Al Pindar interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, March 11, 1998

Section 1: Q: We've done in the past with Carolyn, we're doing some of what you call housekeeping by talking about circulation of the newspaper and the size of Grinnell. So, let me just ask some preliminary questions like that. What is the circulation of the Herald? A: Circulation as paid is about thirty-three hundred. Size of the town is about ninety-two hundred. You have to understand that about twelve hundred of that is college students because they are counted in the population. Q: How old is the paper? A: A little bit older than I am. The paper was founded in 1868 and is has been in my wife's family and our family since 1944. Q: What, if any, is the main print competition? A: The main print opposition? Competition is always the shoppers. The newspapers regard that as a cancer. They have no news staff to pay and it's all advertising and it is distributed free. That is a very difficult opposition to battle against. Q: Do you have radio or TV? A: We have radio in Grinnell. We have KGRN. Frosty Mitchell started the station, not started but bought it, and he no longer is the owner, but it is a good station. And then there's another one, KRTI, which is owned by the guy that owns the Newton station, too. KCOB. And then he owns the one in Grinnell. There are two radio stations. One FM and one AM. Q: Anything else we need to know? There is a profile sheet which I will hand out. I wonder if you could just talk, in general terms, about how the Herald-Register is run in terms of what constitutes a small town newspaper? How is it different from the Cedar Rapids Gazette or the Des Moines Register? A: Well, it is different in many ways. Right now, we have three people that write. We have a news editor who writes news and does the editorials. My wife, I'm 78 and she is 75, I believe, she still works, and she is the best one we have. She is a crackerjack writer and she loves it. We both should be retired, but we're not. We're still having fun. She writes full time. Then we have a sports editor who is about anywhere from half to three-quarters time. That's what Steve Clem did. Steve was one of your students. He was a crackerjack. He learned very well incidentally. He acclimated very quickly. His background was good and his stuff was very well written. But, he kept commuting from Iowa City to Grinnell and he had problems with his car and his girlfriend, now wife, lived there [Iowa City]. So he found a job with the Advertiser. He writes news for that. Q: He has since quit. A: Oh, has he? Who's he with now? Q: He is working privately. They have started some work as fund raisers, he and Mary Clem. A: Principally, the person who writes the stuff makes up the page. In other words, the guy that writes the front page news, he makes up his own front page. The guy that writes the sports makes up his page. My wife makes up her pages. And I sweep the floor. That's about the sum and substance of it. We print twice a week, Monday and Thursday. We also have a shopper of our own, which we're still doing some battle with. The advertising staff is three people and they sell advertising. The advertising and subscriptions are our lifeblood. But, advertising is what really does it. I told Brian earlier, this is the beginning of my fiftieth year there and I still have yet to see the first day that I hate to go to work. I have seen that in other things that I have done, but not in the newspaper business. It is still fun. I was reading a quote just the other day. Katherine Graham of the Washington Post said, "If you like your work and you feel that it matters, what could be more fun?" Something to that effect. That's not the exact quote, but that's the thought. I think that is substantially what the newspaper business is. You feel that you are contributing to an ongoing history of your community or of your metropolitan area, whichever you are in. I happen to have fallen in to the country journalism field. Should I explain how? Q: Sure. A: I was an accountant. A very good one. It saved my life during World War II. I was in the Army and they needed accountants and I looked up and thanked whoever is up there for sending me to Chicago to settle terminated war contracts. I did very well. I was a corporal and got promoted to warrant officer. A chief warrant officer. We had to pay by staying an extra year, but that extra year didn't matter because nobody shot at us. I explained to Brian that people say to me, "Boy, you must have had an easy life." I explain to them very carefully that doing all that drinking and chasing those women was not easy. If I had known how long I was going to live, I would have taken better care of myself. I got out of the service and I liked Chicago so much that I decided to stay. It wasn't only Chicago that I liked. It was this gal from Iowa and her father owned the newspaper. It took her a little while to convince me that maybe I ought to come out and give it a try. Accounting and newspapering are poles apart. There's no connection. I finally agreed that I would try it for one year, knowing full well that I would retreat to my comfortable job in Chicago that I dearly loved. I had fun at accounting. I went to my boss and I said, "I'm giving you seven weeks notice because I am going to leave. I love the job." He said, "Stop. Whatever the offer is, I will meet it." I looked at him, and to this day, I can still see the look on his face. I said, "Please, I am taking a fifty percent pay cut to go to Iowa." He said, "You're out of your mind." I said, "I think I am. I will get well in a year." I fully intended to return to Chicago. There wasn't any question in my mind that the newspaper business was not what I was meant to do. But, as I got into it, I began to have a little fun and recognized a lot of wonders of the small town life and living. I was raised in a small town, five hundred people, but it was back east and you would drive for two minutes and you were in another town and another town and another town. This sort of small town living startled me. I objected to the glass house living. I objected to a lot of it. But there were so many good things about it. I liked getting to the golf course in five minutes and not having to wait for three other guys for a tee-off time. I liked the fact that I could go home for lunch. I liked not fighting traffic. There were a lot of things I liked. Of course, we got into the child raising business after we decided we would stay. We had six children. There was no better place to bring up your children than a small town. I think they had every advantage, a small town with a college, especially a very fine college like Grinnell. I learned to love the newspaper business, but at the same time, I think, the way of life also had an influence on it. Q: You have been in the business for fifty years? A: March 1, I began my fiftieth year. Yes. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: I was wondering if you could talk about some of those jobs you had. You were a reporter, you were an editor, you were a photographer. Talk about some of the days when you were working with hot metal and print doubles and all of that. A: Hot metal. They talk about the romance of printing. Believe me, that's a crock. You worked with hot metal and you didn't get burned. It was heavy. You put the paper together; that meant you picked up lead and moved it. If you didn't have strong fingers, the lead would buckle and they would call that "pie" and you would have to carefully read upside down and backwards. Put the damn thing together and proof it. In each page, there were hundreds of separate pieces and they had to fix that page this way and this way so they could lift it up, get it down on the floor, over to the elevator, downstairs to our press and on the press. To get one page down, it took two men to lift it off the stone and get it downstairs. A double page took four men to lift up a double page ad, get it down, put it down in the elevator. Four men to lift it up. The day that we converted in 1972 to what they call "cold type" or offset, one of my friends, who had been there longer than I had, and I saw a young woman walking around carrying a double page ad with two fingers. That's the day we became believers. Four men to two fingers. We couldn't believe it. Linotypes were fascinating. We had three linotype operators. One was totally wonderful. He was sober and did a good job and was very smart and ran everything for us. The next machine operator was very reliable, but he made a lot of mistakes and caused a lot of problems. The third machine was the one we always had the trouble with. Linotypes, if you didn't drink, they would make you drink. It drove you to drink and it drove you there very quickly. I learned to hate rainy Fridays. We paid people on Friday, and if it was raining, you could make a good bet on it that the third machine guy would just disappear and we'd never see him again. Highway 6 ran right straight through town, and there must have been some sort of a system with jungle drums because in a couple of days, a guy would stop in and say, "I am a linotype operator and I am looking for work." You could tell by the pallor. There was a certain look that they had. "You don't have any problems?" They'd say, "No, I don't drink that stuff anymore." And all I wanted to do was say, "Not until a rainy Friday." It was really ridiculous. The linotype was a monster. The guy that invented the damn thing I think went a little ape, didn't he? It is easy to see why. The linotype, I think, probably was the major reason in driving inventive minds into offset because you couldn't just take somebody off the street and put them on a linotype and make them run. You just couldn't do it. There was a school in Charles City and people had to go to that linotype school to learn how to run the thing. When they got real good, they could, we call it, "hang the machine." They could set the type faster than the machine could put it out. It would come out one line of type at a time. The illustrations were casts. I should have brought a mat along. Every month we would get a big box full of mats with every illustration you might want to use. They would come in different sizes for different size ads. You would put those in the casting box and they would pour hot lead into it and then take it out, and then saw it to size. It was not easy. The guy that did that was called the "printer's devil." He was always the first one in and the last person hired and usually not very smart, for a while. They made the castings, it was called. It was a completely different language. They had a stone, which was where you made up the ads. You didn't talk in inches. You spoke in ems and ens. You spoke in picas. There were seventy-two points to an inch. You had to learn that, and that six points was one-twelfth of an inch. Six points was six over seventy-two, whatever that is. We also had job work, too. We would set the type for that. There were all kinds of problems with hot metal. Going to the elevator, each new devil would do it just once. Going across, there was a little space about this far, and if they didn't hit that thing, it would turn and drop the completed page two floors down into the well. We would have to send somebody down there with a shovel. It was always the last page, the classified page, with all of those ads. You could not believe the swearing that went on. There were all sorts of characters and I was explaining it to Brian. My first day in the office, fresh out of Chicago, white shirt, feeling very good. I went to the back shop. They proofed the pages, and the way they proofed the pages when it was all set, they inked it and then they put a very thin sheet of paper on it and they tried to smooth it out. The way they smoothed it out was by blowing on it and it would stick to the ink. I went back in the back shop and a man was across the way, the tobacco juice was about down to here, and he looked across at me and said, "Blow on that paper, boy." I thought, "Jesus, what am I into?" That was my first job in the newspaper business. I would blow on it to make the paper stay. I learned to appreciate the fact that, had he blown on the paper, which he normally did, I would have been covered with tobacco juice. I even learned how to tell the time from where the drippings were on the corner of his mouth. About a quarter of twelve, it was down to here and his head was tilted back. We had our own press and with an offset paper our size, it is economically not feasible to get a press. To take care of [install] it, just to put the press in, would be somewhere around a quarter of a million dollars. And those things run at eighteen thousand five hundred papers an hour. So, for two and a half hours a week, I am going to spend a quarter million dollars I don't have. Plus getting the people to run it. What offset did was keep a whole lot of papers in business by what they call "central plants," or buying the printing. We buy our printing from the Newton Daily News. That's a daily paper and they have a big press. We make up the whole paper. The pictures are ours, the engravings are ours, everything is ours. The pages are ready. We leave at nine-thirty and we are back at eleven-thirty with our paper. It is a very quick process. It's an expensive process, too. When we were in hot metal, we did our own. We had our own press and it printed twenty-four hundred an hour and made enough noise that it rattled the whole building. It was part of that romance of printing that they talk about. In '72, we made our first switch. The switch from hot metal to offset. The switch started sometime in the mid-to-late '60s. We were on the early part, going up with the curve. They call it the "Bell Curve," or something like that. We were in the early part, going up. We converted in 1972. We're now in our third generation of computers. My son tells me we're behind already, so we're looking to see what we can do for the next one. It is moving much too rapidly for me to comprehend. My wife uses a computer, all my six kids use computers, I use something that you guys may not have heard of. It is called a typewriter. You push little buttons and numbers come up and letters come up. It is very, very clever. Never crashes. You don't lose anything. I have taken two computer courses and I know how to start the damn thing and that's about it. I'm bound and determined to learn because I have a daughter in Spain and a son in Washington and a daughter in New York and they're all talking about e-mail. I have got an e-mail name, but I don't know what to do with it. I'll stop now and see if you have any questions. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: What was your motivation for going from a well-paid accountant to being a newspaperman? A: Have you ever heard of women? That was my motivation, purely and simply. There was a girl I wanted to live with. You didn't do it the way you do today. I had to go put a ring on and all that stuff, get married, and that's what I did. I got married in late February and went to work in early March. That was my motivation. It was stupid, of course, but I have gotten a little smarter. It turns out that it was a very smart thing to do. There is no earthly way that I know of that I could have educated six children in Chicago the way I did in Grinnell. They have all graduated from college and there is one lawyer and one newspaperperson and one was a press aide for a Congressman and is now on a banking committee and one lives in Spain. No way I could have done it. Living in a college town, we took our kids to lots of college events and it became not, "If I ever go to college" - they made up their own minds. "When I go to college, where am I going to go?" "When," not "if." I think that was a major advantage. The initial motivation, I know, was damn foolish. There is a good friend of mine, I was best man at his wedding, and every time I see him, he says, "Do you ever stop to think what you could have made if you had stayed doing what you were doing?" I had a very nice job and I enjoyed it. But I don't regret it. Someone said something about a front row seat. In the newspaper business, at least, I have had a front row seat. I have done almost anything I wanted to do. I have been to Europe six times. I have been to Taiwan once. Been to fifteen All-Star games. Down on the field during batting practice. I've been to countless World Series games. I saw the Holmes-Cooney fight out in Las Vegas. I have been to the North Pole. I landed on the ice cap in Greenland, two hundred miles inland. Anything I wanted to do. In that, it's given me a front row seat. Class member: Did all of your children end up going to Grinnell College? A: I explained to Brian, that almost caused our marriage eruption. My wife said they have to go "away" to college. Three of them wanted to go to Grinnell and they went "away" to college. They moved out of my house five blocks away. It taxed my solvency very much and my practical common sense. I suspect that as long as we remained solvent, she was right. It didn't make much sense to me. The other three would have gone to Grinnell except for sibling rivalries. "I don't want to go where she is going." The three of them that went enjoyed Grinnell and they were number three, number five and number six. The others went to Cornell, Luther, and Boston University. Q: You said that there is no place better to bring up children than in a small town. A: That's what I say. You have to understand, at seventy-eight, I'm entitled to be opinionated. That's one of my entitlements now. I think that there are many advantages in a small town. Especially with the location of Grinnell with the access of five hours driving to every major city in the Midwest. Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and a good college right there. Big Ten football, which I enjoy. Big Twelve or Big Eight or whatever it is at Iowa State. Des Moines is one hour flat from my house. People say, "What in the hell do you do in a small town?" My problem is to get out of doing things. There's just too much to do. If it interrupts, or interferes with, my golf game, I get very upset. My golf game needs interference, I want you to understand that, too. Q: You said you were determined to go back to Chicago after one year. Was your decision to stay more your love for journalism or was it still because of your family? A: These friends of my boss used to call me and offer me double and triple what I was making. Money is not the only thing. It is what you feel. If you feel you are doing some good. One of the things about accounting is that you don't feel like you're doing a damn bit of good for society. At least, I didn't feel like that. I felt like I was doing damn good for me. I had a comfortable living and I enjoyed it and I enjoyed what it did for me in the Army, because it kept me away from all the bad stuff that happened. As a newspaper person, if you are into it and if you do what you should be doing, you suddenly become part of everything that goes on in the town. Economic development. We have a Greater Grinnell Development. I was president for seventeen years. We had two beautiful industrial parks. I was president when we bought one and filled it and while we bought the second one and started it. I'm still on the board since 1966. We had two hospitals, a Catholic hospital and a community hospital. Neither one could be accredited. They both worked very hard. I was on the board of the Catholic hospital. They had two Catholics, I am an Episcopalian, and two Protestants, and we had the best board. The Community had a bigger board, but our board was smarter. We kept trying to get the community to put the two together. We would call meetings with the proper newspaper publicity and everything would go along fine and all of a sudden somebody would say some emotive thing and you could just feel it dissolve. Finally, the two boards said, "We will take two from this board and two from this board. They will go talk to the Mother Superior at Clinton or at St. Francis." They talked to them and settled the thing and came back and we imposed it on the community. The community just loves it. It is one of the finest hospitals in Iowa right now. As a matter of fact, the University of Iowa hospitals have a dialysis center up there in our hospital. It is a very good hospital. So, we had economic development, hospital, education. You are a part of everything and you are just literally thrown into it. Class member: How much money did you make when you started? A: Sixty-five dollars a week, which is what I made also in 1943 before I went into the Army. Six years later, I made sixty-five dollars a week again. Even if I had gone back to Westinghouse, my old job, I would have gotten all those accrued raises while I was away in the service and I would have made a hell of a lot more. Sixty-five a week. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: What did you do? A: I did everything. When I came there, I walked in and they told me to go and cover a story. I didn't know that the hell they meant. I went and I wrote a four paragraph story about a little fender-bender someplace that nobody had heard of. The publisher, my father-in-law, was putting the paper together and he had it all set, except the story that I wrote was a little too long. So, he looked at it and he looked at it, and he picked out the last paragraph and threw it away into what we call the "hell box." I couldn't believe it. I sweated blood to write the damn thing. But, I did everything. I took pictures. You guys today with your lovely thirty-five millimeters. I used a three and a quarter, four and a quarter, Speed Graphic. There was a little notch for your finger and you held it. You carried that thing through a football game and your finger was creased for three days afterwards. Not only did I take the pictures, I had to go downstairs to our darkroom and develop them. The darkroom was underneath a stairwell. You know how wide a stairwell is? That was my darkroom. I could develop these plates, you take a plate out and there are only two films on it. You take a picture and you reverse the plate and then you turn it over. I developed those negatives. After I developed the negatives, I would make the prints. In those days, to get something to print in the paper, you had to have an engraving, it was called. Most papers did not have an engraving unit. We had to send them to Pella. If we took a picture today, we wouldn't get it back until three days later. It was very interesting trying to plan your paper around the mail and that sort of stuff. They came along eventually with something called a Fairchild Engraver. This was plastic. You put the picture on one drum and put this plastic on another drum. Then you looked through a microscope and picked the blackest black on the picture and made a setting and then the whitest white and made a setting. Then you just turned it on and it engraved the dot structure on this plastic. It still wasn't very good. The pictures were never very good. After you finished engraving it, then you had to mount it and it had to be type high. Everything had to be the same height to print properly. I think it was .918, not quite an inch. You had to make sure that it would fit a proper kiss, and if it didn't do it...the levels gave you trouble with the castings. When they cooled, they didn't all cool the same way. There would be little dips in it and we had a round thing that you put the casting on and checked it. It gave you a reading. If there were holes, you had to tape tape on the bottom until the thing kissed perfectly. We were replete with problems. Excuse me, I am getting away from the question. I took the pictures. I sold advertising. I wrote news stories. I wrote editorials. After I had been there five years, in 1954, we had a centennial celebration. I was one of the three chairmen of this centennial. We had a book and I sold all the advertising for the book. You did everything. You couldn't excuse yourself. If somebody didn't come in to stuff papers, you had to go down and stuff one section into the other. Our press printed eight pages maximum, so if we had a twelve page paper, we had to print four pages and then eight and then stuff one into the other. Then the carriers would come in and pick up the papers and take them out. Newton has, I think, a twenty-four page capacity. We have no problems with that. We took the easy way in many things. A Polaroid camera was one of the early things we had. It gave us instant pictures, but we still had the three day wait. Then when the Fairchild Engraver came along, we got the instant picture and we could engrave it right away. But, you couldn't raise [increase] the size. You could only do the same size, which was wrong. Now, you have a small picture and you want it enlarged, you just blow it up. Then you couldn't do that with the Fairchild. The people in the backshop would compose the ads and they would just push them on the stone. The stones were filled with ads, and you would have to go and get a tray and push the ad up unto the tray and then move it over where you wanted it. Once we got all the ads settled, then we would put a chase around it, a big [metal] form, and then start rolling the type in. If that was romance, believe me, I don't know. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Would you talk about the potential kinds of conflict that you had as editor and publisher of the paper while you were serving on the development commission and boards? A: There were conflicts. You sort of had to play games with yourself. You had to ask yourself which was the greater value to the greater number? We desperately needed jobs in Grinnell. We needed economic development. Each time we met with someone, that was a potential news story. But, if you ran the news story, you were out of the picture because these people were so cautious, they would come and give us assumed names. They didn't want people pounding on their door. Everybody in Iowa and every other state around was looking for industry, so we had to keep it in and it was a conflict. It absolutely was. But, I was the first one to know when we finally got the thing OK'd. At that moment, we let free. We had the story in our own paper first. There were other conflicts. All sorts of ethical things that would occur. I can't tell you how many calls I have gotten where somebody is weeping on the other end and their son or grandson or somebody had gotten picked up for DUI [driving under the influence] or theft or something like that. There was never any drugs. They would say, "That's going to kill my grandmother and my grandmother's death will be on your hands if you write it." What do you do? We wrote it. I can't tell you how many times that happened. Within the first three years, we didn't have a liquor store in Grinnell. We had to drive to Newton to buy it. I still hadn't chucked my Chicago ways. I needed some grain to help me through a weekend. I was over there picking up some supplies and two blocks from the liquor store, I had a little wreck. Stone cold sober, fortunately. I put it on the front page. It was not worth the front page and it would have been very easy for me to just say nothing about it, but I put it on the front page so that when other people came to me and said, "Look, I had this fender bender and don't use it," all I could say is, "Remember when I had mine? It was one the front page." We had school fights in Grinnell. In the early '50s, there was something about communities that had been sleeping. A lot of them in Iowa, and I guess all over the country. They had not done anything progressive, really progressive. We desperately needed schools. We had five votes and for each of them, the fights were bitter. I would get calls at six o'clock in the morning telling me to get the hell out of town. I almost wanted to take advantage of leaving. We desperately needed schools and we just had to keep reporting it. When we wrote stories, the only way we knew that we were doing the right thing is if the pro-schoolers gave us hell and the anti-schoolers gave us hell. Then we knew we had written the thing right. Editorially, we supported schools all the time, but we tried our level best not to put it in any news business at all. We kept our news clean. We wanted to do that and we did. There were times that we have taken letters to the editor that just absolutely revulse me. It was submitted to us and we said OK. No slander, no libel - go ahead. We just lost the school bond election yesterday by fifteen votes or something. There is one guy, he is a nice, nice guy. We greet each other very warmly all the time. But, he puts ads in our paper that are very difficult for us to agree to run. But we run them. Q: How so? A: They are emotively charged and they make statements that "We don't need this and nobody else is doing it." We want to go to kindergarten full days. Seventy-six percent of the schools in Iowa right now are full-day kindergarten. We were going to raise some fee from seven percent to nine percent. This guy, I think, has a lot of elderly clients and there were some elderly's who seem to forget that somebody paid for their education and they're not going to pay for anybody else's. It's not just the elderly people. It is easy to drum up "aginners." I'm always a little bit alarmed by that. In the early '50s, if there was anything that would have driven me out of Grinnell, it was the anti-school. When we finally settled it and we got our fifth election, we passed it by eighty percent. The next thing we voted on was a swimming pool by eighty percent. A library addition by eighty percent. Everybody finally said, "Well, maybe we ought to get into the twentieth century." I don't understand it. We supported all of them. Again, it is easy to be against something and it is easy to get other people against them. I can remember some of my good friends would raise hell with me for our editorial positions. I said, "Just don't bother me. I have got six kids and I want them educated properly. I think you should take the same line." But, it seems like the ones that could most afford are the ones who complained the loudest. That never made sense to me. Q: Have you lost advertising because of your editorial stand? A: I don't think so. They say, "Yes." We had somebody call up and say, "No way will I put another ad in your paper." But they get over it. I can't recall a single major thing that we have lost. We have lost minor ones along the way, but nothing major. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: How do you feel about the status of journalism today and how it has changed through the years? A: Jesus. Excuse me. I mean, Good Heavens. If you are talking on the national level, I object violently to this feeding frenzy that occurs. The latest, the Clinton thing, everybody has got to jump in it and they keep hounding and beating and you read the same thing over and over again. I think there was more principle in other days, and maybe that's because I was writing it. I don't know. I think people cared more in other days. A classic example I use. The president, when I was thirteen years old, was Franklin Roosevelt. I went in the Army, I was in Chicago in Soldiers' Field when Roosevelt was running in 1944. There were 120,000 people in Soldiers' Field. [I saw Roosevelt standing in a car, waving at the crowd. But I did not know that he had had polio and wore a full leg brace. The press knew this, but it was not reported.] A: Because the newspaper guys then didn't write that stuff. If they are concerned about Clinton's playing games, Roosevelt pulled a train off a siding to pick up Lucy Mercer. Is that her name? Pulled a train off of the siding. That is real class. The news guys apparently knew it but didn't write it. I don't know that there's a personal life that can stand the test of running for office. You know that they're going to find something. When you were eight years old, you kicked somebody in the shins. That sort of thing. It becomes a frenzy. They all go after it. I like baseball and it fascinates me when I go down on the field to watch these metropolitan journalists, to watch them just hound these managers and ball players. They just rag at them and I think, "What in the hell are they after?" I don't know. I think it is much more fun to pursue your job and act towards people as you would want them to act toward you. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: You have been talking a lot about change in the small towns through both economic development, as well as political issues, and especially in recent years, I think, there have been a lot of changes. What do you think the biggest changes, both developmentally and politically, in the small towns are now, and how do you go about dealing with those issues through the paper? A: What are the biggest changes? Q: Yeah, the biggest issues of change in a small town as you see it and how do you go about dealing with that in the paper? A: Well, there are two big problems in Iowa right now. Economic development is one and the other one is housing. It seems to me that if you didn't economic develop, you wouldn't have a housing problem. We in Grinnell have a definite housing problem because of our economic development. I would say that any town runs into the same thing. Harlan has that problem. Housing is very short in Harlan. That's because they have got some pretty big industries there. [comments on industry in Harlan] We get hell from some of our people saying, "Why didn't we get some really high paying jobs like Silicon Valley?" I thought, "Well, that's great. Let's tell the leaders why." Bob Noyce, the guy who is co-inventor of the microchip with Intel, a graduate of Grinnell High School, graduated from Grinnell College. He was just barely out of Grinnell. His senior year, he and some guys stole a hog and butchered him and were going to have a luau. Anything over twenty dollars, in those days, was a felony. The farmer wanted them punished. Fortunately, they came to some sort of arrangement. They reimbursed the farmer and all that. Noyce was suspended for a semester, then he came back and finished and then went to MIT and then to Silicon Valley and made a pot full of money. When he was on Grinnell College's board of directors, he had them buy Intel. The stock went sky high. That's where a lot of Grinnell's endowment came from. I called him and said, "Look, next time you are at a board meeting, come out to a chamber [of commerce] meeting and tell us how we can go about getting some electronics manufacturers in Grinnell." He came out and he said there is no way. They stick together. They stick in the beltways. "There is no way that I know that anyone would come out here." We still try. You have this Gateway. I guess Sioux City is a much bigger city than Grinnell. We have tried for it. In our economic development, one of the things we did ask was, "Are you a polluter? What do you do? Do you have any waste products? You have got to do this and this." We set down certain rules for them. We don't have any of these really big electronic jobs. We can't get any. We have a door manufacturer. We have a window manufacturer. We have PVC, Polyvinylchloride siding. We have ducts for heating and cooling. All of these jobs are good and we have full employment in Grinnell. But no electronic stuff. Q: In what ways do you cater your paper to the college there? Is that a big part? A: Let me take a step back. I was telling Brian earlier, I had to take a daughter home from Prague to take over the paper. She graduated from Grinnell College. She was trying something. We print the college paper, they bring it to us and we take care of getting it printed. She is adding one sheet, a broadsheet, both sides, of news and advertising of Grinnell. It is part of the college paper. It is just printed with the college paper as a fly sheet, something you pull out. We're doing it as an experiment. I'll be better able to tell you next year. She's telling me that they like it. It's her idea, so she would tell me that. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: Could you talk to us about one or two of the stories that you are proudest of? The stories that you think made a difference in your career? The stories that really were, in their own ways, explosive and important. A: Oh, God. Q: Let me help. I asked the same question of Carolyn Gage last week and she said, without any hesitation, the story she is happiest with, was a story she did about three boys who dug a huge hole. It's an interesting story because, in may ways, that's her favorite story. It had no great impact, I suppose. We're interested in finding out your version of the hole story. A: Did Carolyn tell you about her contest when they remodeled her bathroom? They had riddles on the thing. I submitted some. I think one or two of them got on. Q: I am not sure Carolyn was facetious or not. But, what are some of the stories that you really look back upon your career with the most pride? A: I did a lot of Army stuff. I missed out on the war. I was thankful for that. In the '60s, the Cold War was still on and I found I could get the Air Force to take me places. In the '60s, I went to Cape Canaveral. I saw the first Minuteman Missile. I went to the North Pole. I landed on an ice cap in Greenland. I was weightless in the same plane that the [early] astronauts were. I sent an article about that. I wrote about all of this stuff in the paper and it explained what we were doing in the Cold War. Reforger One was in 1969. We were pulling troops out of Europe and Europeans were very upset, saying that we were leaving them unprotected against the hordes from the East. The Americans said, "Look, it is costing us a lot of money. We'll show you how quick we can get over there." We sent five thousand troops from the United States to Nuremberg in thirty-four hours. I was in the second plane that landed in Nuremberg. Each plane had ninety-eight soldiers and two newsmen. I wrote about that. I thought it was important because the Cold War was on everybody's mind. You guys are much too young to remember, but they used to talk about the clock that was set at five minutes of twelve. At twelve o'clock, poof, there was no world. If you didn't give a thought to that, you were out of your mind. I must admit, I was wanting some adventure, too. So, it was a dual purpose. I couldn't walk down the street without somebody talking to me about those articles. I talked to every service club in Grinnell about them. -- <br><br> Section 9: A: The other thing that I think was of import, although there was not much writing about it, were my guests from the USIA, the United States Information Agency. That started in 1962. The college had a guest, he was Wang Ti Wuh, the publisher of the largest paper in Taipei. The college didn't know what the hell to do with him. They had him for several days. Since he was a newspaperman, they rationalized that he should meet other newspapermen. His paper had a circulation of about three to four million. We are at three to four thousand. He came down and I suggested to my wife that maybe it would be a good idea to entertain this guy at home. Normal Iowa entertainment is to offer them liquid grain. If they don't want it, fine, but I still have mine. He drank one bottle of beer, so he was not on anything. My kids were ages one to eleven at that time. I was a little afraid that at the dinner table they would pick up a handful of mashed potatoes and whap it at the guy. They were fascinated by the interpreter. They brought their toys to the guy and he seemed very interested. But, sitting at our dinner table, he was sitting at my right and all this went through the interpreter. Those days, they brought people in for three months. He said, "I've been in this country for two months. I love everything about Americans. Wonderful cities and everything. But, tonight is special." I said, "That is very interesting. Why is it special?" He said, "This is the first American home I have been inside of." I wanted to weep. What in the hell kind of friendship can you show if you're unwilling to open your front door? So I wrote to the agencies that sent the people out. I wrote to the USIA. I wrote to my senator and congressmen. Pretty soon, I started to get guests. We've had them since 1962 from every part of the world. No guest comes to Grinnell that doesn't eat in a college professor's home. That's dinner. And in a town person's home and lunch out on the farm. They have a continental breakfast with high school kids. They have lunch with professors and students at the college. They go through a factory. They go through a retirement home and have an exchange of points of view there. That's how they find out what the hell the country is all about. I was trying to add up the other day how many guests. I figure it is well over four hundred that we have entertained. Just last week we had three from Moldova. I didn't even know where Moldova was. A week before that had a lady from Germany. Earlier we had a lady from Spain. We have had three Georgians. We had a Chinese guy from mainland China. It took me twenty minutes to drive him three blocks. One street has some lovely Victorian homes and he made me stop at about every home and took pictures of the wonderful homes. That, to me, has contributed as a newspaper person, but not in the newspaper. We write a news story saying that they're here, but I think in seeing so many of those people in town, I can pick up a telephone and call almost anybody in town and say, "Look, I have this guest. Could you entertain them for dinner on such-and-such a night?" They don't say, "Is he black, white, green or pink." They say, "Let me check my calendar." To me, that's amazing. It takes me about three hours to line up the schedule and then another three hours to type it up. Then I spend time with the guests, too. We always have them at our house because it is fun.