a lot of things to try and remember. -- <br><br> Section 9: Q: You also talked about the correspondents who were out in these small towns covering boys and girls basketball games. Who were they? Were these kids? A: They were kids and if it was a bigger town, there were people who were correspondents who maybe worked at the newspaper in that town and also went to the high school football games and earned a few bucks by calling the Register with the results of that game. Most of the time they were just kids that would do. The Register tried to pay those correspondents a few dollars each month. I think it was each month, if not every week. That kept them continuing to call. Q: Would they ever have equipment out there like what you're talking about, the Western Union? A: No. I think that Western Union operator tried to cost the paper some money. But there again, back in those days, the paper didn't mind spending the money. My old Western Union operator, most of the time in Des Moines was Harold. But we'd have a Western Union operator at the old Iowa Field House in Iowa City, in Iowa Stadium and later, Kinnick Stadium, after it was renamed and so did other papers. The Gazette would have a Western Union operator, the Davenport Democrat and then City Times would have Western Union. Chicago Tribune would cover some games with Western Union, so it was a big business. But now, everything is done by computer, and frankly, the computer is a much, much better way of doing it than Western Union or some of the other ways we had of doing it, where you used to send in some sheets of paper with some machine that we had that half the time didn't work. Q: I guess I still don't understand though. You're saying you have a Western Union operator at the site, like at Kinnick Stadium. That's with a person who is sitting there typing this stuff in. Is he someone who came from the local Western Union office? A: Yes, that came from the Western Union. We'd have a Western Union operator at Vets Auditorium, when the state boys and girls basketball tournaments were going on. That Western Union operator, Harold, would come from the office down on, I think, about 6th and Grand and he'd bring his machine up there to the auditorium. And he'd sit there and I had my portable typewriter and I'd type a sheet of paper, give it to him, and then Harold would type it and then it went in the wire Western Union machine at the Register office. Q: I see. A: That's the way that operated. If all went well, what I typed on my machine, my typewriter, would be done accurately by Harold and then it would be received at the Western Union machine in the sports department at the Register.