Russell Smith interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, April 15, 1998

Section 1: A: I was in this game for a long, long time, starting when I first enrolled at UNI. I was hoping I might hear somebody from UNI (University of Northern Iowa) speak up here, but didn't apparently. They were Iowa State Teacher's College then, so you went through there and you came out as a teacher. Unfortunately, that affected me, too. But, eventually, I worked part time in sports until I got a full time job in 1949 and I worked the next forty-one years. I retired as the sports editor at the Courier in Waterloo, Iowa. Q: All right. Time to get started. I just want to know how you first got started in the business. I know that you started as a part time employee. Can you take us through all the steps that brought you through your first years working for the Courier. A: If you were able to translate that epistle that I handed you, it explains some of that to you. It was totally, well, several things were involved. One, I don't suppose I should be proud of at all. I started with...somebody picked me out of the stands one night at the baseball game and asked me if I wanted to run the scoreboard. I don't remember how old I was, but I was a long ways from being a senior. I ran it several years and then the man who was the sports editor of the Waterloo Courier at that time was sitting beside me, as he always was, covering the game. And I was running the scoreboard and telling him how to cover the game, I suppose. I was a senior and it was in May. He asked me what I wanted to do when I got through school there. I stuttered and stammered. I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. He asked if I would like to go to college up at UNI. "Yeah, I guess so." He said, "I can make you the sports personnel for Cedar Falls." Now we don't have such a thing. If you are a sports writer for the Courier, you cover Waterloo and Cedar Falls. But, in those days, they hired somebody special to cover Cedar Falls. He said I also could work a little bit on Saturday and he gave me a figure. It sounded like I could probably make it through my thirty-five dollars a quarter expense accounts for three quarters a year. In other word, it only cost me a little over a hundred dollars to go to school for a year. Can you imagine that? But, they figured a way to do it. I stayed with them until I graduated and found out there wasn't anything to do after I graduated but teach. I didn't teach very long and I decided that wasn't what I was supposed to do. About that time, they decided to expand the sports staff at the Courier from two people to three. "Would you like the job?" You bet. That was in 1949. Q: That is great. We talked at dinner about your being a baseball coach and, in your words, "a damn good one." I want you to tell everyone about your experiences as a coach. A: As you look at the scores, which are on these printed sheets, you won't be greatly impressed. But the teams that I coached hadn't had much success and I think I gave them a little, possibly. One thing I like to remember for all time was that we, the Orange Township High School, enrollment around 75 or 80, beat Cedar Falls High in a baseball game at Cedar Falls. Not only is that a great item in my career, but it so happens that my wife's sister's husband-to-be was on the Cedar Falls team and we kicked his bottom a little bit. But, then I coached basketball, also. Those two sports. That was all they had in those schools in those days. All the athletes were male and that is all they had in those schools in those days. While I was coaching, usually on Friday night I had a game, but on Saturday, they would bring me in the office and I would answer the phone and would help put the paper together for Sunday. In fact, it went a little bit further than that. On Saturday, in the fall, after I had had a little experience, I was putting out the paper. The only other two sports writers on the job, one carrying a camera and the other a paper and pencil, went someplace to a football game and I put out the paper. I was still in my teens. But, it was wartime. That is one of the sad parts that I have to look back on. I was drafted to the service and I did go and get a physical examination. Not only at home. After I got it at home, they told me "Such-and-such time next week, get on the bus and go to Des Moines." I did that, fully expecting the next place I would be would be France or Japan. Of course, after I went through the whole examination process and nobody said a word, the last man I went to said, "Sorry. Can't use you because of your eye." I didn't have one in the right side. This is an artificial one. So, this was in February or March. In those days, UNI had quarterly programs, three a year. This was at the end of the second quarter, the beginning of the third. In fact, the third one had started. But when I got back home, and I was darned near the only one that went back home - after the examination, everybody else went to camp. After I got back home, I went back to school and finished my degree and got to do a lot of things that I wouldn't have gotten to do under any other circumstances. We were short-handed. One of the main reasons we were short-handed, we had forgotten about the possibility of using women in the newsroom. It hadn't happened yet. But, before the war was over, by gosh, it started to happen and it worked. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: Why sports? Why sports for so many years? A: For me? Well, I like them. They are fun. Many things that I guess that reporters do, especially those that draw the police beat, can hardly be classified as fun. But, I was not an athlete. I did enjoy competing and did compete. But I was certainly not going to be any all-stater of any kind. I was doing part time, in the summer I think, I can't remember what year it was, not very far along, first or second, the Chicago White Sox sent in two people to work with our team. We were in their White Sox farm system. See if they could teach them a little bit more about playing ball than they appeared to know. They asked me to help them. Chase the ball. Pick up the bats. One thing and another. But, I learned things I wouldn't have learned any other way. I also, one spring, worked at the suggestion of my sports editor, who happened to be chairman of the Recreation Department in Waterloo, he said, "Why don't you work with my other partner on the summer baseball program?" He had a bike with a trailer on it that carried bats, balls and catching equipment. I just rode my bike down the street alongside of him and had a good summer. Had a lot of fun. A couple of years later, the guy asked me if I wanted to manage the program because he didn't. So, I said, "Yes," and I did it alone. I learned a lot and I got to enjoy it and to like it. I have never regretted my sports career at the Courier. Since I got along in years and started to think in different ways, I have been going to various places, all around the United States and even out, on mission trips where we meet people that we didn't think ever existed. We had an awful lot of fun with them and, in some cases, it was a "mother and father" type situation. And I enjoyed that. But, that was after my sports career was over with. Q: What distinguishes sports reporting from other types of reporting? Or is it just covering sports as opposed to covering the city council? A: I don't know just how to answer that. A sports reporter, I am sure, most of them, try to make their stories appealing. They try to make them fun and light in some ways. Council meetings are not usually regarded as a fun and a light situation. That is the best answer I can come up with on it. In our newspaper, and I suppose most of them, they are going to write more about the home players and polish them, tell great things about them, than they do about the visiting players. But I guess maybe that is the way it is supposed to be. The people that read the paper, that is what they want to read, I suppose. Q: How has the Courier changed? I know it has changed many ways. If you could take us back to when you first started. How much you earned. When you left, how much you earned. The politics in the meantime. A: I will tell you. I wrote this in that thing that I passed out. When I got my full time job, six days a week, incidentally, at the Courier, I was offered the sum of fifty dollars a week. Q: Which year? A: 1949. And, actually, at the end of the year, I should have had twenty-six hundred dollars. I had twenty-six fifty because, at Christmas time, they gave us another fifty. My last teaching job, I worked nine months for twenty-nine hundred dollars. If they had both thrown that out, saying, "Here is your twenty-nine. Here is my twenty-six. Which would I take?" I would take the twenty-six. That is what I did take. But, somewhere along the way, in the first place, in those days, we had three people on the sports department, me being the third. One of them was mainly a photographer. But you go in at six o'clock in the morning and you sit until three or four o'clock in the afternoon, and I mean for the last four hours, you did sit. Then you got up and went to a game that night. Well, they re-organized that. You still have a crew come in and put out the paper from six o'clock in the morning until ten or ten-thirty. Then they go home and then they go out and work again in the evening. Most of these guys, I have a hunch, the Courier didn't then and doesn't now pay by the hour. They might give you an overtime deal if they thought you had a particularly rough day. But, basically, you get what they tell you. So much a week, no matter how much you work. But, I would have to hazard a guess, those guys, very few of them are working more than forty hours a week on the job. Some of them may, some week, put in a lot more than that. But most of them, their average is probably less than that. The Courier department has climbed. Like I say, I was third in 1949. Early '60s, we went to four. Late '60s, to five. Maybe early '70's, to five. And that is all we had when I retired in '90. Very shortly after I retired, I guess they figured they had to have two people to replace me. I don't know. But they ended up with six people. Q: What was your final salary at the end of your career in 1990? A: I believe five hundred and eighty a week. Somewhere in that vicinity. Ironically, when the Courier was sold from the local owner to the person out in California, the sale occurred in January. My recollection is early January. I had just been given a raise for the following year that put me somewhere slightly, like six hundred and five dollars. I was over six hundred dollars a week. When the new management came on, that got reduced drastically, by eighty bucks. I got some of it back before I retired. Q: What do you think of the new management? A: I think they put together a good paper. An excellent paper, probably. They have done what every newspaper has done, I suppose. There is no such thing as a composing room anymore. A pressroom, but no composing room. We don't have people sitting in front of the machines anymore. The newspaper...the stories are written in the newsroom and the papers are assembled in the newsroom. When I left in 1990, I set my date. I told my boss that I was going to retire. I became sixty-five in June of '89. And I told him shortly after that that I was going to retire on January 6th , next year. I had one thing in the back of my mind. January 4th, a Thursday, would be the first day that the University of Iowa basketball team would ever play Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. They did. I covered it. I reported it accurately. The result was a victory for UNI. [laughs] Q: Do you remember what happened the day you and I talked last fall? You were on your way to watch UNI and the University of Iowa play again. A: Yeah, I certainly do. That was the second time that they won. Of course, other than you and I, nobody around here probably cares a darn, but they played...they are 4-0 in Iowa. They beat Iowa and Iowa State once each and Drake twice. Couldn't beat anybody else. Q: I want to go back before we leave this issue. What is it about sports that it would require a man to dedicate his life to them? What is it about sports? Talk about sports. Why would you...to a lot of people, sports is just a bunch of people running around, chasing after something. What is it about sports that it was so strong a magnet that it changed your life. You dedicated your life to it. A: Well, I love to play it and I love to watch it. Then I got paid for watching it. I think we have got some severe problems. I think things are getting out of control. It has been written, hinted and sometimes spoken real loudly, but the colleges have got to demand more from their athletes academically then they are getting. Now, you hear about a player, this is facetious, but a football player scores a touchdown so he wants to be selected in next spring's draft. Sometimes, players do get selected. And I feel that if a kid is on a scholarship and has played a season or two on that scholarship, and then leaves the school for whatever reason other than that he got kicked out, I think he owes the school whatever they paid him when he leaves. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Can you talk a little bit about the growth of women's sports during your career? A: Well, when I started, as I said, there wasn't any such thing. For some reason or other, and this I don't have an answer to, the smaller schools had women's basketball and supported it well at a time when none of the larger schools had teams. Now they do, of course. Many of them have successful programs. I mean, not only successful that they win all the time, but they attract people to the games. Yeah, there is no reason on earth why the women shouldn't have the same opportunities to play that the men do. However, whether or not they accept these opportunities, I don't think what they do should be reflected by the men. In other words, you shouldn't be able to come and say that we have only got thirty-five girls on athletic scholarships, so we have got to cut so many boys. What you need to do is get more girls. If you can't, tough. There is no reason to make the boys pay because the girls won't. Q: Could you go back to 1949, to the newsroom. Could you explain what your day was like. Inside the newsroom, what kind of atmosphere it had. What went on. A: It would be a little bit hard to make it very dramatic, I guess. The boss sits there with the "dummy" in front of him. Pending out where he is going to put this story, that story. He hands the papers around the desk. It didn't have very far to go because there were only two people otherwise, at that time. So, he would write the headlines. They would write the headlines. When everything is done, he sticks the thing on a spindle and a young man or a young woman comes by, picks it up, takes it out to the composing room, and the next time you see it, it is in the paper. Q: So, what went on in the composing room? A: They had...my modern voice won't name what they... Q: Linotypes? A: Yeah. They had linotype machines. And the headlines, especially the larger ones, they still put them together by hand. In a cup or in a panel. If they had some problem out there, if something that we sent out to them didn't fit where we said it should, they would call us out and we would have to make an adjustment, of course. That is about all. I am telling you what we did. Our deadline wasn't essentially different from what it is now. Ten or ten-thirty in the morning - we have got to have everything out there. Saturday night, we don't have a paper on Saturday, but we do have a morning paper on Sunday. Saturday night, we got to have pretty much everything in the pressroom by ten-thirty or so to get the thing going. In the daytime, when we are done at ten-thirty, I, for the life of me - of course, it has been fifty years ago - I don't remember what we did until three or four o'clock in the afternoon. I suppose some of us probably had advance stories to write for the next day, which we might do by telephone. And we might still do it the same way. We might do it at home. Or, we might even get in our car and go out to the gym or the school and talk to the people. But, there were things we could do. The boss, the sports editor, might have written a column for the next day. That sort of thing. Q: What time did you start working? A: Around six o'clock in the morning. And, they still do. But, for some reason or other, despite the modern conveniences, they actually expect our paper to be put together before...by ten o'clock, which would be earlier than we used to think. Q: Two questions. One, was there any attempt to organize workers at the Courier? A: The Courier printers and the press operators did belong to a very strong union. As far as I know, the press operators still do. I don't know for sure, but I think they do. Of course, there are no printers anymore. There were some newspapers whose newsrooms were members of some labor association. Frankly, I can't remember that ever being discussed in the Courier newsroom. I don't know why. Q: The second question is, would you talk about the transition for you from using a typewriter to using a computer? A: Tough. It was tough. I think I maybe mentioned some of this before, but my recollection is that we had four different computer systems while I was still there. Basically, what you do, you get a system. You learn how to handle it. Before you actually get the real touch, it is out of style. It is archaic and you need another one. So, they order another one. The good thing is that it usually takes them a year or two to get it after they order it. But, my recollection is that they had four different computer systems in my last fifteen years there. Maybe less than that. The last one that they had came in September or October before my final days, which were the following January. So, I never touched the thing. Q: I noticed when you wrote me, you wrote on a manual typewriter. A: Yeah, I did. And I made an awful mess of it, apparently. I don't know what I did when I re-copied it. I did a lot of editing on the original and then I went back and re-copied it. It looks like it is even worse than the original was. Plus the fact that we put it on some kind of a system that was supposed to print it, re-proof it, and it is terrible. But, I don't know what I did. It was no good, I am sure. Q: What kind of manual typewriter is it? A: It is fairly ancient. Q: What is the brand name? A: I don't remember even. Q: Royal? A: I don't think so. It sits on my desk and, as far as I am concerned, it works fine. But, it depends on me to make it work and, apparently, I was off-schedule on that day somehow or other. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: When you started out, what was the circulation of the paper and was there any other paper in the town? Was there competition? A: I can't tell you what our circulation was then. In a matter of fact, there was another paper. Cedar Falls had a daily. Q: What was it called? A: The Cedar Falls Record, I believe. The Courier bought the Cedar Falls Record. Possibly, the new organization bought it. If that is true, they bought it within the last sixteen years. But, I think maybe it was longer ago than that that the Courier bought it. So, there isn't one now. And, as I said, there is no division now. Waterloo and Cedar Falls are one insofar as the Courier is concerned and that is good. Our circulation is around fifty thousand. It has been as high as the mid-fifties. I would say it is a struggle now. They are not gaining. I don't think they are losing rapidly, but it is a struggle. Q: Which area do you serve? Just Waterloo and Cedar Falls, or do you go out to the other towns around there? A: We have, I can't tell you the number of counties. They have got the figure and they publicize it regularly. But, there is a Butler, Bremer, Fayette, Chickasaw, Buchanan. South of us - Tama, Grundy. That isn't enough. There are about thirteen or fourteen. Q: Did you cover sports in all of those counties? A: Yes. Yes, we do. We say we cover them and we do. But on a Friday night in the fall, we would bring a group into the newsroom and they would answer the phone. All these people out in the area have been trying to call us and tell us how their game came out. Not only tell us the score, but give us the figures. How many points in each quarter, total score. Then, anything like who had big yardage and so on and so forth. And we would make stories out of that. We would cover an area team with a staffer once a week. It could be anyplace. We would look around and whichever game we would think had the most significance and is apt to be the somewhat exciting, we would send a photographer and a writer to. We have now five high school football teams in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls area and we cover them home and away all season. Then, when the tournaments come around, of course, we continue to cover the area teams wherever they play. But, as the tournaments progress, and the field trims down, if we have got somebody that is about ready to go to the state tournament, we cover them, too. And probably with a photographer. -- <br><br> Section 5: A: I have a story that I have felt compelled to tell you. I don't know if you will have interest. Raffensperger. Is that a name that hits everybody here? Q: Gene. A: Gene. Well, I was thinking Leonard. He was football coach here for two years. He came here from Waterloo where he was a highly successful coach. And, his son, Gene, grew up about a block and a half from my house. I was about five years older than him so we were never actually in school together. Went to the same schools. I think he graduated from the University of Iowa, didn't he? Q: I don't know. A: At any rate, for a period of time in the late '70's and early '80's, Gene Raffensperger and I and another guy by the name of Mike Chapman were sports editors of the three largest daily newspapers in the state of Iowa. The Des Moines Register, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, and the Waterloo Courier. And we were all graduates of East High in Waterloo. Q: Tell us about some of the most memorable events that you covered. A: I will get this out. Pick that name up from the top there. Q: [Unintelligible.] A: I wrote this book. This is the second edition, which is about seventy or eighty pages longer than the first edition. But, I watched him for a long time. The strange thing about this is, I think back to my career, I was named Wrestling Writer of the Year in 1963 after two of our Waterloo athletes had wrestled each other for the national championship. I think at one hundred and thirty-six pounds. At Kent State University in Ohio. It was an overtime match won by Bill Dotson, who is now coaching the University of New Mexico. Lost by Tom Huff . He is a dentist that served his entire dental career in the armed forces. I covered that tournament in Kent, Ohio. I covered it because I always covered the national tournament. That is all. But, when it got down to the final match at that weight, here we have got two Waterloo kids wrestling each other. So, I did a play-by-play and submitted that. I don't know whether that is what impressed them or what. But, anyway, I got a trophy. Pass it around if you want to. I got that trophy one year before Dan Gable got to high school. The next year, of course, he was a sophomore at West High. He never lost a match until his last match as a senior at Iowa State University. Of course, I saw them all. That was quite an experience and Gable is still a very close friend. Q: Did you think he would retire? A: I thought he had it. Yes. I didn't know whether he would or not, but I thought there was a great and good chance. Strangely enough, when he first retired two years ago, his family, at least his wife, wasn't so enthusiastic about it. But, after he had a year off, she was really the one that put the heat on him. Asked him not to go back. Following his career was fun, but, like I say, why I won that trophy had to do with the championship match at Kent, Ohio. It certainly had nothing to do with Gable. -- <br><br> Section 6: A: Then I had another experience before I became the sports editor. We had a Legion junior baseball team that was scheduled to go to a regional tournament. They had won the state championship. They were scheduled to go to a regional tournament out at Hastings, Nebraska, I think, if there was such a place. I wasn't sports editor, but my boss said I should go with them. The American Legion was their sponsor. The Legion should have provided somebody to go along and be their supervisor. But they couldn't find anybody that would go. Nobody wanted to go. So, they put a uniform on me and said I was the supervisor. I was also covering the game. We went out to Hastings, Nebraska, and lo and behold, instead of coming home in two or three days, beaten, we won. Two days later, the national tournament started in Little Rock, Arkansas. They loaded us right on the airplane and headed for Little Rock. We, including me, had two or three days of clothes in the sack and that was it. When we got through at Hastings, most of them were dirty. So, we went down to Little Rock and the next day, our kids went out and looked for a laundry to wash their clothes. They found one and it wasn't too long before two of them got kicked out. Two black kids. They got kicked out by a black officer who told them they had no business being in there. They had a rather rough time down there. I don't remember the guy's name, but you will remember, in those days, the governor of Arkansas... Q: Faubus. A: Yeah, Governor [Orville] Faubus. He was a real something. In fact, the opening day of the first game, our kids were in the dugout ready to start the game and, lo and behold, here comes the governor, right across in front of the dugout. Those two black kids were looking for a place to hide, of course, but nothing happened on that particular occasion. Another time, this was earlier yet, we had a dinner and New Orleans had a team involved. One of the kids leaned over, I think it was a player, I am not sure, and says, "Have you got more than one school here?" I said, "Yeah, we do." We had a couple of kids that were from Columbus High School, the Catholic school. It so happened that the two black kids both went to East High along with everybody else, but they didn't know that. At any rate, there they are. Rick Folkers was our star. He was our pitcher. A left-handed pitcher. He won us a game, but that is all we could get. We came home after we had gotten beat after the next two. Rick went to college and then he played in the major leagues, in professional baseball, for about six or seven years. Q: How did you deal with that editorially? How did you write about that? Did you write specifically about that as a case of latent discrimination? A: I think I did, but I am not sure just how I did deal with it. The story goes even further and it has got another angle on it. We went to church the following Sunday, everybody. The whole group, including the two black kids. A Lutheran church. We were treated cordially. I don't know who chose the church or how we chose it. Whether it was because it was close to where we were living or what. Not everything was bad. But, that was a strange area in 1964. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: Could you talk a little bit more about covering girls' basketball in Iowa. A lot of the people here didn't grow up in Iowa and don't know what girls' basketball used to be like here. You mentioned the small towns having basketball. A: Actually, the tournaments were probably every bit as exciting when the small town girls were having their basketball tournament. One thing that helped make it exciting was that they had sixteen teams come to the state tournament. And they are all the same...they don't have different categories and classes. They all play each other and the winner take all. Now, of course, they have got about four classes, both men and women, in each tournament. I think the women's basketball here in Iowa is a gem and I think it is getting better all over the country. We covered it. We cover our city teams just like we do the football teams, both men and women. A: We don't cover them on the road. We do cover them at home. In fact, the fact that we cover the wrestlers at home is another reason we don't have enough people to cover the basketball players on the road. Q: How did you cover the six-on-six girls' basketball? Are you happy there is no six-on-six anymore? As a reporter, you saw that. A: Yeah, I am happy and I think the girls are now, too. I think they are excited about where they are. I can't say that I like the six-on-six basketball. A lot of people did, however. Actually, my recollection, I have heard this debated before, the crowds were, at the state tournament, when they had a single team champion come out of the field, six-on-six, the crowds were probably as big as they are now at the girls' state tournaments. Now there are fewer people involved in each specific game than there used to be. I am glad they went to five-on-five. I didn't dislike the six-on-six, but it was a different game than we were familiar with. Than what we called basketball. And, of course, as you may recall, it changed gradually. The college team went to a deal where, for a while, a couple of years, not more than that, they had it set up that one player, they didn't specify any specific one, but any one player could cross the line each time. So, you could have four offensive and four defensive players in front of the basket on any given play. It didn't make any difference who they were. Just so there were no more than four. Then, after they diddled with that for a year or so, they went straight five-on-five. Q: Could you talk a little bit about alcohol as imbibed by journalists. The "watering hole" is a pretty standard venue for journalists. It is always the bar around the corner. And, also, if you could talk about alcohol among athletes. This isn't a new phenomenon. A: No, it isn't. I don't know that I can be very specific. I do not use alcohol and never have. I would say our staff now is not...most of them will drink it, but not regularly. Not every night and every day and so on. We had a sports writer who was canned when they changed management back in 1982. I don't know how the new manager got the word or why he got the word, but he was my assistant. He was assistant sports editor. He had been around for quite a long time and they fired him. His problem was alcohol. How they knew it and why, I don't know. Ironically, the sports editor now, and he is a guy, I might add, that never had any college experience of any kind, is his brother. He will drink a glass once in a while, but not frequently, and I have never known him to get intoxicated. Q: Did you see that this guy's performance was being affected because of alcohol? A: Yeah. Not his performance on the job, but the fact that he didn't want to be on the job a good deal of the time. One thing he did. He liked to fish and he wrote an outdoors column. As far as he was concerned, he would do that and that was his week's job. Week in and week out. And drink the rest of the time. He did a good job with the column, but we had to have more help on the desk than that. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: Before you became sports editor, how did you view your boss, the sports editor? A: The guy that hired me to the part time job, and gave me these jobs, was the director of the kids' summer programs and things like that that I mentioned earlier. I never worked for him very much because, before I really found a good place to sit in the newsroom, he was gone to the military. When the war was over, he came back as an officer and he got a job up in Wisconsin some place. The next, as far as I can recall, and the last time I ever saw him was in the casket. Not too many years later than that. I was a pallbearer. But the two sports editors I had after that, I got along with just fine. I liked them both. They were both competent, good men and I enjoyed their company. The one we had when I thought I was going to be a sports writer [sic], and they made me high school sports editor, and gave him the job, he was from someplace else. He wasn't even from Iowa. I don't know where they found him. I can't say that I had any problems with him. He was not a bad guy. He was not real light and fluffy. He couldn't picture us having fun doing the job. He didn't last long and I don't know why he left. But, when he did, that is what made me sports editor. Q: Did you implement any changes when you became sports editor? Did you do anything differently? A: No, I didn't essentially. And I tried my darndest to stick with it and I don't know whether I am right yet or not, but I do know they have changed. But they all thought I was wrong at the time and still I didn't change. But, of course, one of my jobs as sports editor was to make assignments and I assigned people to do something different every weekend. And what I am speaking primarily about is football season. We had, I suppose, four people at that time which is one more than we needed because we had three college games. But I rotated it so that everybody got a chance to see all three of the college teams. Most people got a chance to see each one of them three or four times a year. I thought that was a good idea and I still do. But the new boss thinks we ought to assign one person and tell them they are working with them. You cover their football in the summer, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, whatever. You do it and that is it. Well, they are going to probably know the last word on each one of these teams, which maybe we didn't know. But, on the other hand, they won't get to know all the other teams like we got to know them. Q: I was wondering if, in the world of sports, there were a lot of controversies. Like behind the scenes kind of stuff. That you got to see or like uncovered for whatever reason or you got to cover. A: Controversy, you mean? Q: I am just thinking in terms of sports like coaching and coaches. Q: Scandals. Q: Yeah. Personal scandals. Things like that. I just think that athletes aren't often really too nice and... A: I don't know if I can answer that question. What you say undoubtedly happened and sometime, somewhere along the line, we probably knew it. But I don't think we regularly...I will put it this way, I don't think we regularly broke the scandal. If the thing broke from the university, then, of course, we wrote the story. But I don't think we regularly would go out looking for a scandal. Q: Do you remember stories that you didn't print after hearing about them? A: Not offhand. I wouldn't say that we didn't have any. I just, offhand, can't think of what might have been. Of course, you know, UNI is hiring a new basketball coach right now. Maybe hired him today. Probably did, if the news stories are correct. You may know more about this than I because I haven't seen the evening news or anything. But, the man who covers UNI sports, like I say, now we have got one that covers UNI, one that covers Iowa, I don't buy that but that is the way it is, but he is a good man. He covers them fairly well. And he has done a good reporting job on each of these candidates that came in to be examined. He didn't get to go to the meeting, apparently, so anything he hears beyond that is just hearsay. He doesn't write hearsay. If he wrote a story today saying that Joe Blow was hired as coach and it hasn't been announced as coach and then two or three days later, it comes out that Joe Blow was hired as coach, I suppose, more power to him. But if it turns out somebody else was hired, then that is not so good.