Frances Craig interview about journalism career, Des Moines, Iowa, March 18, 2000

Section 1: Q: Today we are talking with Frances Craig of Des Moines at her address at 4316 Grand Avenue, Apartment #9. Today is the 18th day of March, 2000. Frances, let's just start off with kind of some general topics about what your time was at the Register. You were involved in the changes to convert what was considered the society section into a more mass appeal section in the home and family. What do you remember about the Home and Family section when you arrived in 1964? A: I arrived a long time in Des Moines, before 1964. I arrived in 1944 with my husband. Q: When you arrived at the paper? A: I arrived in Des Moines and was associated with the paper through my husband's employment in the early fifties. I didn't begin my participation until 1964 and when I came we were a Home and Family section, but essentially the newspaper, that section, the E section, still was a strong society section. Lots of weddings and engagements and parties and pictures of visitors and personals. I was hired - shall I tell you how I came? Q:Yes, please. A:Okay. I came as a back-to-work homemaker. I'd had a brief and pretty inauspicious career for half a dozen years or so at a little newspaper, a little weekly, right out of college, University of Idaho, and a daily newspaper in Lewiston, and then Meredith and then a long sojourn at home with some freelance writing but an awful lot of baking and cookies and decorating - making slip covers and participating in a lot of the very kinds of things that were being written about in the old society section, except I wasn't society. Q: What was your freelance? What were you writing about when you were freelancing? A: When I was freelancing, I was writing for Meredith publications, mostly handwritten copy. I wrote A Park, the first garden book. This would have been about 1950-51, something like that and I mainly just combed through a lot of Fleeta Woodruff's material, Fleeta being the garden editor, and organized and wrote pet lines and did this kind of stuff. Over the years, I did this - not extensively at all. But for other editors, I also did assorted freelance. One I remember that was really different was Division of Flying Parenthood that I wrote news stories and went out and covered meetings of the human eugenics board or something, downtown sterilization of feeble-minded people and feeble-minded is exactly what they were called. Q: What year was this, about? A: This probably was in the late fifties or maybe mid-fifties or somewhere in there. And I do remember that this, as far as I was concerned, involved just doing a good job of covering a meeting and getting a story into the Register. It ran in the news, numbers of how many were reviewed by this board, division of the human whatever it was called, human resources department. And then, I was astonished with Joe Rattner who was editor of Better Homes and Gardens at that time, I was appalled when he knew what I was doing because he thought this was a dreadful thing, that this was a real civil violation of the rights of these persons. And, of course, it was discontinued. Well, that was an odd and different thing I did. I wrote toward the end of my days at home. I remember I was writing and rewriting and writing a little bit of original stuff for a sorority magazine that Fern Bonamies, who was national editor. Anyway, some magazine that I wrote a part of. That's the kind of thing. A real assortment, but really not impressive stuff at all. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: How did you come to the Register? A: I saw the necessity - my husband and I saw the necessity for my going back to work because we had two collegians upcoming and my girls were by then in junior high. I had been assured that I'd been entertained for a job at Meredith and I was ready to go back to work, so I went down one day to have lunch with some of my friends who still were there and drop in on somebody who was likely to help me initiate this process, Jack Balace, who by then was head of the book division. Jack was just going toward the parking lot as I entered the building and so I left a note for Jack and went home. That very afternoon, I had a telephone call from Mary Bryson. Mary was probably my first friend in Des Moines. She and Bill Bryson, being friends with Moxes and mine. And Mary worked off and on with the Register from the time she was right out of college. Mary was familiar with my writing and my interests and we had talked about stories for the paper. The Register and Frank Eyerly was looking at maybe more features for Frank and Larry Hutchinson, who was a fiery little editor of the women's department at that time. It had had a few, as I understand and remember. Mary had written, I think, probably mainly what they had and I was always suggesting things to Mary that I thought would make good stories, most of which weren't written. She said, "There's a job here, filling in society, a summer job. Why don't you come down with your big ideas?" She talked to Larry Hutchinson. It wasn't exactly a try-out, because absolutely I had chores and society to do. They were unfamiliar chores to me because I had been adamant always that I didn't ever want to work in a women's department for society. Q: But you had experienced it. A: The experience that I had - I had had an opportunity to do that. And I didn't want to go anywhere near a society department. Q: Tell me why, though. Why didn't you want to do that? A: I suppose, when it came down to it, that the kind of reporting that men did was more status-y. It was better paid. It was a lot more varied and exciting. And I absolutely didn't want to get locked in to society reporting. I took the job absolutely with an agenda. At the same time, I did these little chores that I've never done before in my life. I went to the counter and took the stories from the brides. I wrote that stuff as fast as I could and then got to my own stories that I had lined up for myself. Q: You were paying your dues? A: Yes, and I really wasn't writing the society very well at all. I don't remember that I made any absolutely terrible mistakes but I do remember that I was kind of appalled at the things that we had to ask. It was quasi-news. It was the funniest mixture of stuff. It wasn't regarded as full news or very important at all, I felt, by the men, and yet there were these odd requirements of news. For example, maybe Jane or others have told you that we had to ascertain whether this bride to be had ever been married before, God forbid. Did Jane tell you that? Q: I don't remember, no. A: It was very important that you list a previous marriage in this wedding story, this wonderful rite of passage that this young woman was going to clip out and save all her life had to relate that she had been previously married. And sometimes they were just agonizing experiences over this. I do remember that I talked to one couple, not couple, mother and daughter. That's usually the way it transpired. And when they learned that she had to tell about this previous marriage, they agonized over this and eventually her father came down. He was a man of some supposed influence and even he couldn't deter this kind of coverage. And Jane by then was wonderfully diplomatic, and still Jane was talking to the principles. I was well out of it and gladly. I don't think that particular story that I remember with my initial involvement ever ran because the father related that she had been so briefly married the first time around that most of their friends didn't even know it. Well, it seemed appalling to me and oh, there were some other things. I remember that I was a woman referred to as Mrs. Nottsgrey, Mrs. Earl Kennedy, and it struck me that they were not allowed to be individuals at all. Many things have changed. So I wrote my stories. All of these stories were my own ideas, and one of the first things I remember writing was the changing role of the minister's wife. I don't know whether I have that or not. I know I have it here somewhere [rustling sounds as she looks for it]. These stories I quickly came to know. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: But Frank Eyerly was very demanding of the stories you were going to write and also this idea of changing from a society to a Home and Family section? A: No, no. It was almost - this was low-key enough that I really thought the whole thing was my idea. Frank was, I certainly came to know, the moving force. And Larry Hutchinson was executing what it was that Frank wanted and was all together answerable in his approval. Every story, of course, that I ever wrote was read both by Larry and by Frank. And I think all was throughout my career with Frank. Maybe this was justice, too, that this was a story of some import. I came to know that these stories did have some certain requirements. We were, at that time, quite uniquely a statewide newspaper. Our statewide aspect was very important. So my stories had to have either some real reference to people in places of Iowa and to emanate from particular places of some places that are more necessary - not more desirable than others. We were competing around particular areas, competing with particular papers, the state newspapers. Q: Like where? A: Cedar Rapids and the Quad Cities. Very, very competitive. Dubuque. I remember those and I remember particular things about the competition, very real competition, that I felt with their staff. Q: Like what kind of things? A: It was wonderful to get a story in that area that they hadn't touched or hadn't even thought about out from under their noses. It was gratifying to be copied. And they were very good competition, indeed. They had some wonderful people on their staff. I remember being very competitive with the Quad City Times. Bill Wunderen, I think, even then was feature editor at the Quad City Times and an assigned writer himself. He had some good staff people. I remember Julie McDonald wrote. She was an author of some books and wrote feature stories. It was nice to know that I had their regard, which I felt I did, in the experience of the competition. There was some funny things. The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald was competitive with us. I don't remember that I ever really knew the people there but I just knew they were really competing with us and they were good competition. I recall that when we went to cover a story from the Dubuque area, that we flew. That's another thing we could talk about. That's a real difference. Anything over a couple of hundred miles, we frequently flew to get that story. I would initiate story and a photographer and I would fly over. I realized that the people at the Dubuque airport would call the staffers at the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald and tell them we were in town. And they were really just all but following our rental car! Maybe they did. Q: I'll be darned! A: Very, very competitive. A very healthy, good thing. Q: You were writing feature stories and human-interest stories in this Home and Family section. Were society stories still being written at the time? A: Oh, indeed. Q: When did they start being phased out? A: They were certainly being crowded out, crowded into the other pages. I can't tell you how much they featured on the front of the section. I really don't remember. The society stories continued to be important. They were still pretty important even when I left at the end of 1980. But they were being squeezed out. And I guess, partly, they were being squeezed out. I wrote an awful lot of stuff, long page-filling stories and stories on the inside and I had some help from others on the staff. Mary wrote Hans Bernstein stories. I say, had some help. I sound rather vain and glorious. Mary was writing home furnishings, wonderful home furnishings. Was it Dorothy Yagland then? Yes, I think so. She was writing the Registers and Jean Toman was writing absolutely marvelous feature stories related to food, in the Tribune. So the inside and sometimes the front of the section carried that sort of material. It wasn't society, it was women's. These were considered women's interest stories and they ran along side the social events. Then, after my really mopping those front pages for a good while, I was joined by some other feature writers whose directions were pretty much what I had. The same intent to cover all of Iowa. Hit Iowa. If you're not hitting it, in places and people, you hit it with an interest that is very likely to capture everybody around the state and it certainly was supposed to include men, at least a good part of the time. This meant that the stories had to have some human theme, some thread that would enthrall people wherever they lived. Q: Both men and women. A: Yes. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: May I be so bold as to ask you how much you were paid when you started at the Register? A: Yes, I will tell you how much I was paid. At the end of that summer when I came in I had been called from Meredith and they told me they did have something they thought I would be interested in at Meredith. It didn't hurt that those calls came in on the phones and my associates happened to pick up the phone and tell Larry Hutchinson that Meredith was calling Frances. I don't remember how much I started out on for that summer job. But Frank Eyerly called me in at the end of the summer, probably August or September, and he told he really liked what I was doing a lot and he said, "I'll pay you - I want to pay you what any man makes in the news room" I presume that's on a starting position or comparable position and that magnificent sum was $125.00 a month. That was, for 1963, I think. I compare that with what my husband was getting and indeed it was a comparable position. He was an editor. Q: How was it to work in the same business and at the same employment office as your husband? Were you treated differently? A: No. As I'm sure others have told you, this was a sensitive issue in many newspapers. It was at the Lewiston Morning Tribune when I was there to gather - and you simply weren't hired in the same newsroom. The Register and Tribune all seemed to be very receptive to couples and, in fact, seemed to kind of like it in couples. I never knew of us being anything except an asset to everybody, to be employed together. The only problem was that hours could sometimes make a difference. Q: How was that? A: Definitely back in those early, early days when I worked at Meredith, especially, that he was working night time and I was working day time. So there were those inconveniences, but it seemed to me that at the Register that there was some attempt to coordinate hours of people. There was certainly a great awareness toward making it a pleasant experience. One thing I want to get into this kind of beginnings that I am relating is that I was incredibly fortunate. I think that my early experience was certainly not all that auspicious. I really had not worked very long at all or certainly famously at all. I demonstrated, I think pretty early in my life, a strong writing ability and every place I ever worked, every job I ever had, I think I rather distinguished myself as a writer and as an innovator, which probably had a lot to do with my coming in so confidently as I did. I look back and think how very brash and confident I was. But I was also so very fortunate in being brought in at exactly the right time in exactly the right place with people who encouraged and recognized what I did. I was very lucky. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: And there was this transition going on from the fifties society to the home and family of the sixties. A: Not for public purposes, really. Obviously it was and Mary and I have talked a good deal about that. I see Mary every single week at least. Mary and I go out together once a week, anyway. Q: You're talking about Mary Bryson? A: Mary Bryson. Mary Bryson and I. Mary tells me that this absolutely was in the thinking. I certainly didn't invent the feature story for the Des Moines Home and Family section. And of course feature stories were being written in other parts of the newspaper, but not to the extent that they have came to be. Feature stories had kind of a second place position. Hard news was what held regard in those days. Feature stories were soft news. I wanted to write, I gravitated to the feature story although I do take some pride in the fact that I was a good reporter, too. And I think I demonstrated that in this job that I held, although ostensibly, I was a major feature writer. I also did some good reporting and was rewarded for it. But features were kind of the cupcakes of newspaper. Q: Oh? Okay, the soft side of the news. But there were the society writers and there were the feature writers and the feature writers, it seems to me, were people with a little more journalistic background. A: Not necessarily. Lil McLaughlin - are you familiar with that name? Q: Yes, I sure am. She was a columnist. A: She wasn't a columnist like me. She was a feature story writer. [interrupted by phone]. Lil came to work in the society section. I don't know how long she worked there before she was moved over to the Tribune and she was writing features for as long as I can remember and wonderfully. She was a fine writer. She, of course, had a very southern accent and had come from - I don't remember what southern state, but she started out in society. Some of the about the earliest features that I remember - of course, they were men writing features, writing many, many. Gene Raffensperger. You interviewed Gene. He wrote great personality stories. Q: You had also said that you liked doing the reporting part of it. Did you ever do hard news for the Register? A: No, not officially. But certainly some of the stories that I wrote were hard news. It always pleased me when the men made the observation that they wished they had got the story first. What I wrote were news stories with some strong newsworthy component. I'm thinking of some examples. I remember that I did some kind of hard-hitting stories on inflammatory materials for sleepwear, inherent tragedy in them and what the restrictions were in these stories. I can't say that certainly it was altogether my stories, but they did result in some changes in what legal requirements of manufacturers. Q: So you had an impact? A: Yes, I think a lot of the stories that I did had real impact. One that comes to mind with a social impact of some kind, I did one when couples were beginning to live together and this, of course, was fodder for lots of stories in one way or another. A story on exactly what the legal implications of that might be. When did it turn into a common law marriage? Some of these stories I did a great deal of work on and a great deal of hard, good reporting and I came up with illustrations. I remember, I believe I had some names in that because there had been a case in Burlington involving some lawsuit on the part of the would-be common law wife. This hadn't been in our newspaper and that made a very good and instructive, and to some people, a rather frightening story. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: You wanted me to ask you about getting along with photographers, too. What did you have in mind? A: I had some real personal trauma and the photographers did too. My job was such a kind of an ambiguous one and here I was attached to what was considered pretty unimportant stuff. Photographers certainly didn't take society assignments seriously at all or find them thrilling and challenging. And here was this back-to-work housewife posting assignments. We had a little rigmarole for signing up our stories and I would have initiated all these stories. They would have, quite possibly, been written or had all but been written and it was imperative that they have some good art because this was going to make a beautiful page, hopefully. But this assignment came out of society and the photographers, really at first, were not very friendly at all to these assignments. They were not thrilled to have them. I'm sure I wasn't any expert certainly in the human relations factor of it. The pictures had a kind of real importance to photographers as expression or their art, just as my stories had a lot of importance to me as an expression of my writing part. Look Magazine had really set the standards for them all. I think many of them wanted Look and Life. Photography was really in a great ascendancy at that time and it had been emphasized. These young photographers had graduated as journalism graduates. It was required in the newsroom then that people be college graduates. And just as I had graduated, probably with a lot more journalism than I had because when I was in school journalism was a division of the English department. And they, by god, were every bit as professional as I was and I remember the worst, awful faux pau you make was to refer to a photographer as my photographer. You went with a story, had done a little bit of working with photographers with Meredith, not much. But it was a different experience because there, you initiated or somebody had initiated the story and the photographer really was clearly illustrating something. But these were photographers who worked from a different starting point. And it was their intention to go out and get interesting, wonderful photographers and they frequently advised me that they hadn't read my story. And it was clear that they darn well didn't intend to. They would just go out and get - then the art wouldn't fit the story. So it was kind of a mutual agony. I wasn't the only person from my department who had that experience. I remember that they did not take the story of a woman journalist, a woman, especially one coming from the direction that I did, seriously at the onset. Later, I think maybe I developed a little more experience in working with the photographers and maybe they were a little more skillful and thoughtful than I perhaps was. I was so terribly, earnestly intent on that story. And I did have later very good nice friendships with some particular photographers. In looking back over some of these old papers as I did a little bit, in preparation, I really did appreciate what a superb job that those photographers who all but brought me to unshed tears, what a good job we both did. Reading the stories now, I thought those stories read pretty damn good! Q: Go ahead and hold that up to the camera, just a page, so we can see the page with the photography. I'd like to ask you another question, too. A: Okay. I don't know whether this is a good one to hold up but it happens to be on top and it's one - this was a story that was a lot of fun. I had initiated the idea of doing a story on old churches that had turned into something. And I proposed it as Ghost Churches, that they were just ghosts of what they had been before. They were everything from bars to schools to private homes. I asked one of the photographers, I posted a query - this was in 1974, about whether they knew, if they were familiar with any churches that had been other things. And a photographer, Chuck Anderson, did have a couple. A: He knew about one in Dubuque. Anyway, we had quite a lot of freedom. I think it was a lot more generous experience on the part of management, at least affecting me, that I was getting some - Q: [interrupts] Would you two pick out the photos together? Or would he pick it out? A: This was a very happy experience, I remember, with Chuck that we pretty much did it together. I think he had read some synopsis at least of what my story would be. This was such fun. I remember we were out for several days. It was autumn, and this lent itself to the ghostly theme and this, actually, I think was taken in Dubuque maybe. Around there, Bellevue. Anyhow, there were so many other instances. I thought about this when I was - I think I put on top here, that I would initiate these ideas. Q: That's okay. We've got an idea of what some of the stories were like. You said that there might have been some conflict, though, where they were arrogant enough not to read your story and you would like a picture that fit the story. Were there times where it just didn't work out? A: Yes! You bet! Q: Those would be times that you didn't sit together and pick out the photo. A: True. That's true. That I would initiate the story and I remembered making pleas, "You guys initiate a story. You initiate it and then let me go along and write the story. I'll write anything." Q: So the photographer would take the photo and you'd write around it? A: I offered to do this. I was responsible for getting out a certain number of stories. These were scheduled bang, bang, bang. And I had to be sure there was a story. And I would hope that I would get some suggestions from the photographers. [inaudible sentence]. I used to enjoy going out with Jervis. Jervis was an irascible guy, sometimes. He was a wonderful photographer. Pretty early on, I've held his regard and he was generally willing to do anything that I said was going to be a story. He expected that it would be and he was willing to read a little synopsis at least. Q: Did you ever take your own photos? A: No, God forbid! In fact, I did on a couple of occasions submit some idea of what I saw as a possibility. I'd get the story and I'd submit a possibility. This is was not a popular thing to do. It was a very jealous, possessive feeling that they had toward their art. Q: What do you mean, submit a possibility? You would take a picture and submit that to them saying this is my idea? A: Yes. I did that a couple of times and it was HOOTED down! Oh, I did some other atrocious things that I really had no experience in. The only photographic experience I ever had for any publication is that I'd take some pictures on the old speed graphic when I - do you even know what a Speed Graphic is? Q: No. What was it? A: A big, hand-held slide thing. Q: Probably with the flash bulb over it. A: Yes, and I learned, barely, to use this thing when I was in college and we did some internship for some of our class work on the Daily Idahoan. Somewhere I learned and when I worked on the Colfax Gazette Commoner, the weekly in Washington State, I took a few photographs with it, but there again we did have a photographer, I think one. So I was guilty of knowing very little about the whole thing and having some opinions about what would make a good picture. And I did this atrocious thing once of cutting some contacts apart and doing a little layout. I just thought they would absolutely lynch me. [laughter]. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: You mentioned that there was this tremendous hostility, as you put it, in the male dominated newsroom. A: Did I say tremendous hostility? I probably over-spoke. Q: Okay, maybe a little bit of hostility. Tell me about that. A: I felt when I came back to work. Of course, it was in 1964, 1963, Betty Friedan had written what became the famous Feminist Mystique and that was filtering through our press. We were reading about this book and some influences, even somewhat at the time I came to work, and certainly afterward there was a gaining awareness of what then was called liberation movement. Q: Women's Liberation? A: And while I was probably in some ways a very good candidate for that. I grew up with a mother who was an early suffragette. I was ambitious for me. It was disappointing actually when I married, although I married a man who was Phi Beta Kappa, voted the most promising man in my class of journalists, anyway. And my mother didn't even come to my wedding, she was so disappointed. My very loving mother. I had had a little success and a little acclaim in my early writing and she saw a career for me, a pretty good career, as did some of my teachers and others along the way. And she said, "Wherever you go, you'll always be directed by where your husband goes." And this indeed, was the case. So I was somewhat a candidate but at the same time, I'd been very happily a homemaker for a good period of time and tuned in very happily on it all. I very well knew the inequities of employment fields almost really everywhere. My father was sure I would never get a job as a journalist or it would be a lowly job. I'd prepared myself to be a teacher as well. When I went back to work and the movement was just getting started, I was certainly interested, very interested in it and sympathetic to it. But more than that, almost, because I was so immersed in my work. I do things with considerable enthusiasm and I was an at-home woman with a lot of enthusiasm for many years and just as enthusiastic in my return to a job. I was a good reporter. I saw this as a great story. I began seeing all the possibilities in this, in coverage and reporting it. And although I was given a free hand almost all together, I surely felt the resistance in the newsroom, in the male-dominated newsroom. To this, as a topic and I was appalled at the stereotyping of the women in the movement by my male colleagues. Shall I go ahead and tell you about it? Q: About what? A: My little story. Q: I'd like to hear it. A: When we were becoming aware that there was such a thing as a women's movement, or that the women were restive. The women WERE restive. Then my male editors gave that some heed and decided to throw a cross over to the women. And also to make an attempt to enlist the male readers. I don't know whether I mentioned that earlier, as being one of the requirements of these feature stories, especially. We wanted to draw men into reading the section. I remember saying in despair, we'll never get the men to read the section, I can't even get the photographers to read it. Q: First you had to get the photographers. [laughter by both].