Jack V. Hovelson interview about journalism career, Cedar Falls, Iowa, July 24, 1999

Section 1: Q: We're talking with Jack Hovelson of Cedar Falls, Iowa, on July 24, 1999, at his home at 824 Hudson Road in Cedar Falls. Jack, could you go ahead and just give me a test, 10-9-8.. A: 10-9-8. Q: Jack, I wonder if we could just begin with the time where you'd been at Courier for eight years before opening the Waterloo Bureau for the Register. How did that come about? Who pursued who, was it you going to them or they came to you? A: First of all, I was at the Courier for seven and a half years, if we want to be exact about that. When I was in the army, I worked as a journalist for the First Cavalry division in Japan. I was essentially a bureau reporter then because I was at one of four bases that the division operated out of. I was the correspondent, bureau person, from one of the bases for the division newspaper which was called the Cavalier. Anyway, the editor of that paper was a guy by the name of Ed Heins. He was my editor. He got out of the service and I got out of the service soon after he did. Sometime later he ended up at the Des Moines Register and I was at the Waterloo Courier and he became the assistant managing editor at the Des Moines Register and it was right at the time they decided to open a Waterloo bureau. He knew me from the army and we'd kept in contact, so he approached me about being the person to open and operate the Waterloo bureau. It was a hard decision for me to make because I was kind of on the way up at the Courier and I didn't know whether to just walk away from that and take a chance on something completely new. But after a week of agonizing over this, I took the job and ultimately it was probably the best decision I have ever made. It was knowing somebody, of course. Q: How was that the best decision you think you have ever made? A: Obviously, the Courier is a paper of one size and the Register is a larger paper and, one would imagine with a reputation and the papers were just on different levels. It was an opportunity that, had I not taken it, I would have been sorry. Q: When you were at the Waterloo Courier, had you realized what the Des Moines Register was and did you know how well respected it was? A: Yes, I had read the Des Moines Register since I was five years old. We always had it in our home and I just grew up with it like a lot of native Iowans had. I just thought it was the greatest paper, at least in the Midwest. I don't know whether it was my lifelong dream to work at the Register. I can't say that. But when the opportunity came, it was good that I took it. Q: More money involved? Can you say how much? A: Yes, there was more money, of course. I think it was $190 a week. It was somewhere in that vicinity which was about $30 more than I was making at the Courier. Q: What was the Register doing for news for the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area before the bureau opened? A: They had a bureau in Davenport. That was their first bureau. They opened it in 1961, I think, and Gene Raffensperger was running it. Raff, as we always called him, went all over eastern Iowa. So, if a big story happened in Waterloo, you could figure that Gene Raffensperger would be there from Davenport to cover it. Waterloo, in those days and maybe still, is a good, active news town. It seems like there was always something going on in Waterloo, not always good, but something was going on. The Register opened the Davenport bureau, and then the Cedar Rapids and Dubuque bureaus in 1967, and it began to realize that a lot was happening in Waterloo. After they opened Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, those two guys would occasionally slip up to Waterloo. There was enough going on in Waterloo that it warranted a news bureau. Plus, I think this is correct, for years and years, Black Hawk County had the largest circulation of Des Moines Registers out of Polk County. Of the counties. So it was a good Register area, more than Cedar Falls. And it still is basically because the Waterloo Courier is an afternoon paper and the Des Moines Register is the only morning paper we can get delivered in Black Hawk County. Q: I don't know if you said this, but you mentioned a Cedar Rapids bureau. Who was running that at the time? A: Bill Simbro. And in Dubuque, it was Jim Ney. They had been hired a year before I was hired to open those bureaus. Q: At the time, was there an Iowa City bureau? A: No. Q: When did that come along? A: In the seventies. I can't tell you the exact year, but I think sometime in the mid-seventies. Q: Not knowing the businesses as well as I should, how many stories were you expected to send in on a weekly basis, or was there a quota? A: When I started, the rule of thumb was a story a day, and it was to be something that the Waterloo Courier didn't have. They came out in the afternoon, so I had to come up with at least one story for the next morning's Register that hadn't been in the Courier the afternoon before. Plus, we were expected to do stories for the Sunday paper. Somedays that was pretty tough to come up with a new story. Well, somedays it just didn't happen. But that was the rule of thumb. As time went by, that changed and they decided that really wasn't the best way to do it. It depended on which editor you were working for. They all had different views. When I went to work for the Register, the first thing I did was they brought me down to Des Moines to work three or four weeks to be indoctrinated, so to speak. Every editor I met down there had different advice for me. "Well, when you get out do this, and do that." And I was getting confused because this guy would say, "do this" and this guy would say, "do that." Gene Raffensperger, who had been the original bureau guy, gave me the best piece of advice I ever got from anybody and I always followed it. He said simply, "Hit them where they ain't." The old baseball saying. I always kept that in mind and I looked at what the Courier was not covering or not covering well, that's what I concentrated on. Q: How did you dig up those stories? Were they looking for hard news, or would a feature or human interest story do? A: I think in those days, about anything would do. Usually, it was some kind of a spot news story. One thing I would do, the Courier would come out in the early afternoon and I would go through it and look for some things. Once in a while, they would have some story that they had buried or something out of the police log and they would have a little twist to it. I would make some telephone calls and expand on it and build it up into a story. Every once in a while, it was amazing because it would get on page one. Something that they had kind of treated routinely and I saw a possibility of a twist to it and so it would develop. Q: What would you attribute that to? The lack of follow-through on the part of the Waterloo Courier? A: Probably more than anything, they were just rushed for time. I know because I used to do this. You would go and pick up all these items and you would have to bat them out for that day's paper. Even if you did realize you might have had a nugget of a story, you wouldn't have time to do it that day. I suppose sometimes they just plain overlooked the possibility of a story. I'm sure I've done that. We all have. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: Talk a little bit about the competition. Was there an intensity of competition between the Courier and the Register where you would get the story or they would get the story? A: I think they felt it. In talking with people I knew from the Courier, they said the editors over there were upset if I scooped them. But the Courier could scoop me and I would say, "There are fifty people over there and I'm one against fifty. Sure they're going to scoop me." But if I did it against their forces, that was something for them to wring their hands about. So they felt that more than I did. Q: And I imagine you still had friends at the Courier after you started at the Register. Was there any type of cooperation? A: No, after I moved over, I am told that they were told that there was a staff meeting where they were told by the editor, then Gene Thorne, who's now deceased, he said, "Now I know that a lot of you are friends with Jack and we all like him, but you are not to tell him anything." That's the way it should have been. I didn't tell them anything. We were friendly competitors. Q: Did you socialize out of work with them? A: Sometimes. One thing about being a one-person bureau, you get a little lonesome. You don't have that newsroom atmosphere. You don't have that after work comraderie where you would go and get a beer or something. I would seek that once in a while with friends from the Courier and we would talk in general and careful not to tell each other anything that they shouldn't know. But I had a generally good relationship with them. Q: Name a few people who you socialized with? A: Sure, there was George Saucer, who is the now-retired editor of the Courier. He and I were good, close friends. He came to the Courier a couple years after I started there and we did a lot of work together. I would see him. The others names don't come to mind right away. Verl Sanderson, who later ended up at the Register, was another one. I can recall David Brown, now deceased, who later ended up at the Register also but worked several years at the Courier. Stewart Haas was a state editor at the Courier. Patty Johnson, who died just within the past year. She was a longtime feature writer. I sat next to her and valued her friendship and was able to maintain that. Phyllis Singer, retired, we used to call it the Women's Section. Of course, it's Lifestyles now, I guess. Longtime editor of that section and I still run into her occasionally. There were some really good people over there. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Both were daily papers. Talk about the difference between the two. Clearly, the Register was read by people in Washington D.C. A: Well, the Register, of course, was known nationally as one of the ten best in the country and had this tremendous reputation. It was based on its coverage of the entire state. It was pretty unique that one paper would blanket a state like the Register did, not only in circulation, but in coverage. It's not true now, but back then if something would happen in Inwood, Iowa, which was the smallest town in the most westerly quarter of the state, some major thing, catastrophic or whatever, chances are there would be a reporter and a photographer on a plane out of Des Moines to Inwood or the closest airstrip to go do the story. That was an amazing thing. To me it was the greatest example of newspapering that I had ever known. I just admired that. When I started for the Register, that's what we were doing, things like that, and I just thought that was the ultimate. Q: Why was that so unique, I wonder. The geography of Iowa or the commitment by the owners? A: I think it was a combination of those things. The geography of Iowa was good because Des Moines is pretty much in the center and you could just go out from there. And certainly the commitment of the management. I know that the paper could have made more money, net profit, had they not spent money on some of the things they did in the news. They spent a lot of money. Of course, we now know that's changed. There's more profit coming out of the Register and a whole lot less of enterprising, good newspapering. Q: What do you think about that? A: Frankly, I'm distressed about it and I've expressed that several times. I know the necessity of making money. The Register has always made money. I don't agree with the necessity of making a lot of money. The Register was making a good profit doing the newspapering job that it did and unfortunately for us who live out in the state, outside what they call the Golden Circle, we just don't get the kind of newspaper that we did before. The commitment is not there to the really good enterprising newspapering that used to go on at that paper. Q: What would have been lost? You concentrate on central Iowa more, Des Moines, and you have got your other papers out there. A casual reader might say, "so what?" A: There are a lot of people who would say, "So what? I don't need to know in great detail about a disaster in Inwood." For those who do say that, I say fine. We're getting a paper now that is so concentrated on central Iowa and Des Moines that's there's a good share of the news hole is devoted to things that are really of no interest. We get stories about city council happenings in Urbandale. And it's very important to Urbandale and maybe to all of Polk County, but it's not very important in Cedar Falls. Too much of the paper that we get out here is devoted to that. I would rather read a wire story out of Georgia about something that is really interesting than a story about the Clive city council dealing with a sidewalk program, which incidentally, was a story that was in one of our Sunday papers. Q: So the Des Moines Register is no longer the paper that Iowa depends on? A: I really don't think it is. It really isn't because I don't think the Register can honestly say that it covers Iowa. It will cover major things. For example, they are currently covering floods along the Cedar River and doing a pretty decent job of it. But that's a major story that's going on out here that certainly should be covered. But there are a lot of other stories going on that they give what I call superficial coverage. They do it by phone out of Des Moines. They don't staff it, and you can't staff everything. We never did staff everything, but we used to staff a lot more things. When I say staff I mean physically be on the scene and report from there. We used to do a whole lot more of that out in the state than we do now. There was another thing. They had a correspondents network that was pretty good and pretty extensive. That has disintegrated and there are not too many good correspondents left. Q: That was unique, I think, because I've talked to some other people at the Register and they said you had at least one correspondent in each county, at least in the county seat. And that's no longer the case? A: I think it's pretty obvious that it's not. Q: And these were paid correspondents? A: They were paid. They weren't paid a whole lot, but they were paid and they were dedicated people. I used to work with some of them on occasion. Some of them were little old ladies, literally, and I could tell stories about some of them. I tell you, those people, whatever they might have lacked in journalistic training, they certainly made up for in effort and enthusiasm and dedication. Q: I'd like to hear a story about a little old lady. A: Two of them stand out. There was one in Dubuque. She was the queen of correspondents, Arlene Eberhart. And then the one in Waterloo, Annette Linglebach. Little old lady, a kind of interesting character. Short, never married, lived with her mother and a bunch of cats. Always wore a funny hat. She was a correspondent for the Register for years and years and years. After I opened the bureau, she continued to do that. She did some routine things that I couldn't get to or if I would be working out of town, she would take care of it for a while. Anyway, Annette made these routine calls. Everyday about three times a day, she would call the police department, the sheriff's office, and the highway patrol, maybe even the hospitals in this area, and ask what was going on. She was known by all of these law enforcement and rescue people. She was kind of a joke, but they all loved her and they all knew that she had all these cats and loved cats. One night she called the fire department and said, "Hello, this is Annette, what's going on?" The dispatcher said not much was going on and that it had been a quiet night. Annette asked if they had any calls today and the dispatcher said, "Oh, a couple, not much." Annette asked what the calls were and the dispatcher said, "We had one up on Logan Avenue." He was just leading her on. "We had to send the aerial truck out there because somebody's cat got way up in a tree and couldn't come back down. So we sent the big truck out." There was a cat involved so she was very concerned. The dispatcher said, "Well, we put the ladder up about as far as it would go, about a hundred feet, and the cat was up about ten feet higher and we just couldn't do it, the cat wouldn't move." "Well, what did you do?" "There was nothing we could do, we just had to shoot it down." She just went ballistic, but finally she realized she'd been had. I think they had it on tape. I never heard it, but they talked about that for years. But she was a beloved person. Q: Would that be part of your system to call the police department and the fire department? A: I didn't make routine calls like that. I felt I wasn't expected to. When I knew something was happening and I was working on a story, I would call. I didn't tie myself down to every morning calling the police department. I listened to the radio newscast and the television and I depended on them to let me know what was going on. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: You say you were a one-man bureau, did you have any help? A secretary? A: No. I was by myself. Q: What did you have for references? A telephone? A: A telephone. Of course, there were a lot of changes over the time I was at the bureau. That is one thing we wanted to talk about. I started out with the telephone, and that was about it. I would send my copy via Western Union and what I would do was work during the day and come four or five o'clock, I would start working on writing my stuff. I would try to get it done by about six o'clock. At that time, there was a Western Union office in downtown Waterloo about a block away, so I would make carbon copies, which I would keep, and then I would run the originals over to the Western Union office and then somebody there would type it out in a telegram. I was told that it actually went to Minneapolis and then it was relayed through Minneapolis to Des Moines, instead of going directly to Des Moines. I would take these carbons home with me because so often, about seven thirty, I would get a call from my editor in Des Moines, at this time that was a fellow by the name of Jack Gillard, a colorful, great newspaperman. He would call and say stuff didn't come in. I would have to get out my carbon copies and dictate it to him over the phone. That would happen with too much regularity. At some point, they came out with the first facsimile transmitting machine. What it was was a big machine about three feet wide and had a big cylinder on it and we would type out a page of copy, put it on the cylinder, get hooked up with Des Moines by phone and this cylinder would rotate and a light would scan it. It would take six minutes per page. And then it would transmit it to Des Moines. Then you would put on another page until you were done. At the time, that was quite an advancement. That would have been in the early seventies, I'm guessing around '72. It was a big heavy machine. I remember a couple times we moved it. We moved it out to a golf course one time so that Buck Turnbull, who was a longtime sportswriter, he covered golf and was covering the Waterloo Open and he used it to transmit back to Des Moines. It was not really what you would call a portable. But it was an advancement. Then a smaller model came out that was faster. At some point in the eighties we got into computers and we went through three or four different models of computers. Like the little Radio Shack ones. Q: These are computers that you could hook up to the phone? A: Yes, laptop-type computers that were portable and you could take out on assignment. I can remember sitting at a park bench at a park in Oelwein They had electricity out there and I was hooked into it and I wrote a story there. I had written stories on those things in a lot of different places like that that were kind of unusual and out in the open. Q: I remember, in my own experience, there was a time when we tried to get hooked up to a payphone. Did you ever have any experiences like that? A: Oh yes, sometimes successful and sometimes not. Well, we had these cups that you could put the phone into the cup, but you had to work fast because if you didn't get it done real quick you lost the connection or something. I had moderate success with them, only moderate. Q: But the last resort was dictating the story over the phone? A: Oh yes. At some point in there, I guess I missed this, in between the Western Union and the oncoming new high-tech stuff, that's what we did. We did it for about three years or so, that's the way we did it all the time. We just decided this was better than what we had been doing. I can remember Lucia Herndon, who's now a columnist for the Philadelphia Enquirer. She was a Drake student, an African-American young woman from Des Moines and she went to Drake journalism school. They hired her and one of the main things that she did was to take dictation. I used to dictate to her every day almost and we developed a close friendship through dictation. Q: At that point, between fax machines and Western Union, all the bureaus were calling in their stories to the Register in Des Moines. A: She was the primary one to take our dictation and if she was tied up with me and the Iowa City bureau called in, they would drag somebody else over to take theirs or put him off until Lucia was done with me. Q: Labor intensive. Maybe, as long as you're on the subject, you could talk more about the changing in technology since you became a journalist. A: There had to be more changes in my career span than all the times before. We went from the clackity old typewriters to laptop computers and various stages in between. There is just no comparison between those two methods. I know a lot of new technology happened in the office. The whole computer thing came in during my time and that just revolutionized the whole industry. Really, what it did was knock out a whole department of the newspaper, the composing room. It just eliminated the composing room. Ninety percent of what used to be done in the composing room is done in the newsroom now. The page make-up and all that is done in the newsroom now. Q: Is there a downside to that? A: Yes, it has put an added burden on the newsroom, which has resulted in earlier deadlines. We all thought with the advent of the computer, gee whiz, this new fast stuff, instead of an eight o'clock deadline we can go up to a ten o'clock deadline. Well, it didn't work that way. It worked the other way. The only thing I can figure out is because the newsroom had to do these tasks that the composing room used to do. It's probably not as simple as that, but that's one of the reasons. I think that's certainly a downside. There are a lot of upsides, of course. As these things are perfected, it gets better and better. We now use pagination. Not working in the main office, I kind of missed out on some of this because I'm out here with my laptop and I know that end of it and I know how to operate that. What happened after it got into the main office is still kind of a mystery to me. Q: Somebody had mentioned that another disadvantage to that change had been the elimination of these people who were checking copy and now they were relying on spell check or editors. A: You really do see more mistakes. A lot of it you know is because of spell check or somebody. I did considerable editing when I was at the Waterloo Courier and I did it looking at typewritten pages and also, in editing my stuff that I wrote myself on a computer screen, it's a lot easier, I think, to edit typewritten pages. There's something about the screen that makes it easier to miss stuff than on the typewritten page. I don't think it's just me. I've heard other people say the same thing. Q: Given the configuration of the newsroom now, we're not seeing typewritten pages at all. It's all on the computer screen. A: Yes, well, I don't know. Maybe they do some printing out of some long-range stuff. Maybe they do that. I don't know. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: You took photos, too. Was that something you learned on the job or something you'd been trained for? A: I always say I'm a picture taker, I'm not a photographer. I think there's a real difference. I like taking pictures and I started news pictures, in earnest, when I went to work for the Fort Dodge Messenger in 1959. A small, daily paper where everybody had about fourteen different jobs. One of the jobs that everybody had was you took pictures. That's what I did. You would get a camera and somebody would show you how to use it, and you'd go out and take pictures. I enjoyed taking pictures and I really enjoyed it when I got a good picture. I can show you one that I really prize. I've got it in a frame. I don't know if you'd like that. Q: Is it close? We could stop the tape. Why don't we do it at the end? I would imagine that after you've been taking photos for a while, you would get an eye for what is newsworthy and what isn't. The photojournalist side. A: Yes, I felt that I had a pretty decent eye for a news photo. I remember a couple of times when I was working with our own professional photographers, who incidentally I thought were great, really some talented photographers at the Register, and I spotted something and tipped them off to it. I got a kick out of doing stuff like that. If I could get a picture in the paper, or particularly get one on page one, which I did occasionally, I thought that was a bonus. I didn't get more pay, but it was just great. Q: Did you have any photography training? A: For composition and stuff? No, I never took any courses or anything. Q: Did any of the photographers at the Register give you any tips? A: I had some really close friends, particularly Larry Neibergall, who is now deceased and his son is a photographer for the Register now and has been for quite a while. He and I worked together, I once estimated, for more than 250 stories over the years. I learned a lot from him, as I did from other photographers. Just watching them. A current photographer I worked with is Harry Baumert out of Cedar Rapids. He, too, was one that I learned a lot just being around. Q: When you say you worked with them, as in Larry Neibergall, you would send a story and they would see that it needed a photo. Is that how it worked? A: A lot of times we would work together. We would go out on a story together and he would do the pictures and I would do the interview. Sometimes he would go first and I would follow. Usually, the photographers would like to have the reporter do the interview and they would sit in on the interview and then that would give them ideas about picture possibilities. More often than not, I would lead off with the interview. And then sometimes we would be on spot situations, crime stories or something like that, where he'd be taking pictures and I would be interviewing. Q: He was based in Des Moines? A: Larry Neibergall was based in Des Moines. Q: Did you ever cover sports stories? A: Yes, on occasion. When I started out in Fort Dodge, one of the things I did was be the assistant sports editor on top of everything else. So I did a lot of sports there. But when I was at the Register, they would ask me if I could. If I couldn't or didn't want to, I usually didn't have to, but I liked sports. I would cover some UNI football games and some basketball, on occasion. If a sports figure would come to town, one of the nice, most enjoyable interviews I ever did was Bart Starr, when he came to town. Rod Carew came to town and I got his autograph on his picture on Time magazine. I loved that. I'm a big sports fan and I loved doing that. Q: Talk about the story you wrote about Bart Starr. How did that come about, what was the story? A: It wasn't a particularly great story. He was in town to make a speech and so I grabbed him for five minutes and talked to him. There was something going on at the time in the NFL, some controversy and I can't remember what it was at all, but it was something I could ask him his opinion on. He gave me some comments, a very gracious man. It was enough to build a story. Q: Was he still a player at the time? A: No, he was retired. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: How was it you came about talking with Barbara Walters over the farm fence? A: In 1976, the NBC Today Show, because it was the bicentennial year, each week they were going to a different state and doing their program from someplace in that state. When they came to Iowa, they did it from a farm a few miles south of Hudson. We all knew in advance when they were going to do it. I went out and spent the day covering them doing the Today Show from this farm near Hudson. Barbara Walters was the one who did it. One of the two anchor people would go out and do these things and they traded off. Barbara Walters was there for the Iowa piece. I just stayed as close as I could to Barbara Walters whenever I could. At one point, she and I and Paul Engel were sitting at the kitchen table in this farm, just the three of us. Q: Paul Engel from the University of Iowa? A: The late Paul Engel. They had him up because they did an interview with him. The three of us ended up at this kitchen table just chatting for five, six, seven minutes, which I'll always remember. Then later on, we were out in the farmyard there and they were shooting the obligatory Iowa pigs. They had to get those. Barbara was there, she was not out with the pigs, but she was leaning on the fence and doing her thing with the pigs in the background and then afterwards, for just a couple minutes, she and I were leaning on this fence and she was asking me what pigs do. So we talked about pigs. I was so impressed with her, she was a consummate interviewer and every time I talked to her, three different times during the day, she was actually interviewing me. She was pumping my brain just about Iowa. That impressed me. Q: What was she getting out of you? A: Just little bits and pieces. One thing she asked me at the kitchen table was about Clark Mollenhoff, who was the Washington bureau of the Register. Mollenhoff had gotten up at a press conference and gotten into an argument. Tape One, Side Two A: She was referring to a press conference, I think it was President Nixon, and there was an exchange between the two that was unusual and Mollenhoff shot a remark back to Nixon that some people thought was uncalled for, impolite, something that you don't do with the president no matter what you think of him. But that was Mollenhoff. He was a guy who would bowl through. There were stories about him when he was a reporter in Des Moines going out on the ledge on the outside of the Polk County courthouse and getting around to a window where the supervisors were trying to hold a closed meeting. They saw him at the window and they said, "All right, let him in." There are just some really amazing stories about that guy. Q: Is that legend? A: It was told to me as a factual story. Q: When you told Barbara Walters what you knew about Clark Mollenhoff, did she have any comments about him? As you said, some of the journalists weren't happy with what he had done at the press conference. A: As I recall, she expressed that. She thought he was out of line. Q: What are some of the other stories, too? You said, Jerry Rubin, the member of the Chicago Seven, one of the most obnoxious people you ever interviewed. How was it you came to interview him? A: I really didn't interview him. He had a press conference here in Cedar Falls before he made a speech and it was during some turbulent times. The community was upset that he was here and they were fearful that he was going to set off a riot. Anyway, he held this press conference and there were several other reporters there from all the media. Every question that we asked, we got a smart-aleck answer from him. He was just an obnoxious person. I asked him one question. Before my question, somebody had called him Mr. Rubin and he had dressed them down for that. So, I didn't say Mr. Rubin. I said, "You used to be a newspaper reporter. Why did you get out of it?" He looked at me and sneered and said, "Because of people like you." OK. That was the kind of response you would get from him. I thought he was one of the most objectionable people I had ever dealt with. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: Can we talk about how news stories are selected and reported today as compared to how they used to be when you were practicing journalism in the fifties and sixties? Not necessarily the technology but the way hard news is written. How stories are selected and reported on. A: I don't know if this is exactly what you're asking but one thing that I have seen a real distinctive move is the selection of the stories, the way they were covered, that used to be pretty much decided by the reporters, at least for the Register. Back then reporters were given a beat or an assignment or whatever. Let's say you were covering education. You were responsible for being the expert on education. You went out and you got to know people in that field and you got to know what was going on. At any given time, an editor could call you over to his desk and say, "What's going on with the board of regents?" And you were expected to know. People did, reporters did. Reporters, more or less, decided what was news from the education. The education reporter would follow stories and he would keep the editors informed. Back then, the Register was what we would call a good reporter's paper. Because reporters did, more or less, decide or dictate what was going to be in the paper. I, being a reporter, thought that was great. Today, papers are editors' papers. They have meeting after meeting to decide what is the news. I think it's a bad system. Not always, not every time, but I often wonder how can six people sitting in an office building in Des Moines on the fourth floor decide what is news in Waterloo or Inwood or wherever. The reporter who was there was covering Waterloo or the reporter who was covering the regents meeting in Iowa City, they are the ones who, if they don't know, they're not doing their job. When they are doing their job, they're doing it better than editors can do. That's been the big change and I think it's editor driven papers. They decide now what's going to be news next Tuesday. Maybe some of it's going to be news next Tuesday, but you sure can't decide today what's happening next Tuesday. To me, it's a backward way of going about it. But that's the way it is these days, mostly. Q: What do you think the editors are thinking with that? Are they going for some sort of theme to the newspaper or what's their motivation? A: Newspapers today, and I'll use the Register as an example, are being run more as a magazine. All this preplanning, all these meetings. They are going to do this kind of coverage. Sometimes this is great. Take the coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Tournament a couple of weeks ago. Super, fantastic. You couldn't have asked for better coverage of anything. That was all preplanned. That was something you could plan for and lay out what angles you're going to go for and that's great. But, on the general run of news, I don't think you can do that. That's what they try to do. They try to predict and dictate how they're going to cover something next Tuesday or what next Tuesday's news is going to be. I think there's got to be more spur of the moment, seat of the pants, gut-feeling newspapering going on than what there is. Q: You have a limited amount of space in the newspaper and some stories might get lost. A: The paper is looking more and more like television. More graphics and fewer words. More pictures. Q: We were talking a little earlier about a reporter who is very well recognized and well renowned at the Register who editors say couldn't write. Did you come across any of those people? A: I think some of the best reporters in the world were not good writers. Great reporters, great for getting the news and mediocre at putting it into prose or free-flowing writing. That's where the editors come in. Good editors can take raw material like that and form it into really readable stuff. We were talking about Clark Mollenhoff, who is a good example. As I was told, I never edited any of his copy, but I heard people talk who have and they said his stuff was really tough and he would jump around, but it was all there. He was a great reporter and not a great writer. There were a lot of people like that. Q: What makes a great reporter? A: The one who can get the information. It's as simple as that. However you have to get it without being illegal. Of course, some did go illegal on occasion. I don't recall that I ever did. People with a great personality, number one. Someone who could talk with people and get people to talk to them. That was the main thing. And then people who had a good instinct about where to go and who to go to for the information. There were times when just being tough and not taking no for an answer and when you knew that something was a public record and somebody was trying to tell you it wasn't, and you just stuck to it and finally got it. A lot of elements. Q: And a plus could be that you could actually write. A: And if you could write on top of that, you were a pretty damn good newspaper person. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: Can you think of any mentors at the Register or the Courier or the Messenger? A: People I tried to pattern after or looked up to. I know I have mentioned Gene Raffensperger at the Register. He was one that I always admired and I learned from him because he had been a bureau person. I sought advice from him. And then he became an editor, my city editor, for a while. He was great. There were a lot of people at the Register that I just admired. I think there was great talent there. Jim Flansburg is one and there were many others. Otto Knauth who wrote about science and things like that was an excellent writer. I would read something that they wrote and I would just marvel. A current one is Ken Fuson, a great feature writer who is now back with the Register after being with the Baltimore Sun. Larry Fruhling, who left the Register a few years ago, had a great touch. There are just so many that I would read their stuff and hope that I could write somewhere close to that. Q: What made you want to be a reporter when you first started out and what did you like about it when you became one? A: My desire for it began in high school. I went to a real small high school, so it wasn't that I was getting any great experience from it there. It wasn't one of those things that I woke up one morning and said, "I want to be a newspaper reporter." It just kind of developed. Q: What did you like about it once you became one? A: The variety, not being the same thing day after day. Although some days were pretty routine, of course, and some days weren't the best. I think just getting up in the morning and not really knowing what the day was going to hold for you. You could end up having a very dull day, a slow news day, or I know one day I was sitting in my office and by eleven o'clock I got a phone call that said to go to Houston. That night I was in Houston, Texas. Something like that, there's just something about it. The unexpected, the variety and excitement. Meeting people, important people, of course. Bart Starr. That was a great experience. Just interesting people, maybe somebody you have never heard of before turned out to be a real interesting person. That was one of the greatest things about it. Some of the people I dealt with I didn't particularly care for. I mentioned Jerry Rubin, and there were some others.