Gil Cranberg interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, November 2, 1999

Section 1: Q: We're speaking with Gil Cranberg at Seashore Hall on November 2, a Tuesday, 1999, in his office at a quarter until four o'clock. Gil, from the emails that we've been going back and forth about, I understand that you have been writing freelance. I want to go a little bit back before the Register's time so we can get some perspective here. You had been writing freelance articles before graduating from Syracuse. A: Yes, that's right. Q: And then, during the Register as an editorial writer. So, for a little background, what kind of freelance material were you writing and how has that given you experience for your move to the Register? A: Well, after I left the service in World War II, I traveled fairly extensively in Europe and attended schools in Europe. During those visits abroad, I wrote a fair amount of material and published some material in The New Republic magazine and various other places. Q: Were these opinion pieces? A: Right, about politics. I visited Norway and basically wrote about the Norwegian elections that I observed. I wrote about Spain during Franco. Also, one of the schools I attended was in Hungary at the time when Hungary was supposed to have been behind the Iron Curtain, but it turned out we were able to get into Hungary. I just described our experiences in Hungary. Q: This would have been in 1941? A: Well, these trips abroad were in '47, '48, and '49. Q: So you were still attending Syracuse but going to schools in Europe? A: Well, these were summer schools. Q: Then were there other kinds of freelance pieces that you were writing other than opinion pieces? A: No, well, it was a combination of reportage and opinion. That's basically what you do as an editorial writer. That helped me get the job at the Register. Q: That's quite a leap into the international publication world from being just a student at Syracuse. Had you been writing before that? A: A little bit in the service, but not very much. Prior to going into the service, I had contemplated a career in engineering. I decided after I left the service that engineering was not for me. I found I was more interested in journalism. That's what I enrolled in at Syracuse, journalism and political science. Q: How was it that you came to the Register? A: Happenstance. I was graduating in 1949 and was looking for newspaper work. I was looking for a reporting job, and I decided I would send a resume' to every newspaper with a circulation of more than thirty-five thousand. I simply addressed these letters to the editor. I thought I would get maybe about a half dozen responses. That's what I got. When I copied down the name of the Register for reasons I'll never know, I copied down the name of an actual editor. I copied the wrong name. It turned out that I copied the name of the editorial page editor. He got this resume' and he was one of the half dozen or so responses I received. He said, "I'll be in New York and would like to visit with you." I went to see him. Midway through the interview he said, "Well, it just occurred to me that you wouldn't be interested in this job because this is a job writing editorials, not reporting." I told him, "Well, that's perfectly all right. I'd be very happy writing editorials." I figured that I saved about twenty-five years in starting as an editorial writer instead of working up to it. Q: And, in fact, that had been your experience. A: Right. So, the editor at that time, Forrest Seymour, known at Wog to everyone, Wog Seymour, recognized what I had done. He asked to see copies of what I had written. He recognized that what I had done really fit very well with what they were doing on the editorial page. Q: Was there any apprehension about you moving from a big city New York to small town Iowa? A: Not at all because although I grew up in New York, I didn't really care for it very much. I liked Syracuse a great deal. I was pretty involved in the community, not just in what went on on campus, but off campus. I knew a lot of people off campus. I just liked the size of the city and the opportunity to be involved in the community that you do not have in a place like New York. That's impossible. Des Moines seemed to me to be the same size as Syracuse and offered the same advantages to Syracuse. It didn't bother me to leave New York at all. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: Based on the Register's history and what you know of it, was it unusual for someone to start out as an editorial writer? You would think there would be a progression from reporter or copy desk. A: Yes, that's the usual progression. I was very fortunate to start as an editorial writer. It was a big thrill to me. It was a well-known newspaper. That's why, as I said earlier, I saved twenty-five years by being able to start that way. Q: Do you remember some of the people you were working with? A: Oh yes. I remember them all very well. Q: How many were on staff at the editorial page when you arrived? A: There were about five. The editor would make six. Q: Anybody that stood out? A: Of course, Wog Seymour. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing not too long before I joined the staff. Lauren Soth, who was the assistant editor. Nowadays they call them deputy editors, but his title was assistant editorial page editor. Those were the two mainstays of the department. There were a couple others. Q: All of these people were older than you? A: Oh yes, I was 24 years old. Q: At that time was it structured so that you were getting assignments or you were specializing in some kind of subject matter. How was it divvied out that you would be writing something? A: It was remarkably unstructured. Incredibly unstructured. We would never hold a meeting for any reason, let alone to discuss what we were going to write about. You would come into the office and you would read the paper and you would decide what you were interested in writing about. You just went ahead and did it. It was not unusual that more than one person would write on the same subject. It didn't seem to bother Wog. Fairly often, he would just take scissors and glue and snip out parts of the editorial and stick it with what somebody else had written on the same subject. He would meld the two editorials. It was so unstructured. I came to work shortly before New Year's at the very end of 1949. This was the first newspaper I worked on and I knew that newspapers come out seven days a week, so it occurred to me that maybe some things had to written during a holiday. I wasn't sure what was going to happen on New Year's Day. Whether this was a day off for everybody or what. I approached the senior person there, Charlie Ransom, who had been there thirteen years at that time. Partly to make conversation and also partly because I was curious as to what happened on a holiday, I said, "Charlie, are we supposed to work New Year's Day?" Charlie's response was, "I don't know." He did not know because nobody had ever said. As a consequence, people would show up Thanksgiving Day and all of the major holidays. Probably not Christmas, but I'm not one hundred percent sure about that. People would come in and stay maybe about half a day and write an editorial or so, because Wog had never ever explicitly said, "Don't bother coming in, we've got enough editorials." It was very, very loose. Extremely loose. Q: How did you feel about working in that kind of environment? A: It was a bit strange. The idea of people writing on the same subject and not knowing what other people were writing about. Sometimes you would check, but it didn't seem to be the usual thing that people did. They just sort of struck out on their own and wrote what they were interested in. Wog seemed to be happy with the setup. It was really, for a communications company, the lack of communication in that department, and it was not a very big department, was rather remarkable. There really needed to be more interchange on issues. We all would have been better off had we had the opportunity to kick some issues around as a group. In fact, that's what happened eventually. That was Wog's style and he was comfortable with it. Some issue erupted that led Wog to leave the paper. Lauren Soth, the assistant, became the editorial page editor. He, rather quickly, started a system of daily conferences. He wouldn't give out assignments, really, he basically wanted to know what we were interested in writing about. But then when somebody would mention a subject, that would kick off a conversation about the subject and people would chip in ideas. That was a much more congenial way to go about it. Q: Was that lack of structure to start with a carry-over from a policy that had been in place before? A: I'm really not sure. I never probed that question, I was just sort of taken aback by how the veteran staff members didn't know whether you worked on New Year's Day or not. I don't know what the history of it was, whether Wog instituted that on his own or he inherited it. It was very strange. Q: Speaking not as a newspaper person, was it unusual that you would have that cut and paste where two people would be contributing to the same editorial? A: I assume it was unusual because I think it was very unusual for people to be working on the same subject simply for a lack of information on what other people were writing about. I imagine it happened seldom. I was given practically no instruction when I came to work there. No advice, really. I had one bit of advice that Wog gave me. It was marvelous advice which I give my students here. His advice was, "Forget about pride of authorship." It was terrific advice because if you were going to fret and stew about every editing change in the copy, it's not going to be much fun. By telling me to forget about pride of authorship, basically he signaled to me that it's common to edit the editorials fairly heavily. You could end up with an editorial that the conclusion is some distance away from what you had written. But, he would never say, "I disagree with your conclusion. The conclusion should be thus and so." He would not have you write a conclusion that was congenial to him but not necessarily to me. No, you never had to write anything you disagreed with. But, a system where you were cutting one person's editorial and attaching it to somebody else's editorial, that advice to forget about pride of authorship fit perfectly with that editing style. Q: It's also strange that you might be trying to make one persuasive argument that is opposing another's argument and that ends up in the same editorial. A: Well, he would take out the parts and maybe add in some factual information and put that in with the other person's conclusion. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Changing the subject just a little, what did you know about the Register before you came? At that time, it was a well-respected newspaper among both readers and the industry of journalists. A: Yes, I knew of its general reputation. I didn't know any of the personalities involved. I had known about the Cowles family, just in general. I had known about how Mike Cowles founded Look Magazine. I knew that it had a significant reputation. I didn't realize that it was the force that it was in Iowa. I was stunned when I showed up the very first day and saw the sign hanging on the front of the building that said it had a Sunday circulation of five hundred and fifty thousand, in a state with, at that time, maybe two and a half million people. That was an incredible circulation. I very soon realized that this was a very potent force in the state. I found, from my point of view, a force for good. Q: What do you think made the paper such a great paper? A: Well, it had solid journalistic principles. There was never a day when I felt any reason to be ashamed of anything the paper had done, any kind of issue that the paper supported or opposed. It had very good people, people who were principled. I found the paper's editorial principles very congenial with my own in that it was a progressive paper. I never had any difficulty with the positions that the paper took. Q: You could see why it might be such a potent newspaper in Iowa because it was the one that everyone read. But why were people out in Washington D.C. and New York and Los Angeles reading the Des Moines Register? A: I think in part, it was the gorilla out here. It had such a huge circulation and it had influence. Well, it had created an atmosphere that made it very different, for example, than the atmosphere in Nebraska. I'll illustrate: I got a first-hand picture of this very soon after I came. When there was a lot of political hysteria in the country, where there was a lot of anti-Communist feeling that bordered on hysteria. That led state after state and city after city to impose loyalty oaths on public employees, particularly teachers. These things were just zipped through. All they had to do was be proposed and they would be adopted because that was the popular thing to do. A loyalty oath was proposed for public employees in Iowa. My very first visit to the state legislature was to listen to the debate on the loyalty oath. This was a very mal-apportioned, very rural-dominated legislature at that time, and quite conservative. They were solidly Republican. I was assuming that this loyalty oath legislation was going to be adopted overwhelmingly and very quickly as it had been elsewhere. I was floored listening to that debate. These people, many of them farmers, certainly most of them from rural areas, one after another get up and say, "Who are we to question the loyalty of our neighbors?" I was stunned to hear this. This was defeated, not on technicalities, not on motions to table, or anything like that. It had an up and down vote on the loyalty oath. Iowa was one of the very few, if not the only state at that time, to reject loyalty oaths for public employees. I was totally flummoxed by this. In thinking about it, I could only conclude that this was part of the atmosphere that the Register had contributed to. The Register had made it unpopular to go down that path. Generally, at about that time, the American Legion all around the country was very active in attacking UNESCO, United Nations Education, Social and Cultural Organization. That was a favorite whipping boy of the American Legion. At every convention, they would attack UNESCO. The Iowa American Legion did not do that. The Iowa American Legionaries would get up at these national conventions and defend UNESCO. Again, this is something that mirrored the kind of things that the Register stood for. It had that kind of influence. Time after time, I know from my own experience, we would advocate something, some issue or other. The issue would be rejected by the electorate or the legislature. On particular issues I would feel that, no, the Register could not determine the outcome. But, over time the kind of impact the Register had was on atmosphere. It created an atmosphere that would result in, over time, the state adopting a more progressive stance than it would have otherwise. Q: Then you compare that to the image that is out there nationally of the Iowa hick, the backwards people. Where does that come from as compared to the reality? It doesn't match that stereotype. A: Right. Well, I said I received very little advice. One was to forget about pride of authorship. The other thing I was told was what the Register stood for. The Register stood for support of internationalism, and support for civil rights and civil liberties. Those were the cornerstones of the Register's philosophy. I think in all those respects, the Register had an impact. Q: You said the Register was a progressive paper. How was that decided? Was it just by those principles that you stated or were there people that were hired intentionally to reflect what was perceived as a liberal slant? A: When I was interviewed by Wog, I don't recall that we discussed my political views at all. I'm not sure to what extent that was discussed with anybody the paper hired. It's sort of a self-selection process that if you are going to be writing opinion, you're not going to be very happy in a place where your opinions are going to be edited out of what you write. Just as a liberal would not apply as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal because it would not work, same thing with the Register. Conservatives would not find it congenial working at the Register back in the days when I was there. Q: Do you believe that's still the case? A: Probably less so. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: Also, you had mentioned that it was unusual that a paper's owner would not intrude on editorial policy. As for the Register, why was it important that the publisher didn't push his or her views on the editorial page? A: When I was editorial page editor, as when Lauren Soth was editorial page editor, we had daily conferences. The publisher never showed up at those conferences. For that matter, the editor of the paper never showed up at those conferences. That was a signal to us that we had a pretty free hand. Publishers tend to be more business oriented and perhaps may reflect the interests of the business community, although that was not true of David Kruidenier, who was the publisher for many years. By and large, the Cowles philosophy, Gardner Cowles' philosophy, I was told was, "Hire people smarter than you and let them do their work." You never had the feeling that somebody was looking over your shoulder, that you had to satisfy Mike Cowles off in New York or you had to satisfy the publisher up on ninth floor. You just did your work and stuck to the principles that had been established over time. Stayed with the traditions of the paper. Without somebody holding a magnifying glass over what you were writing and second-guessing you. You never had that feeling at all. The only time the publisher got involved with policy was when we would have endorsement editorials, editorials saying which candidates we thought were superior. We would have the major candidates come in for lunch and the publisher would be present. He would ask questions and prior to writing the editorials, we would have a session with him. We never had an occasion where there was a disagreement. If you're more or less in sync 364 days of the years, are you going to suddenly be in violent disagreement on the 365th on choosing a candidate? If you see eye-to-eye on issues, chances are you're going to see eye-to-eye on the candidate. One time, after one of these sessions, we had all pretty much agreed on the candidates. As I was leaving, I turned to Mike Gartner, who was then editor of the whole paper. I said, "What do you suppose would have happened if he disagreed with us?" Mike said, "Darned if I know." We didn't know, he didn't know and it never came to pass that we had to learn. The more telling example happened when Mike Cowles' right-hand man for many, many years, Ken MacDonald, he had been a longtime editor and then publisher of the paper, retired. A black-tie dinner was held for him at the Des Moines Club. The head of the Washington Bureau and colleagues of MacDonald were there, maybe a dozen people in all. In the course of the dinner, Mike Cowles was sitting in the middle of the table. He had a rather resonant voice. He was not making a public statement about this, but he was talking to the person next to him. Everybody could hear what he said. He said, "You know, there's one thing that I've never, ever told anybody." It was like this old E.F. Hutton ad where the conversation stops and everybody leans forward to hear this revelation. The person said, "What is it?" He said, "There never has been one word written about agricultural policy that I've agreed with." Stunned silence. David Kruidenier, his nephew, the publisher, has never heard this before. Ken MacDonald has never heard this before. I ascertained this later. They were stunned. Lauren Soth, my predecessor, by training is an agricultural economist. He had written all of the agricultural editorials. He was in disbelief when I told him this. He said, "I've met Mike many times and he never said a word to me about that." At this dinner, the person responded to Mike and said, "What are your views on agricultural policy?" He said, "I think Earl Butz is a great man." Butz was then Secretary of Agricultural and Lauren Soth hated him with a passion and let it be known about every other day on the editorial page. Here, Mike Cowles never, ever said a word to his closest associates, even in private conversation, that he was in disagreement at all. After all, agricultural policy, this is a major issue in a major agricultural state. He never let on to anybody. I think this was in keeping with his feeling that he was going to hire people and let them run it and he was not going to butt in. He was not going to micromanage. It must be in the Cowles genes because Dave Kruidenier did the same thing. Q: That's an amazing story. The fact that Cowles actually owned the paper and never expressed their views to anybody that worked there. A: Not only to the person who was writing it, but to the publisher of the paper, his own nephew. I said that it must be in the Cowles' genes. There came a time when we had strongly endorsed Dick Clark for U.S. Senate. His opponent, Roger Jepsen, he looked like a senator, but that was all you could say for him. He was not really very well informed, and I'm understating this. We had him up for lunch for the interview near the end of the campaign when every question that could possibly have been asked of him had been asked before. He should have been well briefed. He seemed to be floored by most of the questions that we asked him. He brought his wife along and his wife answered most of the questions. In terms of the choice, there was just no contest at all. We strongly endorsed Dick Clark and, of course, the voters elected Jepsen. We were faced with this question of what do we write in the post-election editorial. The usual thing is to congratulate the winner and so forth. But we wrote an untraditional editorial that said this was a real loss for the state. I put a head on the editorial, "Best Man Lost." You don't do things like that. I knew that and I showed it to Gartner and I said this was the head we were going to run and he said, "Fine." All hell broke loose and readers were outraged; they said this was unsporting. Q: In letters to the editor? A: In phone calls, letters, we were inundated with complaints. We were bad losers, sore losers, you name it. There were a certain number of cancelled subscriptions. A few months later, the Register was doing a series of profiles of prominent people in town and they did a profile on David Kruidenier, the publisher. In the course of the profile the reporter asked him, "Has there ever been an editorial that you disagreed with?" He said, "Yes, the best man lost editorial." That was my first inkling that he wasn't happy with the editorial. He never let on to me that he was unhappy with it. I asked Gartner, "Did you know that he didn't care for it?" "Yeah, I knew that. He told me that he didn't like it." But Gartner never told me. They just want you to feel that you can run it the way you want to run it. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Along those lines, you also said that the ad sales manager never even set foot in the editorial department. Clearly, that was an indication that they had no influence either. But I had heard through various sources that Younkers was going to pull their advertising for an editorial that had been written. There was also a conflict about something that had been written where a tax on insurance companies were proposed. They were threatening to cancel or to squeeze the sales department. Do you remember those incidents? A: I don't recall about the insurance company. Younkers did pull their ads. There was another time when Firestone pulled their ads. I was never told that they pulled the ads. If I had been paying attention to the advertising, I would notice suddenly that the Firestone ads were not there or the Younkers ads were not there. I was never told and that I'm sure was deliberate. They didn't want me to feel that we should be pulling any punches or anything. It was business as usual, you just write whatever you felt you should write. Of course they were negotiating, I assume, to get them back in the paper. But we didn't know anything about it. The advertising director, Lyle Lynn, as far as I know never set foot on the fourth floor. That's the newsroom, the editorial department. He was on the ninth floor. He kept his distance so much that I didn't even know him. I had no acquaintanceship with him at all. Only after we both retired from the paper did I get to know Lyle. He's a delightful person and I've become a very good friend of his. I have lunch with him all the time. I figure it was too bad that I didn't know him earlier, but we just kept our distance from each other. He was on the business side and we were on the news side, the editorial side. That was another wonderful tradition of the paper. Nowadays, the wall between advertising and editorializing is breaking down all over the place. But it was certainly alive and well during my years there. Q: How is that wall breaking down? A: You have editors serving on marketing committees where they're working hand in glove with the advertising, circulation and promotion departments. At the L.A. Times they have appointed business managers to work with other sections of the paper. Each editorial section has got a business manager right there and they make suggestions for new stories. The most recent outrageous thing is that they put out a special section and shared the revenue with the subject of the special section. That got too much for the staffers there and they revolted over that. That is symptomatic of the weakening of the wall between business and editorial. Q: I have to ask just so you can state the case, what is the problem with that? A: Because you want to cover news without regard to whose economic ox is gored. You don't want to do puff pieces for an advertiser because that news story is not based on the intrinsic news worthiness of the story but to please somebody who can put money in your pocket. You want to divorce what gets into the paper as much as humanly possible from those people who can do economic favors for you. Q: Do you remember what the issue was where Younkers pulled their ads? A: It had something to do with their interest rates on charge accounts. I'm so uninformed about what caused the rift. That's because it was felt that we didn't need to know that. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: On the day-to-day basis, I get the impression that you and Lauren Soth operated similarly in the way you ran the editorial page department. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about these daily meetings where the editorial staff met and how it was decided who would write about what? A: I would go to the meeting with a list of possible subjects for editorials, maybe eight or ten. I would go around and say to each person there, "What do you want to write about today?" When I would complete the circle around the table, invariably most of the subjects on my list were spoken for. If some of them weren't and they were of marginal importance, I would forget about it. But if there were some that I really thought we ought to have an editorial about, I would say, "Is anybody interested in writing about thus and so?" If nobody was interested, then I would write about it. The idea being that you held assignments to the barest minimum for one principled reason and one practical reason. The principled reason being that you didn't ever want anybody put in the position of writing something that they might disagree with. The practical reason was that if somebody was interested enough to volunteer to write on that subject, you're going to end up with a better product. Invariably, on those rare occasions when we had to make assignments, the result was not very good. Simply because the person was not all that interested in it. Q: Did writers have specializations? A: Yes, they did. In my own case, when I first came there, I wrote on a very large variety of issues. Over time, you simply found that you could not keep abreast of everything. You had to narrow down just as a practical matter. You would develop certain areas that you were especially interested in and kept up on. It sort of piled on itself so the next time a development came up in that area, because you had written on it before, you would pretty much be expected to write on it again. So then you became even more immersed in that subject. Tape One, Side Two A: Yeah, right maybe four or five, something like that. Q: How many editorials would each person be turning out at the time? Was there any given amount? A: No, some people clearly were more productive than others. Charlie Ransom was incredible. He was a fountain of information and very prolific. He could knock out five editorials a day. I usually wrote a couple of editorials a day. I did that for a long time. That was before I was editor when I had to do other things, but I would still try to write as much as I could. Parkinson's Law really worked here. I've forgotten exactly how Parkinson's Law worked, but it was generally that the amount of work filled the available time. What happened basically was that if you need editorials, people are going to produce more. As you had to do when people were on vacation. I would write four or five a day if necessity dictated it. Charlie Ransom, I don't know what his record was but it was pretty good. Q: I would imagine it would change from year to year, but how many editorials ended up on the page in a day? A: We had two papers, the Register and the Tribune. We shouldn't slight the Tribune, we're always talking about the Register, the Tribune was a very, very good local paper. It focused more on local issues. We ran about three editorials in the Tribune and about three or four daily in the Register. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: What is an editorial intended to do, as far as you're concerned? A: They have multiple purposes. Generally, it's an essay. An essay can be on anything. So, we would write editorials on any subject under the sun. It had multiple purposes. One of the less recognized purposes is to correct the news story. Not too infrequently we would pick up the paper and see a story that we ought to write an editorial about this. You shouldn't just accept at face value what's in the news story, you should do your own reporting. You should go back and talk to the sources or dig up additional sources or whatever. Well, not infrequently we would find that the story was wrong. It gave a wrong impression. The facts may have been literally correct, but somewhat misleading. We felt that one of our functions was to correct. We would write an editorial and set the record straight. We wouldn't say, "Well, the news side screwed it up yesterday and this is really what's going on." But, we would attempt to correct by putting a different emphasis on it. That was one function of it. I don't want to over-emphasize it, but that was one of the functions of the editorials. The obvious one is to express the institution's point of view on an issue. Another function was that you only have a certain size news hole and subjective judgements are made about what should go in the paper. You sometimes would find an event that you regarded as important for the readers to know about but that didn't make it into the news columns. So, you would write an editorial whose primary purpose was to communicate information that the reader wouldn't have gotten otherwise. It's sort of basically a news story dressed-up in essay form. Maybe you tack on a little opinion, but the opinion was the least important part. The most important part was the new information you were recording. I think those are the essential functions. I think there was one other one, but it's slipping my mind at the moment. Q: Is it to effect change? A: Yeah, you hope that. When it came to your so-called endorsement editorials, I disliked the term because it implies that you are supporting, electioneering for a candidate. That is not the purpose of it in my view. First of all, you can not tell people how to vote. They're not going to pay attention to that. They're going to make up their own minds, which is fine because it would be horrible if newspapers could determine the outcome of an election. Fortunately, they don't. What do you want to do? I don't want to influence the outcome of the election, what I want to do is simply provide a point of view that would add to the mix of opinion to stimulate debate about the election. That is the purpose of it. That's what we tried to do. We didn't try to jam our opinion down people's throats. Sometimes you would have to wait until the very last sentence of the editorial to know which candidate we were supposedly endorsing. You don't try to paint one candidate as the shining knight. You tell the strong points and the weak points of a candidate and of his opponent as well. You try to basically be honest and not try to jam your opinions onto people. Q: Are there one or more editorials that you wrote that you can look back and say, "This one really left a mark on our readership." "This really defined what the paper was about." A: Yes, I can say it made a difference and that I felt especially good about. Well, we really took issue with the treatment of mentally ill offenders. It was called the criminally insane ward, it was a real snake pit, it was awful. I say offenders because some of them were offenders, people had been convicted of crimes. Other people were there who had never been convicted of anything, but they were behind prison bars, wearing prison uniforms and subject to prison discipline. It was an outrage and we really went after that situation. That was changed. We now have Oakdale as a result of that. That system was shut down and I felt very good about that. Q: Was that one editorial? A: Oh no, that was a series and some signed pieces. I did signed pieces on bail reform, about the bail system. That have an effect. We had a bail reform system in Polk County that is recognized nationally as sort of a model. It was better at one point than it is now, but it is still much better than what most cities have. And I editorialized very strong about stock ownership by Supreme Court justices. I accused them of having violated ethics rules and ethics laws. They were cognizant of what we were writing and they changed the rules to prevent these kind of conflicts in the future. I really felt very good about that. Mike Gartner was a lawyer and here I was really getting out on a limb and accusing about three different court justices of violating a law. This is pretty serious. Never once did Gartner come to me and say, "Show me what you have. Are you absolutely sure?" Never. It was definitely good on his part not to. What this was was a sign of confidence and you have to feel very good about that.