George Mills interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, April 23, 1998

Section 1: [beginning of transcript not available] A: When he visited Des Moines in 1959, John F. Kennedy said, "I cheered for Iowa and I prayed for Notre Dame." Jimmy Carter, for instance, when he came here in '77 when we had the fuel shortage and we had gas lines, and one of the things he said, I covered it for WHO-TV at the time, he was president, he said, "Why, you people out here shouldn't have any trouble with gasoline shortages. Fifty years ago, you made alcohol out of your corn and burned the alcohol in your cars." Well, I put myself in a position where he had to pass me when he went out and I said, "Mr. President, you said they burned that alcohol. They didn't do any such thing. They drank it. Those were the bootleg days." Well, he smiled and went on and then he came back and said, "I gave you the Baptist version." Another time when Lyndon Johnson was down in Warren County, he liked to show off his farm knowledge and farm aptitudes. He was out in the hog lot and so he tried his pig call to call the pigs to come and eat. They went the other way. They apparently didn't like his Texas brogue. Herbert Hoover, when he came in 1932 to announce his candidacy for re-election, in an election when he knew he was going to get clobbered, he sat on backstage at the Coliseum with his head in his hand, very dejected. Mrs. Hoover went over and grabbed him by the shoulders and said, "Herbert, straighten up and be a man." The guy went out and made a terrific speech, a wonderful speech. He was plenty good. But, of course, nothing would have saved him. Another time when Eisenhower and Adlai [Stevenson] were battling for the presidency in '52, I got a lucky break in that I was up in Minnesota at the national plowing contest where they both spoke at separate times. Well, they both had lunch separately in the host farmhouse. And, one of the things, of course, was that everybody in the crowd, five hundred cameramen, all wanted a shot of both of them eating lunch at different times. They finally said, "OK, we will let six of you in at a time. You go in the back door. You take your shots for two minutes. Then you go out the front and six more will come in." I always carried a camera, so I became a cameraman. I got in the line and went in and shot several shots. I saw Ancher Nelson, a congressman from Minnesota over by the kitchen door. So, I went over to shake hands with him and I looked in. And here is the big, fat farm woman washing dishes. On an impulse, I walked in and pushed her away from the sink and said, "You shouldn't have to do this on this day. Let me do it." Lo and behold, it worked. I was in the kitchen the whole time that Eisenhower and Adlai were eating lunch and I got all kinds of great stuff eavesdropping on them. Q: Did you use that in the story? A: Yeah. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: Why don't we start out with how you got into journalism. Where you were born, where you went to school. A: I was born in Chicago. A below-poverty level family, but a family that was a book family. We had a collection of books going back to my grandfather Mills. We never had much money. My father used to do a lot of reading. He worked at Marshall Fields downtown and he used to go around to second hand book joints at noontime buying books for a nickel or a dime. Stuff like that. So that, it was my privilege to grow up with a bunch of books. He had a bunch of Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, books, about this many. When I was nine, he said, "Don't read those. You are not old enough." So, I read them. Then also, one of the things that I remember that affected me, when I was about nine, I think it probably affected me more than any book I have ever read, and that is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I am sure I didn't get much of it, but nothing affected me like that book did. I read with my feet up on the stove. You see, we had a house with no furnace. No electric lights. No telephone. But I never will forget that book as long as I live. I was born June 15, 1906. I will be ninety-two in June. I wanted to be a writer because I was surrounded by books, so to speak. The other thing I wanted to be in, and this was paramount, I wanted to pitch for the Chicago Cubs. But, I never made it. I was a skinny little kid. I never did have enough heft to be a top-flight pitcher, although I got by in the Big Ten all right. I played against Iowa maybe four or five times. Once in a while, they knocked me loose from my back teeth and some of the other time, I did all right. I did pitch a four-hitter against Iowa one time. Then, it was my hope that I could, on graduating, get a job as a sports writer and pitch at the same time. So, that was the reason...well, it wasn't the reason, because I was happy to get a job anyplace. I was out hitchhiking and I stopped in Marshalltown because one of my fraternity brothers, Northwestern fraternity brothers, lived there. I stayed with him overnight. His father took me down to the Times Republican and I got a job at the Times Republican. The thing was that organized ball in Marshalltown, it was a Class D league, went to the devil. There wasn't any organized ball in Iowa at all because the depression was coming on and baseball was having a tough time. So, I ended up with the sports writers job all right, but I didn't end up with the Cubs. Which I wasn't going to end up with anyway. That is sort of the outline of my beginnings. I was enthusiastic about the Cubs beginning in 1916 when I was ten years old. My father would give me a dollar on my birthday. It cost me twenty-five cents to get in in those days. Three cents each way on the streetcar. That made it thirty-one cents. Ten cents for peanuts. That's forty-one cents took care of a baseball game for me. So, my father's dollar gave me two baseball games and eighteen cents profit. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Take us from the Marshalltown paper to the [Des Moines] Register. A: I was on the Marshalltown paper for five years. I have bound volumes here to show you...how different - you are talking about history. You ought to know about how different the Marshalltown paper was. There never was any local news in our paper on the front page. There never was anything but Iowa news on the second and third pages. All local news was in the back part of the paper. The last page was market, but the last half-dozen pages were the local news. Something that you never see anymore. And some very interesting things on the heads, for instance. They are very complex things that you wonder why the newspaper had such long heads. And then, what was interesting about it, Paul Norris and I, up there, we were reporters together. We were the reporters on the paper, the two of us. And I was the sports editor as well. I was sports editor for the first two hours every morning. Then I was the courthouse reporter. I was city council reporter Monday night. And I covered baseball games at night. Football games and stuff like that. But the two of us were the reporters. Plus the fact that the city editor, Joe Whitacre, was a very prolific writer, too. So, really, three guys turned out the paper. The local part of it. The interesting thing about those heads - we frequently wrote the head before we wrote the story. As Paul said, it enabled us to sum up our thoughts. Q: What do you think about that idea of having national news on the front page and local news inside? A: I think there is something to be said for departmentalizing. I think maybe one of the mistakes the Register made in about the '40s or 1950 in which they dropped what we used to call the "Local News Section" of the Sunday paper, which was Iowa news. The whole section. They changed that and diffused it and I think they lost ground to the Omaha World-Herald thereby, because the Omaha World-Herald did a tremendous job of concentrating the Iowa news in the Iowa part of its edition in that one section. Q: You think that is better than what we have now? A: Now you don't have that type of thing at all. But I think there is something to be said for it. And, as far as that goes, we used to say that if you ran the local news on the front page in Marshalltown in my time, three-quarters of the people would miss the story. It sounds screwy, but that's the way it was. But, as I said, I was the sports editor for two hours every day. That included writing a column. Of course, as far as that goes, we didn't pay any attention to hours. We worked six days a week in the first place. Q: What was your salary? A: To begin with, I got twenty-five dollars a week when I first started. Then I got a hundred a month. They cut me down to a hundred a month. Then I got up to a hundred and forty-five a month. They boosted me that much. And one hundred and forty-five a month was darn good pay because I ate on a dollar a day. Twenty-five cents for a small steak dinner in Henry Wachter's place up on Main Street in Marshalltown. I paid two dollars and a half a week for a very nice room. My landlady did my washing and laundry for fifty cents a week. So, I saved money. Then, when I went to Des Moines... Q: Why did you leave Marshalltown to go to Des Moines? A: I wasn't feeling very well and I just took a few months off. Then we ended up in Des Moines. I stopped in at the Register. John Silence from Marshalltown was working as assistant state editor. He told me that they needed a copy reader. I went in and I got the job. The first week, eighteen dollars. The second week, twenty-five. In six months, I was up to thirty-seven fifty, which was going pretty good. I quit for the reason that I am too much of a bum. I do not want to be in the office. I want to be out on the street as a reporter. So, I quit in '34 and I was told by Ken MacDonald, the news editor, "You are never going to get a job on this paper again. Quitting like you did." Well, anyway, then I quit and I took a job with the Iowa Daily Press Association. Do you know what that was? It was an organization of about forty daily afternoon papers in Iowa whose sole purpose was to squelch the Register. Because the Register's circulation was coming up so fast, you know, and it was really a superior paper. So, the Iowa Daily Press hired me to be a one-man bureau in Des Moines to steer as much news as I could toward the afternoon papers. They were all afternoon, really, daily except for Sioux City. So I was out to not have the Register carry exclusive news in the morning paper, state news that is, mostly out of the statehouse, rather than have the Register get some of it. I was engaged in a battle to steer all the news I could to the afternoon papers. But, I decided that wasn't a whole lot of fun just doing that. So, I went out to see how much I could scoop the Register. In other words, get exclusive stories in the papers out in the state. As you guys know, you can't keep a reporter from getting the news. I don't care who you are. If a guy works, he is going to get news. Well, I worked and worked hard, and I got some pretty good scoops. I got a scoop on one that I remember the Cedar Rapids Gazette put the Sunday line on and that was the fact that Iowa law forbade the sale of liquor, liquor by the drink, in those days. Here, the federal government had issued retail liquor dealer licenses to some seventeen or eighteen hundred bootleg joints in Iowa. I got the list and, boy, the Cedar Rapids Gazette really went to town with that. They used to love scooping the Register and, of course, we weren't very popular with the Register reporters either. But that was the Iowa Daily Press Association. Vern Marshall of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and Earl Hall of the Mason City paper. Dubuque, Davenport, Muscatine, Sioux City, Marshalltown, Ames, Centerville, Mt. Pleasant, Bollington, and so forth. They all just loved it. I don't think it had any real affect on the Register, because the Register circulation just kept soaring. But it gave them all, out in the state, a feeling that they were giving the Register some come-uppance from the little guys. Kicking the big guy in the teeth. Q: After the Register, you worked for them. Then did you go to Cedar Rapids? A: I quit the Register and went to the Iowa Daily Press for forty dollars a week. Really good. I was with the Iowa Daily Press from '34 until '37 and then began the series in which I never applied for a job. I was invited into the rest of the jobs I had for the rest of my life. In 1937, the Associated Press offered me fifty bucks a week. Well, I jumped at that. I got along pretty well with the Associated Press until '42 when the Cedar Rapids Gazette, what did I get - eighty, I think. They offered me a job as City Editor of the Gazette. I took it and then I regretted it, even though I had a perfect set-up and I probably would have ended up as editor of the paper. But I just don't want to be in the office. So, I quit and came back to Des Moines with the AP and then when Ken MacDonald heard I was back, he invited me out to lunch and offered me a job. Even though he had told me some years before that I never could have a job again with him. So, I went with the Register and I spent the next thirty-some years with the Register. Legislative. Politics. Just whatever I wanted to do with the Register. I thought I had the best reporting job in the United States. No fooling. Because they would let me do anything. In other words, most of the news that I wrote, I originated. That is the way the Register functioned. Just turned guys loose. The paper was our religion. We really were out, by God, to show the world that we were turning out a good newspaper. So, I was in that job until I retired in '73. Then, after that, in '76...I continued to write. I wrote a book for the Register in that period. Then, in '76, I was retired and WHO-TV called me up. This was in the Jimmy Carter/ Jerry Ford campaign of '76. I said, "We have got a bunch of kids. They are good kids and all that, but they don't know anything about politics. How about coming to work for us for three or four months to cover the Carter campaign?" I said, "OK." And I did. And it lasted eight years. In other words, in December when the period was over, they wanted me to stay on. I stayed on from '76 until '84. -- <br><br> Section 4: In between, one of the things that I think is very interesting, it was to me, it was wonderful to me, from 1943 till 1954 the Register let me be the Iowa correspondent for Time, Life and Fortune magazines. It ended up with way too much work for me and if it hadn't been for my good wife, my late wife, I couldn't have done it because she sort of managed the telegrams and so forth. Time and Life and Fortune were just unbelievably wonderful to work for then. Actually, I made enough money out of them in that eleven years to buy my house twice over. I made about...in those days, you know, seventy-five dollars a week was good pay. Well, I was making seventy-five bucks a week on the side. And not only that, but whatever I originated or whatever they asked for, they didn't care if we ran it in the Register first. I had some pretty good stuff over the years. Certainly had a wonderful opportunity to see those big shots in action because they took us into New York for a week every year while we watched the Time and Life editors especially, put their magazines together every week. It was a class operation. Don't think it wasn't. So, that was a real advantage. I told you one about the American County deal. This was a Life picture story about Adair County, Iowa. I did the preliminary gathering of the facts. One of the interesting projects was that in '46, at the end of the war, the globe was in a bad food shortage as a result of so much war-time...the absorption of production into the war effort so that there just wasn't enough food in the world to go around. Well, Time asked for some suggestion that I might have as to some individual who would epitomize the productivity of the American farmer, who was going to rescue the world from this big famine. Which, probably, they did because the American farm production was just absolutely fabulous for the time. So, they said, "You pick out some guy who is of some other prominence than being a farmer." I said, "Sure. Gus Kuester of Griswold, Iowa. He is a big, raw-boned farmer who was also the Speaker of the Iowa House." They said, "OK." They sent a guy out from New York. I bird dogged it for him, told him all about him. They sent out a writer to write the story of Gus Kuester. Who did they send out? Whittaker Chambers. Now, I don't know how many of you know who Whittaker Chambers was. Well, man, you should know. He was one of the great Americans of his time. He was a former Communist who backed up on Communism and was the guy who really exposed Alger Hiss who was sitting as Roosevelt's [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] right hand as a Communist spy. That high up in the government. Roosevelt's trusted assistant. There is a book written by a guy from Grinnell, Sam Tannenhaus, called Whittaker Chambers. It came out last year. It is one of the great books of our time. And you if want to know about America's wrestling with the Communists, and it was a real proposition, and don't ever think there weren't all kinds of Communists that had infiltrated the American government, you ought to read that book. -- <br><br> Section 5: Another story one that was kind of fun. A guy out in Urbandale who was a hatchery salesman traveled around the country selling grain and stuff like that to hatcheries. He collected, from hatchery operators, all the chicks that he could who had malformations of one kind or another. One wing or something like that. In other words, chicks that weren't normal physically. He interbred them and he bred a breed of wingless chickens. Don't ever think that wasn't a sensation. I had control of that darn story. We ended up with a great big beautiful picture story in Life, a good text story in Time and we had it all over the paper in Des Moines before anybody did. That is the kind of stuff that I did for them. -- <br><br> Section 6: People usually ask, "What are your best stories?" You probably bump into that and you have a heck of a time figuring it out, don't you? I think maybe the most important story that I covered, I did cover thirteen national conventions and, of course, there was a lot of good stuff in those. But I think the most important story that I covered was Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech. I don't know how many of you know who Winston Churchill was or what the "Iron Curtain" speech was. [The Iron Curtain was the term given to the self-imposed isolation of communist countries in Eastern Europe and Asia during the Cold War. The term was popularized in a speech given by Sir Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946.] But that was the first...that was down at Fulton, Missouri and President Truman was there. I covered that for the Register. Then, forty-six years later, the Register dug me out of the mothballs and sent me down there to cover Gorbachev's speech in '92. I was the only reporter who was at both of them. In fact, three different television stations interviewed me down there, a St. Louis station and what not, because I had been at both of those historic meetings. -- <br><br> Section 7: Another story...most of us don't take the trouble to collect our clippings. One of the others that was pretty sensational, I went out to Glenwood, the state institution for the mentally retarded, one time in '56 because they had a new superintendent out there. And I got a story from him on...he had just arrived and they had found all kinds of interesting stuff dating back into the 1870s up in their attic. It was a good story. Good visuals and so forth. Before leaving, I said to him, Al Sasser his name was, "Al, I saw a story in the paper the other day about somebody in Chicago by the name of Bernadine Olson who had taken twenty mentally retarded people and given them very intensive education and training and succeeded in raising their IQ. You have got eighteen hundred mentally retarded people here. Are you doing anything to raise any of them up to normal?" He said, "Hell, we have got them normal here now." I said, "In this institution?" "Yeah." "You mean to tell me you have got people who are normal in this institution as mentally retarded?" "Yes." "Did you just get them?" "We got one guy who has been here for fifty-eight years." Well, you can imagine what I did with that. I said, "Lead me to that guy." They brought him over. He was a nice little fellow. He had been there since he was ten years old. He was sixty-eight years old. He played nine musical instruments. He subscribed to Time magazine and the Omaha World-Herald. He was foreman of the print shop. He gave piano lessons to kids in downtown Glenwood. Well, we went to town on that and Life magazine did, too. Can you imagine the wasted lives, just by carelessness, so to speak. We got some forty people freed from Glenwood. When I say, we, I mean we didn't do it. The authorities did. That was a pretty good one. And, as I say, Life magazine went to town with it. Q: Do you remember that guy's name? A: Mayo Buckner. -- <br><br> Section 8: Then, another story that attracted a lot of attention, some teenagers were playing chicken up in northern Iowa. Back in about 1949. Chicken was a game by which the kids drove head on toward each other and then would swerve at the last minute. See who had the guts to stay on the course and who would wilt. That type of thing. Well, they smashed into each other and four of them got killed. It was west of Hampton. And four of them were badly injured. It came up with a story about that one in the paper. [The teenage crash story first appeared as a routine report about six inches long in the paper. What I did was build it into a story five columns long.] You know what it would be. Commonplace, so to speak. I said to the boss, "How about letting me go up there and just letting me do a real take-out on that thing?" He said, "You think you can get a pretty good story out of it?" I said, "Yes." So I went up there and I talked to fifty different people. I was up there seventeen or eighteen hours. I came back and I wrote a story in which I sort of built the lives of all eight of those kids for their last three hours. The Register ran a five-column story on it. Can you imagine running a five-column story on an auto accident today. It was a line story. I wrote it a couple or three times and the telegraph editor, he didn't say anything to me. I thought, "My God, am I going to have to write it again?" Then the next thing I heard was from MacDonald. He said, "This story is going to be re-printed all over the United States." You know how that is. You sometimes write something that you think is darn good and nobody pays any attention to it and another time somebody writes something and, wow, it is great stuff. You never can predict. It ran in Reader's Digest and it ran in Look. I got a thousand dollars out of it from Reader's Digest which, a thousand bucks in 1949 was an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, I regretted the fact that I had to cash in on the stupidity and the loss of life of all those kids. -- <br><br> Section 9: I don't know. I worked for a year trying to nail down the fact that the governor of Iowa had cheated on his income tax. And I guess I broke the law in getting verification of it. But I didn't run it, or we didn't run it - when I say "I," I am just part of a newspaper, you can't say "I" too much - what we finally did is we went over to the governor and we said, "The report is everywhere that you have cheated on your income tax. If you did, if you are having trouble, you would be much better off to disclose it yourself rather than somebody else come out and dig it up and make it an expose' story." He was pretty well shocked by that time mentally and he agreed. So we ran it as an exclusive story. He had cheated to the extent of $16,000 on his income tax in 1949, which would be the equivalent to something over a hundred thousand now. It was a substantial amount at the time. [That was an exclusive story that shocked the state.] -- <br><br> Section 10: I wrote a story that two mothers of retarded children came up to me to see me about. Back in the '50s, I think it was. They said, "We aren't getting enough publicity on our efforts to handle the retardation problem in this state. Why can't you do something for us?" I said, "OK. You do what I say and we will go to town. I know you both have retarded children." One was from Forest City. I said, "Let me come up to your home." This is in the days when retarded kids were kept in the closet, you know. It wasn't out in the open at all. Families were ashamed of them. I said, "Let me come up there and write the story and let's put it out just exactly what the experience is of a family with a retarded child." They fell for it. They went for it. And that is what I did and I won a prize on that story, for whatever that was worth. -- <br><br> Section 11: Another thing I used to try to do. Everybody in the reporting business has his own procedures. I used to try to get into meetings where I wasn't supposed to be. Especially if it was some big shot. In 1954, Richard Nixon was vice president. He came and had a closed door conference down in the Kirkwood Hotel with the leaders of the Iowa Farm Bureau. Before he got there, I went down there and looked in the room from the sides so people couldn't see me necessarily and thought, "Nuts. Why don't I become a member of the Farm Bureau?" So I went in and sat very unobtrusively in a back seat. Nixon came in pretty soon and he sat on the edge of the table. He had a nice, formal, folksy conference with the Farm Bureau guys. Good story. Well, when it was over, my opposition - and we had opposition in those days, really honest-to-God opposition reporters in Des Moines. They saw me leaving the room. They were enraged and they jumped all over the Nixon people. "What do you let that guy in for?" Well, the Nixon people were just furious and they jumped all over me. I didn't give them the satisfaction. MacDonald was the executive editor then and he was in New York at an American Newspaper Association meeting. They called him and he called me back and said, "What's going on? Man, did I ever get a reaction." I told him and he laughed. We ran it, of course. But, before that, Nixon found out. He said, "What is going on?" Then he said, "Did I say anything on foreign policy? I don't want to embarrass the Eisenhower administration with some off-the-cuff comment on foreign policy." I said, "No, you didn't. You didn't say anything on it." So he said to his guys, and this is one reason why I have been pro-Nixon somewhat ever since, he said, "Let that guy alone. He showed enterprise." Another time, Tom Dewey was candidate for president. He was in Des Moines in 1948 and he had a closed-door conference with Iowa labor leaders. Well, I succeeded in becoming a temporary Iowa labor leader. I got in the room and I was in good shape until that darn [Bourke] Hickenlooper, he was then a United States Senator from Iowa, he decided he would take Dewey around and introduce him to all the labor leaders. Well, there wasn't any escape for me because we were on the twelfth floor of the Fort Des Moines Hotel. They reached me and Hickenlooper said, "You son of a bitch. What are doing in here?" He jumped all over me. Between the two of them, they made me promise that I wouldn't write anything that I had heard. And I didn't, but I told Dick Wilson, our Washington bureau chief and he wrote it. -- <br><br> Section 12: Q: Let me ask you something. You said, "The paper was our religion. We were out to show the world the Register was a great paper." What is it about the Register? Was it a combination of people? Was it the ownership? What happened in that era when the Register was a great paper and then take us to where the Register is now. A: Well, I don't want to go too far in taking you to where it is now, because I want to leave that up to somebody else. Let me go back to why I think we had that esprit de corps. And it was tremendous. There is no fooling about it. Does the name Gardner Cowles mean anything to you? Gardner Cowles was a country banker up in Algona. He was also a legislator for two terms. And, incidentally, for your archives, let me tell you this to take you up to date. One of the things I have done recently, and I am in the process of doing right now, I have about finished a twenty-thousand word article on the Cowles family as a power in the newspaper business. Gardner Cowles bought into the Register in 1903. Even though he wasn't originally a newspaperman, I think he is as close to a genius in newspapering as I have ever bumped into. They guy had the ability to charge people up. In the first place, he was willing to spend almost unlimited sums of money. As he put it, let me see if I can word it exactly as he put it - I can't seem to word it, but what it amounts to is what he wanted to do was sell enough advertising to make a lot of money to make a better newspaper to sell more advertising to make more money to make a better newspaper to sell more advertising and so forth, indefinitely. The guy's mentality wouldn't let him ever let up. The result was that that paper just had sensational circulation gains. It went from eight to ten to fourteen thousand when he first got it in 1903 up to, our biggest edition, which is the Sunday paper, centennial, five hundred and fifty thousand papers in a town of under two hundred thousand in 1949. There is nothing ever close to it. The guy just knew how to motivate people and, at the same time, he was just a tremendous businessman. He didn't let up on anything and nobody around him was able to ever let up because he wouldn't let them. But, at the same time, he had that motivation power. A: One of the things about the Register, the first half of the century was the Golden Era. There is no question about it. The second half, it changed because the situation changed. Look magazine, which had been a big success, failed. The Des Moines Tribune had to discontinue because television was soaking up so much national advertising. Also, the Register was not able to maintain circulation in all ninety-nine counties the way that it had. But, at the end of the century, what happens? The Register had, with a great struggle - the Register people - had taken over the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. It sold for one billion, four hundred million dollars. That was the Register's biggest story, I think, of the last half of the century. But I am also of the opinion that when you get one billion, four hundred million dollars, mostly into a family, my God, I am entitled to know how much everybody got individually. And I am fighting with them right now, trying to get at the figures. I have got some figures. I know some people got one hundred and fifty million dollars and that ain't chicken feed. I am maintaining that when you are in the newspaper business, you are not in the position to hold out anything. In other words, I want those figures. I have got some allies on my side in the family. So, I am engaged in a ninety-two year old battle to jar loose some figures that haven't been out even though the sale was completed several months ago. You have touched it, though. There is something different about this guy. One of the things that he insisted upon, at all times, anything involving the family had to be in the paper. [Gardner] "Mike" Cowles, one of the sons, had three divorces. Every one of them was reported on the front page. And, so far as advertising pressure and so forth, back at the end of World War II, all our prices and our economy were subject to price ceilings. Well, I covered the OPA. That was one of my jobs. One day, I flushed a story of a deal that had been cooked up secretly between the OPA and the Iowa Laundry Association so that the laundry companies were going to be able to boost their price ceilings and get more money for their services and the labor union, the laundry workers, were going to get higher ceilings on their wages. I had it and flushed it. I was sitting and typing it at my desk and here comes a call with a favorite epithet that I have had all my life. Some guy said, "You son of a bitch. I don't want that story in the paper. Our association spends fifty thousand dollars a year with your company and we don't want that story in the paper." Well, you know, you pass it off. So, he slams the phone and pretty soon I get a call from the advertising manager. He said, "I was told a long time ago, 'Don't fool around with the news.' Just tell me what is happening." I told him. We ran it as a top head on page one. Maybe a week later, I discovered that this laundry guy had called Mike Cowles in New York where Mike was running Look magazine. Mike said, "Mister, I don't have any control over those reporters in Des Moines." That shows the attitude of them. The realization that you had to be square with the public in running your paper. -- <br><br> Section 13: Q: Were you sad when they sold the paper to Gannett? A: Yes, I was sad. But, on the other hand, I wasn't what you call "happy" with it without the management that it had. Just imagine the management. You would go to MacDonald or one of those guys and say, "Hey. The battleship Iowa is going to sail into mothballs in Norfolk, Virginia on Thursday. We ought to be on it." "Sure. Go ahead. Arrange your transportation." Which I did and I was on it. I dictated by radio-telephone from out in the Atlantic back to the paper. That kind of stuff happened all the time. Another time, you know, Iowa was in the Rose Bowl for the first time in 1957. That was [Eveshevski] Evy's first Rose Bowl. I said to Frank Eyerly, "There are going to be fifteen thousand Iowans out there and they are going to get in all kinds of trouble and there will be a lot of fun. There will be lots of good news." "Sure. Go ahead." So, I was out there for a week. That is the kind of paper it was. They had no worries, shall we say, about the budget or anything like that. I went to Vietnam with Governor Hughes that way in '65. I was gone for three weeks. In fact, nobody knew where I was because I couldn't get anything out of Vietnam. The military had all the communications blocked. You couldn't even telephone. You couldn't wire. You couldn't do anything. My family didn't know where I was. It was not what you would call a tea party anyway, with the type of fighting that was going on. But I went to Vietnam and got a lot of Iowa stuff that nobody else had. They just took a tremendous amount of pride in turning out a good Iowa newspaper. In newspapers, there are all kinds of cross-currents all the time. About half the reporters think the editors are stupid the way they choose news or what they eliminate. You know what reporters are up against. But the general thought on the thing was that, as I have said since and as I have said now, I think I had the best job in the United States because they let me do everything I wanted to. -- <br><br> Section 14: Q: Changing directions a little bit, you have worked in newspapers, magazines and in TV. Would you talk a little about the differences in those and what your preferences are? A: TV, let's take that first. Its advantages are indisputable. This big picture that I showed you of the wire photo picture. When wire photo first came in, that was a absolutely sensational. When the Hindenburg exploded, here is how the Register played it. And there are twenty-six pictures of that explosion in that newspaper. It is the damnedest thing you ever saw. But just imagine the impact that had. Nobody else in Iowa had it. There were only twenty-six cities in the United States that had wire photo. It cost the Register, the fee to the Associated Press, was sixty thousand dollars a year, which is about three quarters of a million dollars now. Now, you couldn't come close to getting that much of a picture in the paper, because unless you had something that was completely exclusive that was of that sensational nature, but all of it, play by play, live, on the tube. One of the casualties of the modern age is that the pictures are of relatively much less importance in newspapers as they were in those days. Q: What do newspapers do that TV can never do? A: Well, let's put it this way. When I was on TV one time, a couple of instances, I said, "I have got a pretty good story from out in Dallas County." They said, "We can't use that. We don't have any pictures." I said, "You are in the business of transmitting news. I don't give a damn if you have got any pictures or not. You have got to run this story." That is one. Another thing I told them one time, I had a good story and I couldn't come close to covering it. I said, "The trouble with this media is that you write your story, then you start eliminating essentials." And that is true. TV has got the advantage, from a lazy person's standpoint, you can watch TV and think you have got the news covered when you know darn well you haven't. In fact, you haven't got it covered in the press either, but you have come much closer to it. And then you have got the advantage of reading a newspaper at your leisure, whereas you have got to be on the spot unless you are with CNN where they are popping it at you all the time.