Drake Mabry interview about journalism career, Des Moines, Iowa, March 18, 2000

Section 1: Q: Today we are talking with Drake Mabry of Des Moines and we're at 4115 Tonawanda Drive in Des Moines, which is his home address, today being the 18th day of March 2000. We're going to talk a little bit about the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company and of course, specifically about the Tribune, when you were there. A: And its relationship with the Register. Q: Drake, I really haven't come across anyone who has described the Tribune as a practice paper, at least that was perceptive of what things were when you came on board. Not only when you came on, but you said that you changed it, you changed that perception of it. What did it mean by people thinking about it as a practice paper? A: The idea was that the Tribune was not as good a newspaper or as a respected a newspaper as the Register because the Register was statewide and the Tribune primarily was central Iowa and Polk County. It had more papers in Polk County than the Register but the Register had the prestige, to the ones out in the state. Q: Did the employees feel that way? Does the fact that they were working to move up to something better? A: On the Tribune? No, I don't think so. I think both of us, when I came on board and while I was writing and then editing it, I thought it was a pretty damn good newspaper and it was. It was lively, despite the practice paper title. We had some very good writers. Cliff Millen wrote politics and he was a terrific political writer. Bob Spiegel was a wonderful writer. Lillian McLaughlin was almost unbeatable as a kind of a prose poet. She had a wonderful eye and a wonderful southern way of writing. So there were some very good writers. And when Jim Flansberg started the Tribune. So with all those people, the Tribune could be a very, very lively paper. The problem was, it wasn't edited very well. You have to understand, the Register and Tribune, in their heyday, they were really a reporter's paper. The editors did what I would consider a minimum amount of directing. Their theory was to hire reporters that were self-starters, that had a gleam in their eye and felt very strongly about getting at the truth and getting at good stories and chasing them and pursuing them. So reporters really made the Register and the Tribune. George Mills got an award finally, from Northwestern University. He was a graduate there. And I wrote a little op ed piece for the Register, saying in essence, it's about time, because reporters make editors look good. Two days later, I got a little note from Ken MacDonald and he said, in essence, you're so right. That's the way both the Register and the Tribune operated and that's the way Dick Wilson ran the Washington Bureau. It was a very, very challenging place to work because they expected so much of you. Q: You called it a reporter's paper. What would the difference be? What would the other side of that be? A: The other side would be that reporters, first of all, were not aggressive enough and did not pursue, couldn't see a story for the weeds and the editors would direct most of the news coverage, the type of thing that ends up in the paper. Q: What would be wrong with that? A: Because the editors aren't out on the street. The editors aren't tuned to the nuances of reporting and what techniques to use. That's why they are editors. They may be very good editors, with a piece of property, but by and large, really not very aggressive as far as dictating the coverage. They gave you the freedom to do it and that's the creative output. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: You were a general assignment reporter when you first started. I wonder if you could talk about the more interesting stories that you remember from those days, back in '56. What was it like being a general assignment reporter starting at the Tribune? A: I was a new kid on the block. I was originally scheduled to go to the courthouse but I got started on some general assignments and stuff and never got to the courthouse. One of the odd things we used to do as a rookie, is we used to have to cover the convention beat and there may be three, four or five conventions in town at that time. So, when Flansberg was there, he did the same thing. We'd go out and we'd scout around and we'd find a very interesting convention or an interesting speaker. Then our mode was to make it so good, they had to put it on page one. And we succeeded some, on doing that. They don't do that anymore. So, it was a really good training ground. Eventually, I left general assignment reporting and I started covering the Highway Commission. That was when the planning and building of the interstate highways and freeways. Q: I want to talk more about later, but I do want to ask you, what made a convention story good? A: Say you went to a Weed Commission meeting. We had, every year, a Weed Commissioners meeting. Most people don't even know there is such a thing as a County Weed Commission. So you build a story on the unusual job of here's a guy who is paid from public money, to do whatever with weeds, whether he counts them or whether he tries to kill them or keep them mowed or whatever. You can build an interesting story out of that. You know, Frank Eyerly used to say, there are no dull news days. There are only dull reporters and dull editors. So, that's what we did. Q: I'd like you to talk more about that kind of baptism by fire, not at the Register but when you were doing baptism by fire, cops and courts at the Mason City Polk Gazette. Because that was, like you say, a learning experience. A: Yes, I went there directly out of the University of Iowa. W. Earl Hall was the editor. It was a Lee newspaper. And it was kind of sleepy but it was a decent newspaper. And I went there because I knew that I could get a little taste of everything. So I covered every beat at one time or another. I even put out a farm tab once, covered society news. I worked part-time on sports, covered sports events. Wrote features. Covered the cops. Covered the courthouse, which led to a big brouhaha. I was city editor when he was on vacation. I ran the wire desk when the wire man was on vacation. I knew the composing room. So you really got a full basket of everything that putting out a daily newspaper is involved in. I tried to use that to a full extent. Q: And the production side of it, too? A: The production side, yes. You got to know all these old printers and you understood the reason for deadlines and why it took them so long sometimes. You learned how the paper got put together, in those days of lead type, the linotypes and all that stuff. So, I considered it a learning experience. And I only stayed there about nine months. Q: How was it that you ended up at the Register from Mason City? A: I was in journalism school with Dwight Jenson and his wife, Pat. And he came to the Register and called me up one day and said, "The Tribune is looking for a courthouse reporter." So I applied and went down and interviewed with Frank Eyerly and was offered the job. That's how I got there. One of the reasons why I got there was because the pay, in those days was really fairly miserable. And I was about to get married. I'll never forget this - Earl Hall was a wonderful man and he wrote all the editorials. He put the editorial page out by himself. It wasn't all that vigorous, but he came by my desk, see, he had a habit of walking out in the newsroom and swinging his glasses around like this [illustrates]. And he came by my desk one time and he said, "I think you're going to have a little more money in your paycheck next week." And I said, "Gee! Thanks, Earl." And when I got my paycheck the next week and got a $2.25 raise. [laughter]. So I figured I'm going to move out of here. And about that time, Dwight called and I came down. That's how I got started at the Register and Tribune. Q: How much was the pay at the Register when you started? A: Same amount as I was making up there. But it was bigger; it had a bigger staff. It was a prestigious paper. I figured I'd spend a year on the courthouse beat and I'd learn how to run a courthouse beat, like Clark Mollenhoff, ran the courthouse beat for the Register for years before he went to Washington. So I figured it was a good move. Again, it was another learning experience. I never got there because I was so busy on general assignment stuff. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Frank Eyerly? How was he to work for? A: Frank was, from a reporter's standpoint, Frank was wonderful to work for. But he was sure hell on editors. Desk men, copy editors and he was especially hell on news editors. He was very critical of the news coverage, of the news choices, sometimes. The Register used to send the first edition out to Eyerly about ten o'clock every night. You've probably heard this story before. Q: I have, but go ahead. A: And they'd sit there, and they'd be sort of trembling, you know, waiting for the phone to ring. That was the fear. But it was really not all that unusual. I'll tell you a wonderful story. When Stuffy Waldows one time, was the managing editor of the papers, and he went from there to Minneapolis and then Chicago Daily News, but in those days, his office was about two steps up from the main newsroom floor. And when the first edition came off and it went into Stuffy's office, all those guys would sit there and wait to hear that first step, when he hit it running, BANG like that. They could gauge, almost, how serious Stuffy was with the walk he got, hitting that first step, coming out waving the newspaper, you understand. So Frank wasn't any different, really, but he was hell on news editors. They couldn't keep him happy. And he fired some really good news editors who went on to other newspapers. Denver and on the East Coast. But he didn't have that same feeling about reporters. He'd come out and ask you to go to lunch with him, frequently. He really liked reporters. He didn't instill the fear of God in them, like he did copy editors and all that sort of stuff. So it was a different relationship and I never really understood that. I don't know why that would be, because reporters are the first line of anything that goes in the paper. So I just never understood that. Q: Give me an example of something that might rile him up. A: What would really - I can't think of anything specific right off hand, but what would really rile him up would be if he found something inside the paper that he thought should be on page one. He had a well-tuned news judgment. People were critical of it sometimes but he had the best news judgment by what readers should know and would want to know, than most editors I know. He wasn't perfect. I know he put a banner on the divorce between Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio. And he was criticized for that. But he knew it was a hell of a readable story. In those days, too, the Register - you had to have a banner. You had to have an eight-column screamer. Q: We talked about that. A: Across the top of the page. Of course, news doesn't always fit that sort of screaming banner. Sometimes it's not that important. But the Register, for years, had to have it. And that resulted in some over-playing of stories, but it was something we had to live with. Later they changed that and made more of a balance out of it, so you could get some gauge if the reader was sensitive enough, to how important the story was. If it carried an eight-column banner, it was really an important story. Or if you had just one column or two columns. Frank also demanded a reader, what he called a reader, on each page, which was sort of an off-beat, below the fold unusual type of story. It could have been a feature. It could have been almost anything that didn't have a hard news edge to it, but was awfully interesting. Q: What was the thinking behind that? Just to open up the paper more? A: No, it was to give page one some diversity. And I'm a believer in that. Most papers will have a similar theory. You don't want all doom and gloom on page one. You like that little sparkle out there. There used be - I can't think of his name, but there used to be a guy on the Chicago Daily News, the old Chicago Daily News, who was an expert at that. The city editor or the news editor might all the sudden turn around and hand him a piece of paper and say, "Here, make me laugh." That was his job. To take this cute little thing and put a twist on it and give the reader a laugh or grin, amidst all the crooks and the disasters. Q: It's kind of a paradox, because you think about today, the paper today is focusing all on this metro Des Moines stuff. Let's keep things local and everything, but the real paper that Iowa depended on was the Register, actually covered the entire world. When you talk about a reader, that wouldn't have just been from Iowa. A: Right, it could have been from anywhere. And you're right, the Register was truly a state newspaper. It had a marvelous Washington Bureau. They had the Big Peach sports section with photographs that nobody else could have, the ones from the press box and the ones looking down. And they had a plane. They had a very good editorial page. To some of us, the editorial page is really the soul of the newspaper. That's one way, maybe the major way, if you can judge a newspaper. And they had a really long string of good editorial writers. And editorial editors, starting with Marv McGaphin, Lauren Soth, of course and Flansberg Q: Who did you say? Marv McGaphin? A: Marv McGaphin. He was one of the early ones when the Cowles were still in Des Moines. Flansberg. Cranberg. They all ran very savvy editorial pages who understood what an editorial page should be. It not only has to be diverse, but it has to speak for the institution. That's part of the soul of a newspaper. You know, a newspaper has got to stand for something. Not many people really realize that. The Register always did. It stood for Iowa. It stood for honesty and it stood for fairness. But it was very, very aggressive. That's why it was as dominant as it was. Because nobody else in Iowa was doing that sort of thing. So they had a responsibility and they felt it, very strongly. Certainly the reporters felt it because they had a stack of wonderful, very smart, savvy reporters. To start with, was George Mills, of course. I mean, people don't realize it, but George Mills sometimes almost, I swear, almost wrote the whole Sunday paper. He had stories sticking out of both hip pockets. And he'd say, "Well, which one do you want?" And truly, he was obsessive about the news and getting it in the Register. That's why I was able to set the agenda, which goes a long with the editorial page being the soul. When the newspaper has to be strong enough and aggressive enough to set the agenda by running investigative stories, not waiting for somebody to come out with a press release, but pursuing a story deeper than any press release could go. That's how it made its reputation. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: You brought this up, the fact early on, that you were doing some investigative reporting yourself, about the interstate highway that was coming to Des Moines, the Des Moines freeway? A: Yes. Q: There were some surprises. I mean, a little more digging and you found that there was something that made you dig deeper. A: There are a lot of things. First of all, I did it almost full time. So I had the time to really study and understand what this highway building was all about. And in the process, I'd cover the commission and pretty soon, I'd go and I used to roam the hallways at the Highway Commission. I admit I have a couple of moles who would tell me about problems they heard about. One of them was in the attorney's office, so he was my best one. So I picked up an awful lot of other stuff. Q: A mole is a source? A: A mole is a source, yes. Q: Quoted or not quoted? A: Not quoted. He's a tipster. He says, "Hey, you ought to go look at this." "I heard this the other day." So, it was a very complicated job, building interstate highway systems, and it was enormously expensive. And it's a very difficult thing for them to keep track of what the hell they were doing, since it was so widespread. That opened up all sorts of avenues. One of them, my favorite one was, they were building the Interstate west, Interstate 80 West and before they even got traffic on it, the trucks were going back and forth, building the rest of it down the road. Before they even let traffic on it, the thing began to break up. We're talking about a million dollars every couple miles. What happened was, that some guy - they suspected that there was a lot of water trapped underneath there. So one of the workers got a pick ax and got out in the middle of the road and he chopped a hole in the surface of this very newly paved road. And a geyser of water shot up, about 8-10 feet in the air. Q: Oh, no! A: Of course, they had to go back and make repairs. What they did was, they dug in from the shoulders and put drainage pipes every so often, so the water would have some place to go besides working its way up. And that was all in addition. It was lousy planning. It was lousy engineering. It was just lousy everything. That's the sort of thing that I worked for in addition to the usual progress and how much it was costing and all that sort of thing. Another thing, after I was on it a while, what I became convinced of, was that there was some sort of collusion between asphalt contractors and concrete contractors. Because the Highway Commission, they'd have a 20-30 mile stretch of road that was asphalt and then all of the sudden, you're on concrete. I could never get an answer that satisfied me of why they built some with asphalt and some with concrete. They kept saying, "Well, you know, the bids looked better." And we didn't know whether they did or not. So I spent about two weeks one time, going back over all the bid forms. I wasn't smart enough or good enough. I needed an accountant and I needed an engineer and they weren't available. So I gave up, not without niggling them a little bit, though. One time - they used to open the bids for highways in a Des Moines hotel. They'd rent a ballroom and all the contractors would show up and they would open the bids. I sent a photographer up one time to photograph this process. And it scared the beejeezus out of them because they didn't have any idea what I wanted that for. And why was I interested in bid openings and all that stuff. Well, I couldn't get at it, but later, the Justice Department Strike Force, out of Omaha, did get at it. And the presidents of some of those highway contractors were found guilty of collusion and bid rigging. Some of them went to jail. I was just sure in my own bones that something like that was going on, but I couldn't get at it. Q: You couldn't document it? A: No, I couldn't document it. And certainly nobody was going to tell me. But I knew that there was something going on between the asphalt and the concrete people. Q: Did somebody call your attention to that, or did you just take an interest in that? A: No. When you're up there and they approve a construction contract, during a meeting or something, some of them go to an asphalt contractor and some go to a concrete contractor and it was just in the normal flow of things. And I could never figure it out. The answer I always thought was, well we want to split the spoils. That's also suspicious. How do you split the spoils on what was supposed to be a low-bid basis? Q: Had you had any experiences as an investigative reporter before these times? A: No, none. I was a babe in the woods, as most reporters are. It takes an awful lot of expertise in order to get the facts and to prove something. Q: Was there anybody you could turn to on the staff? A: Well, I did. I talked with Mollenhoff in Washington about it, in the middle of all this process on the Highway Commission, why roads are breaking up. I made what I thought was some arrangements for one of the staff investigators on the Senate, who was also an accountant and that was very helpful to Mollenhoff in some of this stuff, to come out and take a look at all this. He never made it out here. Otherwise, there wasn't any help available. I just threw up my hands. I figured it was going to come out some time and of course, it did. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Still, if it was a reporter's tip and you're calling the shots...I mean, an editor couldn't say, you know, this is where we need to go. A: No, this was all on my own. There was another similar instance at the Iowa Liquor Commission. Iowa adopted liquor by the drink in 1963. And in those days, the legislature met only every other year. So I was always scouting around for something to do in the interim to keep me busy so I wasn't at the mercy of the city desk. And liquor by the drink was the one thing that that particular year, that I happened to follow, which was a big change in Iowa. I became almost married to the enforcement people. Larry Scalise was at one time, Attorney General, which headed up the enforcement. They hired another friend of mine from the old days, a Chief of Detectives with the Des Moines Police Department, Eugene McCarthy. And I was almost wedded to those guys because I wanted to keep track of what was going on and what the troubles were. And it was very fruitful. But in this process, I really got the feeling that the commission was too much in cahoots with the liquor people, the manufacturers and the salesmen. I thought that one time when I was in talking to the chairman. He was Homer Adkoff. He was an old-time Democratic Pole in Polk County. You know, one of the guys that got a good job not because he was very good at it, but because he was a Democrat. And Homer was always very friendly and I was in talking to him one time and there was a table there, loaded with bottles, samples. One time when there was a lull in the conversation, he said, "Drake," he says, "You can help yourself to whatever you want over on that table. They're all samples. You can put them in a bag and take them with you." And of course, I didn't bite. But I just knew there was something there. There wasn't even records I could go at. I went over the sales, the buying record. It was all public. I went over all that. I just knew it. And I was right. Several years later, Homer was found to be on the take and he spent several years in jail, and he was an old man, by that time. He grew old and feeble in jail. So, there's a certain intuition of really good reporters. Q: When you have these inklings, like when you saw what was happening with the Interstate and then of course, what must have been the collusion between the liquor companies and the commission, is there anything you can write? What did you write at the time? A: I covered almost everything they did. And I was always in sight and I was always looking over their shoulder. They knew that I was there. But I couldn't write anything. I said, "Hey look, there may be a chance that these three commissioners are in the back pocket of the liquor salesmen or the liquor producers." I just knew when to throw in the towel. I mean, you just couldn't prove it. Q: But the fact that you were there was a kind of regulation. A: I hope so. That's why I was there. And that's why I was doing it. I was especially there with the enforcement branch. But I knew both police and E. J. McArthur and they knew me. They knew that I don't take any crap. And I can be very demanding if I have to be. So, I'm convinced that operation was run pretty well, actually. I don't think there was any way anybody could get a liquor license if the enforcement division said, "Nah, you've got a bad record." I mean, I don't think anybody could buy a liquor license in this state, through the Liquor Commission, anybody with a tainted reputation. Q: There is an interesting segue way from that to the memories that you have about the sheriff's party, where the booze got confiscated. A: That was a shock to me. I talked about the Tribune staff and they had some really good reporters and good writers, but they also had a bunch of old hands. They weren't exactly dogs but they were - like the guy that covered the police station - he had been there so long, he almost thought of himself as a cop. Q: I've heard this story. Tell me, what was his name? A: Guy Taloose. The other guy, the other old-timer was a guy by the name of Fred Petit. He was kind of a courthouse reporter, general assignment reporter and he had been around a long time. Q: Before you go any further, there is a story about Guy Taloose, when he died, the police department lined up along his coffin at his funeral - I guess it was [?] who told me this story - and they saluted him as his coffin passed by. A: I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised at all. Q: Anything you can remember that gave you an indication at the time, that he was in their pocket or anything? A: You can't say he was in their pocket. He was just too damn close to them. I'm sure that he would hold up on some stories if they wanted him to. On the other hand, they might have given him some stories that he wouldn't otherwise get, because he was a buddy. But it's a very bad relationship from a newsman's standpoint. You just don't form - everything should be at arm's length. And those guys were in the bosom. The sheriff was a Democrat named Wilbur Hilder. He'd been sheriff a long time. He used to have a cabin out in the woods somewhere. Once a year, he'd throw a party. He'd tell Fred Petit and Taloose, you can invite some of your buddies. One year, of course, many of us went. I tell you, it's a shock to look over there and see your news editor throwing craps with the chief of police or something, for real money. The bar was wide open, with booze that they had confiscated in raids and didn't have to be accounted for any more. There was a lot of gambling going on, a lot of drinking. And nobody really thought a whole lot about it, except some of the youngsters that had come on board. Q: Newsmen? A: Yes, newsmen that had come on board. Flansberg and myself and several other guys, we began to wonder - reporters shouldn't be doing this. And neither should news editors, for crying out loud! So, we let Petit and those guys know and the annual sheriff's party just sort of petered out. Q: Oh, it was an annual party? A: It was an annual party, yes. They held it every year. They had to get rid of their booze somehow, you know. We might as well drink it up ourselves. Q: With the reporters? A: With the reporters, yes. With our friends of the press. Q: So, was that just the Register people or would they bring in people from - A: I think they would bring in some Register people. I don't really remember but I'm sure there were. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: Moving on to another topic, later you became the managing editor of the Tribune. A: Right. Q: Sometimes I get the feeling, since you were in the same building, the Register and the Tribune, that there was this kind of friendly competition. But there was no friendly competition going on. You were - A: Well, ,yeah, there was. There was, on the surface. I mean, we didn't stiff on each other. But it was certainly competitive from the standpoint of getting stories and getting the news. From that standpoint, yea, we wouldn't give them zilch. Although we might be down drinking in the office saloon the next day, we wouldn't tell the Register folks about it. That's where the phrase, the Tribune being a practice paper was bandied about, by some smart-asses on the Register. And I think that was a general feeling on the Register because we had too many good people that they had to admire us. And we got so many good stories that they didn't have a handle on. But there had to be some respect there, at least for the reporters. Q: Did you see a trend where there was movement from the Tribune to the Register? If people had gotten very good, no one stayed at the Tribune? A: I wouldn't call it a trend. Flansberg, of course, went from the Tribune to the Register. Don Kahl went from the Tribune to the Register. Of course, Don Kahl had an awful time as a reporter, when he was on the Tribune. Q: Tell me about that. A: Well, one time - the Tribune had a re-write desk but it was run by the former city hall reporter and it was just one guy. He wasn't the fastest guy in the world and he was usually busy taking dictation from other reporters and one time, there was a highway patrolman missing, down in southern Iowa, down around Sheridan. Nobody had heard from him for days, nobody at the State Patrol. So they finally found him and he was shacked up in a motel with a girl down in southern Iowa, near Sheridan. Well, I was dictating the story to Kahl because he was the guy that happened to be available when I called. And I was dictating the story to him. Q: He was what, a copy editor? A: No, he was a reporter. He just happened to be walking by the city desk when I called and they needed someone to take my dictation, so they grabbed him and set him down at the typewriter and put some earphones on him. But it was down near Sheridan and I remember, Kahl's the only guy I know that could spell Sheridan seven different ways with none of them right. He was a wonderful columnist. I wish he had stayed in Des Moines instead of going to Washington, because he was a wonderful columnist. But he had his problems as a good reporter. He wanted to cover a cat show one time and the city editor wouldn't let him. Q: A cat show? A: A cat show. I wish he would have. I mean, even in those days, he had to have that nice touch. You know, kind of the wry and ironic view of things. I wish he had written the story. That was the kind of story that newspapers need these days. Q: But you're saying his reporting wasn't up to par? Or his grammar wasn't? A: He was just never comfortable as an on-the-spot reporter where speed is important and accuracy is important. In those days, being able to dictate a story was important. Some people just didn't have that knack of dictation. In other words, you would write a story off the top of your head and you talked it into the guy at the rewrite desk. That was a common occurrence for the afternoon Tribune, because our deadlines were so short. We didn't have time to come in the office and write a story. Most of the stuff that I wrote out of the legislature was dictated from the press bench in the senate chamber, talking it to a guy with a typewriter in the office. That's very crude by today's standards, when you have laptops and you can zap it into the computer in five seconds. Q: You'd be surprised. Some of the correspondents - [inaudible]. Logistically speaking, how did that work? Did you write the story or were you writing it in your head and speaking it? A: I had a system which served me very well. I had my notes, and before I dictated, I would get set in my mind what the lead ought to be. And I'd go through there, through my notes, very quickly and use a numbering and underlining system. One, two, three, four, five. And you can do that in about two minutes. You could do it on the back of an envelope if you had to. So by the time I started to dictate, I knew in my mind what direction I was going to go. And I just wrote it as I went along. I'd write a lead and then I'd go to number one and I'd dictate that, that point, then I would go to two. It might be at all different points in your notebook or on your pad. Q: But you weren't writing out a story then. You were saying, "Here's my lead and now here is the second paragraph." A: No - I was writing the story. The story went as I dictated it, or as anybody dictated it. It's a technique that not everybody could do. I handled it pretty well. The best example that I know of is the AP guy. He was down in Little Rock. His name escapes me right now, be he was at the civil rights disturbance outside the high school. And he had commandeered a telephone booth. Saul Patton - he was a wonderful guy and a wonderful writer. He commandeered a telephone booth right across the street. So he's standing in a telephone booth and he had the AP rewrite man on the telephone and he was dictating as things were happening. That's very difficult to do. But he tells this story - and then he says, the telephone booth began to go like this [illustrates] and it kept getting bigger and bigger and Saul kept talking and dictating and pretty soon, he was on his side and the telephone booth was horizontal and so was Saul and he was dictating away all that time. Well, not because of that story, but he won a Pulitzer for his civil rights coverage that same year. Q: This was a guy with the Register? A: No, a guy with the AP, one of the AP guys. So, that's an extreme of dictation. If you've got three or four minutes, you can organize it. It takes a lot of concentration but you can organize it in your head and you can organize it on your notebook, so you go one, two, three, four. But you're dictating the actual story all along. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: You said that there were no formal budgets for the newsroom up until when? A: Not in those days. I didn't think anything about that when I took over the Tribune and I starting hiring people and doing different things and spending money. Q: What is a formal budget? A: You go through - it's just like the legislature goes through a budget hearing, how much you spend. The newspaper people go through a budget and they argue with the publisher and there is a budget for the advertising and the news, the production department and all that sort of stuff. So, in this case, the newsroom - there was a newsroom budget. You get so much for salaries and so much for travel and so much for this and so much for the photographic department. We didn't have any of that. I mean, we just spent the money, at least I did. This really didn't occur to me as being very important until far later when I became familiar with budgets and all that sort of thing. But there was no budget. Q: No meddling from the publisher? A: No, very little. I mean, sometimes you'd have to go into the managing editor and say, well, I'm going to send a guy to whatever. Shortly after I became managing editor of the Tribune, I sent Gammack, Gordon Gammack... Tape One Side Two Q: We were talking about Gordon Gammack. Describe who he was again. A: Gordon Gammack was a front page columnist for the Tribune. He's an old war correspondent. He covered World War II and he covered Iowans in World War II. He was very popular and he was very successful. So, I had made a pitch one time, before I became an editor, to go to Vietnam. And Frank Eyerly wouldn't let me. So after I became an editor, I sent Gammack to Vietnam. I can remember when I asked him. He worked back in a cubicle at the back of the building. And I went back and I said, "Gammack, you want to go to Vietnam?" He said "You kidding?" And I said, "No." He reached for the phone right there and called somebody he knew in Washington to start the process of getting accredited to go. He's a marvelous reporter. I worried a lot about him being so old. He was nearing sixty, I suppose, in those days. But he was unstoppable. He went and spent about a month and a half over there the first time. The second time, he went back and spent about thirty days. Then, the third time, he was in Manila for the prisoner exchange, which was an example of how an old reporter's technique that covers city hall and every courthouse reporter worth a salt knows, when the prisoners came back, they were secluded. Reporters couldn't get at them, couldn't talk to them. They held no press conferences, what kind of health they were in, what kind of wounds they had, how was their emotional state, all this sort of stuff. And there was a whole pack of reporters out there, big guns, waiting for all this stuff. When Gammack found out that there were two doctors from Iowa on the team of doctors examining these guys, he took them out to dinner one night and they became his source and they gave him a lot of really, really good stuff about what kind of shape the prisoners were in, who they were, what their experiences were, because they talked to all these guys. And they relayed a lot of that to Gammack and pretty soon, Gammack was filing stuff about the prisoners that nobody else had. I mean, the New York Times, the AP - nobody had that stuff. And Gammack tells the story, he says, one time he was typing away and there was a guy looking over his shoulder. And it was a guy from the AP - I can't think of his name - Peter. But he'd also won a Pulitzer for coverage. And he said, "I hear that you've got some really great stuff about these guys coming back." And Gammack says, "Yes, but you can't have it." So he worked out a deal with the AP that Gammack would file the story and we would get it in the paper and then the AP could use it. I mean, there was a very quick turnaround. That was simply to protect the sources that gave it to him. But it was a simple reporter's trick of finding somebody who knows and lining them up to tell you what's going on. Reporters do that all the time. Q: And the fact that the doctors were from Iowa. A: Well, sure. They knew who Gordon Gammack was. They knew his column. They knew him, probably, from his World War II coverage and he covered Korea, too. He was in Korea, too, which is why I sent him back. He was marvelous. He did some really great stuff, great stories, about young Iowa kids being sent out on search missions and the sole purpose was to capture a couple soldiers and bring them back alive for the intelligence guys to interview them and talk to them and try to find out what was going on. But can you imagine- a seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old kid, from this little town in Iowa, out there in those jungles all darkened up and creeping around like an Indian, trying to capture the enemy alive. And Gammack can write those kind of stories without them sounding really corny, you know. He's no frills, no nothing, just bare bones facts and reports and quotes. He even had his camera out. I gave him a camera the first time he went and he took some pictures. The first ones really weren't very good and I went back to the photo department and I said, "Neil, what's wrong with these pictures?" And he looked at them and he said, "Well, what kind of camera was he using?" I said, "I don't know." Turned out that he had a camera with a plastic lens in it, one of those cheapies. So I got about $300 put together and I bought Gammack a really good camera that was simple to run, like any one you and I would use. And the next time he went, he had a decent camera and he got decent pictures. It's just amazing what you can get out of story like that for a home town or home state paper. All you have to do is go out there. Q: Like you say, you had the unlimited budget to go ahead and do that. How did you go about getting the money? A: I just told them I was sending him. Q: You didn't have the executives saying I need the money for this - A: No. I just said, oh, by the way, Gammack is going back to Vietnam. "Oh, good idea!" There was no question about how much it cost. Gammack worried about it. We used to talk back and forth by the wire. He used the AP - AP had a direct wire between Saigon and New York. It was clean line - for their use only. And he used to file his stuff through the AP, in New York and then they would file it back to me on the wire. It didn't take very long. And he told me one time - he was kind of worried about what it was costing. He wanted to know - this is typical Gammack - he says, "I've been eating an awful lot of strawberries on shortcake over here in Saigon and they are in season, but they are really expensive." I had to wire back to him, "For Christ sakes, Gammack, don't worry about strawberries!" He was just an amazing man. One time - you know, he still had friends in the military from his stints in Korea. And he would use them, he would get in touch with them and they were remarkably open to him because he was an old guy and we got to kind of look after him. So they tipped him some really good stories. One of them was the invasion of Laos. He was right behind them. One time I sent him up somewhere, it wasn't the Dien Bien Phu, but it was something like that. And some stuff was going to happen. And he went up there and he came back and I got this note that said he lost his notebook. He was sleeping on the ground in a tent somewhere up there and he simply lost his notebook. You know, he restructured, recreated that whole goddamn notebook, almost complete from memory, with names and addresses and not one of them was wrong. They all checked out. We used to check the names and addresses in his stuff, because editors do that just to make sure that it was right. And he just recreated it. Didn't hardly skip a beat. I wish every reporter was like that. He was bored writing a column, a page one column. It was full of little tidbits and gee whiz paragraphs and gee, did you hear about this and that sort of stuff and he was bored. He needed revitalizing and he did. Q: That did it, huh? -- <br><br> Section 8: A: Lil McLaughlin, who is the lady writer I mentioned earlier, was about the same way. She was bored. She hated the city editor. The city editor didn't give her decent stuff. Q: Who was that? A: A guy by the name of Doyle Taylor. He's dead now, so I guess I can give you his name. But Taylor and Lil didn't get a long at all, and Lil just wasn't doing much. She's a marvelous writer. She's from Greenville, Mississippi, and she grew up there and she knew the Greenville paper, that would stand on civil rights. So, I tried to revitalize her and give her some really good assignments. She went down to the Truman home one time, to talk- Q: The what? A: The Truman home. They had some sort of a do down there. And she told me, "That's the first time I've been out of the state for thirty years, on a job." So I tried to turn her loose. And I did and she wrote some really tender, sensitive writing. You have to keep...as an editor, you got to give people the freedom. First of all, you got to get good people. Then you got to give them the freedom to go. I think I mentioned somewhere, when I first became editor of the Tribune, I set up a three-person task force, for lack of a better word. I called them the tree-shakers. And they worked for me. They didn't go through the city desk or didn't go through the news editor, they were under my control. Q: These were reporters? A: One editor and two reporters. And later, one photographer. But I hired all these guys. The editor was a former bureau chief for the AP in Des Moines. And I knew them all, too. The best writer was an AP guy who was in Atlanta, covering the southeast, for golf, for AP sports. The third writer was a guy in New York, writing about pro football. I just hired them all and brought them back and we set up this little task force. Later on, I managed to hire a guy away from National Geographic, a guy by the name of Tom Defrayo, who is a marvelous photographer. So that was our little strike force and they took great pride in it. Their job was to go out and root around and find good stories. They were great at it. They could move fast. They were all wire service guys so they could process copy fast. They could write fast. And they had good eyes and good ears and they produced some really wonderful exclusives that nobody else could get. I never heard a whimper from the city desk. I expected I might, but nobody ever said anything. I just simply by-passed them. Q: How were they different, how were the tree-shakers were different from a reporter going out? A: They weren't any different. These were the big boppers. They were experienced hands. They knew what they were doing. They knew what their job was and they knew how to do it. No, not every reporter understands that. -- <br><br> Section 9: Q: You said so many things here, I don't want to lose what we were talking about. Gammack being one, where you talked about getting information, what? I guess from wire services? Or, from where the action was going to be and then relaying that to him, to get him there? Was that how it worked? A: No. How it worked was, he did his own thing over there. Q: When he was there, you would send him somewhere? A: I could talk with him through the Saigon bureau chief, who could talk to him out in the field, because there was usually another AP guy around, especially up in the press center in Danang, where Gammack would be when he wasn't in Saigon or when he wasn't out in the field. So I had to talk through the AP to him. That's what I mean. It wasn't on the phone. It wasn't like, I say this and he said that. It was all by message, by written word. And I paid pretty good attention to what was going on. And I would just make a suggestion. I mean, he's the one that told me about the invasion of Laos, which was highly secretive at the time. But one of his old World War II or Korean War buddies, who was a public information officer, told him about it. And that's how we messaged. You know, "Do you think I ought to go?" And it came back to me and I said yes. So he went. He just climbed right up on a truck and away he went. Sixty-years old and he was terrific. Q: How many trips did he make to Vietnam? A: He made two to Vietnam, each of them about 30-45 days, something like that. I didn't want to keep him there all that time, because that's tough. It's really tough on you. The second time he went, it was with some specific ideas for coverage that we talked about, the main one being a phenomena over there called fragging. It was where the kids, the drunk soldiers would get mad at their sergeants or their second lieutenants, their platoon leaders or something and literally not only harass them and not do what he says, but try to harm him. That was a process called fragging. And I really wanted to know how widespread that was. He did several stories on that his second time over. So he did have some specific stuff. The war was winding down by then anyway. The AP bureau chief was really great. He became good friends with both of us. I'm thinking of that AP guy's name. I can't think of it right off hand. I got his book. Q: Was his name Peterson? A: Peter Arnett. Q: He's on CNN now. A: He's at CNN, yes. Peter Arnett. He was the guy that was in Manila with the prisoner exchange. He didn't know any more than anybody else. Actually, Gammack and him became really good friends. Peter used to stop by Des Moines sometimes and Gammack would put on a chicken fry or something for him. But I just can't - you know, reporters - I said this before - reporters make editors look good. And I've got example after example of how good writers and good reporters and good copy editors can really - you know, I can kind of bask in their sunshine, because they did it all. All I did was give them the freedom.