James Flansburg interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, March 25, 1998

Section 1: A: Julie, before you ask questions, may I simply say I am happy to be here. I am honored to be here. Feel free to ask any questions. I don't know of any that I would duck, although I don't preclude that possibility. One thing that I should tell you, I suffer from an eye condition called macular degeneration. I cannot see any of your faces. I am very good on voices, but raise hell if you want my attention because otherwise I may not see a hand or something. As a matter of fact, I am a patient at University Hospitals. I had eye surgery six or eight weeks ago. It is an experiment. It is a study. They told me that I am the first person in the world to have this surgery for macular degeneration. I said, "Is there some other way I could put because the people I know wouldn't believe me if I said I was the first person to have this?" This is a two-fer. I will be at the hospitals tomorrow for a full day of tests. They won't take my word on what I can see and not see. They have objective ways of determining what I can see and not see. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: I might just as well jump right. How did you get started in the newspaper business? How did you get interested in journalism? A: I don't really know. The first thing I ever did for a newspaper was for an elementary school, Cleveland Elementary in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where I wrote a piece about Wendell Wilkie's visit to Wisconsin for the Wisconsin primary in 1944. I think there no longer is an extant copy of it. I hope there isn't. The next thing I recall doing was something for a student paper at Tiffin School out here, west of town. I was the paper's correspondent for the visit of Harry Truman's whistle stop to the town of Oxford in 1948. So, I go back in journalism a long way. I have not answered your question. I have often wondered about that. My family settled in Cedar County. My father was in the hardware business in the towns of Tiffin and Oxford, just west of Iowa City. No connection with journalism at all. I have often wondered if I wasn't unduly influenced by the Superman comics which came out, I think, about 1938 about the time I started reading comics. And, of course, Superman's alter ego was Clark Kent, a mild-mannered reporter. In any event, I came to this campus in 1950 fully intending to become a newspaperman, a sports writer. I encountered somebody who was assigned to be my adviser, a professor names Walter Stiegelman, who was just a hell-for-leather newspaperman. He said, "What do you want to be?" I said, "A sports writer." And he said, "No, I mean, what do you want to be when you grow up?" [laughs] At that very moment, I no longer wanted to be a sports writer. I wanted Mr. Stiegelman's approbation and I wanted to become a newspaper reporter. I studied here for a couple of years. At the end of my sophomore year, I got pissed off at my dad and joined the Army. Sure showed that son of a bitch because four months and twenty-seven days later, I hit my outfit in Korea where the Chinese were making life very uncomfortable for everyone. I returned here in the fall of 1955. Took my degree in 1957. Went to Des Moines in June of 1957. I did spend a summer at the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1956 and there an associate editor and political writer, a man named Frank T. Nye, kind of mentored me in the sense that, whenever a political story came along, he saw to it that he was on vacation or something so that I got a chance to cover it. I came close to another political campaign then in 1956 when W. Averell Harriman set out to win the Democratic nomination for president. I kind of figured he wasn't my kind of Democrat because he wore suspenders and a belt. Harriman was not a man to take chances. It was the Union Pacific Harriman. He had no business being a Democrat, I guess. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Could you tell us a little bit about the Daily Iowan newsroom when you were there? Do you remember much about it? A: Not really. I tried to get away from it. The school was different and the Iowan was different in those days in this sense - the people in, I think, advanced reporting (I am not sure basic reporting), whatever the names were, were required to report for work at the Daily Iowan. It was part of their class obligation. So, it was clearly a part of the School of Journalism and a not very comfortable thing for the people on the Iowan trying to be independent newspaper people. Journalists. Nor was it very comfortable for the people in the School of Journalism, trying to teach the ethics and ethos of journalism and catching hell from the university administration or somebody else to get those dip-shits on the Iowan in line. But we made it work. If the First Amendment was ever gravely offended or gravely violated, I do not know of it. We simply made it work. We made poor Les Moeller's life a living hell because we were always trying to figure out what the news was. A couple of stories jump to mind. A couple of old friends of mine, Gene Raffensperger, who is retired now, and Marvin Braverman, who is a copy editor on the [Des Moines] Register yet, were on the Daily Iowan back there somewhere. Braverman was the city editor. Raffensperger was the managing editor. They got this one photographer, Maury Rosen to go around town to buy beer. Now, Rosen was born looking thirty-five years old. [laughs] But the age of beer buying in those days, the age of majority, was twenty-one. And the night before Rosen turned twenty-one, he went out and he bought beer in a bunch of places and we came with just a hellish expose' about the illegal sale of beer in Iowa City. Mind you, if Rosen walked in today looking the way he looked then, I would have given the poor old man a chair. He just was born looking thirty-five. The County Attorney was a man named Bill Meardon. He may still be practicing here. Meardon and Sueppel firm. And his associate was a man named Bill Tucker, whom I would guess is still practicing here. They took umbrage at the great headline that we had on the Daily Iowan about beer being sold all over town to minors. The grand jury summoned Braverman and Raffensperger. Now I am violating a confidence in telling this story, because I have never talked with Braverman or Raffensperger about it. My father was on that grand jury. I will leave it to you to guess my source. Today, with that grand jury subpoena, you would turn and have your lawyer answer it if you would have allowed them to serve the subpoena on you in the first place. And you would have put up a hell of a fuss. But, in those days, we did not do things that way. If you were summoned before the grand jury, you went and you told them. Or, you told them to go to hell. You were prepared to go to jail, if need be, for your calling. Mind you, we did see it as a calling. Q: Things have come full circle, because they are talking now about minors buying beer. A: There's not been anything new in six thousand years. So, they called those two poor souls to the grand jury. And they, of course, were so thoroughly intimidated. Bill Tucker handled the inquiry. He said, "What did you do with the beer?" "Well, we drank it." "You destroyed evidence?" [laughs] My dad said that Gene Raffensperger just began sweating out of every pore. End of story. I don't know what became of Rosen. Last I heard, he was shooting pictures for the Milwaukee Journal, I think. The Daily Iowan newsroom was a yeasty place then. I suspect it is a yeasty place now. I guess, in principle...I leave it to the three faculty members here to testify to it, but I would guess in principle it is no different today than it was then. I don't find that much difference in reporters and editors. They tend to come together and they tend to socialize. They tend to live with and off of each other. So, we were chasing things and pursuing things. We set out to prove that the barbers in Iowa City were racist bigots. That is kind of small stuff and obvious. You think about the barbers in Iowa City in 1950 and you know damn well they were racist bigots. [laughs] But, we found a couple of black people in our midst, Roy Walker is one that I remember, and sent them off to the various barber shops in Iowa City to get their hair cut. And then we published the simpering rationalizations of the barbers on how it was impossible for the barber to cut a black man's hair. That black people had different hair than white people and it took special skills. Therefore, they could not...well, it was a nice excitement for a month or two. Until we elected...we elected a kinkajou...no, kinkajou came in second in the most popular man on campus contest one year. Came in second to some football quarterback. I think his name may have been Olin Treadway. And, you know what a kinkajou is. A honey bear. It is a sweet little animal. It is very curious and crawls around. We got the idea that the most popular bachelor on campus was a kind of a silly thing, so we ran a campaign to name that kinkajou the most popular bachelor on campus. Damn near got it done. It came in second and the student council, or whoever was in charge of all of that the following year, took a hard look at it and decided they could spend their efforts on something that made more sense. I would guess that, in fifteen minutes, if we went to the Daily Iowan right now, we would find they were working on something about like that. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: Could you talk a little bit about the [Des Moines] Register? Q: Do you remember your starting salary? A: Yes. I started at the Register for seventy dollars a week and was told it was the highest starting salary the Register had ever paid a reporter just out of school. I since have learned a good deal more about editors and I am inclined to doubt that story. [laughs] I figure that son of a bitch told at least twenty-five others the same story. But, I believed it then. Q: What year was that? A: 1957. That is curious. Carol and I were talking about that very thing last night. Mike Gartner had come over for a drink and to pick up some stuff. He said when he came to work for the Register as executive editor in 1974, he came for $34,000 a year. Carol said, "What were you making then?" I said, "Christ, I don't know." Well, we looked it up this morning, as a matter of fact, and I was making $18,000. Which I think would be about right the way you keep ratios between the boss's pie and the peon's pie. Seventy was a little bit low for the industry in 1957. That year, or the year after that, the Wall Street Journal shocked everybody by paying beginning reporters a hundred a week. But, coming full circle now, and I will stop and get a breath, that spring, I scandalized the people here in the School of Journalism because some kind of public survey had been taken and I said that I planned to make at least $10,000 a year in the reporter's trade. I can remember a number of faculty members telling me what a damn fool I was. That something like that would never, ever happen. Well, maybe it wouldn't have. I have never had the nerve to put the inflation measures on these things and figure out what I finally ended up making in the business. My last year at the Register, my base salary was, I believe, $82,000. But, that really doesn't tell all the story because there were some perks and then, for the first few years of Gannett ownership of the Register, '85,'86,'87,'88 and so forth, I was paid a rather substantial bribe to remain a member of...to stay on the Register payroll. They called it a bonus. Q: Why do you call it a bribe? A: Inducement might be a better term. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Could you talk about covering City Hall? Stories that you remember. A: When I went to Des Moines, the one thing that I was sure I did not want to do was to cover municipal or state government. Here in Iowa City, the record will show I spent a great deal of time studying political science, American government, comparative foreign governments. I trained myself to become a foreign correspondent, I think. And I very studiously ducked some very good courses. Russell Ross's local government. God damn it, don't go telling Ross that, because Ross brags to people that I was a student of his and I wasn't. [laughs] You ask Stark or Bloom or Hart about this. It's the same thing. Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan. Well, anyhow, I ducked the courses that would have been the most use to me throughout my...the political science courses...the most use to me throughout my entire career. But that wasn't all bad, I decided. I wish I hadn't done it. Because I really had to learn things from the people I was covering. I don't have any great recollections of my years at City Hall although, my gosh, I spent seven years at City Hall. The Register and the Tribune in those days put an awful lot of effort in...there were, I think, five or six of us covering the Hall for both papers. It was a tumultuous time because there was a huge scandal in the police department. Some of the police set out to supplement their low salaries by becoming burglars. We put several in prison and fired about two dozen, I suppose. My most memorable part of that period for me was not on City Hall. While here at Iowa City, a good friend of mine was studying for Ph.D. in physics. I spent a good deal of time listening to him talk about how some guy named Van Allen and the Navy were going to put something called a satellite into space and it was going to circle the world. It was called Vanguard as I recall and it was a basketball-sized satellite that was to go up on a Navy rocket of some type. Maybe it was the Vanguard rocket. I don't know. In any case, it blew up. And the fall after I started at Des Moines, the Russians put Sputnik into orbit. The United States immediately rushed to try to counter that in some way, shape or form. I spent a good deal of time covering that effort from Des Moines and Iowa City, simply on the strength that I knew what James Van Allen and George Ludwig and that other bunch in the physics building looked like. And knew enough about what they were doing to tell the boys around the stove in the back of the hardware store in Tiffin so that they would understand it. It was a fascinating time. That always seemed to me to be, it seems to me yet, the fundamental charm of the Register and the Tribune, or the papers like it in that day and age. If you had a reporter who knew something about something, to hell with all the niceties, cut through them and get him or her on that story. ... -- <br><br> Section 6: A: ... It was an incredibly intoxicating time for me. I suspect all young reporters...That fall, no, it would have been two years after that, it would have been the fall of '59, Nikita Khrushchev came to the United States and accepted the invitation of the Register's editorial page editor, Lauren Soth, to visit an Iowa farm. And I, and ten thousand other reporters, covered it. Good God! We really could not fathom assassination and that kind of thing back then, and so the heads of government took enormous chances. We were innocents, I guess. The Secret Service, for its own reasons, refused to guard Khrushchev. So, a bunch of yahoos from the State Department who didn't know up from eyehoo or sic-um, as they would say in West Johnson County. About any of these things. And a man who you are going to interview eventually, George Mills, had an absolutely fascinating story about an Iowa doctor who came to American authorities at that point and said, "I will be happy to kill Khrushchev if you like. You won't be able to trace it." Mills ran with that story without using the name. A few years after that, we were sitting there one day and I said, "Mills, if I tell you that doctor's name, will you [nods head]?" Yeah, he would. I said, "Clinton Berryhill." He said, "How the hell did you find that out?" In any case, it was a great mob scene, the Khrushchev visit, but it marked the beginning of the hope that the world wasn't going to be blown up in nuclear war. So, that happened while I was at City Hall. It is rather hard to... -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: Jim, let me ask before we go ahead. What was it like for a young boy from Tiffin suddenly to be working for the Des Moines Tribune? Did you expect to do that? Did you expect to go from the University of Iowa suddenly to the paper of record for the entire state? A: Well, you know, I think I did. It was pretty heady stuff. I always was pretty damn confident that I was about four times as good as anybody else that I was around. I have never seen anything that would have given much doubt about that. But, I did have a piece of luck. And I can't explain it to you yet. I simply got a letter from Frank Eyerly, the managing editor of the Register one day, saying...and I had been accepted to law school here. It said, "If you have any interest in working as a reporter for the Register and Tribune, please make an appointment with my secretary. Sincerely." That was it. I sent back a letter that said, "Dear Mr. Eyerly: I will. Sincerely." Those were in my job file at the Register. I imagine they have thrown that on the garbage as they have most of the history and the tradition of the place. Anyway, I went up there. He offered me my seventy dollars. It was just incredibly heady. My Lord. Nothing was asked of you except to go out and find the news and write it and make sense of it. And they put your name above it and pay you for it. ... -- <br><br> Section 8: A: ... We fancied we were poor. Don Kaul and I were cub reporters together. We have talked about some of those times. He had three kids, we had four. And, we would put the kids in their pajamas and go to the other person's house. We would put all the kids to bed, all the kids to bed, and then we would drink cheap Dago-red wine and play bridge. That was our entertainment. But our work was so intoxicating - is the word that keeps coming back to me. I remember Kaul's experience on the Tribune was pretty miserable. They decided that he was a bad reporter. He wasn't. He was a good reporter. But he wasn't one to suffer fools. The city editor sent him out to get him a package of cigarettes. Can you imagine that? That was common. "Go get me a package of Marlboro's." And Kaul brought them back and said, "There are your cigarettes. I would appreciate it if you wouldn't ask me to do that again. It is demeaning." And the city editor, of course, decided that Kaul was a rotten reporter. Kaul went out one time. I was working the city desk on the Tribune on Saturdays in those days. Kaul went out one time to cover the Des Moines cat show. He was sent to cover the Des Moines cat show. And he interviewed a cat. We are sitting there on the desk. Jim Cooney and the assistant city editors, he said, "You know, you have really got to watch that Kaul. He is really clever." And he takes his pencil and goes slash. Kaul thought he had been fired. The city editor of the Tribune, a man named H. Doyl Taylor, who really loved to tell you that he happened to be a lawyer, thought he was fired. Kaul went in to the managing editor's office and became the first person to ever transfer from the Tribune to the Register as a general assignment reporter. And his assignment was to go write something funny. And he did. -- <br><br> Section 9: Q: In those days, the Tribune was looked at as a farm club for the stronger state-wide Register. A: I think that that is a fair statement, but to stop that and to preclude that, management damn near prohibited transfers from one paper to the other. Later, it became a very, very common thing. But in those days, those staffs were separate, independent, and proudly so. You could get a fight after a few beers by saying somebody worked for the Register when he, in fact, worked for the Tribune. It is fair to say that the Tribune people did not like the Register people and the Register people looked down on the Tribune people. But it's vastly more complicated than that. The Tribune, being a daily afternoon paper, moved so goddamn fast, and faster, I think, than the electronics move today. You got a story and you either went to the office and started writing it - and if it was a good story and you were anywhere near deadline, they were ripping the takes out of your typewriter and whipping in another one. So, you would write a paragraph and, whap, it would go. This was common. It was not uncommon. It happened to somebody almost every day. Enormous, enormous pressure. Exciting pressure. A: ...the Register as being a country club and the Tribune being a beer-drinking pool hall. Things happened in the Tribune and happened very, very fast. Just incredible. That first summer that I worked for the Tribune, to go back to your question, for a period I worked on a new operation called the Dawn Busters. What that meant was that we got to work at five o'clock in the morning and started the reporting at that time rather than at eight o'clock. It was a very successful and intelligent move. It makes you wonder why the hell we hadn't done it years before. As a result, I was the reporter covering one day a flash flood on the Nishnabotna in west Iowa when nineteen people were killed in Audubon and Exira and those towns along the Nishnabotna. We had the only telephone line into Audubon and refused to give it up to the highway patrol or the Red Cross or anybody else. If they had any messages, they could get them through us and we would relay them. You did not screw with the Register or any other paper like that in those days. We had some marvelous stories. The phone operator did all of this. You simply...you got on the phone and said, "Will you find James Van Allen for me? I think he is at the Huntsville arsenal in Alabama." And she would come back pretty soon with Van Allen on the line. We got some woman who went down the river thirty miles on a log. I can remember getting old Freddy Lazell to do the story. And Freddy grabbed the phone and got up beside me and said, "How is it feel to ride down the river on a log for thirty miles?" I thought, "Fred, there has got to be a better way to start it." [laughs] We had that entire story in the city edition of the Tribune that afternoon. Names of the nineteen dead. What had happened on the flash flood. The whole bit. It was a marvelous piece of work, I say in retrospect. The kind of wham, bam, thank you ma'am journalism that you occasionally see on CNN or CNN Headline service when they have a breaking story, as they did yesterday in those Arkansas murders. At least, for a few minutes. When you talk about somebody covering City Hall in this period or something, in journalism at that time, my God, you washed over all kinds of things. -- <br><br> Section 10: Q: How has journalism changed from those days, do you think? A: I am not sure that I have any better answer than you all. Let me elaborate. I can remember my dad talking about the Civil War veterans. When that new-fangled machine gun came out in World War I. And they were grousing about how it wasn't like the good old days. But, yeah, they had that machine gun and they would get a few of us, they said, but we would fix our bayonets and we would charge and we would take it out. So, I am deeply suspicious of grousing old men. An old one. [laughs] I want to be an equal opportunity grouser. So, it is very, very hard for me, at times, to objectively separate my feelings about something and what the fact may be. What the reality may be. That noted, I feel that journalism today isn't instilled by the hope, by the sense of greatness, that it was when I started in it in the 1950s. We fancied, on the Register, that we were publishing a paper that just, by God, might be great. Sometimes we thought we might...we thought it was great. I can remember working on the Cedar Rapids Gazette. If I sat here puzzling for a while, I would even remember the story. I think it might have been a train wreck in Durant. Well, we just did a hell of a good job of it. For that second, we were great and we thought we were. We felt it. I said before that we felt we had a calling. I felt that then. I feel that way now. But I kind of feel, I am inclined to believe, that we have among us counting house types who care no more about the purveyal of the news, the gathering and processing of fact, than they do raising chickens or hogs or making soap or toothpaste. We became marketers, I feel. And, we tend to worry today about giving people what they want rather than publishing the information that tells them what is really going on and what the warp and woof of the society is. What is means to the society. I don't understand where the failure came. It may well be that it was always there,. I can remember...can any of you remember the name of the grocer who bought all the New York newspapers in the '20's. I can remember the old timers in journalism when I was a boy in journalism worrying about him and being embarrassed then by Bernard McFadden, the great health food nut, who had bought up a bunch of newspapers. And cannibalized them or...maybe this happens with newspapers. And maybe it is a healthy thing. I don't know. If I did know, I think I would try to write about it. But I find that it a great, great puzzlement. I am sorely disappointed with our society, our American society, that it is not paying more attention to government and politics. My God, I think what is happening in Des Moines or Washington right now are vastly more important than they were forty years ago. And we are all but ignoring it. Q: You were there when the Gannett company took over the Des Moines Register. You witnessed that. And I think you probably have some insight on that. It changed the quality of the newspaper. The Des Moines Register today is not what it used to be. And it probably started when the Gannett people moved in. A: I would like to say that, but I kind of fear it began before that. The Gannett purchase certainly accelerated it. But it's a seduction, Mr. Hart. It is a very slow process. And you don't do the kinds of things they are doing today with a Jim Gannon or a Jim Flansburg or an Arnie Garson or a Geneva Overholser running the show because they would tell you where to put it. It's a seductive process where you find the people who, I swear, find people who don't know any better. Who think marketing is journalism. Who think that it is important to go out to talk with some...get into a focus group to find out what we should be doing and covering at City Hall. Nobody reads the Planning and Zoning Commission stories, so we won't cover the Planning and Zoning Commission anymore. Forty years ago, if you would have said that, the editors would have gone over to you and said, "There are no dull stories. There are dull reporters. Get some decent reporter out to Planning and Zoning and find out what in the God damned hell is going on down there." If people aren't reading it, what it means is that you are turning out dull stories. It doesn't mean that they are not interested. They are not interested in the path we have been printing. Part of the problem is that it is so very difficult, it seems to me, to tell the difference between good journalism and ho-hum journalism. The "warm body" theory. You send somebody to City Hall and say, "Well, we have got City Hall covered because somebody is there. If he is drunk, so what? It is covered." I feel very, very disappointed. My career was based on the Des Moines Register being a damn good newspaper. And suddenly, it has become kind of an insipid imitation of something. A thoughtlessness. A marketing device.